09.16.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: We each predict a news story that may or may not have happened over the last seven days. Play the final results of our ‘build a game’ challenge, and we ask, is it finally time to do away with the command-line?
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Ballnux
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They come a day after Finnish rival Nokia presented three phones to revive its flagging smartphone division.
Mobile phone makers and network operators are betting heavily that consumers are keen on a connected and multimedia experience on the move.
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HTC plans to launch a tablet PC, possibly equipped with Android 3, in the first quarter of 2011, according to Taiwan-based component makers.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Matt Dew, a self-proclaimed “X newbie”, just finished talking about his experiences as just entering the world of X.Org development and hopes to contribute to the X.Org world by gathering up and improving X.Org documentation.
As most know who have ever investigated X.Org, traditionally the documentation covering the software stack has been rather fragmented or even nonexistent in many places. This lack of reliable X.Org documentation can lead to a steep learning curve for new developers and can be a deterrent when coupled with the fact X.Org is complicated, but Matt hopes to work towards addressing this longstanding problem by rounding up the existing documentation from various sources and then eventually to write documentation for the missing pieces (particularly the newer areas, but also for areas like libdrm).
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Scheduling issues had plagued X.Org Server development for the past few years: to the point that even delivering a point release had come more than a year late and major X Server releases were never delivered on time. This though has fortunately changed.
With X.Org Server 1.8 though it was proposed to make some fundamental development changes and better refining the X.Org development process to be more like the Linux kernel — though not the same — where there is an official release manager, timed releases, and a defined process for requesting changes/patches be pulled into a given release. Since that point, the X.Org Server has basically been released on time. X.Org Server 1.9 was released on time just last month.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Yet another gameplay detail has been added recently, namely slipstreaming. When a kart drives behind another one for a while, and then moves out of the slipstream, it recieves a speed boost and can then overtake the kart in front.
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Desktop Environments
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Red Hat Family
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Qualcomm, the wireless chip specialist, appears to be a poster child for Red Hat’s enterprise software strategy. Indeed, Qualcomm plans to leverage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) to increase production workloads. Qualcomm’s move comes as most large enterprises try to choose between VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix virtualization. Here are some details.
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Debian Family
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Now that Debian’s graphical installer flavour has migrated to X11, porting it to GNU/kFreeBSD became a low hanging fruit, so I shamelessly picked it up and here comes a version of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD installer with graphical support.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Phones
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Android
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Lastly, the cheap look of the screen will be a major problem for anyone who has used an HVGA or WVGA resolution device in the past The solid keyboard is excellent and will work for many. Truly great. Unfortunately, though, for most the Charm will fail at being what it promises, and that is a good entry-level smartphone. Instead, it appears to be something else all-together: an Android feature phone.
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Meet the ZTE Racer, an Android 2.1 powered ultra low cost smartphone currently available in the UK.
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Tablets
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It’s possible that Android 3.0 will bring solutions to some of these problems. There are already rumors circulating that it will boost tablet support and be better suited for non-phone form factors. If Google’s compatibility program can evolve to function as effectively for new devices as it has for smartphones, we could see Google’s little robot show up in a lot more places.
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ViewSonic became at star at IFA 2010 with the release of its ViewPad 7. Powered by Android 2.2, the world’s most ‘advanced’ and ‘powerful’ mobile operating system, ViewPad 7 enables users to conduct video-conferencing, social networking, and enjoying AV entertainment, realizing their dreams of achieving a fun and diversified digital lifestyle. ViewSonic India is planning to launch this product in Indian market very soon.
“ViewSonic‘s ViewPad 7 is so far the best android that has attracted the whole world. With the showcasing of the ViewPad 7 we in ViewSonic maintain our commitment towards the best IT innovations. We are expecting to launch ViewPad 7 in India in a very short time and hope we will get a great response from the Indian consumers who had always been very keen to the most hi-tech inventions,” says Gautam Ghosh, Country Manager, ViewSonic Technologies India PVT LTD.
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Yesterday Julie Bort wrote in the NetworkWorld site an interesting post called “Cisco doesn’t contribute nearly enough to open source”, where she contends that “”[despite its] .. proclaims it responsible for a half percent of the contributions to the Linux kernel (0.5%). In reality, Cisco has been a near non-entity as an open source contributor”. Of course the author is right in its claims – the amount of contributed code to the Linux kernel is substantial but very “vertical”, and specific to the needs of Cisco as a Linux adopter.
Which is a perfectly sensible thing to do.
The problem of “contribution” comes up and again in many discussions on open source and business adoption of OSS; it is, in fact, a source of major debate why participation is low, and what can be done to improve it. It is my opinion that there are some barriers to OSS contribution – namely, internal IPR policies, lack of understanding of how participation can be helpful and not just a gift to competitors, and more. On the other hand, two points should be made to complement this view: the first is that some companies contribute in ways that are difficult to measure, and the second is that sometimes companies have no economic reasons to do so.
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The first development release, oi_147, is now available for download! It is available in 3 download formats – a Live DVD with a graphical installer which installs a full desktop environment, a Text installer CD which installs a minimal server install, and the Automated Installer ISO which allows performing a custom install via XML files.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It certainly didn’t take long for Mozilla to jump to the pump and address a very-recently-announced bug affecting automatic updates to Firefox 3.6.9 and 3.5.11. A patch has been pushed, and users can now allow auto-update to do its thing without fear of winding up with a browser which won’t start properly.
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If you’re using the latest Firefox 4 beta you may have noticed a few new visual changes…
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GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.
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Databases
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Bucap S.p.A., a provider of outsourced document archiving and management services, has selected Ingres Database as its database of choice for its data management solution.
“Prior to Ingres, all information managed by Bucap could be retrieved locally and remotely by our employees, but due to the complexity and low reliability of the system, most of the queries were done through manual retrieval and physical mailing or faxing the document to the customer,” said Ruggero Rinaldi, General Manager at Bucap. “Bucap wanted to offer a better quality and up-to-date service to its customers and therefore created a service portal enabling customers to access all of their documentation. Ingres best responded to our economical and technical requirements and the decision has been supported by the enhanced performance, features, and ability to leverage an open source product.”
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Oracle
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Oracle will work with the OpenJDK code base and the OpenJDK community like Sun did. We will continue to develop the JDK in the open under a GPL license. We welcome the cooperation and contribution of any member of the community – individuals as well as organizations – who would like to be part of moving the most widely used software platform forward.
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Oracle is seemingly trying to calm down the discussion about the focus of Java programming language development and open source. The business software and database vendor is drawing people’s attention to the events and announcements during next week’s JavaOne event, which will take place at the same time as Oracle’s OpenWorld in-house tradeshow. In a recent announcement, Henrik Ståhl, Senior Director of product management for the Java Platform Group at Oracle, said that Oracle will have the same approach as Sun did with the OpenJDK code base and its community.
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Some people insist that OpenOffice.org should be called an office application instead of an office suite. The distinction that they are trying to make is that the programs in OpenOffice.org share a common code base, instead of being separate programs that are simply bundled together, the way that Microsoft Office’s are.
This distinction means that the complete OpenOffice.org is much smaller than any version of MS Office (and that you don’t save nearly the space you expect by installing only the components you actually use). It also means that many dialogs are identical in different programs, which makes them easier to learn. And, most important of all, it means that the separate programs can easily interact with one another.
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CMS
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Developers have been given their first glimpse of a community-funded and open alternative to Facebook.
Diaspora describes itself as a “privacy-aware, personally-controlled” social network.
It was conceived earlier this year by four US students during a period when Facebook came under fire for its privacy settings.
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I understand that people wanted to pick one of those quick development frameworks, I myself like them quite a lot, but they are exactly the wrong thing for this kind of app: WordPress is so successful cause it runs everywhere. And you gotta realize that those frameworks help you get a prototype running fast, but in the end you end up dropping most parts of the framework anyways cause of specific needs for features they don’t cover.
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BSD
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FreeBSD is a UNIX-like OS that has been around since 1993. If you’re familiar with Linux or other UNIXes, you have most of the knowledge required to try it out, but you will also notice a few differences. Those familiar with the underpinnings of Mac OSX know that it, too, is based on BSD.
FreeBSD isn’t as popular as the better-known Linux distros, but it has a strong reputation for reliability and robustness, and it’s still in active development. For my first foray into FreeBSD, I tried out the latest stable version (8.1), which was released mid-July.
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Project Releases
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GNU Kart is a kart racing game for GNU using characters based on GNU/Free Software stuff.
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Government
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What is your big idea for the Digital Agenda, Europe’s new strategy for digital economy? What can you do to make a part of the Digital Agenda happen? The new strategy was published in May and it is now time to discuss how to put it into practice.
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Openness/Sharing
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GROUND LAB is a research and development company focused on designing and fabricating prototypes and solutions for a wide range of clients, ranging from large organizations like UNICEF to smaller NGOs, conservationists and artists. To prototype and build solutions for these varied challenges requires a high degree of flexible problem solving techniques, skills and solutions, which has led us toward using an open source business model and tools.
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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One of the questions people often ask about Open Educational Resources is “do they really increase efficiency?” Creative Commons has worked with many OER innovators, and their stories indicate that it does. We thought it would be useful to gather pointers to some of these examples. Please read on, and leave a comment with other great examples of how CC-enabled OER can increase efficiency for teachers, students and self-learners. Note of course that increasing efficiency is only one benefit of OER.
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Science
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NASA is looking hard at a way to blast spacecraft horizontally down an electrified track or gas-powered sled and into space hitting speeds of about Mach 10. The craft would then return and land on a runway by the launch site.
The rail launcher, known Advanced Space Launch System is one of a few new launch systems a team of engineers from Kennedy Space Center and several other NASA centers are looking at that would use existing cutting-edge technologies to offer the space agency a next generation launcher to the stars, NASA stated.
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Aerospace heavyweight Boeing has teamed up with a private spaceflight marketing firm to sell passenger seats for future flights in its new space capsule.
Under the agreement, the Virginia-based Space Adventures will market passenger seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 spacecraft, currently being designed to travel to the International Space Station as well as other future private space stations.
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Security/Aggression
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The inspectors can now turn up at people’s homes or businesses unannounced and examine their records if they believe not enough tax has been paid.
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HALF of York’s secondary schools have been filming pupils on CCTV without telling parents, sparking condemnation from privacy campaigners.
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Council chiefs have caused controversy by revealing plans to sift through random bins to see if the city’s residents are meeting strict recycling rules.
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From 42 days to control orders, they were a model of illjudged and overbearing persistence. And so to today, during the report stage debate of the Identity Documents Bill – which is set to scrap the hated ID card once and for all – Big Brother Watch favourite Meg Hillier was moaning:
“When something is bought in good faith there needs to be some recompense for the individual. We recognise, reluctantly, that both parties in this Government have a mandate to get rid of ID cards… but this issue is very important.”
And promptly introduced a motion to force the Government to pay back £30 to the misguided individuals who signed-up to a lifetime of living on a database.
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Starting in September, the entire 2,000-mile US-Mexico border will be monitored by drones, the Christian Science Monitor has reported.
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The launch of a fourth Predator drone Wednesday will mean the entire US-Mexico border is now patrolled by the unmanned aircraft.
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We’ve seen all sorts of stories about identity fraud and how it really is a pretty horrible crime — one where the victims are often left entirely on their own to unravel the resulting mess. However, there are times where things get even more ridiculous. Mitch Wagner points us to a case where a woman who had her identity used by a petty crook/coke addict was picked up by the police, believing she was the scammer, leading to this victim of identity fraud being jailed, strip-searched and de-loused, until she finally convinced police to look at a photo of the actual crook. Even then, they kept her in jail for an additional 24-hours.
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During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for its excessive secrecy, noting that it had “invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” Obama also promised to end “extraordinary rendition,” a practice through which “we outsource our torture to other countries.”
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Here’s my first impression of the tea party movement: It’s a rabidly right-wing phenomenon with a shaky grasp of history, a strain of intolerance and xenophobia, a paranoia about Barack Obama, and an unhealthy reverence for Fox News. Any movement that doesn’t firmly exclude Birchers, birthers, and Islamaphobes is not a movement for me.
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Jonathan Rauch wrote in the National Journal Saturday on the “radical decentralization” of the tea party. A “Tea Party Patriots coordinator and co-founder” talks about it this way:
“I use the term open-source politics. This is an open source movement…. The movement as a whole is smart.”
No doubt, this has and will continue to be a bandwagon meme equating decentralization automatically with open source and by extension some form of novelty. Rauch, to his credit, focuses more on the decentralization aspect and acknowledges the “yes and no” answer to the novelty question.
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Police in Johannesburg are investigating a man who’s been using Twitter to warn motorists about speed traps and other police activity.
PigSpotter, as he calls himself, has now agreed to stop tweeting the location of road blocks but vowed to continue posting speed trap information. He also posts traffic congestion reports, and info about out of action traffic lights and accidents.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In July of 2008, a new nonprofit organization, the “Alliance for Climate Education, Inc.” (ACE), Inc., zoomed onto the scene and suddenly became a huge player in the much-overlooked field of climate education. ACE offers high schools free multimedia assemblies on climate change that utilize “cutting-edge animation, music and video.” In short, this is not the usual low-budget presentation that school assemblies are known for.
On the surface, ACE’s effort seems laudable, but questions remain about the messages is ACE is crafting with its free access to the nation’s youth on school time. ACE’s featured web content on BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which has since been removed (after our initial criticism of it), did not even mention “BP,” although it conceded the unimpeachable fact that the spill is a “disaster.” ACE also featured positive images connected to the disaster such as a swimming dolphin and a rescued pelican, alongside a clean-up worker and a photo of the well fire being extinguished.
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Summer dead zones are common in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by the large amounts of fertiliser that get flushed down the Mississippi river, which triggers a dramatic drop in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Researchers have been concerned that microbes breaking down the oil from the BP spill might exacerbate this year’s dead zone and have been closely monitoring oxygen levels in the Gulf.
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How well prepared is the UK for climate change? asks the title of a report released today by the Adaptation Subcommittee of the Committee on Climate Change established under the UK Climate Change Act of 2008.
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Finance
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American taxpayers bailed out the big banks. Now many of those banks are returning the favor by extending credit to payday lenders who sucker consumers into a spiraling debt trap.
That is the claim in a new report published this week by National People’s Action (NPA), the Chicago-based community organization. The report, called Predators’ Creditors, names Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase as some of the biggest lenders to the booming payday loan industry.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was sued by three former female employees who claim they faced discrimination in pay and fewer opportunities for promotion than men at the firm.
“The violations of its female employees’ rights are systemic, are based upon companywide policies and practices, and are the result of unchecked gender bias that pervades Goldman Sachs’s corporate culture,” the women said today in a complaint in federal court in Manhattan.
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Will the Equal Employment for All Act make it out of the House Committee on Financial Services when Congress reconvenes this fall? The bill, HR 3149, would make it illegal for employers to use the personal and private credit reports of American job applicants when making hiring decisions for most positions.
Bad credit means no job and no job means bad credit. Second chances in Hollywood and professional sports occur every day, but the rest of America is locked down in a modern-day debtors’ prison run by credit bureaus and ruled by corporate greed. A two-class America of the elite and the poor is becoming more and more a reality, thanks in part to the continuing practice of pre-employment credit checks.
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15 Shocking Poverty Statistics That Are Skyrocketing As The American Middle Class Continues To Be Slowly Wiped Out
1. Approximately 45 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009.
2. According to the Associated Press, experts believe that 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.
3. The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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UK Liberal Democrat MEP Diana Wallis, who is representing the Parliament in talks with Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič, said Belgian Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere had asked the Council’s Committee of Permanent Representatives to “review” plans to establish a single register for all three institutions at the close of the General Affairs Council on 13 September.
“If this materialises, it will represent a welcome evolution in the Council’s position,” said Wallis.
Talks on establishing a joint lobby register between the Commission and the Parliament resumed in May without the Council’s involvement.
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Outside groups supporting Republican candidates in House and Senate races across the country have been swamping their Democratic-leaning counterparts on television since early August as the midterm election season has begun heating up.
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The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make the syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient “corn sugar,” arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer confusion about the product.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Last week, we questioned whether Sarah Palin may have violated Facebook’s terms of use by using a ghostwriter to update her profile. We also criticized Facebook’s attempts to enforce those terms with state and federal computer crime laws — which carry both civil and criminal penalties — in Facebook v. Power Ventures.
As we explained, it’s dangerous for a website to claim that users who breach its terms of use also violate computer crime law. Facebook users can easily make uncontroversial choices that nevertheless violate the plain meaning of Facebook’s terms. Furthermore, Facebook shouldn’t have the discretion to criminalize certain behavior just by forbidding it in terms of use.
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There are many reasons why you should be concerned about online privacy. Stalking on the internet can lead to unwanted offline encounters, blackmail, fraud, cyber-bullying, and personal details, which you’d rather not have the world know about, falling into the wrong hands.
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The Swiss Federal Court has ruled that software which identified the internet protocol (IP) address of unauthorised music uploaders broke data protection law.
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Is US dominance of the internet – and particularly of the social networking space – leading to the export of US prudery across the globe? Or is the growing debate on international censorship a little more complicated?
As Becky Dwyer, a US citizen and, as member of CAAN Scotland, a campaigner for less censorship in the UK put it: “Isn’t this more about American Corporations forcing conformity upon private individuals rather than ‘American’ values?”
First off, examples of US social networking sites coming down hard on subscribers who fail to toe the line set by Ts & Cs are widespread.
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Bowing to the Obama administration, a federal appeals court Monday gutted its own decision that had dramatically narrowed the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.
The 9-2 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nullifies Miranda-style guidelines the court promulgated last year that were designed to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights during court-authorized computer searches. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, as solicitor general last year, had urged the court to reverse itself amid complaints that federal prosecutions were being complicated, and computer searches were grinding to a halt, because of the detailed guidelines.
The original ruling required the government to cull specific data described in the search warrant, rather than copy entire hard drives. When that’s not possible, the feds were advised to use an independent third party under the court’s supervision, whose job it would be to comb through the files for the specific information, and provide it, and nothing else, to the government. The ruling said judges should “deny the warrant altogether” if the government does not consent to such a plan in data-search cases.
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An advocacy group on Tuesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to block a soon-to-debut TV cartoon show starring characters first created to market Skechers footwear to children.
Unless banned, the group said, the show could pave the way for Ronald McDonald, Tony the Tiger and other iconic cartoon pitchmen to become stars of their own series — potentially inundating children’s television with what amounted to full-length commercials.
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Despite having the law on its side Craigslist took down its Adult Services section at the end of August, replacing it with the word Censored. It did so without fanfare — and still no explanation. But the small change marked a big capitulation to a gaggle of state attorneys general and anti–child-trafficking groups who have been hounding the free classifieds listing service for years, casting Craigslist as an online pimp.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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On Monday, somebody posted online an array of numbers which purports to be the secret master key used by HDCP, a video encryption standard used in consumer electronics devices such as DVD players and TVs. I don’t know if the key is genuine, but let’s assume for the sake of discussion that it is. What does the leak imply for HDCP’s security? And what does the leak mean for the industry, and for consumers?
HDCP is used to protect high-def digital video signals “on the wire,” for example on the cable connecting your DVD player to your TV. HDCP is supposed to do two things: it encrypts the content so that it can’t be captured off the wire, and it allows each endpoint to verify that the other endpoint is an HDCP-licensed device. From a security standpoint, the key step in HDCP is the initial handshake, which establishes a shared secret key that will be used to encrypt communications between the two devices, and at the same time allows each device to verify that the other one is licensed.
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The impact of HDCP’s failure on consumers will probably be minor. The main practical effect of HDCP has been to create one more way in which your electronics could fail to work properly with your TV. This is unlikely to change. Mainstream electronics makers will probably continue to take HDCP licenses and to use HDCP as they are now. There might be some differences at the margin, where manufacturers feel they can take a few more liberties to make things work for their customers. HDCP has been less a security system than a tool for shaping the consumer electronics market, and that is unlikely to change.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Ron Coleman writes an essay well worth reading on how trademark law has morphed into perverse measures at the hands of IP attorneys and big businesses looking to protect their turf in response to overall changes in the IP landscape.
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The case isn’t quite over yet, as Tiffany keeps appealing various aspects of it, but it certainly doesn’t look good for Tiffany — but does appear very good for anyone who believes in the principles of properly applying liability to those who did the actions, rather than the “easy target” third party (even in the absence of official safe harbors).
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In today’s Washington Post, John Feinstein captures an important truth about college sports –- the print headline of his column is: “Greed is the most powerful tradition in college football.” (In the online addition, the headline described greed as “the new tradition”). Whether new or longstanding, a tradition of greed is typified by a dangerous decision issued this week by a federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, in which Ohio State University was able to use trademark law to suppress a fan web site and magazine devoted to its sports teams, established by a commercial publisher.
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Copyrights
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The Gallo report on copyright enforcement -from the pro-Sarkozy MEP, Marielle Gallo- will be voted on Wednesday, September 22nd in the European Parliament. Surprisingly, the Liberal ALDE group has tabled its own alternative resolution, a bad and almost equally repressive text. Under blatant influence of the producers and publishers’ lobbies, this political move from the liberals actually aims at facilitating the vote of the original Gallo report.
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Boston student Joel Tenenbaum is the poster child of an entire generation of downloaders, and one of the few people to stand up against the RIAA instead of signing off on a settlement. This decision proved to be a costly one for Tenenbaum, who now has to pay $67,500 in damages to the record labels for sharing 7 songs. In an interview he now looks back at recent years.
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Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for “discretion” to cover file-sharing as well. That’s the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly available information is illegal.
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It’s difficult to think of a sentence that shows anyone more out of touch than that. Would anyone really want to pay $5,000 (not an insignificant sum by any means) for purely a non-commercial compulsory license? Whenever various compulsory licenses have been discussed, they’ve usually been in the range of $5/month or so. To pretend that anyone will just pay up $5,000 for non-commercial copying is just silly.
The Linux Foundation Video Site:: Why Linux IS Better than…
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the catalysts for my excitement is a slide that was presented during an Ohio LinuxFest presentation from HP’s Phil Robb: “This is the Year of the Irrelevance of the Desktop.” Robb presented a slide which displayed just how far computing has come, and just how far it will go, with Linux riding the wave.
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Until we get to today, with a projected 10 billion-plus mobile consumer devices (the LF slide appears to have a typo, but the original Morgan Stanley study has 10 billion). These mobile consumer devices include:
* Car electronics
* Mobile video
* Home entertainment
* Games
* Wireless home appliances
* Smartphones
* Kindle
* Tablets
* MP3
* Cellphone PDS
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Desktop
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There are inevitably going to be a lot of concerns if you’re thinking of making the jump. I’m going to try and put some of those to bed and demonstrate some of my favourite things about the operating system.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds rarely makes appearances at conferences, and it’s even less common for him to get up in front of the crowd and speak. He made an exception for LinuxCon Brazil, though, where he and Andrew Morton appeared in a question and answer session led by Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin. The resulting conversation covered many aspects of kernel development, its processes, and its history.
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Graphics Stack
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While Mesa 7.9 is just around the corner with a great number of new features and other improvements to this open-source graphics stack used by Linux and other operating systems, those being bound to releases that are proven stable will still be leaving with Mesa 7.8 until Mesa 7.9.1 or 7.9.2 is released later in the year. But for those stable users, there’s also Mesa 7.8.3 that will soon be released.
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Martin Peres is a French developer now working on the Nouveau driver and in particular has been focusing on developing the power management architecture based upon the reverse-engineering work of other Nouveau developers. This morning before leaving for XDS in Toulouse he announced his Nouveau power management work that includes support for parsing the NVIDIA BIOS for the necessary power management bits (with the NV40 to NV96 ASICs) and then voltage and clock settings for the NVIDIA graphics cards.
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It turns out that Wayland may end up finding itself deployed within MeeGo Touch. In fact, it sounds like there is already a prototype of MeeGo Touch + Wayland done by Kristian at Intel. Though this isn’t to be confused with the MeeGo netbook edition or even Nokia’s version of MeeGo Touch for their hand-held devices as they have the decision of using Wayland or continuing to run an X.Org Server.
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XDS 2010 has just begun in Toulouse, France. Well, besides yesterday’s pre-event where we were discussing Wayland and other topics. At the moment just the X.Org Foundation itself is being discussed.
There is an audio feed of the event that I am recording directly from the microphone feeds and those will be published on Phoronix in the coming days. I will also be recording videos of select talks in HD, but it will be from an integrated microphone source.
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Applications
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Audacity is no mere virtual jukebox. Sure, it’ll play music, but what it’s really there for is editing audio files — everything from MP3s you may have in your collection to recordings you make yourself. The multitrack editor isn’t what you’d call a pro-level tool, but its healthy menu of effects and clean-up utilities makes it an easy-to-use and effective app for the amateur soundsmith.
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Guayadeque – (I hope I spelled this right) – This is a music player using wxWidgets which integrates well in GNOME. According to the description on the SourceForge project page, Guayadeque aims to be intuitive, easy to use and fast even for huge music collections. Don’t ask me where the name comes from, because I don’t know. If someone could enlighten me, please do so. Guayadeque comes with a pretty rich set of features, including music library, Last.fm song submission, lyrics fetching, cover fetching, podcast support, fullscreen mode, system tray integration.
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Now, let’s explore the 6 archive managers at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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We tracked down some of the biggest brains at Google and posed them some tough questions about how their projects will evolve and change to accommodate the ever-shifting tides of development. In the first of our two-part series Linux User & Developer sat down with with Fred Sauer, developer advocate, Google App Engine. In the concluding part, we talk to product manager for developer tools, Brad Abrams to chat about Google Web Toolkit and WebM…
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A bunch of new improvements including minimized window previews and awesome plugins like Drunken, Reflective Surfaces, Vignetting etc are also coming. Compiz 0.9.2 is nearing completion, but there are no tentative release dates yet. You can read a more detailed discussion on the topic at compiz-fusion blog.
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Proprietary
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There is also Gnash and Lightspark as free software Flash/SWF alternatives, both of which support 64-bit Linux and the former even supporting VA-API for video acceleration on capable drivers/hardware.
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If a while back Adobe wasn’t very interested in its 64bit Linux users and discontinued Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for 64bit, the new Adobe Flash Player codename “Square” developer preview released by Adobe today is also available for 64bit Linux systems (and obviously, 32bit too).
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Instructionals/Technical
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If, like me, you never paid much attention before to all the intricacies of Java, it’s a chance to get up to speed on all that, as the article walks us through different ways the word Java is used, sometimes a bit loosely, as well as explaining what Dalvik does and the benefits it offers.
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Wine
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What is playonlinux-cmd?
This is a new tool to manage PlayOnLinux in scripts, this was requested on the bug tracker as a feature… and this tool is not yet fully finished.
Currently you can ask for an update of the script database, run already installed software and start the installation of an application.
There are some known bugs that I discovered just after releasing PoL 3.8.1. Currently you can’t use this software if you have never run PlayOnLinux before (will be fixed in next release).
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Games
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The binary installer runs most things by itself, but as is the usual way with these things, you need to flag it as executable.
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The latest version of this argument is Graham Morrison’s article, “The trouble with Linux: There’s too much choice.” Morrison writes that the amount of choice is “often overwhelming, needlessly complicated and an easy excuse for change. Choice goes hand-in-hand with redundancy and duplicated effort.”
Morrison goes on to suggest that, on the one hand, if the community doesn’t make a decision to standardize, then it will lose the choice because others — presumably, businesses and distros — will make the choice for them. On the other hand, by giving up a little unnecessary choice, “we’ll have gained a whole lot more choice where it’s important: the freedom to run secure, safe and supported software on whatever platform we choose.”
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Team Tiny Core has released Tiny Core 3.1 the world’s smallest desktop distribution – an 11 MB live CD, the major theme for this release is the introduction of on demand icons. This allows for more options to have even faster boot times with the easy access to less often used application extensions. Much improved internationalization support and other upgrades and enhancements have been performed throught the system.
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Red Hat Family
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The fastest-growing infosec certification is Red Hat’s. Launched in 2006, this certification is aimed at senior network administrators and is designed to prove that a person has deep skills related to running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a secure fashion.
“Between this time last year and today, the number of people who have passed [the Red Hat Certified Security Specialist] exam has grown by 70%,” says Randy Russell, director of certification at Red Hat. “Clearly, something is happening with this particular credential.”
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Qualcomm Incorporated has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a key virtualization platform for its production workloads.
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Debian Family
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For users who would like to know what an application will look like before they install it, there is a service at screenshots.debian.net. Most screenshots are uploaded by developers, but others can contribute as well. Visit screenshots.debian.net to peruse current screenshots or to sign up to upload.
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So Linux Mint Debian is a project I’ll definitely be watching. If a Mint distro based on Debian Testing proves to be a success, I wonder if the Mint team’s next move will be a distribution based on Debian Stable (though it looks like you can easily make your Mint Debian install stick with Squeeze rather than post-Squeeze Testing). An easy-to-use, multimedia-ready version of Debian Stable would be a great addition to the free, open-source OS ecosphere.
Linux Mint Debian is good enough that it almost (but not quite) makes me willing to give up data encryption in the installer. However, a check of the Mint forums leads me to believe that an encryption option may be coming to Mint Debian. That could very well seal the proverbial deal. How’s that for an endorsement?
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Six years ago I believe that Ubuntu changed desktop Linux. Of course, this had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t involved back then; it was the fantastic work of the original gangstas such as Mark Shuttleworth, Matt Zimmerman, Robert Collins, Scott James Remnant, Jeff Waugh, Benjamin Mako Hill and others who got this train on the rails. They all have my unending respect: they took the fantastic and inspiring rock that is Debian and they built on it to create something different. It was fresh faced, innovative, and had a wicked-cool tan. It inspired me to use and advocate Ubuntu, and ultimately see if I could fit in in a world populated by such original gangstas. Fortunately, the original gangstas was rather nice and welcoming gangstas…
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Late last month, the GNU Gnash project released version 0.8.8 of its open-source flash player, which touts much better compatibility than its predecessors with popular Flash-centric sites, like YouTube. But how well does Gnash 0.8.8 actually work on Ubuntu? We botched up a virtual machine in order to find out.
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Advent of Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect, Apple iPhone and the likes changed quite a lot of things. The first thing they destroyed was the perception that, computer controls are all about keyboards and touchscreens. As we are all aware now, there are a bunch of hardware sensors which, with the help of state of the art software, could do such wonderful stuff which we haven’t even thought about before.
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We are pleased to announce that Ubuntu Pay, the new payment service that allows you to buy commercial software (by means of the Ubuntu Software Centre) or subscriptions to services like Ubuntu One (in the near future), is ready to start accepting translations from the community.
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There are some aspects of Unity which I’m not crazy about. For one, it can feel pretty laggy when performing certain tasks, a problem that might be mitigated by providing better pronounced feedback to the user when clicking buttons.
I also really wish there were a way to auto-hide the panel on the left of the screen, or even remove it altogether. Granted, the most valuable pixels on my netbook’s tiny 1024×600 display are the vertical ones, but horizontal real estate is not in unlimited supply either, and the space eaten up by the launchers can be problematic–especially since many websites these days are designed for a minimum width of 1024 pixels.
In general, Unity has shaped up nicely, and offers netbook users an interface that’s both pretty and functional–especially on touchscreen devices. But like most worldly things, it has flaws, which we hope will be addressed for future Ubuntu releases.
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This highly versatile 3G mobile broadband gadget puts a personal Wi-Fi hotspot in your pocket, but watch for scorch marks on your wallet…
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Phones
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First things first — before you jump on past the break and mash play, mute your speakers. Mute. As in, off. Alrighty, now that you’re prepared, you’ve got two minutes and 14 seconds of teasing just a click away, as some sure-to-be-yelled-at developer has leaked a sneak peak into the wide, mysterious world of webOS 2.0.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Peter Skillman brings interface knowledge to burgeoning open source platform.
Peter Skillman, design VP at Palm has defected to Nokia where he will lend his user interface knowledge to MeeGo. Skill worked directly on Palm’s webOS, which while never a top-seller, has definitely earned high marks for its design presentation.
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Android
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Earlier this morning Avaya unveiled a new lineup of business class products and service that include the Android-based Avaya Desktop Video Device. With a sizable 11.6” HD touch screen, HD camera, and dual-mic support, the device provides real-time enterprise communication and collaboration.
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Tablets
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Asus plans to launch its long awaited Eee Tablet with an 8-inch LCD touchscreen in October for around $300 (£190), though prices vary by market.
[...]
The Eee Tablet will run a Linux OS, but not Google’s Android mobile operating system, which has long been the rumour. The Linux distribution on board was developed by Asustek, said Jerry Shen, CEO of Asustek, speaking with reporters after the conference.
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Archos Internet Tablets – Can you say master of tablet PCs? Not quite done with the Archos 5, Archos 7, and Archos 8 released in September of last year and June this year, the French company last month unveiled its latest offerings in what is getting to be a long list of Archos Android-powered tablets. The five (yes, you read that right – 5) tablet devices all come with the Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’, accelerometers, touch screens in varying sizes, and cameras, to name just a few of their features. The Archos fab five take on the first five slots of this list.
1. Archos 28
With a 2.8-inch resistive touch screen, this midget is apparently the smallest of the lot but there’s still a lot you can do with its 4G of storage, Wi-Fi capability, and a new Archos music application that supports a variety of video and music formats. Browsing on such a diminutive touch screen could still be inhibiting for a lot of people though but at a starting price of $99, it would still spark some interest especially for those who want to browse on the go but don’t want to shell out too much.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Hardware acceleration is fast becoming one of the new standards in browser technology. The process allows the browser to offload certain processes to the graphics processor to add some power to the rendering of the web pages.
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The Mozilla Project announced the release of a new JavaScript benchmark that focuses on real world applications and forward-looking applications. Called Kraken, the benchmark addresses the elements of the Web that people often complain about for being too slow.
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Mozilla Labs is what it name stands for. A place where people come together virtually to produce creative works mostly web based technologies. Mozilla Labs hosts a number of popular projects and involves active community participation.
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CMS
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The consumer-ready alpha is still a few weeks away, but today Diaspora released the developer code as promised. Be patient, though–looks like joindiaspora.com is a little slammed. Skip over to GitHub if you want the code.
And even if you’re not a developer, you can see the first screenshots. You might notice it looks familiar, if you’re not one of the (handful of) people who quit Facebook back in the beginning of the summer.
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Today we are releasing the source code for Diaspora. This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control. From now on we will be working closely with the community on improving and solidifying Diaspora.
We began the summer a list of technologies, and a few bold claims and the goal to make an intrinsically more private social network. The overwhelming response that we elicited made us realize that technology woudn’t be enough. Even the most powerful, granular set of dropdowns and checkboxes will never give people control over where their content is going, let alone give them ownership of their digital self.
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Healthcare
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Jesse Dylan’s story is an amazing one. His son was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune inflammation of the intestines which causes chronic pain, vomiting, and other symptoms. Dylan found it to be extremely difficult to find reliable clinical data on Crohn’s disease online or through any other medium, so he founded the Lybba project. The goal of Lybba is to create an online central repository of medical information, a “Wikipedia” for the health care industry. Lybba is a non-profit organization that is committed to transforming health care using the principles of the open source movement.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Thinkers lending on the side of software neutrality organized a Petition For The Removal Of Proprietary Software Advertising On Government Websites. Zealous members of this community actually went to spend some time to find examples of government websites promoting a product from a private company, such as the website of the French Ministry of Education. This is embarrassing.
A well-known bias in procurement approach is to ask for a “BMW” or an “IBM” when we need a car or a computer. Open and competitive procurement means that buyers are giving a fair chance to everyone capable to offer a “solution”. Brands have value, but why should a public administration pay for brand use (would this be a good use of taxpayer money)? Isn’t a generic service satisfying enough if is does the same thing? Even when the product is free of charge, there is still a benefit for a vendor (brand owner) in terms of exposure, promotion, and implicit endorsement when their product is being advertised by a large and well-known organization. Should free of charge products, and others, be examined in light of alternatives before leaning toward one particular solution?
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Government
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The government of Romania is considering to develop an IT strategy to increase public administration’s use of open source, ICT Minister Valerian Vreme said Tuesday in a press conference.
“We will work on a strategy on the use of open source software. There are other European countries, such as France and Germany, which extensively use this type of software”, Vreme was quoted by Ziarul Financiar, a financial newspaper.
Increasing the use of open source is one of several options to reduce government spending that were announced by Vreme on Tuesday.
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Licensing
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Over ten years ago, the development of syslog-ng started out as a purely GPL project, but required copyright transfer for contributed patches. Similar to other projects, for example MySQL, this aimed to keep the codebase under a single copyright, leaving the possibility open for future relicensing and proprietary versions.
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Openness/Sharing
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I don’t know why but this cynical example from Jacques Bughin (McKinsey & Company) on open innovation is not supposed to be fun:
When recently Fiat has called its fans to give ideas and feedback on new Fiat 500, no less than 170,000 designs have been proposed graciously, together with 1,000 accessories. No IP, no wage, but there’s a feeling for contributing fans that their opinion matter,
It is a concept from the news papers business, the letters to the editors. Free content – and from an editorial perspective “improvement of newspaper-reader relations”.
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Standards/Consortia
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On September 3rd OASIS ODF Adoption TC member Rob Weir sat down KDE community members Jos van den Oever (left) and Inge Wallin (right), in Budapest at the OpenOffice.org Conference, to discuss a range of topics, including the design philosphy of KOffice, its use of ODF 1.2′s new RDF metadata capabilities and the Nepomuk social semantic desktop project. You can listen to this interview in our second episode of the ODF Podcast.
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DISPLAYLINK HAD a beta version of their monitor over USB3 hardware running on the floor of IDF this year, and some other goodies too. Just because USB3 is on the horizon doesn’t mean USB2 devices are standing still.
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The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department, who can’t be bothered to look up Pedobear’s extensive Wikipedia entry, issued a very serious warning about Pedobear last week, as seen in the news report above.
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However, the RepRaps won’t lead to a mass revolution either, at least not yet. They are simply far to complex for most people to own and operate. Today’s 3D print operators are much like the barnstorming pilots of the 20th century, who sit ready with wrenches to tune and repair their 3D printer. Yes, they’re inexpensive, but our Mom would never be able to use them.
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Science
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Finance
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The improvements in the unpaid credit card balances that banks gave up trying to collect stalled in August.
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Production at U.S. factories grew in August for the 12th time in 14 months, but at a slower rate than earlier this year as consumers spent cautiously.
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The latest data from the Washington D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics shows that Goldman has doled out roughly $914,000 to Republican candidates compared to about $776,000 to Democrats in this year’s election cycle.
“I think that Wall Street and other large donors have become not too much unlike the electorate at large – sort of willing to change,” said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor of the Cook Political Report, one of the nation’s leading non-partisan political handicappers.
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Goldman’s “ultimate goal is hunting and killing China,” warns Li Delin, the Chinese author of “The Goldman Sachs Conspiracy,” a bestseller in China.
Li is not as visually dramatic as Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone picture of Goldman as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” But Li’s Chinese readers love his “Goldman Sachs knows when to go for your neck” like a “Manchurian tiger.”
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Three former female employees at Goldman Sachs sued the investment bank on Wednesday, contending that the firm discriminates systematically against women.
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Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is trying to recover more than $3 billion from banks, insurers and other financial services companies that it claims it lost when its bankruptcy filing in 2008 caused its priority payment status to be modified.
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The nation’s largest banks have an obligation to pay some of the cost for bailing out mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because they sold them bad mortgages, a government regulator said Wednesday.
Edward DeMarco, the acting director for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said the banks this summer have refused to take back $11 billion in bad loans sold to the two government-controlled companies, in written testimony submitted for a House subcommittee hearing Wednesday. A third of those requests have been outstanding for at least three months.
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The European Union’s executive on Wednesday proposed tougher curbs on financial market practices seen to have contributed to the global market crisis that drove the world’s largest economies into recession.
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There are a couple of weird arguments that come up when you talk about tax cuts. One is that “tax cuts do not cause deficits. Spending does.” This is pretty easy to test: If we cut taxes this year but leave spending unchanged, will anything happen to deficits next year? The answer, of course, is yes. They will go up. Fast.
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While there has been much debate about the ethics of walking away from a burdensome mortgage, the majority of Americans still believe such behavior is unacceptable, according to a report from Pew Research Center.
On the other hand, more than a third (36 percent) say the practice is at least sometimes acceptable.
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The Obama administration is moving to take a harder stance on the Chinese government’s trade and currency policies, with anger toward China rising in both political parties ahead of midterm elections.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, in separate hearings before House and Senate panels, plans to acknowledge on Thursday that China has kept the value of its currency, the renminbi, artificially low to help its exports and has largely failed to improve the situation as it promised to do in June.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Last week, we teamed up with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) to bring a lawsuit challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy that allows agents to search, copy and detain travelers’ laptops (and cell phones and cameras and other electronic devices) at the border without any reason to believe that the search will turn up evidence of wrongdoing. These tactics amount to electronic fishing expeditions into the constitutionally protected materials on an innocent traveler’s electronic device.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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I filmed a video of my comments on today’s San Jose Mercury News story about Apple wanting to get into the newspaper business by selling subscriptions on its iPad and other devices and keeping 30 percent of the subscription revenue and 40 percent of the advertising revenue.
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Copyrights
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Similarly, the user generated content provision allows Canadians to make non-commercial new works that incorporate other copyrighted works. This provision – dubbed by many as the YouTube provision for supporting popular online mashups – has nothing to do with piracy. It is remarkable to find the chair of a leading industry association now claiming that these provisions support websites that promote piracy. In fact, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore had a better description for these kinds of claims – radically extreme.
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After signing its intention to conform its copyright act to World Intellectual Property Organization standards 11 years ago, the Canadian government has introduced Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, to fulfill that mandate.
But after the failure of two previous attempts — Bill C-60 and Bill C-61 both died on the vine due to unexpected election calls — some are warning the same fate could befall the CMA, especially since federal conservatives remain in charge and could be toppled by the opposition at any time.
Many private and public Canadian music industry interests wouldn’t mind seeing the CMA — in its present form — defeated, maintaining that the proposed copyright reform falls far short of assisting the very creators the bill is designed to protect.
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ACTA
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Last Sunday, Clifford Levy in the New York Times published a disturbing and eye-opening account of selective crackdowns by the Russian government against alleged pirates of Microsoft products who also happened to be vocal environmental activists. The day after the story’s publication, Microsoft changed its policy, stating (as reported again by Mr. Levy) that it will now “provid[e] a blanket software license to advocacy groups and media outlets,” so that there will be no question about whether certain computers are running licensed software or not. Though they will “be automatically covered by it, without having to apply,” I’m wondering what exactly will qualify as an “advocacy group” or “media outlet,” and how and when those determinations will be made — e.g., before, or after, a seizure has occurred?
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09.15.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There are plenty of people who have offered explanations for why Linux thrives anonymously on servers and as Android on smartphones but lags behind on the desktop. Though reasons abound, at least one significant one is a self-inflicted wound: the Terminal Bully.
The Terminal Bully is the poster who refuses to offer a respectful and understandable solution to a genuine problem some newcomer has posted on a forum, and instead tries to show off their own knowledge by offering a lengthy and sometimes risky set of commands that only confuse anyone who is not yet familiar with Linux.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While Kristian Høgsberg is now likely on his way to Toulouse, France for the 2010 X Developers’ Summit, over the past day he has been working on some minor changes to the Wayland Display Server that he has now been working on for a while to leverage the latest Linux graphics technologies like kernel mode-setting and is something we initially reported on back in 2008 when it began.
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Applications
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Know about vim? emacs? nano? Bah. You have only scratched the surface.
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Videoporama (available for Windows and Linux) is an application you can use to create videos (or slideshows – call it what you like) from images.
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GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a powerful and versatile graphics manipulation application that is available for many different OS. GIMP is a standard in Linux, usually part of the standard image on most desktop distros. It is clearly one of the most popular applications in the Linux application catalog, mostly down to its outstanding quality, power and flexibility.
[...]
Single Window Mode. An old favorite request from the user community.
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Proprietary
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What’s next ? You guys may ask. It’s been a while since I wanted to talk about this, but there it is, the Flash Player “Square” preview has been posted this morning.
The drops we posted today includes :
- 64-bit releases for all platforms (Linux, MacOS and Windows).
- Enchanced support for IE9 (leveraging the GPU through Direct3D9 for compositing)
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I was hoping it would take longer so my last “contest”/giveaway will make sense – but now everyone can register a trial account and play 10 matches.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Applications seem to be working fine and snappy. My previews are even working with dolphin file manager.
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As reported a few months ago, KDE software has plenty of use among scientists, who may use Plasma workspaces for their daily jobs or develop applications on top of the KDE Platform.
One application that builds on the KDE Platform is RKWard. RKWard is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the R programming language, a free implementation of the statistics and math oriented S-plus. Due to the wealth of statistical and mathematical functions and the large number of add-on libraries, R is often the tool of choice for people doing statistics and mathematics in many different fields of science. As R does not come with a GUI on Linux (unlike its Windows counterpart), RKWard provides one and adds a lot of features to ease the job, going beyond the role of a simple front-end.
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Aaron: I am a member of the global KDE community, and have been for nearly a decade now. Within KDE, I work as a software developer, provide some project and community management services and help provide a public face to the world for KDE by doing presentations at conferences, participating in interviews like this one, etc. I have also served on the board of directors as President of our global non-profit foundation, KDE e.V.
Beyond KDE, I live in Canada and have a young and happy family on the Western coast of North America, which provides a wonderful environment for enjoying the outdoors as well as music and food, which are two of my main “vices”.
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No, I do not want to talk of Linux MINT, but as is practically possible to apply some tricks to make our desktop a bit more nature oriented.
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In software development, it has become common practice to improve program code, stabilise it in alpha and beta versions, and then release it. The whole process then begins again, while the released version receives small low-risk fixes as patches. Most Linux distributions pursue this strategy to coordinate the software contained within them and test the mixture. A lot of distributors are very careful in maintaining their distributions to keep the complex structure from collapsing when a new distribution is released; instead of providing updates to more recent program versions, between distribution versions they merely send out the changes that patch security holes and correct other major flaws.
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New Releases
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aptosid is a full featured Debian sid based live CD with a special focus on hard disk installations, a clean upgrade path within sid and additional hardware and software support. The ISO is completely based on Debian sid, enriched and stabilized with aptosid’ own packages and scripts.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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The distribution contains everything you average desktop user need:
Gnome desktop, Firefox, Thunderbird, openoffice, pidgin, brasero, The Gimp, Transmission, Rhythmbox, VLC, mplayer, Xchat and Gwibber.
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We all know that there are passionate partisans of the GNOME and KDE versions of Linux Mint; yet, oddly, you rarely hear about people raving about the Xfce version. That’s a shame, because sometimes less is truly more. Linux Mint 9 Xfce has a lot to offer to those who have limited hardware, or who simply prefer not to deal with the eye-candy bloat of GNOME or KDE.
[...]
Summary: Linux Mint 9 Xfce is a near-perfect blend of the minimalist advantages of the Xfce desktop environment and the tools/features of Linux Mint.
Rating: 4/5
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After a few hours of hacking, I came up with Debian Bugs Search. This Ultimate Debian Database tool enables to query different kinds of Debian bugs (especially RC bugs using a multi-criteria search. It is aimed at being a replacement for the unofficial RC Bugs tracker, which has some bugs and fails to display the correct status for some bugs (Debian Bugs Search sees 450 RC bugs affecting squeeze, vs 278 for the unofficial RC bugs tracker).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When the new wallpaper landed in maverick, there was a loud outcry as a lot of users were upset with the visual appearance–the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS background with deeper saturation and orange spots added. I did not appreciate it either, although it did grow on me. But I eagerly awaited the revamped wallpaper and it finally landed.
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They say first impressions count and Maverick has certainly taken that to heed with its redesigned slideshow to play during installation.
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Tablets
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The Insignia Infocast is a $169 simple media device being sold at Best Buy. Marketed as a way to share photos and run Chumby apps, hackers are starting to release packages to extend its features.
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Oftentimes, when you hear the arguments for “Why open source?”, they are aimed at convincing companies to use open source software. But the other piece of the argument is, of course, an argument for why your company should build open source – why it should develop its technology in a community-driven, open sourced way.
Along those lines, Peter Friese, head of mobile development at Itemis recently wrote an article arguing “Why Your Next App Should Be Open Sourced.”
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Fortunately open source software has reached the point where it has become mainstream. Companies are buying other companies purely for their open source components. Other open source programs are extremely popular and grabberments, educational institutions and more businesses than ever before are seriously considering or using open source software. However, you may be thinking, what does this have to do with our children?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Growth over the last year has been static, and things are about to get worse. A competing open source browser has been able to go from zero to 7% market share, and doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.
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Oracle
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It is not quite ready for primetime, but with the announcement of OpenIndiana, a so-called spork of Oracle’s OpenSolaris Unix distribution, the server world is getting a familiar, re-opened, and community-developed operating system aimed specifically at data center workloads.
Alasdair Lumsden owns a hosting company in London called EveryCity Managed Hosting, and his customers are deployed on Solaris 10, which was made freely available with security patches when it was announced nearly six years ago by Sun Microsystems. The company has 50 servers supporting 250 Solaris containers – not exactly a hyperscale customer by some standards – but Lumsden has been an enthusiastic supporter of the OpenSolaris project and did his part in the community as he built a business running Solaris on x64 servers.
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The preferable approach, and the safest approach, to protecting innovation in the field of software development from the chilling effects of patent claims will always be to eliminate the dangerous practice of software patents altogether. It is important to oppose software patents at every turn, and for those of us in the United States to try to get the USPTO to stop issuing patents for software, if you care about healthy innovation in the software industry in general and open source software in particular.
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CMS
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Best Buy, one of the biggest retailers of consumer electronics in the United States is using Drupal for their mobile magazine website: http://www.bestbuymobile.com/. Best Buy earns 50 billion USD in revenues and has over 180,000 employees. Needless to say, this is a big enterprise adopting Drupal.
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I kept my account on identi.ca, the open source version of Twitter. When there are Open Source solutions for the broader problem of social networking, I’ll install them.
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Education/Libraries
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Librarians uncomfortable with the erosion of privacy on Facebook can now turn to a new social network called Diaspora, a personal Web server that stores shared information securely.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Government
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E-tax is software provided by the Australian Taxation Office to conduct tax returns online. The office has been under fire for a number of years for not making a version of the software function on Linux or Apple Mac systems.
However, this wasn’t the reason Stallman called the product “unjust”. His reasoning for this term was that it is not “free” software.
Stallman feels strongly about freedom and wanted to be very clear on the distinction between free software and open source.
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Standards/Consortia
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Kaltura, the world’s first open-source video platform, has developed one such library available at www.html5video.org and has created an industry resource to involve developers.
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Science
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Provide people cheap access to clean water and you could save billions of lives. South Africa may use tea bags to do just that. Researchers at Stellenbosch University’s Water Institute have developed a new water filtration system that uses activated carbon and nanofibers to quickly filter out pathogens. The carbon and nanofibers are placed in common tea bags and then fitted into a bottle. Fill the bottle with dubious water, install a filter, and drink. It’s that easy. According to SciDev Net, the ultimate price for these ‘tea bag’ nanfiber filters will be around half a cent (USD) each and be able to handle around 1 L before being replaced. A super cheap, portable, easy to use system to purify water? Sounds amazing. Watch developer (and SU dean) Eugene Cloete describe the project in the video below. You know a scientist believes in a product when he’s willing to test it on himself in front of a camera.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are calling for answers to critical privacy and safety questions that loom over a controversial federal program to track preschoolers with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips at George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California.
In an open letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Contra Costa County Employment and Human Services Department, ACLU-NC and EFF are asking officials to disclose what technical and security measures are used by the system to safeguard the privacy and safety of preschoolers, as well as what data is collected, how long it is retained, and who has access to the information. The letter also calls on officials to publicly address why and how the government decided to track Head Start students, and if the government plans to expand such tracking.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Digital Economy (UK)
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For months now, the brightest minds in the UK—well, the brightest minds in the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, anyway—have been pondering a thorny question: who should pay for all the warning letters that will soon be winging their way by e-mail and post to (suspected) P2P users? Today, we learned the answer (PDF): rightsholders will pick up 75 percent of the tab, but ISPs will pay the rest.
Under the Digital Economy Act, passed earlier this year, the UK gave its courts the power to order complete blocks on websites, required ISPs to start sending P2P warning letters from copyright holders, and opened the door to throttling and Internet disconnection for repeat infringement at some future date.
Vlmc demo #2
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Despite the bombastic predictions of open-source advocates, and a short-lived spell as the default netbook operating system, Linux remains at the very margins of mainstream computing. Even among PC Pro’s technically literate readership, only 4% are running a Linux OS, according to the visitor stats for this website.
However, something rather extraordinary is happening in the Linux world. Amid all the distros that have come and gone over the years, one finally has the potential, the momentum and the commercial backing to at least challenge the Windows hegemony.
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I have been touting the security of Linux on the desktop for several years now. But a question from Artremis on my article Open Source: FOSS Security Updates vs Microsoft Patch Day has me thinking about how to attempt to prove that. I know one “cannot prove a negative”, barring odd philosophical views from odd philosophers on that. But I think we in the FOSS Linux community can do more than just talk.
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Ballnux
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As if the smash success that was the original wasn’t enough, HTC has made official the Desire Z and Desire HD. Both handsets feature aluminum construction but each offer something unique. The HTC Desire HD — which has been floating around as the HTC Ace in leaked screen shots — features a 4.3-inch 480×800 SLCD display, 8MP camera and dual flash capable of 720p HD video capture, and Android 2.2 with a new HTC Sense. This monster packs some hefty specs including a 1GHz processor, 1.5GB of internal storage, and 768MB of RAM. The phone features radio support for HSPA/CDMA and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s been a while since I last reviewed a shooter game for Linux, and one of them was World of Padman (reviewed here), which was a cartoon-like, funny first-person shooter. Well, the same goes for Warsow, the game I’m going to talk about in this article. Every graphical aspect of Warsow indicates we’re dealing with a cartoon-like universe, from the character models to weapons and maps.
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According to an updated posted on September 5 on the official Warsow blog, the next version, 0.55, will feature several new maps, a tutorial map, a new chat console and a new crosshair featuring a damage indicator in a Quake Live style.
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Red Hat Family
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The Garage doors are opening for entrepreneurs at North Carolina State University thanks to support from open source software firm Red Hat and the NC State Entrepreneurial Initiative.
The “Garage,” is a facility for students engaged in entrepreneurial endeavors and provides curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to empower students, whatever their discipline, as entrepreneurial thinkers, doers and leaders.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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He’s got a point. I remember the excitement generated a few years back when Michael Dell publicly applauded the Ubuntu desktop and Dell’s decision to preload Ubuntu on select PCs. Now that deal per se was not a big success, but it shifted perception about the potential of Linux on the desktop in a far more signifiant way than Red Hat or Novell ever did.
Both Canonical’s Ubuntu and Google’s Android are open source Linux projects that have advanced the cause of Linux, even if the implementations have stirred controversy within the open source community. That has to be good for open source.
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The selected video and audio tracks for this cycles Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase initiative have been uploaded to Maverick.
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Fortunately for me, my work in Canonical enabling Ubuntu to work on PCs fulfils this passion of mine. My daily work normally involves me looking at obscure firmware issues in PC BIOSs and figuring out what is wrong and how to address and fix the problem.
Without fixing these issues, quite a few machines would just not function correctly for various reasons. My work involves fixing issues such as Suspend/Resume and Hibernate/Resume hangs, or looking at why hardware is not quite configured correctly after boot or resume. Unfortunately buggy firmware does happen quite frequently and leads to all sorts of weird issues. Hotkeys, LCD backlights, wake alarms, fan controls, thermal trip points and even CPU configuration can be affected by BIOS or ACPI bugs. All these need fixing, so it keeps me busy!
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Last month I gave a presentation on the interaction between Android and kernel upstream at Linuxcon. The video for that is now available here (requires registration). Contrary to stories you may have heard, I do not dropkick anyone through a window.
There’s some parallels between the Android/upstream scenario and Canonical’s approach to upstream. Mark wrote a lengthy defence of Canonical’s focus on components that they feel need development, while not putting development effort into things they feel are good enough already. That’s pretty consistent with the discussions I had with him at the Ubuntu development meeting in Oxford over six years ago. Back then the focus was on taking all the excellent software that already existed and concentrating on providing it as a single polished and integrated product. It was successful – what’s easy to forget now is that the first release of Ubuntu was massively more usable out of the box than any other Linux distribution available at the time, and it’s absolutely undeniable that its release spurred increased efforts on the part of competitors. But I don’t think the same focus is being applied any more.
[...]
Canonical would be perceived as much better team players if there was an indication of their long-term plan in terms of Unity and the Ayatana projects and getting that code into mainline Gnome and integrating with the Gnome shell. It’s completely unsurprising that they’re viewed with distrust until that happens.
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When it comes to organizations involved in tending to Free software projects, I personally take a view that is probably deeply colored by my previous life experiences in business. Which is to say, it’s probably a bit boring, conservative and balances out my raging enthusiasm for community.
In my opinion, there is a responsibility for such organizations to identify, define and manage risks related to the responsibility of oversight of what is a very valuable item: the intellectual and creative work embodied in the software products. This is ignored only at great risk to the software, its users and those responsible for the continued development of the software. As a whole, the Free software ecosystem fails more than it succeeds in this, though it is getting better every year.
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English-built, open source games console Pandora has shipped its thousandth unit – not bad considering every one is hand made by geeks in Newcastle.
The Pandora isn’t just a games console: running a tweaked Ångström Linux it can manage Open Office and Firefox too, all using open source hardware and software in a box the size of a Nintendo DS. Even the fact that it costs twice as much as a DS hasn’t stopped 1000 people buying one.
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The Chinese, like me, prefer low cost and efficient IT. Hence their love of GNU/Linux and home-grown chips. There is news that a new dual core ARM CPU has been integrated into the SoC (System on a Chip) design with 1.6gHz and 2gHz speeds.
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Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) announced a Linux-ready, conduction- or air-cooled 3U cPCI single-board computer (SBC) based on Freescale’s 1.5GHz, eight-core QorIQ P4080 system-on-chip (SoC). The XPedite5430 is equipped with up to 8GB of DDR3-1333 SDRAM, 16GB of NAND flash, PCI Express or Serial RapidIO expansion, plus gigabit Ethernet, serial, and USB connectivity.
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The two-drive TS-259 Pro+ (4TB), four-drive TS-459 Pro+ (8TB), five-drive TS-559 Pro+ (10TB), and six-drive TS-659 Pro+ (12TB) all ship with 1GB RAM, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, iSCSI support, and newly updated Linux-based firmware.
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At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Intel showed off Atom-based Google TV devices from Sony and Logitech. Meanwhile, Google confirmed Google TV is on schedule, and D-Link switched its Linux-based Boxee Box set-top box (STB) from an Nvidia Tegra 2 to the same Intel Atom CE4100 chipset used by the Google TV devices.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The open-source mobile operating system is the result of a tie-up between the two tech giants, bringing together Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. It’s designed for tablets, netbooks and handsets as well as televisions and in-car systems.
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The MeeGo operating system is an open source Linux project, which is a combination of Intel’s Moblin project and Nokia’s Naemo project. It is able to provide flexible UI and application environments, allows you to do practically anything with it, and supports all popular file formats. It also manages to do this while working with a number of graphical and processor optimisations, meaning it is not only extremely open but also very fast.
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DeviceVM previewed a new MeeGo-based version of its Splashtop instant-on distribution at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), effectively opening up the technology to Linux developers. The distribution is already being made available to OEMs, with end user upgrades available in the first half of 2011, says the company.
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At an Intel Developer Forum (IDF) keynote, Amino demonstrated a new MeeGo-ready set-top box (STB) while discussing its contributions to MeeGo’s Connected TV reference platform. Due to ship in the fourth quarter, the Freedom STB is equipped with Intel’s Atom CE4100 SoC, supports IPTV and traditional broadcast services, and offers both Adobe Flash 10.1 and Microsoft Silverlight.
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Android
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Google’s Android platform is the elephant in the room. While open and completely community driven, there are thousands of applications running on Android that are closed source. To protect those applications, Google released its Licensing Service.
Google’s Licensing Service, which is still in the infancy stages, is a great offering to the development community when it comes to copy protection. Yet, the Licensing Service is easily defeated, depending on how it is implemented.
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Verizon appears to be moving further away from Android’s Google and open source core premise this week as it has begun to ask for submissions to its own app store, expected to debut as early as next week. The carrier appears to be following a similar structure to that of Apple, where apps must go through an approval process and revenues are split between Verizon and the developer.
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This is a problem that will get worse, not better, as open source moves ever-closer to the heart of consumer electronics, and as more large-scale projects start to put together open source components with many different licences. Android shows how powerful that can be – and the kind of challenges it brings with it. Now that this digital Pandora’s box has been opened, the open source community needs to start thinking about how to manage the consequences in a more structured, scalable way.
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Amazon.com opened pre-order sales for a $370, seven-inch, Android 2.2 tablet from Stream TV Network. The eLocity A7 tablet is equipped with a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2, 512MB RAM, 4GB of flash memory, and offers a seven-inch capacitive display, an HDMI port for 1080p output, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and a 1.3-megapixel webcam, says Amazon.
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Yoon Boo Keun, head of Samsung’s TV business line, reportedly said the company is reviewing whether to use Android, an OS more commonly found in various smartphones, in a new line of TV sets.
Samsung is working on an operating system that can be used for both mobile phones and television, Yoon apparently revealed.
The Korean electronics could be stepping into a confusing market — it has its own Bada mobile phone OS and also makes Android smartphones. Further, it has just revealed an Android-based tablet, the Galaxy Tab.
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T-Mobile officially unveiled its G2 smartphone, the successor to the world’s first Android-powered mobile phone, touting its faster Web-browsing experience and direct integration with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) services.
The G2, which is designed specifically for T-Mobile’s new HSPA+ network, features downloads at “4G speeds,” according to T-Mobile. The network is expected to reach more than 100 million Americans in 55 major cities across the country when the smartphone becomes available later this month.
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Of course, in TechCrunch’s world, there’s only two mobile platforms out there. It’s probably too hard to keep track of three. And yes, Symbian as well as MeeGo are open-source platforms. We’ll give TechCrunch a little bit of slack and presume they ignored this fact to get their link bait right.
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Liferay, provider of the leading open source portal solution, today announced it has awarded CIGNEX, the global Platinum partner of Liferay, the Partner of the Year for 2010. This announcement was made at the Liferay West Coast Symposium held at Anaheim, CA on September 8 & 9.
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Just because it say’s “Free” doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Arizona Reporter examines four relevant Open Source applications that reduce overall operating costs for small and large businesses alike.
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To get another perspective on the Vernor vs Autodesk case we went to Groklaw. Groklaw is one of the best sources for legal information about the computer industry. The founder of Groklaw, P.J. Jones, has been correct about computer law case outcomes more times than not.
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There is a ruling [PDF] from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Vernor v. Autodesk, and some of you will hate it.
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Sonatype, the start-up founded by the original author of the open source Maven build and project management software, has announced that it has a new CEO and is receiving $11.6M funding. Maven is an Apache Software Foundation project which is supported by Sonatype.
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Open-Xchange, provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced today an exclusive distribution agreement with Next IT for hosted and on-premises Open-Xchange products in Japan.
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CONNECT includes one or more open source applications for each of the components, plus some private vendor tools such as IBM/Initiate Systems’ master patient index software.
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Free, open-source software (FOSS) is finally a trusted solution in the enterprise, but primarily only in infrastructure layers. The promise of a completely open-source enterprise is nigh, but the nagging question remains: Will it work as a business for the technology industry? New business models are now appearing that bridge the old world of enterprise software with the promise and customizations of open source.
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While only half a dozen people were affected there is a matter of principle at stake. Companies making use of (GPL) open source enter into a legal agreement to share their developments, so it was important that Dell complied.
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Opsview, the open source network and application monitoring vendor, today announced it has teamed up with Canonical, the Ubuntu service provider, to help drive the enterprise adoption of Opsview Enterprise with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition. Opsview has grown rapidly within the managed service provider and financial services space; key strategic verticals for Canonical.
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I’m a college student, a panelist at IT seminars, a tutor at IT workshops, a writer, a moderator and the founder of a few hacker community forums, the head of KPLI — Kelompok Pengguna Linux [Linux User Group] – Tangerang.
And I do work on some IT projects that I can’t mention here.
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Events
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The Department of Justice introduction of the “whistleblower bounty” is further evidence of the increasingly aggressive position the government is taking towards enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Under the provision, whistleblowers are eligible to recover between 10 and 30 percent of any settlement that exceeds $1 million based on the significance of information and level of cooperation provided.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The flaw appears to have been introduced in Firefox versions 3.5.12 and 3.6.9, released last week, with the Bugzilla bug-tracking system showing a large number of reported crashes from clients across Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.
[...]
While a report over on ComputerWorld suggests that the updates have started flowing once again as of early this morning, there has so far been no official word from Mozilla on whether the root cause of the problem has been addressed.
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SaaS
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Open-source cloud infrastructure provider Cloud.com has announced a big win in the enterprise market: a partnership with HP that will bring Cloud.com into the AllianceONE programme.
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Where Cloudera shines, however, is in taking these different contributions and making Hadoop relevant for enterprise IT, where data mining has waxed and waned over the years. Part of the “waning” has come through the cost and complexity of the systems used to mine corporate data.
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With regard to continually refining its consumer products, Yahoo is working with developers through its open source initiative Hadoop, which is the company’s analytics and data warehousing framework, to constantly improve its compute capabilities, said the executive. The Hadoop framework was made available to the open source community last June and, since then, Yahoo has contributed about 70 percent of all code written, he added.
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OpenStack, the open source cloud project built around a Rackspace API, has set some deadlines for development milestones.
The most important date is October 21.
That’s the day for delivering the company’s first release, dubbed Austin. This will be followed by a development conference scheduled for November 9-12 in San Antonio. (Nachos for everyone!)
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What makes the Hadoop and NoSQL movements is that their growth is driven less by the itches of the associated vendors than it is the itches of the users/developers. Indeed we see vendors in these markets being led by existing users/developers in trying to figure out the opportunities for commercialization.
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Databases
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Xeround is based on an in-memory database and has been tested in a number of telco production environments, according to CEO Razi Sharir. The software utilizes virtual partitions where data partitions are decoupled–or abstracted–from physical resources. These virtual partitions hold copies of both the data and the indexes, in order to ensure high availability and performance.
Despite the ubiquity of open-source MySQL, the database has in the past suffered from scaling issues, which has often led developers down one of two paths: using a NoSQL database to front-end applications; and/or sharding, a process that splits the database into smaller chunks, but requires a high-degree of user sophistication.
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Oracle
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Next, is the blog of Bruce Perens, original author of the “Open Source Definition” and a founder of the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Standard Base, and Software in the Public Interest. The insightful Perens jumped back into blogging after a fairly long absence with some useful posts on the Oracle lawsuit, the Mark Hurd firing and other issues.
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What do I expect from JavaOne 2010? Well, I am hoping that Oracle will finally put rumours to rest regarding its stance on Open Source. I hope that its plans for Java will include a faster and more open process in defining and releasing improvements to the language and the technology.
I am hoping that JavaFX will finally get the much needed marketing funds to get developers, as well as device manufacturers, e.g., mobile phones and TVs, to start developing and deploying apps.
Sun announced the Java Application Store, I hope that this will be released for the global market, rather than for a select few.
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OpenIndiana aims to be binary and package compatible with Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express and to act as a “free drop in replacement” for OpenSolaris. The developers compare their development model to the way CentOS project is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source. OpenIndiana combines the official OpenSolaris source with free, open source software from the community, such as the XNV X Window System, the Sun Freeware Collection (SFW), the Java Desktop System (JDS), the IPS packaging system and the Caiman installer.
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Education
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Additionally, the cost of developing courses can also be significantly reduced with open source technology. Currently, every university develops its own courses, one of the most costly aspects of running an academic institution. Why do we need so many professors developing courses at so many universities? Just as we share materials online, we must also share talent. If we enlist the top minds in every discipline to create quality courses and then distribute them via open source technology, we can drastically reduce education costs, lessening the economic burden on students.
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Healthcare
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The developers, including specialists from Brazil, Germany, Greece and France, aim to build a system that will manage electronic medical records, hospital information and health information. Its services include prescriptions, billing, patient information, managing epidemiological and statistical data and management of medical stock. The entire project is published using the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), an open source licence.
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This Sunday sees Tauranga’s very own Software Freedom Day event.
The event – an open day to promote free software and free software concepts – is part of a worldwide celebration.
Organised by the BOP Linux User Group supported by TechnologyWise, the open day will feature volunteers showing visitors the extent of open source software and its capabilities.
Internationally, the goal of Software Freedom Day is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality Free and Open Source Software in education, in government, at home, and in business.
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Government
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A spokesman from the Department of Finance and Deregulation explained that while open source was “in wide use across the Australian Government”, AGIMO took a neutral position on open source.
“Based on the Committee’s decision, AGIMO formally declined South Australia’s request to be involved in the OTF,” she told iTnews.
“AGIMO has a policy of informed neutrality regarding open source software with value for money across the total cost of ownership of the software being the overriding principle for its use.”
But Bryan King of the SA Office of the CIO yesterday told delegates at the open source OSSPAC conference that “open source for Government hasn’t made any major penetration”.
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Communications Minister Valerian Vreme, appointed in this position at the beginning of the month, says he is considering devising a strategy to introduce free-of-charge open-source software, which would see a decline in contracts between the state and software producers, but would mean cost savings for the government.
[...]
Vreme (47), who worked for over ten years in IT in the private sector, says first interoperability rules will be set, in order for an institution that uses open-source software to be able to communicate with one that is not using such software. Open-source software, such as the OpenOffice suite, the Linux operating system, and the Firefox browser, is free-of-charge, and can be an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows and Office, produced by the world’s biggest software company.
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Openness/Sharing
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They say open source material puts the information in the hands of students and professors.
“It gives students the choice as to how much they want to spend,” said Saul Adelman, a finance professor at Miami who had used open source books in his Risk Management class. “I’m concerned about book prices. That’s why I explored this option.”
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It was the hard-edged professional, with either a product to push or a geospatial project searching for a solution, who attended this year’s FOSS4G. Perhaps more than any other descriptor I can think of, the word “mature” best defines the state of the free and open source geospatial software industry today. One has to look no further than companies like OpenGeo to realize these are legit outfits, with shrink-wrap software solutions capable of managing geospatial data and applications, from top to bottom, for all but perhaps the largest of users, such as the U.S. Dept. of Defense. Open source GIS software is here to stay, and it’s making big inroads into private and governmental users by the looks of the vendors and attendees at FOSS4G.
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I’ve never been much for clubs. When I was young, I made a lousy cub scout. I wasn’t a real “joiner” in high school or college either (just enough to get by) and I still don’t get actively involved in many professional associations today.
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Thousands of unpublished pages of Jeremy Bentham’s manuscripts are ready for transcription with a new crowdsourcing program from University College London’s Transcribe Bentham project.
Researchers at UCL are counting on Bentham enthusiasts around the globe to help transcribe and digitize thousands of handwritten pages of the influential philosopher’s work. The university has about 40,000 untranscribed pages of Bentham in its collection. It photographed 4,500 pages for the initial phase of the project—accessible through the Transcribe Bentham Web site—and is calling on Bentham scholars, armchair philosophers, or almost anyone with an Internet connection to turn the handwritten prose into machine-readable type.
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The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation.
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Open Data
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The ‘Who Runs London?’ guide illustrates the web of ministries, assemblies, agencies and councils that together run London in a visual diagram (see example below). Additional information about each organization, including their key relationships and websites, is provided in a brief glossary on the last page. It is finally possible for a lay person to quickly distinguish between, for example, the Olympic Delivery Authority, Olympic Board and the Olympic Park Legacy Company, as well as establish what they do and who they answer to in the wider context of the capital’s governance. This sort of transparency is essential if these organizations are to be held up to public scrutiny and to public account.
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Open Access/Content
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The inventor of the Web has called for everyone to have access to his creation for free.
Tim Berners-Lee said that he would like to see everybody given a low-bandwidth connection “by default”.
He said the web could be instrumental in giving people access to critical services such as healthcare.
Currently, he said, just one-fifth of the world’s population has access to the web.
“What about the other 80%?” he asked the audience at the Nokia World conference in London.
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Programming
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What would you like to have happen? My feeling is that there should be a configuration option to choose the policy, and we should perhaps eventually distinguish “junk” (safe to delete) from “precious”, as Baz and GNU Arch did.
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Standards/Consortia
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That’s because, unlike most Japanese robots, which are either purpose-built or one-offs, and unlike iRobot (which despite its name is a cleaner and military contracting company), the PR2 is built from an open source software base, with modular hardware.
Willow Garage is not the only open source base on which to build a robot. Urbi went open source last month, with a C++ library and an API. CARMEN is Carnegie-Mellon’s open source robotics toolkit. Orocos also offers an open source platform for robotic control.
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Elhange is an open source developer, which seems to be a big part of the problem. Twitter doesn’t want certain parts of developer’s code to be out in the public. For an open developer, that’s impossible to prevent.
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MIPS Technologies’ (MIPS) stock has skyrocketed recently as it lays the groundwork to challenge ARM (ARMH), the dominant player in cell phone chip design. Savvy investors see the small Silicon Valley company as an emerging threat to ARM, the Cambridge, England firm that licenses the processor designs used in nearly all the leading mobile phones.
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Security/Aggression
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Steven Hoskin had strong feelings about his killers. They had abused, exploited and humiliated him over a year, taking his money, treating him as their slave and making him wear his own dog’s collar and lead. Eventually, having forced him to swallow 70 painkillers, they took him to the top of a railway viaduct and made him hang from the railings as one member of the gang, a girl aged 16, stamped on his hands until he fell 30 metres to his death.
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For those of you following along on facebook.com/savebradley (over 10,000 friends!) you might notice that the URL leads to a dead page. The page can now be found at https://www.facebook.com/pages/savebradley/114129961964452?ref=ts You’ll notice that the page, with over 10,300 supporters, is rather quiet. That’s because the Bradley Manning Support Network’s administrative rights to the page have been revoked due to a “violation of the terms of service.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Encyclopedia of Life is a cool tool which is a sort of wikification of taxonomy — it allows a large number of contributors to add descriptions of species with the goal of eventually documenting all 1.8 million known species in a single searchable source. Look at the page for my experimental animal, Danio rerio; lots of information in a standard format with links and references. Thumbs up!
However, there’s a problem here: the sources. To organize that much data, a large mob of contributors are needed, and that means some fairly open policies to allow contributors have been instituted, and that in turn means that there will be parasites on they system. And a reader sent me an example of a doozy.
[...]
I know, this is a truism: don’t trust the Net of Lies, learn to vet your sources, watch out for anything on the net. But it looks to me like the Turkish creationists have been waging a successful astroturf campaign to infiltrate sources that we would normally regard as pretty good, and are thereby corrupting sources even more. It also allows them to pass casual review because their articles are very widely sourced.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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These same Internet values are reflected in the open source movement. Links need to be free, access needs to be unlimited, for open source to maximize its potential. Worrying about the politics of contributors or users is a waste of brain cells.
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According to recently leaked documents, the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security has been tracking anti-gas drilling groups and their meetings — including a public screening of the film “Gasland,” a documentary about the environmental hazards of natural gas drilling.
The office has included the information in its weekly intelligence bulletins sent to law enforcement agencies.
The bulletins are also sent to gas companies drilling in the Marcellus Shale.
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The debate on Internet filters reaches the hot phase now on EU level, as discussions begin in the EU parliament. It is now urgently necessary to make ourselves heard. We cannot lean back now and complain later.
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A program designed to make Iranian internet users safe from government peeking has been pulled by its creators because, er, it opens up their identities to anyone that cares to take a look.
The program, called Haystack, is designed to hide traffic to and from the internet at large inside what looks like connections to innocuous sites. The Haystack client connects to the company’s servers, which in turn talk to websites on behalf of its users.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to dismiss charges that would turn any employee use of company computers in violation of corporate policy into a federal crime.
In U.S. v. Nosal, an ex-employee is being prosecuted on the claim that he induced current company employees to use their legitimate credentials to access the company’s proprietary database and provide him with information, in violation of corporate computer-use policy. The government claims that the violation of this private policy constitutes a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Following a decision issued just last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the District Court ruled against the government, holding that violations of corporate policy are not equivalent to violations of federal computer crime law. The government appealed to the 9th Circuit.
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Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit issued an unfortunate revised opinion in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing Inc., a case featuring blatantly unconstitutional government action. As the court put it:
“This case is about a federal investigation into steroid use by professional baseball players. More generally, however, it’s about the procedures and safeguards that federal courts must observe in issuing and administering search warrants and subpoenas for electronically stored information.”
One shocking example: the government seized and reviewed the drug testing records for hundreds of players in Major League Baseball—and many other people—even though the judicially authorized warrant was limited to the records of the ten players for whom the government had probable cause.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Open Source Consortium (OSC), a trade body for companies that work in open standards software, has formally written to Ofcom asking it to investigate Canvas, whose backers include the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and BT.
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The complaints are mounting up against IPTV joint venture Project Canvas after the Open Source Consortium (OSC) became the latest group to submit a formal objection.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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George Lucas likes lawsuits. He also really likes the word “Droid“, which Lucasfilm holds the rights to (yes, Verizon actually licenses the word “Droid” for its handsets). In fact, Lucas likes the word so much that he (or at least, his law firm) will threaten to sue you for using it as the name of your company — even the letters DROID make up just part of your company name.
That’s what Matt Cooper found out this week, when Lucasfilm’s lawyers sent him a cease and desist notice demanding that he change the name of his company, Addroid. Cooper says the new startup is an HTML5-based ad serving platform (hence the ad part of the name), and because it’s digital advertising he thought that a tie to the techie word “android” would be appropriate. In other words, the name stems from the word Android — not the abbreviated “Droid” that Lucas is so fond of.
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Since emerging economies will soon have more web users than the EU and US combined, Internet governance should also be extended to the developing world, Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said at the opening session of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Vilnius yesterday (14 September).
“Public authorities across the world must now be able, on an equal footing, to effectively carry out their roles and responsibilities when international public policy issues are at stake,” Kroes said, welcoming the fact that ICANN, the organisation coordinating Internet IP addresses, was now reviewing its working methods to include more representatives from the developing world in ‘advisory committees’.
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Copyrights
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Think Congress will take it up? I don’t either. Which means that, while the RIAA has to cut musicians in for more of the cash they bring in, they now have the right to raid your local library and blow all their digital media off the shelves.
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The Gallo report on strengthening copyright enforcement will be voted in the European Parliament on Wednesday, September 22nd. Even if non-legislative, this dangerous text relies on biased figures pushed by producers and publishers’ lobbies to call for an extension of repression. It opens the door to the creation of private copyright police of the Net. All EU citizen can act to help the Members of the European Parliament out of the blind repressive path, and adopt an alternative resolution -more constructive and protective of consumers- instead of the Gallo report.
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How big is Spotify? 10 million users big. Well, it’s about to break that milestone anyway.
The company is holding a party in London later this month “to celebrate reaching 10 million users across Europe”, according to an invite sent out to press and partners.
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Copyright law and free speech are fundamentally in conflict. It bears repeating, because most of those pushing for things like ACTA simply do not recognize this simple fact — and when they then try to export the expression suppressing parts of copyright law without the all important exceptions and guarantees of free speech, it should come as no surprise, at all, that governments use the law the US pushed on them to suppress speech and dissent. What is not acceptable is for US policy makers to continue to ignore this key point.
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I won’t bother analyzing why people copy games and other digital media, as that’s really a moot point. We’ve got an amazingly effective way of distributing culture that is extremely beneficial for humanity, but it clashes with our current economical models. Piracy will win in the long run. It has to. The alternative is too scary.
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The New York Times article goes on to explain that the raid on the environmental group is only a recent example of a growing pattern: “Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years.” For those familiar with the hard line copyright maximalist position — which holds that all copyright infringement should be swiftly prosecuted with harsh penalties regardless of the context — it was sadly unsurprising. (This risk is one reason that NGOs around the world choose free and open source tools that avoid the risk of copyright claims altogether.)
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ACTA
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How far will ISPs be held liable for infringement of intellectual property rights under ACTA? On close examination in the EU context, we also come up against another question: is ACTA re-writing the weak “compromise” on Internet users rights that was rejected by the European Parliament in the Telecoms Package?
In previous drafts of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), liability for ISPs in enforcing copyright on the Internet was clearly stated. In the latest leaked draft of 25 August 2010, it appears to have been deleted. At least the substantive text requiring countries to implement a liability provision is not there.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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The UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills has concluded its consultation on how to pay for all the new copyright enforcement built into the Digital Economy Act.
The DEA is a sweeping, punishing copyright law that the former Labour government crammed through Parliament without debate in a closed-door, poorly attended vote hours before it called the next election (which it lost). The Act requires ISPs to send letter to their customers warning them that an entertainment company has accused them of infringing copyright (if this fails to reduce national levels of infringement by 70% in 18 months — which it will fail to do — ISPs will then be required to disconnect entire families from the Internet on the unsubstantiated accusation of a rightsholder).
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DEAPPG is an all party parliamentary group based in Portcullis House, Westminster. The group was started by Eric Joyce MP in May 2010 in response to the DE Act (and conversations in social media eg Twitter #DEAct)
Broadcom Open Source! Linux Mint 9 Fluxbox and Debian, Tablet News, Magic Trackpad on Ubuntu
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Could 2010 be Linux’ breakout year? Linux is already making huge waves in mobile computing, with the rise of the Android operating system, the momentum behind Meego, a bevy of Linux-powered netbooks, and an army of Linux-toting tablets on the horizon. With Web-based computing becoming the norm, flexible and robust Linux could finally become the OS of choice for device manufacturers.
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Now you can advance your proficiency in free and open source software solutions as the Linux Professional Institute (LPI (News – Alert)) has launched a brand new program for it service organizations and other technical solutions providers.
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“Devices shall be built using the Linux operating system with either glibc or uClibc” (libraries of the C language).
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All new projects would involve GNU/Linux based operating systems. “The state has a successful history of GNU/Linux adaptation, and has a near cent-percent success rate,” observes Dr. Ajay Kumar. “We avoid proprietary software as much as possible. However some applications need legacy software, which are proprietary. In such cases, we are forced to use proprietary softwares,” he admits.
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Server
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Autocue will show its first four standalone, Linux-based video servers.
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The AIX and Linux operating systems support either raw disk in 200 GB format or RAID mirroring performed by the operating system in 177 GB format for the new SSDs. The IBM i platform assumes you will use RAID mirroring, either RAID 0 mirroring of whole controller and SSD ensembles or RAID 5 or RAID 6 data protection within a single ensemble. (RAID 5 means striping across all four SSDs in the unit, while RAID 6 means striping across three drives in the set and keeping one as a hot spare.) You cannot mirror hard disks and SSDs against each other no matter what operating system you choose.
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Kernel Space
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Make no mistake: Broadcom didn’t open source this driver to support peace, love and Linux. Companies who have included their drivers in the mainline Linux kernel do so because it benefits them. Once the driver is included in the mainline, the maintenance costs associated with keeping up with kernel changes drop considerably. Also, as Katherine points out, they undertook this work because they see a market and realize that many of their competitors, like Intel, have been enjoying an advantage their open-ness affords them.
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Sometimes as a sysadmin the logfiles just don’t cut it, and to solve a problem you need to know what’s really going on. That’s when I turn to strace — the system-call tracer.
A system call, or syscall, is where a program crosses the boundary between user code and the kernel. Fortunately for us using strace, that boundary is where almost everything interesting happens in a typical program.
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Applications
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Shutter is probably the most powerful screenshot application for Linux, and the main reason for this is that it comes with tons of configuration options for the final process of taking a simple screenshot. And why not, considering there are people out there who need to take a screenshot of a single window or a desktop region instead of fullscreen only, like the GNOME default screenshot program. Of course, there is KSnapshot which offers these two options too, but that’s where similarities stop.
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The Yorba developers have released version 0.7.2 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. According to the developers, the latest update to their free digital photo manager includes several “crucial” fixes and includes translation updates.
Shotwell 0.7.2 addresses a “major startup problem” caused by users having a symbolic link in their Pictures directory and a potential crashing bug related to directories containing a large number of subdirectories. Other changes include copying and linking updates, PicasaWeb fixes for passwords containing a ‘+’ character and other bug fixes.
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Proprietary
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The ivi TV player allows users to select a channel by using a simple channel guide, the company said. The TV player can be downloaded to any Windows, Mac, or Linux computer. ivi says it will soon be available on platforms such as mobile devices, tablets, and set-top boxes.
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Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor Version 8 adds new agents for physical and virtual machines along with new methods to monitor Linux-based systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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A Linux class, based on Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop Edition, will be offered. The first session starts Wednesday. All computer classes cost $20. The sessions are for those 55 or older. The classes are taught by members of the Licking County Computer Society.
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Games
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As the title suggests, TORCS is a free and open-source racing simulator available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. I’ll list here some of its features:
- 3D graphics using OpenGL
- 42 different car models
- 30 racing tracks
- 6 racing types
- different camera angles
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It’s also available for Linux.
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I played this game at 12:30 AM, in a dark room with the door closed and using high quality head phones. It scared the crap out of me. No, I mean it scared me. Not a simple sneak-up-from-behind-and-yell-boo scared. I’m talking about crescendo-swelled music and sound effects. I mean, they let you know the horror is approaching and it still frightens you when you see the threat.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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It’s really impressive how good Krita is getting these days. A look through the Krita showcase demonstrates quite admirably what someone can do with it. What strikes me most while looking through those images is how not all of them look like they were done with a computer, but could just as easily be scans of natural media artwork.
I have Plasma on the brain, however, so of course I immediately jumped into thinking about what this could mean from a Plasma perspective. Yes, I’m aware that any connection between a great natural media painting app and a component framework for building primary user interfaces is probably not immediately obvious. No, I wasn’t thinking about how to use Plasmoids in Krita, either.
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How will it work? Each attendee can pick the Plasmoid or aspect of Plasma Desktop of their choice, announce their intentions in the irc channel and then start writing about it. You’ll have the support of KDE people to answers technical questions, proof-read and help with wiki-fu as needed. Personally, I’ll be working on documenting the new Activies features and user interface.
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New Releases
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The SystemRescueCd developer and Partimage author François Dupoux has released version 1.6.0 of the SystemRescueCd Linux distribution. Based on the Gentoo LiveCD and using Xfce as its default desktop, 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.
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Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has released version 3.1 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that weighs in at just over 11 MB in size. The “tiny frugal” desktop distribution features the BusyBox tool collection and a minimal graphics system based on Tiny X and JWM. The core can run entirely in RAM, allowing for very quick booting. With the help of online repositories, Tiny Core Linux can be expanded to include additional applications.
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Red Hat Family
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The collectively developed software is distributed under open source licenses, such as the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License, permitting access to the human-readable software source code. These licenses also provide rights for licensees to use, copy, modify and distribute open source software.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I might add, which Shuttleworth didn’t spell out, that if you need help to do anything with Linux, you’re more likely to find online help on how to do it on Ubuntu than openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, or any other Linux. Ubuntu’s popularity combined with that attitude of helping everyday users get the most from Linux has made it the go-to Linux for users who want and need a helping hand.
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Notwithstanding these moments of suspense, the upgrade was surprisingly trouble-free. My applications work just as they did before. My scanner and printer both work as well, and because Lucid kept my desktop settings, my windows control buttons are on the right side, and not on the left where Lucid puts them by default.
All in all, it’s worth going the upgrade route because the longer installation time is more than offset by the time you save from not having to reinstall programs and tweaking your system all over again. In my case, that could mean a savings of a day or more.
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CrunchGear, TechCrunch’s hardware-focused sister site, makes a compelling argument for buying a “janky old computer” off Craigslist or from another source, then simply loading it up with Ubuntu and classifying it as a simple work/email/Facebook/MP3 machine.
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Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth shot back against detractors today, pointing out that his project has made Linux more marketable and successful on the desktop.
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As expected, the x86 processor runs Windows 7 Pro, while the ARM TI OMAP powers Ubuntu LXDE, Midori Web Browser and Gimp.
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D-Link’s Boxee Box can now be ordered from Amazon for November delivery (to US destinations only). Additionally, the company disclosed today that its device is based on an Intel Atom processor CE4100, representing a significant triumph for Intel over ARM Ltd.
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The Linux-powered gaming handheld known as Pandora is now available for pre-order, ever since the first 1,000 pre-orders have already been shipped ever since they became available back in May. Why Linux? Well, it was done so in order to take advantage of existing open source software, and the fact that Linux is a primary target for home-brew development is not lost on the Pandora as it is a miniature computer device which off Linux.
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Pandora, the Linux-based gaming handheld, is back on pre-order. The first 1,000 pre-orders have been shipped since they became available in May.
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The Universal MediaLibrary 7200 has a 10GigE storage infrastructure and has Linux-based servers that offer constant access to all drivers with a massive storage capacity of up 144 terabytes.
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Tanner EDA has released a Linux version of the company’s HiPer Silicon full-flow design suite, giving designers a complete analog design flow from schematic capture, circuit simulation, and waveform probing to physical layout and verification. HiPer Silicon v15.02 includes all the functionality of the recently-introduced HiPer Silicon v15 while allowing customers to choose between the Windows and the Linux platforms.
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Both Mac OSX and Linux systems now support read and write of DNxHD files with the optional DaVinci Resolve DNxHD Update. This optional $500 update allows native DNxHD media files to move instantly between Avid and DaVinci Resolve.
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Smith added, “We are delighted that we now support the OpenTV Linux-based client middleware and look forward to continuing our successful relationship with Nagravision”.
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Phones
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But most of the Android powered phones (interesting usage this), are really powered by a Qualcomm chip. According to Harald Welte, who lead the team of developers that gave us the Neo 1973, the problem with the Qualcomm chips, from a Free Software point of view, is that the company is very secretive about their products. Their lack of public documentation, and the ever-increasing integration between the application processor (AP) and baseband processor (BP), make it more difficult to run custom software on phones powered by these chips.
Qualcomm is a member of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) and proud of its Android innovation success story. Sy Choudhury, Product Manager at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, who is heading up the company’s involvement in the OHA, reasons that due to Android’s open source nature, “developers can find and debug problems much easier and quicker because they can see the code and understand how it works.”
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– The launching of a retail version of the Bria for Linux softphone and the deployment of the enterprise version by two Fortune 500 customers. Bria for Linux gives enterprises a new option for extending VoIP across multiple operating systems and enabling them to reduce communications and travel costs, while improving productivity and responsiveness.
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Intel/Nokia/MeeGo
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The first tablet to feature the MeeGo operating system is set to hit the shelves next week.
Initially the WeTab will only be available in Germany, but Intel – which launched the OS with Nokia back at Mobile World Congress in February – is hoping the device will catapult the operating system into the consciousness of consumer and business alike.
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What makes the German-exclusive WeTab so special? First, its 1366 x 768, 11-inch capacitive touch screen is over an inch larger than the iPad’s and has a lot more screen real estate. Considering that a 720p video is 1280 x 720, the WePad more than makes the cut, while the 1024 x 768 iPad and the 1024 x 600 Samsung Galaxy tab have to downscale. Amongst 10 and 11-inch tablets we’ve seen, only the Viliv X10, which hasn’t come to market yet, has a resolution this high.
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DeviceVM’s Splashtop quick boot software is designed to let you run a handful of apps including a web browser, Skype, and email software without waiting for Windows to boot on your computer. It comes preloaded on a number of netbooks and laptops from major PC makers. Today DeviceVM announced that future versions of Splashtop, which is already based on Linux, will use MeeGo Linux technology.
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Intel’s AppUp application portal for apps running on the MeeGo and Windows OSes has come out of beta and gone gold, and soon will be available on Samsung and Asus netbooks.
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Amidt the turmoil in the executive ranks – with first its chief executive exiting abruptly on Friday, and then its recently-appointed head of mobile resigning on Monday – the question for developers is a much more simple one: what phones is Nokia going to offer, will there be compelling reasons to develop for them, and will people want to buy or use apps on them?
Nokia has been showing off its new N8, C7, C6 (two of them; you tell them apart because one has the -00 an the other has the -01 suffix, obviously) and E7 models. They all run on Symbian^3, the latest version of Symbian.
Speaking to some of the developers on the floor it’s clear that quite a few had been hoping – and expecting – to see something using MeeGo, which is a Linux-based mobile OS that is going to be part of another strand in Nokia’s smartphone attack.
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Open source license compliance in general has been a hot topic in recent years. Multiple vendors have had legal suits brought against themfor non-compliance. In an effort to help developers and vendors comply with open source licensing requirement the Linux Foundation recently launched a new compliance program in an effort to make compliance easier to achieve.
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The world’s biggest chip maker, Intel, has unveiled the chipset it is banking its immediate future on and one it hopes will shake up the market.
The product, code-named Sandy Bridge, is Intel’s first architecture to merge a microprocessor and graphics processor onto a single chip.
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Android
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The company is now going ‘tough’ against App Store name warehousing. App Store may be bloated with many app names without any binaries being uploaded. These name hogs keep other developers from creating and uploading genuine apps with the same names for the App Store.
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In our last article we examined the steps required to prepare an Android application for publication to the Android Market, or for that matter, any number of other venues for distributing Android applications.
This article picks up where the prior article left off as we demonstrate the steps required to upload a signed and packaged application to the Android Market.
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gvSIG Mini development team is proud to announce the release of the stable version gvSIG Mini for Android 1.0.
This version offers, among other features, the ability of a direct download of maps from the phone to the storage card, for a further map displaying in offline mode, with no data connection.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jeff Orr told iTWire: “The tally at the end of 2009 had global netbook shipments consisting of around 24 percent for all types of Linux compared to 76 percent for all versions of Windows.
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If you are a professional photographer or an aspiring one, then the article Photography with Open Source / Linux will be a great help for you. This article written by Nathan Willis delves deep into the various tools that aid you to create photographic masterpieces.
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Events
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Bangalore’s premiere Linux event, FOSS.IN, turns 10 this year. What started out as Linux Bangalore in 2001, organised by a group of hackers and Linux technology enthusiasts from the Bangalore Linux Users Group, is today a well-attended conference. In 2004, it was re-christened as FOSS.in.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4.0 is still a bit away from final release, but the time to think about switching is now. The Mozilla Project is releasing Firefox 4.0 beta 6 this week, and the current builds are really good. Why switch? I’ll give you five excellent reasons to jump on the 4.0 train today.
One of the great things about open source development is that you don’t have to wait for the final product to ship to get your hands on it. Case in point, I’ve been running development builds of the Firefox 4.0 series off and on for weeks. You can too, if you don’t mind some rapid changes and possible instability.
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SaaS
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At the VLDB conference in Singapore, researchers from Saarland University have presented the results of the Hadoop++ project which aims to accelerate the distributed computing framework Hadoop when performing analytical queries. The technique involves plugging a kind of query planner into Hadoop using hooks provided for the purpose.
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Oracle
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Healthcare
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The open source movement already has produced innovations like online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Linux operating system.
By creating a free or “open” platform that allows people to share and analyze information, the system can tap the collective intelligence of the world to improve technology and solve global problems.
In other words, 6 billion brains are better than one.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Principals from more than 60 elementary, junior high, and senior high schools of Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, signed a “Software Freedom Manifesto” at the invitation of the city’s Education Bureau on Sep 9 Thursday morning in a press conference. Also announced in the conference are the the upcoming events of International Conference on Open Source (ICOS), and the “mother tongue tux usb key” workshops designed for the growing population of Vietnamese mothers in Taiwan.
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Licensing
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Red Hat employee Matthew Garrett says he has written to the US Customs about the fact that Fusion Garage, the maker of the Joojoo tablet, has not provided him with the source code for the operating system that runs the device.
Garrett sent the letter based on advice offered by former Linux Journal publisher Don Marti on a web forum.
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Openness/Sharing
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“I can design with tools as good as those that the car companies use, that Intel uses. It’s just cheap software that lets me design, simulate and test,” he said. “Communication costs are also dropping because of the Internet. That lets users actually undertake bigger problems because each one does a chunk of the work. I can do part of Linux. You can do another part of Linux.”
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Programming
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Git, he said, is becoming popular because of its association with Linux and its speed, said Marion. Git was authored by Linux founder Linus Torvalds, Marion noted.
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The developers of the Seaside web framework for Smalltalk have announced version 3.0. What had originally begun as development work for a 2.9 version turned out to be such a significant change that the developers say it justified relabelling the release a 3.0. They believe Seaside 3.0 to be a “solid foundation for the foreseeable development” of the Smalltalk web framework.
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More schoolchildren are daily being killed by traffic on the highways of the world’s poorest nations than by deadly infectious diseases such as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, prompting campaigners to call for a UN-backed target to halt the spiralling numbers of traffic fatalities by 2015.
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Applications and desktops that run on Windows, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and other UNIX and Linux versions are supported, as well as mainframe and midrange applications.
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Security/Aggression
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I was detained last night by federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport for refusing to answer questions about why I had travelled outside the United States.
The end result is that, after waiting for about half an hour and refusing to answer further questions, I was released – because U.S. citizens who have produced proof of citizenship and a written customs declaration are not obligated to answer questions.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Times-Picayune reported yesterday, “A new wave of black oil suddenly came ashore west of the Mississippi River on Friday and Saturday, coating beaches and fouling interior marshes, according to anglers’ reports.”
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Like BP PLC’s Maconda well, which spewed more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the Ixtoc spill began with rig explosion and a failed blowout preventer.
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Ambitious targets to increase the amount of rubbish recycled in the UK could help create more than 50,000 jobs, a report suggested today.
The study by Friends of the Earth said 51,400 jobs could be created if 70% of waste collected by local councils were recycled.
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The nine victims want a ban on finning, a gruesome practice in which fishermen cut off a fin for shark fin soup and then dump the fish back in the water to drown or bleed to death. An estimated 73 million sharks are killed by finning each year. Nearly a third of all shark species are threatened or near threatened with extinction, conservationists said.
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Unsurprisingly, the inability of global oil production to have bested the peak year of 2005 is being driven by its largest component: Non-OPEC supply.
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Finance
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First of all, I’m not calling anyone out to put them down. I have had a long time to think about these topics. I’ve been in the workforce for over thirty years now, including a long period in which I earned the absolute minimum or close to it (in some cases more, in some cases less).
I earned two associate’s degrees (one of which was in business administration), on bachelor’s degree (business administration), and one master’s degree (information technology) during that time. This means that I have typically had years more education than my bosses. But most of the time, this had little impact on my bottom line.
During this time, I’ve been a voracious reader with a desire to know and understand what and how and why in things related to business and the economy (and computers, but that’s a different article).
No matter what your instructor tells you, you have to look deeper. Look at real world data. Very often, what you’ve heard is factually wrong. When I was sitting around with business school classmates who commiserated about the low quality of applicants, I could tell them directly that they chose the worst applicants out of the bunch, because many times I had been one of those they chose not to hire.
There are very many personal and group decisions that should be made with an understanding of economic principles. It is a pity that so few people ever learn them.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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So the Haystack Affair (is there a Wikipedia page named after this already?) continues generating food for thought for those of us working at the intersection of free expression, Internet censorship, and media development.
Yesterday I blogged about what the Haystack Affair suggested about the responsibility of “Internet intellectuals”. Ethan Zuckerman, who was one of the intellectuals I singled out in that post, eloquently responded to my criticism on his blog.
“I’ve not published on Haystack for a very simple reason: I haven’t been able to conduct a proper evaluation of either the tool or the protocols behind it,” wrote Ethan.
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Google released a statement confirming it fired teen-stalking engineer David Barksdale for “breaking Google’s strict internal privacy policies,” as Gawker first reported earlier today. Our original exclusive, about Barksdale spying on minors’ Google Voice and Talk accounts, has been updated.
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Related to the recent Haystack hubbub, here’s a basic overview of censorship resistance tools, of which Haystack was an example (unfortunately a fairly broken one).
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Software created to help Iranians escape government control of the web has been withdrawn over security fears.
Haystack was designed to help people in the country communicate via the web without revealing their identity.
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David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users’ accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment, we’ve learned. Barksdale met the kids through a technology group in the Seattle area while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google’s Kirkland, Wash. office. He was fired in July 2010 after his actions were reported to the company. [Update: Google has confirmed the security breach. An update appears below.]
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Just as the MPAA is preparing to offer movies to customers at home while they’re still in theaters by limiting playback to DRM-protected digital outputs only, the HDCP protocol they rely on may have been cracked wide open. All devices that support HDCP, like Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and displays with HDMI inputs, have their own set of keys to encrypt and decrypt protected data and if keys for a particular device are compromised, they can be revoked by content released in the future which will then refuse to play. Now, posts have been floating around on Twitter about a supposed “master key” which renders that protection unusable since it allows anyone to create their own source and sink keys.
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Make you voice heard by responding to the European Commission’s public consultation on Net neutrality! The more citizens and NGOs submit their own responses to the questionnaire, the more chance we have to collectively weigh in the EU policy-making process to ensure that the Internet remains a free and open communications architecture. You have until September 30th to send your submission and tell the Commission to protect the Internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Digital Economy (UK)
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The Telegraph is reporting today on how the Digital Economy Act will be met in order to tackle online piracy or copyright infrigement. You can read the Telegraphs article here. People may remember that its proposed that alleged infringers of copyright are sent a number of warning letters before sanctions and eventually a ban is put on their connection.
[...]
Now maybe here Mr Vaizey is making a joke that I don’t get. If the ISP is to pick up the tab for 25% of the costs for this “enforcement” where does he think the money will come from if not passed onto the customer? Whilst that may be fair for the repeated copyright infringer, how is that fair on me or anyone else who thinks that the material “infringed upon” is not even worth a download for “free” and on the rare occasion when they are interested in a title, actually goes out and buys it? – I think far from help enforce an anti-piracy message, many people will just say “stuff it, Im footing the bill, I may as well jump in too”. Just like in my view, the person who came up with the idea of knock off Nigel, when you get people who really don’t know the subject trying to solve it, you only end up looking silly when it backfires. (For those that don’t know, Knock off Nigel was an ad campaign against piracy, that turned into a cult classic and even gave piracy a little kudos)
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Rights-holders will bear the brunt of the costs for tackling copyright infringers, the UK government has said.
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09.14.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As someone without a technical background, I’m often skeptical of promises like “one-button setup” and “installs in 2 minutes.” Just because it’s easy or obvious for the developer, doesn’t mean it’s easy for the end-user. “Turnkey” isn’t always “turnkey.”
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He’s been listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time, and was a 2008 inductee to the Computer History Museum.
In 2004, he was called one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In 2000, he ranked #17 in Time’s Person of the Century Poll.
That same year he was awarded an honorary dotor status at the University of Helsinki, a Lovelace Medal and an Award for Industry Achievement by Infoworld.
But back in 1998, Linus Torvalds was a man with a manifesto and he sat down with boot to discuss the future of open source software and Linux.
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When it all boils down, does Linux on the desktop really matter? Last week, I touched on the problems counting the number of Linux desktops, but the real question is does it really matter?
Over the weekend I made my annual pilgrimage to Columbus, Ohio for the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF). While I’m skeptical that the Linux desktop has more than 5% of the market (all desktops in use) in the general population, the Linux desktop had about 95% of the OLF-attending population. Yet at least two of the talks, including Stormy Peters’ keynote, asked the question “does the Linux desktop even matter?”
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Server
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Learning to administer a new operating system is intimidating. We are expected to combine home experimentation, job experience and vendor certifications to get any real understanding of how operating systems, applications and devices work. With a few exceptions, education programs provide little more than a cursory overview of operating system admin. Major strains of Linux place files in different locations, use different configurations for fundamental tools and are based on different package managers. Many of the skills learned in one major strain will port to another; but coming to grips with the differences is not easy.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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The Samba developers have released version 3.5.5 of Samba, a security update that addresses a buffer overrun vulnerability in their open source file and print server software. According to the developers, the vulnerability affects the sid_parse() function and the related dom_sid_parse() function which do not correctly check their input lengths when reading binary versions of a Windows Security ID (SID); a file share connection – authenticated or unauthenticated – is needed to exploit the issue.
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Final conclusion: if you like XMMS and use KDE, then Qmmp can be a perfect choice. On the other hand, for those used with collection-oriented players like Amarok will probably not like this player.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Red Hat Family
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Piper analyst says, ” Shares have appreciated 394% in the past 22 months, versus 49% for the S&P 500, and we believe they are now fairly valued…We remain optimistic on near-term trends and believe the company is well-positioned for continued growth…However, our sector-wide analysis indicates growth rates for the current cycle are peaking in 2H:10, and as such, deceleration is likely to develop in the subsequent 3 to 6 months.”
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Fedora
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That’s still true of the b43 firmware for older (pre-802.11n) devices, but the firmware to go with their new driver is now in linux-firmware.git.
Their *original* offering of that new firmware had a stupid licence — you could only distribute it if you promised to indemnify and defend Broadcom from all related third-party lawsuits. They fixed that though, and I merged it.
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Debian Family
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Of all those topics, one topic *might* have consensus already: accepting as DDs contributors which have contributed a lot to Debian doing non-packaging work, which intend to continue doing so, and which are ready to uphold our Foundation Documents. My feeling of consensus on that builds upon: in person feedback, private mails, and a growing number of requests on that direction hitting Front Desk (which FD has kindly shared with me). I do have an impression of consensus, but I don’t have any “quantitative” evidence.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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During a small exploration we did internally few months ago, we thought about how Ubuntu could behave if it was more aware of its physical context. Not only detecting the tilt of the device (like iPhone apps) but also analysing the user’s presence.
This wasn’t really a new concept for me, in 2006 I experimented with a user proximity sensitive billboard idea. I reckon there is a value on adapting the content of the screen based on the distance with who is watching it.
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I’m pretty new as a Canonical employee overall, only having been with the company for about 7 months, but I must say I’m really thrilled to be part of a large gang of people so involved in making Ubuntu great; with so much pride in all the work accomplished. If there’s one thing that has been constantly motivating me, it has to be the prospect of working every day with the community and with other Canonical employees on making Ubuntu better.
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After the rather luke-warm reception that greeted the first ‘default wallpaper’ for Ubuntu 10.10 (through no fault of the Design team, more on that here) the latest iteration – and a much more pleasing one at that – has been revealed.
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In This Issue
* How Ubuntu is Made
* Daily Dose of Scribus Trunk
* Edubuntu Gets a New Installer
* Magic Trackpad Drivers Land in Ubuntu Maverick and Upstream!
* Making Usability Part of the Development Process
* Ubuntu Stats
* Free Banner for Approved LoCo Teams
* OLF Day 1: Ubucon
* Recent posts from Planet Launchpad
* Measuring the Value of Canonical’s Launchpad
* Cleansweep Updates
* GTK Impression – Nautilus Breadcrumbs
* New in Quickly for Maverick
* Ohio Linuxfest 2010
* Ruby packaging in Debian and Ubuntu: Mythbusting and FAQ
* Running Ubuntu on an Amazon “micro” Instance
* Some progress on Daily Builds
* This week in design – 10 September 2010
* In The Press
* In The Blogosphere
* Canonical’s Attention to Detail Starting To Show Up Big Time
* Fluendo DVD Player For Sale in Ubuntu 10.10
* Linaro Beta Released !
* OMG! Ubuntu! interviews GNOME co-founder, Frederico Mena
* TurnKey unveils a new kind of smart backup/restore system, powered by Amazon S3
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security
* Sneak Peek
* And Much Much More
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Flavours and Variants
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While Kubuntu received some polish this time, the latest version of KDE that powers it (version 4.5.1) might actually work against it. During my testing of KDE 4.5, I found it to have severe graphics problems with certain video cards (this laptop’s Intel card being one of them). The problems I had with KDE 4.5 include window thumbnails being so bright they cannot even be read, slow repainting of the panel (over ten seconds), distortion within transparent objects, and a complete plasma lock up when changing some settings under System Settings. Unfortunately, Kubuntu inherited all of those problems by adopting KDE 4.5, though thankfully the Kubuntu developers somehow fixed the thumbnail issue. I’m hoping that Kubuntu includes the upcoming KDE 4.5.2 release (which might fix these issues) but considering the timeframe for release, I doubt it will. Another downside is that the Plymouth splash screen (which is showed during boot) still doesn’t show anything other than a blinking cursor for me. I hope this gets fixed before release.
Although Kubuntu 10.10 isn’t out until next month, it’s already a very stable release from what I’ve seen so far. The only problems that Kubuntu has are those caused by using KDE 4.5, and as a result you may experience glitches in graphics, unless KDE 4.5.2 is included or the developers include some of their own tweaks. Other than that, it appears that Kubuntu may finally be on the right track! I’m excited to see how this release turns out come October 10th.
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Apple’s drastically updated Apple TV won’t ship until late this month. But home viewers looking for simple ways to enjoy Internet video and audio on their HDTVs will get a few other new options soon afterward — or in one case, maybe before Apple TV’s retail rebirth.
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I’m constantly amused (and always slightly disappointed) when an Open Source proponent is dismissive of Free Software, or even worse, hostile towards Free Software. Team Apologista may harbor and encourage the worst of the group, but they are not the only ones.
Just a methodology
Consider this: if you think Open Source is “just a development methodology” and Free Software is “too idealistic”, it seems quite absurd to get all excited and promotional about Open Source.
I mean I know some bass players that get a bit preachy about how playing with a pick (instead of fingers) is a terrible affront, but:
1. No one is really that serious about it
2. Who cares what bass players think anyway?
If something is just a methodology or technique — even a far superior one — what is there to get so all fired-up about?
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Open-Xchange, provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced today an exclusive distribution agreement with Next IT for hosted and on-premises Open-Xchange products in Japan.
Next IT will expand its portfolio with Open-Xchange by offering customers either: Open-Xchange Hosting Edition to web-hosting companies, ISPs, telecommunication companies and IT service companies; or an on-premises version to be installed and run on the enterprises’, educational institutions’ and government authorities’ own computers.
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Bloglines includes an API that could be extended to provide these services. Even if the main interface, the thick reader part of Bloglines was not used, the API could be installed anywhere, on any server, like WordPress. That is, of course, assuming that Bloglines was written with open source tools, as most modern web services are. Ask.com has made a big decision to shut down Bloglines after all these years, but with that decision comes an opportunity to ensure that the code they worked so hard on remains relevant, useful, and popular. Ask.com should release the code to Bloglines as open source.
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Blender is a free open source 3D modelling and graphics software widely used for making animated movies. Here is a nice collection of 8 short films and animations made using Blender which I think will give you an idea on Blender’s capabilities. Enjoy the ride.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 Beta 6 will reportedly address a number of issues found in previous development releases, including a critical stability issue on Windows systems. Beltzner notes that a problem related to plugins on Mac OS X that caused rendering and keyboard/mouse focus issues, that left key presses ignored or overlaid grey panels that obscured web pages, has been corrected. Beta 7 will be considered to be the “feature freeze milestone” and is tentatively planned for the “2nd half of September”.
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Firefox will still download updates automatically as it does now, and offer to install them prior to launching the browser. A silent method would have been nice, since it remove the possibility of a user simply clicking cancel or deny and running an out-of-date version. That system has certainly worked well for Chrome, though Chrome does have one advantage over Firefox when it comes to being “silent.”
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Databases
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Government
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With only hours notice the Department of Health called a press conference at its HQ in Whitehall. It said there was to be “an announcement on the future of the National Programme for IT”.
At about the same time a ministerial statement was laid in Parliament; and by lunchtime the media was reporting the death of the NPfIT. The Department’s press release said a review of the National Programme for IT had “concluded that a centralised national approach was no longer required”.
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Openness/Sharing
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I’ve also long embraced the principle that motivates OAuth. You should never have to give your name/password credentials to a third-party application or service so that it can impersonate you. This so-called password anti-pattern is profoundly wrong. When legitimate applications and services ask for permission to impersonate us, we learn that it’s OK to do things that way. It isn’t. Malicious actors can and do exploit our willingness to give up our credentials.
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A new British study of lads (and lasses?) who play shooting video games suggests that all that virtual spatial-navigation improves ability in driving, multitasking, and “reading the small print.” Sure you’re a dehumanized, sociopathic monster, but you drive so well!
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The naive enthusiasm of an American marketing graduate, hyped by the world media, may have risked the lives of Iranian activists through over-reaching claims for an inadequately understood software system
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Humanizing the need generated roughly twice the amount of money as the case made with statistics (which I suppose explains those Sally Struthers commercials on late night cable TV).
But the study didn’t stop there.
It created a hybrid pitch that centered on Rokia but also included facts and figures.
Now, what do you suppose happened to the donations?
As you can see in the chart below. combining factual information with the child’s story actually lowered the donations compared to the money that came in from pure storytelling.
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Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said he’ll never return to Japan after officials at an airport barred him from taking Ninja throwing stars aboard his private plane, SPA! magazine reported in its latest issue.
A security scan at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, detected the weapons inside the executive’s carry-on luggage in July as he was returning home to the U.S. from a family vacation in Kyoto, the Japanese magazine reported, citing unidentified officials at the airport and the transportation ministry.
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World leaders will be meeting at the UN in New York later this month to review progress towards the UN millennium development goals (MDGs) and to chart a course for accelerated action between now and 2015. Today, with just five years to go, there are fears that the goals may not be achieved, due to a lack of will by governments to acknowledge the role of other stakeholders and to work in partnership with them.
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Science
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EU researchers will have sustainable and continuous access to the combined processing power of over 200,000 desktop computers in more than 30 European countries thanks to the European Commission funded European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) project launched today. The Commission is contributing €25 million over four years to the EGI-InSPIRE project to link the processing capacity of desktop computers when they would otherwise be idle and so give researchers the processing power needed to tackle complex problems in environment, energy or health. The EGI, the largest collaborative production grid infrastructure for e-Science ever created, will enable teams of researchers in different geographical locations to work on a problem as if they were in the same laboratory
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Newton sought a deeper understanding of gravity in the concept of an Aetherial Medium with faster than light waves as illustrated in the quote from Opticks above. So too, the explanation for quantum mechanics may lie in some sort of faster than light waves that transmit signals between entangled particles. Another possibility is a “hyperspace” that connects all points in space-time together, bypassing normal space-time. Even more exotic possibilities may exist. Mathematically speaking, one is looking for a deeper, more fundamental equation or equations from which Schrödinger’s Equation can be derived.
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The next time you feel like your computer is struggling to keep up with your workload, spare a thought for the physicists at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC).
The researchers at the institute, based at Durham University, are tasking their machines with nothing less than recreating how galaxies are born and evolve over the course of billions of years.
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Health/Nutrition
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Just about a month ago, the disease-geek world was riveted by news of the “Indian superbug“: common bacteria carrying a newly recognized gene that confers profound multi-drug resistance, and that was linked to travel between Europe and South Asia, especially for medical tourism.
The gene, which directs production of an enzyme called NDM-1 for short, was briefly Bug of the Week, the spur for alarmist headlines in every Internet echo chamber and the target of denunciations by Indian politicians, who vilified the discovery as a Western “pharma conspiracy” spurred by envy of lucrative medical tourism.
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Security/Aggression
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This is an amazing and scary story: Kimberly Shields, a 23-year-old-manicurist, was mistaken for the woman who stole her identity, locked up in jail, strip-searched, and deloused before the bureaucratic mixup was resolved and she was set free.
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It’s good to see the White House begin to acknowledge the seriousness of the drug gang violence in Mexico — especially in the cities and towns that border the United States — and which some observers consider a national security threat. But as long as our government officials fail to adopt, strengthen, and enforce laws that could help protect brave men like Edelmiro Cavasos, along with countless everyday Americans, the risks increase for all of us.
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Despite being a party to international aviation and human rights treaties guaranteeing free passage through international airspace, the US government claims the right to require prior government permission (granted or withheld in secret, without due process, judicial review, or publicly disclosed standards) not just for travel to or from the USA but for transit through US airspace — even on nonstop flights that aren’t scheduled to land in US territory.
Most such overflights of the US between other countries are to and from Canada, where US control and surveillance of overflights have provoked continuing controversy and opposition.
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In his decision, Judge Raymond Fisher described the case as “a painful conflict between human rights and national security”. In the UK, we have seen some politicians conflate “national security” with “national embarrassment” – seeking to keep information secret not because its disclosure would create a risk to the nation, but rather because states do not want the details of their illegal activities revealed. Thankfully, British courts have proved relatively effective at policing this.
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New York City woke up yesterday to a 9/11 anniversary like no other. Blue skies hummed with the buzz of helicopters as police conducted a major operation to patrol two rival midday protests about Park51, the planned Islamic centre close to Ground Zero. The noise of the aircraft mingled with the sound of church bells ringing across Manhattan, marking the exact time that the first plane struck the World Trade Centre.
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Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa’idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.
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Barack Obama is to go ahead with plans to sell Saudi Arabia advanced aircraft and other weapons worth up to $60bn (£39bn), the biggest arms deal in US history, in a strategy of shoring up Gulf Arab allies to face any military threat from Iran.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is also in talks with the Saudis about possible naval and missile-defence upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more over five to 10 years.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A comprehensive Wonk Room survey of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate finds that nearly all dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight global warming pollution. In May, 2010, the National Academies of Science reported to Congress that “the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change” because global warming is “caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.”
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WHEN 23 people drowned picking cockles on Morecambe bay, UK, in February 2004, it gave us a grim insight into the murky and frightening world of people trafficking.
The cockle pickers had been smuggled into the UK from the Fujian province in China by transnational criminal networks and used as cheap labour to extract lucrative shellfish from the sands. They were working at night in dangerous conditions, paid just £5 per sack of cockles while their gangmaster Lin Liang Ren received three times as much from the seafood companies at the shoreline. The people who died had hoped that two or three years working in the UK would provide a better life for their families back home. How wrong they were. The case shocked the world.
As well as highlighting the practice of people trafficking, the tragedy also revealed some stark realities about the international wildlife trade – how it is driven by wealth not poverty, and how it is inextricably linked with organised crime.
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Environmental campaigners focus on more modest goals as hopes of US climate legislation dwindle ahead of expected Republican gains
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The natural gas industry is coming under intense scrutiny today, after a massive fireball ripped through a ruptured pipeline in a suburban town near San Francisco, killing at least four people, injuring dozens more, and burning more than 50 homes to the ground.
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Researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS), who have been tracking walrus movements using satellite radio tags, say 10,000 to 20,000 of the animals, mainly mothers and calves, are now congregating in tightly packed herds on the Alaskan side of the Chukchi Sea, in the first such exodus of its kind.
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Finance
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Like an emotionally distant lover, the less Goldman Sachs gives us, the more we want. In today’s New York Times, a Goldman spokesman declined to comment on the process by which the firm annually selects its partners, leading the Times to describe the process as “secretive” and driving us wild with curiosity. What kinds of sick things do they make potential partners do, for the firm to decline to speak about it entirely? What secrets lurk in the hearts of the hordes streaming in and out of the building on West Street? We asked a former Goldman Sachs partner to describe how this mysterious ritual works.
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The bulk of the media often gets pulled along for the ride when the United States government has a serious political and public relations campaign around foreign policy. But almost nowhere is it so monolithic as with Venezuela. Even in the runup to the Iraq war, there were a significant number of reporters and editorial writers who didn’t buy the official story. But on Venezuel, the media is more like a jury that has 12 people but only one brain.
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The International Monetary Fund undermined the main thrust of the UK coalition’s economic strategy today after it warned western governments that they risked holding back the recovery and creating a massive pool of disaffected labour if they pursued draconian cuts in spending.
IMF director general, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, told a conference in Oslo that governments needed to identify ways to generate employment to prevent a generation of workers losing their skills and joining the long-term unemployed. He said cuts in public spending had a “human cost” and could result in “tragedy” for millions of young people.
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This week it is two years since the US bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, setting off a wave of panic that almost brought down the entire financial sector. It is a truism that the two most important forces in the world of money are greed and fear. For years, during the boom, greed had dominated; now, in the aftermath of the Lehman implosion, fear kicked in, and the world’s banks stopped lending to each other, and to us. The result was the banking crisis, which in turn triggered the recession, which in turn triggered the collapse in the public finances that is going to be the dominant issue in this country for years.
Given what a big deal the collapse of Lehman turned out to be, you would think that it makes sense for there to be a whole fat book of legislation on the statue books designed to prevent a repetition of the crisis by making banks smaller and safer and more focused on their wider public function. Well, you might have thought that; but if you had, you would have been wrong, because there have been exactly no new laws targeting the causes of the crash. The systemic risks are the same as they were two years ago.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The treatment of WikiLeaks’ spokesperson Julian Assange, facing investigations of harassment and rape, has been disgraceful, leading international human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has said from London, and the Australian government should make a formal protest to the Swedish ambassador on behalf of Assange, an Australian citizen.
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Bradley Manning faces a court martial for allegedly releasing military documents and videos that expose what appears to be a military policy of shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood.
It should be noted that the documents in question are nearly three years old and have little value except to historians and people who don’t want the truth to be known.
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The CBC is considering a new policy whereby people commenting on news stories must use their real names, a corporation spokesman has said in response to complaints from an MP.
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In the land of all-night samba clubs and soccer fanatics, Brazil is throwing its famously high-energy spirit into the untested waters of online democracy. Multimillion dollar budgets are being handed over to online “town halls,” and the federal government is crowdsourcing legislative consulting through interactive web tools.
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Tens of thousands of supporters added their names to the ACLU’s Protect Our Privacy Petition—calling on Congress to update and strengthen the decades-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Reading a physical book, giving it to a friend or selling it to a secondhand bookseller doesn’t involve any copyright-restricted acts, so the copyright owner has no control over those acts. An eBook is entirely different: even reading it involves copying, and copying (generally) requires authorisation under the Copyright Act, (like all legal points, it’s not quite as simple as this, as there are some exceptions in the copyright legislation, but their scope is still open to argument) so the copyright owner has a lot more opportunity to intervene and control usage.
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Why? Simple: using this key — the secret piece of the puzzle — people can now build hardware and free software compatible with HDMI, that can decrypt the encrypted video traversing between HDMI-compliant equipment, without having to obey the restrictions imposed by the HDMI oligopoly. Game over — pirates 1, digital restrictions management AACSholes 0. One more note: using this key might be illegal in some parts of the world — but whoever cares about what’s right can’t afford to care about what’s legal.
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After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Laptops experienced precipitous price drops during the past decade. Digital cameras, personal computers, and computer chips all followed similar steep declines in price. Has the price of broadband Internet followed the same model? Shane Greenstein decided to look into it.
Since there are no public data on what has happened to broadband prices over the last decade, Shane Greenstein, a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and his co-author Ryan McDevitt, a graduate student at Northwestern University, analyzed the contracts of 1,500 DSL and cable service providers from 2004 to 2009. They found evidence of only a very small price drop, between 3 and 10 percent, nothing like the rates of price decrease that characterize the rest of the electronic world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This is important. If you are seeking to understand what is happening and how to respond to it, calling it “theft” immediately shuts the door on a variety of important points. It closes off a path to understanding both what’s happening and how one might best deal with it. I find that incredibly dangerous from the perspective of a content creator. Calling infringement theft or not isn’t just a semantic argument from people who like to argue. It’s about actually understanding what’s going on, and that’s simply not possible when you put up a wall to understanding.
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Because libertarians reflexively (and correctly) favor strong enforcement of property rights, we need to be careful about too credulously accepting the “property rights” frame for proposals to create or expand legal privileges. Such arguments can be found in a wide variety of fields, including gene patents, the recording industry, and spectrum policy. Clear and predictable property rules are a tremendous engine of economic growth and individual liberty. But Seeing Like a State reminds us that the creation of new property rights can sometimes be a process of expropriation, with the state inventing new rights to transfer wealth to parties with political power.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the new property rights whose creation Scott describes in Seeing Like a State had positive consequences in the long run, but it’s hard to deny that some of the short-run consequences were deeply illiberal, transferring wealth from ordinary peasants to those who had the closest ties to the state. When large firms deploy the rhetoric of property rights in defense of creating new legal privileges for themselves, libertarians especially need to employ an appropriate degree of skepticism.
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Copyrights
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An extensive study into the effect of digitalization on the music industry in Norway has shed an interesting light on the position of artists today, compared to 1999. While the music industry often talks about artists being on the brink of bankruptcy due to illicit file-sharing, the study found that the number of artists as well as their average income has seen a major increase in the last decade.
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Some time ago, prompted by truly horrifying customer service and useless web interfaces of certain domain registrars, I decided to move all of CC’s domains to Gandi.net. I had had my personal domains with Gandi for quite some time, and had been very happy with the customer service and web management interface. Also, other people on the tech team at CC commented on the good experiences they had always had with Gandi.
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The NY Times ran a bombshell article over the weekend in which it reported that Russia has been using the pre-text of intellectual property enforcement to seize computers from NGO groups involved in advocacy and dissent. The article notes that the authorities have been receiving active assistance from Microsoft, which had been delivering statements describing the company as a victim and asking for criminal charges against the NGO groups. While human rights groups had been pressing Microsoft to address the issue for months, it only responded yesterday after the article’s publication. The company now says it will offer free blanket licences for its products to NGOs to prevent actions under the guise of IP enforcement. It will also establish a new legal assistance program to assist NGOs who need to respond to enforcement actions.
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Stories like this always amuse me, because, of course, it wasn’t that long ago that all we heard was how evil such “infringers” were, in creating their own videos “using music that doesn’t belong to them.” It’s always nice to see musicians realize that fans making videos are fans making videos, rather than threatening them with infringement claims.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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People accused of unlawful filesharing by the music and film industries will have access to a free appeals system, the coalition government said today.
Tory broadband minister Ed Vaizey said there will be no cost for the public to appeal against Digital Economy Act (DEA) copyright infringement notices, at least initially.
However, the Department for Business will closely monitor the free appeals system, and reserve the right to introduce “small fees” later, because it “risks the possibility of large numbers of unnecessary appeals”. Appeals will be heard by a new tribunal.
Michael Moore: ‘We Should Always Stand Up Against the Angry Mob’
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I am currently using, at this very moment, while I am typing, the latest completely updated version of Gentoo. I can surf the net, play movies and my window manager even has transparency. I am developing my Partalog program on it and transferring files, home movies taken with my Flip, to my home server over the internet. In other words pretty much everything which the average computer user uses.
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There is no possible way I could run any windows on this machine and do what I can now do with this little trooper. It yet another reason why I like Linux. It doesn’t matter what I use, what the hardware specs are, I can still run the latest, modern, operating system available.
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Give me GNU/Linux any day. The licence is easy to understand: you have permission to
1. use,
2. examine,
3. change and
4. distribute the code.
That’s so easy and the price is right, usually $0. There is no need for cripple-ware in GNU/Linux. It’s the real thing. Whether you are a large corporation of a young child, you can run top notch software on your PCs and servers, network and clusters. It’s the right way to do IT.
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However, just owning a computer and using an operating system is not enough. The real measure of whether you are considered a second rate citizen or not, is the after market service, gadgets and thingamajigs available. It is those who manufacturer hardware and the amount of support they give to any particular operating system which, to me, is the real measure of rating level.
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It is an ironic coincidence that I have received update notices from Mandriva for software installed on my Linux PC systems as well this weekend. These updates come regularly from the upstream developers through Mandriva to Mandriva end-users. These updates may be simple code fixes for bugs, upgrades to get new versions of software or security fixes to patch possible security problems. While looking at these today I thought it would be interesting to compare vulnerability wise what I am getting from Mandriva today with what Microsoft customers will be getting on Tuesday 14 September 2010.
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Remember when Linux was the “upstart,” and it used to drive us crazy? Declaring victory (which is arguably premature at this stage) just sets Linux up to be the target for our next upstart.
Is Linux doing great? Yes, absolutely. Can it do better? Yes, always. Because even if Linux captures market dominance in every sector, it must always be ready to change and adapt to new consumer, business, or technological needs. Growth, adaptation, and change must forever be a part of the Linux mindset (indeed, any truly successful project).
Because that which does not grow, dies. And declaring yourself the winner in one game never means you’ll automatically win the rest.
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The 200th issue of Linux Journal is just around the corner, and I thought it would be fun if all of you could participate! (No, I’m not just a lazy editor, stop thinking things like that…)
For our 200th issue, we’re going to put an article in the front called, “200 Things To Do With Linux”, and you get to fill in those 200 things! Just drop your favorite thing to do with Linux in this nifty form, and we’ll try to get ‘em all in. We’ll try to give you credit as well, as long as your name isn’t something really long or really offensive.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month we started once again our annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we poll our readers about their choices and opinions concerning graphics cards, display drivers, and other graphics / X.Org related features of the Linux desktop. While this survey is still going on through the end of September — so you still have time to participate — here are the results from the first 6,300 people to submit their responses. We are publishing the results so far since there is the X Developers’ Summit this week in Toulouse and some of these findings may prove to be useful during those discussions.
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Applications
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In this article I want to talk about three great virtualization software for your desktop computer.
Why virtualize?
The current computers have faster CPUs and more RAM compared to those of 3 or 4 years ago. There is more ability to run a second operating system in parallel to your main operating system. But why do it?
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Development of course is progressing nicely, now as much to the point where we can do blog posts about progress, like I did back in 2007 and 2008! We’ve had some great community contributions and new developers jump on board and the project is rapidly regaining its health from the slow down in 2009.
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Let me quickly list some of the features which are present in almost any decent audio player for Linux out there, and also in Jajuk:
- Jajuk offers a playlist which can be sorted depending on many factors, like artist, title, duration, genre etc
- lyrics fetching from the Internet
- cover fetching (including detecting covers from the local directory where the current playing file is located); covers can be displayed in many sizes
- Wikipedia information about the currently playing artist, album and song
- Last.fm song submission
- file browser
- Audio CD player
- collection statistics
- web radios
- ratings
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Email, love it or loathe it, there’s no getting away from it. On an average day I process hundreds of emails, but haven’t yet found an open source mail user agent (MUA) that I really like. Ten years ago this wasn’t surprising, but today? Why aren’t open source mailers keeping up with the rest of the Linux desktop, and being blown away by Gmail?
In the 14 years I’ve used Linux, I’ve tried pretty much every mailer. Mutt, Pine, Alpine, Sylpheed, and the list goes on. In the last year, I’ve checked in with SpiceBird, Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, and Claws (formerly Sylpheed-Claws, the bleeding edge of Sylpheed). They’re all solid mailers, but it’s like time stopped somewhere around 2002 feature-wise. None of the open source mail clients have truly stepped up to the plate with anything new.
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Foobnix is a brand new Linux music player designed to be minimal and for both local and online music.
What I instantly liked about it is the online music search feature – Foobnix downloads and plays music from Vkontakte (a Russian website, I for one never heard of it) and in my tests it was able to find any band I could think of. I’m not sure how legal this is, but it’s an amazing feature!
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Proprietary
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ivi is an app: download, install (Mac, PC and Linux versions are available), and seconds later you’re watching live TV via the Internet. ivi’s not the first service to offer live streaming of TV channels online, but it has a standout ingredient: content. The big networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS and the CW — are the highlight of ivi’s 25-channel lineup.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you want to download and install these or other cursor themes available, just follow these simple instructions (specific to KDE in this case, but very similar to what should be done under GNOME):
1.- Go to KDE-LOOK.org and browse the X11 mouse theme CATEGORY (Order here by highest rated, descending).
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Wine
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A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is
What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?
There are three main commercial Wine products: Bordeaux, Cedega, and Crossover. There are a few distinct differences between the commercial Wine products and the FOSS Wine.
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Games
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Warzone 2100 is a free, open-source real-time strategy game available for Linux, Windows and Mac. This game was originally closed-source, developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in 1999, but in 2004 it was officially licensed under the GNU GPL.
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“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, before being misquoted in just about everything. If Roosevelt were still alive, I’m sure he would’ve made an addendum to his inaugural speech to include Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Or maybe he wouldn’t have. Amnesia is about fear, after all. It’s the central premise. Pure, unadulterated, terror. Chill, icy fingers clawing at the back of your neck kind of terror, that of the creeping dark and Cthulhu, Hesselius, the House of Usher. It’s a Gothic supernatural tale of crumbling castles, ancient artefacts and evil from time immemorial. And fear. Fear of insanity, fear of the dark, fear of the unknown. All those fears -from childhood to adulthood- have been deftly plucked from our psychs by Frictional Games. What we’re presented with is a masterwork of horror, perhaps the first game to ever capture the classics so perfectly, to build something so vile with so much love.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I have applied the Oxygen KDE theme to Mozilla Firefox and have installed the Oxygen style to OpenOffice.org. I also wanted GTK+ applications to better integrate with KDE 4.5, so I installed the GTK-Qt engines and the QtCurve theme, but try as I might, other GTK+ applications (e.g. Pidgin, the Mint tools) would not look right (though the color scheme, if not the theme itself, was applied properly). Maybe I’m still doing something wrong, but I’ve run out of ideas regarding how to fix the problem.
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This week, a new season of KDE and the Masters of the Universe kicks off with our good friend, KDE e.V. Board Member, Sebastian Kügler (and his two chinchillas).
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A Mint derivative where the main color is BLUE. Yes I know that it is less than a month before Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat arrives, and then Linux Mint will follow with their releases soon after, but Mint 9 KDE warrants special attention.
For those of you who have been following I have been looking for the perfect KDE 4 distro. Yes I have been neglecting it a little, and I have no excuse for it besides hoping to drag it along that I can review Kubuntu Maverick as part of my quest. The current incarnation of Kubuntu (Lucid) is a wreck.
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If you’d like to get involved, have some ideas or just want to keep an eye on what we’re up to, please join the KDE science mailing list (which, along with the wiki, is the main point of coordination).
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So here we have, lo and behold brought to our attention, a new theme for at least some soon to be happy KDE bloggers out there. KDE-Look.org contributor csslayer has submitted a new WordPress theme based on KDE Air – The aptly titled KDE Air WordPress theme. We must say, it looks stunning.
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Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4 to QT 4, giving users an application that fits in well with KDE 4 while still resembling the previous version of the library-based music player. As I’ve commented in the past, acceptance of KDE 4 wasn’t helped by the fact that the developers took it upon themselves to redesign some of the most popular apps such as Konqueror and Amarok.
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I recorded a quick screencast today about some 4.6 (and one 4.5.2) things. It ended up being exactly 15:00 minutes long, though that was more accidental than intentional.
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Linux doesn’t offer too much choice, “but it may not organize its choices well enough,” says Slashdot blogger David Masover. “The ideal situation “is to provide sane defaults so that people aren’t forced to make choices — but if you remove choice, you remove one of the biggest reasons to use Linux in the first place.”
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Reviews
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TinyCore Linux runs completely of RAM, which makes it extremely fast. Having bare minimum applications in a fully operational system further helps this. TinyCore Linux is not all hardware compatible nor does provide a complete desktop with all kind of fancy applications, it provides just enough functionality for someone to download and install application of Internet and customize distribution according to his needs.
[...]
In Conclusion, TinyCore Linux might not be suitable or recommended for a modern computer with humongous amount of resource as there are better distributions for such a platform, but for computer severely lacking in resources, TinyCore Linux could prove to be savior. On such a resource constraint system you could customize distribution with your own choice of applications, having only the required applications and services should makes things faster. TinyCore Linux uses applications like TinyX , BusyBox which are meant for Embedded Platform , this makes it as possible alternative for embedded platform(like Intelligent Panels, Netbooks (Maybe ? ), Kiosks. Overall, I had lots of fun playing around with a distribution with footprint of 10MB.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS or PCLOS is based on Mandrake. The Gnome version comes equipped with an ugly gray colored background. I attribute this to the fact that most PCLOS users are KDE desktoppers and don’t really care what color Gnome is.
[...]
Adding software and packages is a snap, this is what Linux is about, not some primitive terminal command (If I want old style, I’ll get out my 8088. It still runs and I remember some of the DOS commands). In addition it uses Synaptic update manager, but the status reload is extremely slow.
Despite the fact that most PCLinuxOS users are KDE and get most of the support, the Gnome version is very good, I will give this OS an ‘A-’.
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Red Hat Family
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N.C. State University on Monday opened a space on Centennial Campus called “the Garage” intended for students working on entrepreneurial activities.
The N.C. State Entrepreneurship Initiative and Raleigh-based Red Hat, which is headquartered on Centennial Campus, are sponsoring the 2,000-square-foot facility. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is not disclosing how much it has contributed to the Garage.
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Shares of Red Hat gained $1.54 (+4.12%) to $38.95.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) rose on renewed takeover speculation. Shares are up 4.4 percent.
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) traded in a range yesterday that spanned from a low of $37.91 to a high of $39.08.
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Fast Money’s Jon Najarian said there is speculation that Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) may be acquired, and as a result, its options and common stock are active today.
Shares of Red Hat are up more than 4% today, gaining $1.63 to trade at $39.04.
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Delegates at a Sydney open source conference this week heard that a cloud provider would launch in Australia shortly.
In his open source Pacific conference keynote speech yesterday, Red Hat business development manager Colin McCabe said a Red Hat cloud-provider customer would soon launch in Australia.
He said open source was the “foundation of the cloud”, naming Amazon Web Services, IBM and Savvis as companies that ran public clouds on Red Hat infrastructure.
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Fedora
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Linpus Lite 1.4 is the latest distribution that I am currently reviewing. While the review is in progress, I thought posting a few screenshots is in order. If you are not familiar with Linpus Lite, it is developed by Linpus Technologies, Inc. of Taipei, Taiwan. The company’s main distribution was Linpus Desktop, which was based on the old Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva). The Linpus Desktop line is no longer officially available for download (Linpus Desktop 9.6 was the last edition reviewed on this website).
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Yesterday the Ohio LinuxFest kicked into high gear, with dozens of talks and sessions geared toward free software aficionados of all skill levels. I don’t know the attendance numbers but I heard people saying the conference felt even bigger and busier than last year. (I was last at Ohio LinuxFest in 2008.)
We had discovered that, besides the Fedora booth, the generous folks at OLF had also set up a booth for Red Hat, who sponsored the conference in part as well. Since we had a fair number of Red Hatters in attendance — Spot, Ruth, and myself — and had a full complement of Fedora Ambassadors on hand as well, we decided to work that booth. The booths were helpfully right next to each other so we could all easily collaborate and converse with each other during the day.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Nevertheless, the Ubuntu Project does bring something unique, special and important to free software: a total commitment to everyday users and use cases, the idea that free software should be “for everyone” both economically and in ease of use, and a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there. I feel that commitment is a gift back to the people who built every one of those packages. If we can bring free software to ten times the audience, we have amplified the value of your generosity by a factor of ten, we have made every hour spent fixing an issue or making something amazing, ten times as valuable. I’m very proud to be spending the time and energy on Ubuntu that I do. Yes, I could do many other things, but I can’t think of another course which would have the same impact on the world.
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Above all, to extend the power of Ubuntu as an environment. Ubuntu One already allows you to many things beyond the basic file sync we started off with, you can keep your contacts from your phone and desktop (and between other Ubuntu devices) in sync and backed up, notes, bookmarks, all your important files are backed up and synced, you can share them privately or publicly, you can buy music that gets delivered right to your music player, and soon you will be able to stream any of your music to your phone. And this is just today. As the project matures, we are working hard to make it easy for more and more third-party projects to use our platform and out-pace us in ideas and code.
All of this allows Ubuntu to extend its reach into mobile devices and even other operating systems. It feels like integrating into the real world today, not only the world we want to build.
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Here’s what Ubuntu 10.10 has to offer:
- Linux kernel 2.6.35
- GNOME 2.31, including Nautilus as a file manager, Rhythmbox as a music player, Totem as the default video player, Empathy Instant Messaging client
- OpenOffice 3.2 suite, including the Writer, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Drawing, (doesn’t that Oracle logo look awkward when the splash-screen appears?)
- Mozilla Firefox 3.6.9
- Evolution 2.30 email client
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…the Ubuntu Extras repository doesn’t have any purpose until after the Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat final release.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bucking the trend toward ever beefier and bulkier Linux distributions, the Peppermint OS project recently unveiled the first release of a lighter-weight variant of its small-footprint Linux OS. Since “Peppermint Ice” targets netbooks and older, resource-constrained laptops and PCs, I dusted off a well-worn ThinkPad 2662-35U, loaded it up with the new OS, and took it for a spin.
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Upcoming Xubuntu 10.10 based on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat with Xfce desktop environment coming with many artwork enhancement for Wallpapers, Icons, and Themes.
Xubuntu Artwork wiki shows new logo, text logo with different dimensions, great wallpapers collection vector, bitmap, and photography wallpapers.
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D-Link’s Boxee Box can now be ordered from Amazon for November delivery (to US destinations only). Additionally, the company disclosed today that its device is based on an Intel Atom processor CE4100, representing a significant triumph for Intel over ARM Ltd.
D-Link unveiled its plans last December to build an STB (set-top-box) based on Boxee’s media-streaming software platform, and published preliminary photos and functional specs at that time.
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Not to be confused with the music service, Pandora the Linux-based gaming handheld is off to a solid start, according to The Register.
Pandora’s small team in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, has shipped 1,000 devices since they became available in May. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, but it’s enough for the team to claim that they’re all sold out. Pandora devices are now being sold on pre-order, and the makers hope to ship another 3,000 units by the holidays.
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Phones
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But Venkatesh Hariharan, corporate affairs director, Red Hat, a leading vendor of open source software, says, “Without such a policy, e-government would be a mess of incompatible systems. We are still using land records and maps that date back 400 years. If we store this e-government data in closed proprietary formats, we risk losing this data forever. If we use open, royalty-free standards like those defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, we can ensure the long-term preservation of government data,” says he.
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Cisco has long dominated the networking world. It seems its supremacy is unassailable. Yet open source-based networking just might be its undoing – eventually.
Open source software, after all, has conquered many arenas. Apache Web servers, Linux-based operating systems and the OpenOffice desktop suite are a few of the well-known areas where open source has carved out a large chunk of the marketplace.
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Many firms that had previously been reluctant to use open source (i.e., free) software have changed their minds. So what’s different now?
For one thing, open source has evolved. Improvements in the actual software has led to a significant spike in businesses using open source.
In fact, 98% of firms use some type of open source software – according to a study conducted by Zenoss, Inc., at the annual USENIX Large Installation System Administration conference.
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A critical security flaw in current and older versions of the popular open source OpenX ad server allows attackers to remotely compromise a server. A few reports (German language link) even discuss successful attacks on OpenX servers in which the vulnerability was exploited.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that it held elections for the Foundation’s Executive Officers, who will be overseeing the day-to-day operations of the foundation, during its September 11th board meeting. The non-profit Foundation supports the Apache community’s development of some of the most well-known open source projects, such as the ASF’s first project, the Apache HTTP Web Server, Tomcat and Hadoop.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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That will require quite a lot of work, and so I’d also like to propose a trivially easy step towards bringing some much-needed focus: do not ever let anyone on the site refer to “Drumbeat” – it should always be “Mozilla Drumbeat”. However evocative the word “drumbeat” may be, it is completely untethered – it could refer to anything, and certainly has no obvious, inherent links with the Internet or openness. Every time that the “drumbeat” brand is enhanced, Mozilla’s is diminished – and with it the focus on the open Internet. Foregrounding Mozilla in this way would remind everyone who is behind this project, and why, ultimately, they are getting involved.
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One of the things that the Mozilla Firefox developers do not want to see happening is that their browser takes the back seat performance wise. That was almost the case, with the recent releases of Opera 10.60, Google Chrome 7 and the preview version of Internet Explorer 9, as all of which left Firefox in JavaScript benchmarks behind.
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Mozilla’s goal to release the first release candidate of Firefox 4 in the second half of October may not be realistic anymore as the feature freeze of the software is now already more than two weeks behind schedule. Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner informed developers late last week that the feature freeze would be moved from September 10 to September 15, while the original feature freeze date was September 1.
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SaaS
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vtiger CRM is a web-based Customer Relationship Management application that delivers enterprise features. vtiger CRM leverages the benefits of Open Source software and adds more value to users by providing advanced features such as Lead, Opportunity, Account and Contact Management, Integration with common desktop applications such as email and office productivity software and support for Quotation and Invoicing, Inventory Management, trouble ticketing and customer support activities.
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Education
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Lecture capture — the practice of recording lectures, storing them in a library, and allowing students to play them back whenever they want, along with accompanying slides or other media — has become one of the more popular trappings of e-learning. Some research suggests that having lectures available for playback could help students retain lecture content. Another study indicated that it would not prompt students to cut class, as some professors have feared. The number of companies selling lecture capture hardware, software, and services has grown to more than a dozen, with the top providers serving hundreds of colleges. All in all, the lecture capture market did more than $50 million in business last year, according to a recent report from the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. The firm predicts that figure will triple by 2016.
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Business
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Proprietary software licensing is a dead model, and one the Public Sector can no longer afford.
Turning to the greater proportion of costs taken up by services, this is precisely the reason that the Public Sector can no longer afford, and must break it’s reliance on, a small handful of enormous ICT companies and move to a triple-Open strategy (Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source).
By migrating existing infrastructure in line with a triple-Open strategy, the Public Sector enables itself to escape ICT provision from the existing monopolies and oligopolies, freeing itself from lock-in, systemic risk and ruinous costs. In fact there is no choice in this matter (Public Sector ICT costs are unsustainable), but let us assume there is and explain why.
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Project Releases
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Another week, another bugfix release for Lightspark! Apart from restoring the support for YouTube this release features the new plugin based audio framework that makes it possible to support other backends beside PulseAudio. At the moment both an ALSA and OpenAL plugins are being worked on.
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Licensing
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And what about your own code? Do you know every open source package you use? What about code coming in from developers in other groups? Off-shore partners? Have any of them copied and pasted code from the open source community into code they give you?
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Openness/Sharing
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That crisp hint of Autumn in the air means it’s time to head back to school whether that’s on campus or the school of life. Here’s Shareable’s reading list for the Fall.
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Open Data
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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will reportedly propose that the city’s open data initiative called DataSF that started 13 months ago be made into law.
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The latest Australian politician to be caught out by technology is New South Wales Ports and Waterways Minister Paul McLeay. According to ZDNet, he’s been forced to resign after having to admit to accessing porn and gambling websites on a parliamentary computer.
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Security/Aggression
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The Defense Department is attempting to buy the entire first printing – 10,000 copies – of a memoir by a controversial former Defense Intelligence Agency officer so that the book can be destroyed, according to military and other sources.
“Operation Dark Heart,” which was scheduled to be published this month by St. Martin’s Press, recounts the adventures and frustrations of an Army reservist, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who served in Afghanistan in 2003, a moment when the attention of Washington and the military had shifted to Iraq.
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The Homeland Security Department plans to test futuristic iris scan technology that stores digital images of people’s eyes in a database and is considered a quicker alternative to fingerprints.
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An international cybercrime investigation is underway into a sophisticated scam network that left a Western Australian man half a million dollars out of pocket when criminals sold his Perth investment property using stolen credentials.
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Adobe has issued a warning about yet another unpatched hole in its Flash Player and Reader (including Acrobat) products that attackers are already using to infect Windows systems. Just last week, Adobe warned of a hole in Reader that criminals are also using to spread malware on Windows systems.
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Finance
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“Summer Davos” is the World Economic Forum’s four-year old conference in China, titled “The Annual Meeting of the New Champions.” It’s all about the economic challenges and opportunities emerging markets. Wandering between panels where heads of multinationals, entrepreneurs, government officials and social entrepreneurs are talking about the Chinese consumer that’s just waking up, trillions in foreign investment and where it’s going and the time-bomb of shortages in food, water and energy as the world population goes from 6.9 billion to 9.1 billion in 2050, two things occurred to me: This is my version of porn, and I’m a total nerd.
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Still, while cheering Basel III, you’re cheering the further, continued and deepening screwing of American people, and European, and Japanese, not to mention dirt-poor-to-begin with Africans and Asians, who will for instance increasingly be bid out of what fertile land they once had to feed their children.
Basically, the banks can continue to do anything they want till 2013, and “just about” anything they want until 2019. Not that they’ll be lending to “consumers”, mind you, unless their governments force them to and/or make it very attractive (50+% credit card charges), and if anyone has anything adverse to say about that, their answer will be that they will need the money to comply with Basel III in 2019. Oh, the lovely irony.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Britain’s biggest travel review website, whose critiques of hotels and restaurants can include damning references to Basil Fawlty-style hotel managers, bed bugs and stomach-churning meals, is facing potential legal action from hundreds of hoteliers and restaurateurs who claim their businesses are being damaged by malicious and unfounded reviews.
More than 400 establishments have indicated they may join a “group defamation action” against TripAdvisor, which carries “unbiased” reviews, written by members of the public, of hotels and other businesses.
Unless the popular site removes the most wounding criticisms within a fortnight, legal proceedings could begin shortly, according to KwikChex, a Bournemouth-based reputation management firm, which is canvassing support for a case.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Engadget reports that the master key that controls HDCP, the anti-copying system used to restrict the outputs of Blu-Ray boxes, set-top boxes, and many game systems, have been compromised and published. With these keys, knowledgeable users can make their own “source” and “sink” keys for devices that permit copying at full resolution — which means that you should be able to create a hard-drive-based recorder that you can plug into your Blu-Ray player and record shows in real-time. This player would be immune to “revocation” (part of the HDCP specification that allows a cartel of Hollywood studios to remotely disable devices so they won’t interoperate with compromised systems — essentially, the ability to reach into your living room and shut down your equipment).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ormer entertainment industry lawyer, is currently in the middle of a legal fight with Reed Elsevier over a parody logo the band briefly used — but has since stopped using. His discussions of the lawsuit have been interesting and informative, so I’m a bit shocked to see the following article, submitted by a bunch of folks where Escalante goes a bit off his rocker in attacking the public domain as “communism.” Honestly, I had to read it a few times, and am still sort of wondering if this is pure satire. If it is, bravo. If it’s not, Escalante may have taken cluelessness about the public domain to previously unheard of levels.
At issue? The story we recently covered of how the folks at Musopen wanted to raise money to hire an orchestra to record public domain symphonies, and release the recordings into the public domain. As you’re hopefully aware, while such symphonies are in the public domain already, new recordings of those works are not.
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Another company facing a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Righthaven LLC is fighting back, this time calling the Las Vegas company’s litigation campaign “a parasitical abuse” of judicial resources.
Righthaven is a company that detects online infringements of Las Vegas Review-Journal stories, obtains copyrights for those stories and then sues the alleged infringers.
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Bob Marley’s family lost a lawsuit seeking the copyrights to several of the late Jamaican reggae singer’s best-known recordings.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan said the UMG Recordings unit of Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group is the rightful owner of copyrights to five albums that Marley had recorded between 1973 and 1977 for Island Records.
The albums “Catch a Fire,” “Burnin’,” “Natty Dread,” “Rastaman Vibrations” and “Exodus” were recorded with Marley’s band The Wailers. They include some of Marley’s best-known songs, including “Get Up, Stand Up,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” “No Woman, No Cry” and “One Love.”
[...]
But Cote concluded that Marley’s recordings were “works made for hire” as defined under U.S. copyright law, entitling UMG to be designated the owner of those recordings, for both the initial 28-year copyright terms and for renewals.
CES 2010 : Motorola Backflip
Credit: TinyOgg
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09.13.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Between Linux and Windows, which is easier to fix when broken? It was an interesting question, but one that should be easy to answer (at least in theory). It was time to set up my testing ground. I decided that .NET would be the obvious choice because there is a similar frame work on Linux – Mono. What would happen if I forced the uninstall of each and then re-installed. Would the applications that depended upon those framework applications still work? It should be a simple test. SHOULD.
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Desktop
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Tablets, slates, and smartphones are growing markets as the traditional desktop market is not growing. Phil believes in a future
where many of our work day tasks are completed via rapid input with those devices ubiquitously at our sides. HP is very successful in selling Linux-based netbooks – mostly in emerging markets such as China and India. These devices are fun and simple to use for both parents and kids. Can Linux enjoy the glory of the rush to the mobile platform? So far, Linux-based Android and HP’s Palm WebOS platforms have been seen in market share reports by classifying them as separate from the Linux category. Phil exclaims “These are Linux too!” It is time that we celebrate the success of Linux on mobile platforms and fret no-more on winning the Linux desktop.
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The future is on the web, how one consumes it is of less importance the the ability to access it. More powerful devices can afford multiple applications that customize web services, but the information is the same. Linux is perfectly positioned to be the operating system of choice for very low cost, portable, almost throw-away devices.
The Chromium project has the right idea, but is being overshadowed by Android. What I’d like to see is an Android release that only had one app, the browser, and boots directly to the browser to get the device online as fast as possible. Low cost, low power chips, low cost memory, low cost flash storage, and the dropping price of touch screens means that the hardware is ready, will Linux be ready for the sub-hundred dollar tablet?
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On the flip side, SSH is extremely versatile and flexible. And here’s why. First, you can use ANY SSH client you want. Personally, I use PuTTY. It’s very lightweight, powerful, and has the features that work for me. Copy and paste is very efficiently done. Simply select the text (which is intelligent enough to select line by line, not by cursor position), and the text is automatically copied to the clipboard. Simply clicking the right mouse button (or center mouse button/wheel in Linux) will paste at the cursor position. I use this all of the time for editing documents in a shell, very very easy and powerful. This behavior is also done at the text terminal of Linux as well, with the “gdm” service on (allows the mouse to be used in the text terminal).
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Kernel Space
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So due to travel, it’s been two weeks rather than the usual one, but 2.6.36-rc4 is out there now.
Nothing in particular stands out, although there’s been more noise in GPU development than I’d like at this point (both Radeon and i915). But that should hopefully all be just stabilization. There’s also been some PCIe/firmware interaction changes, that should fix way more issues than it breaks.
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It fixes a single bug that a number of users have reported in that their USB devices no longer work properly. Sometimes it causes lost keystrokes, and other times X refuses to boot as it can not communicate properly with some tablet devices.
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Applications
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Twitim is a Twitter client for GNOME. It is implemented with Gtk2-Perl.
* Custom watchlists
* Sounds and pop-up notifications
* Support XMPP
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The year 2010 is proving to be a real goldmine as far as Linux gaming is concerned. Almost a month back, we reported the release of ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ and ‘And Yet It Moves’ for Linux. Now Unigine OilRush RTS game joins the fray and announces its Linux version.
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The folks who brought the three-part Penumbra series to the Linux community now bring us another even more terrifying adventure. Amnesia: The Dark Descent follows Daniel as he confronts a sinister dark shadow in his quest to hunt and kill evil Alexander in order to save his own mind and life. Danger hides in every corner. Risk life and limb at every turn, your very sanity in peril with every step into the dark descent.
The first-person adventure immerses the user in the spooky setting of an ancient desolate and crumbling Prussian castle. You, as the hero, navigates the terrifying environment using all your wits and knowledge to wriggle out of one tight spot after another. Hang around in any one area too long and you will begin to lose your mind and, if you’re not careful, even your life. The eerie atmosphere makes it difficult to find the hidden clues and the necessary elements needed to progress. With ghostly sounds and poor lighting, it’s little wonder one can hardly determine their next step. The dark shadow is always lurking and often right on your heals.
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Desktop Environments
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From left to right, they are Ghost, Black Hole, Dissolve, Flicker, Popcorn, Raindrop, Pulse and Fan. Many of them are based on a new framework, which will allow a whole bunch of similar animations (which draw the window a number of times in different positions on every pass).
I have also included a video so you can see them in action…
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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New Releases
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This is the final and stable release of Kongoni 1.12.3 (Cicero). With this release most issues and problems should be solved, also most packages where cleaned-up, updated to the latest version. Kernel upgraded to version 2.6.35.4-libre, improved the stability and speed, re-build with support for more hardware devices, cleaned-up the kernel configuration, set Rekonq browser as the default web browser, Gnash upgraded to verison 0.8.8, KDE upgraded to version 4.5.1, removed Ktorrent and replaced it with qBittorrent, which should be much more faster and lightweight.
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The name change is due to conflicts between the developers and the board of the registered non-profit Sidux e.V. association. Disputes between the board and the developers have been going on since mid-August and the developers decided to separate from the association shortly after the first board chairman resigned. As the Sidux domains are registered to the association, the Sidux developers have forked to a new name.
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Red Hat Family
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Today the ribbon was cut on 2,000 square feet on NC State University’s Centennial Campus where ten students have set up their projects in the new Garage, an incubator for student engineers. Spaces with names like Brainstorm Room, Idea Meeting Space, Hobby Shop, and Designer’s Workshop are home to mechanical, electrical, and woodworking spaces with whiteboards, a small library, and a kitchen space to nourish the next generation of entrepreneurship.
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N.C. State and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will unveil “The Phase I Garage,” a center designed to help students become entrepreneurs, next week.
Red Hat, which maintains its global headquarters at NCSU’s Centennial Campus, is partnering with the NCSU Entrepreneurship Initiative on the facilty.
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Debian Family
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Perhaps the most common request I get from readers is to review utility distributions. Without question the CD which gets used the most in my digital toolbox is KNOPPIX. The KNOPPIX distribution was one of the first projects to offer a Linux live CD, giving people the opportunity to test drive a Linux desktop without installing any software. It’s also well-known for automatically detecting and using a wide range of hardware without user assistance.
[...]
KNOPPIX has a slightly different feel to it. The KNOPPIX live CD isn’t a means to an end (i.e. getting you to install it on your hard drive), the live environment KNOPPIX provides is the means and the end. A lot of the tools a system administrator will want are right there on the disc, it’s well put together and its focus allows for a level of polish. This is a distribution which isn’t chasing the latest cutting-edge technology or trying to wow with eye candy (though it does have some nice desktop effects). Instead, KNOPPIX is a stable system which really delivers useful tools and hardware support. I have used this distro steadily for about five years on a wide range of machines and I have found just one computer, to date, where KNOPPIX wouldn’t boot into a graphical desktop environment.
The KNOPPIX live discs are dependable and, I’ve found, extremely useful under a wide variety of circumstances. It’s a digital tool I think any administrator should carry with them, whether they’re working in a Linux environment or not.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Clearly nothing happens overnight. More than two years ago, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth went out on a limb and said that his ambition was to make the Ubuntu desktop better than Apple’s famously good-looking desktop.
Over the next couple of releases small changes were made to the interface of Ubuntu, some popular and some not so popular. And then in Ubuntu 10.04, released in April this year, a new theme was introduced and slowly the changes started to flow.
Ubuntu may not yet have a better interface than Mac OS X (depending on your perspective) but it looks like the many changes that have been made, and many others still being added in time for the next Ubuntu release, are showing signs that the interface changes are paying off.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Intel has defended MeeGo’s progress, saying its mobile joint venture with Nokia is still wanted by the industry.
The open source mobile operating system is the result of a tie-up between the two tech giants that brought together Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. It’s designed for tablets, netbooks and handsets as well as televisions and in-car systems.
The MeeGo platform is “gaining traction,” Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini claimed in a keynote at IDF. MeeGo 1.01 is currently supported by about two dozen netbooks as well as the Nokia N900. Touchscreen support is expected to arrive next month.
Otellini said room remained for another operating system in the market, suggesting that there was demand by mobile service providers for systems other than Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and those from handset manufacturers or software vendors such as Microsoft.
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Android
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Piper Jaffray, an investment banking firm that earned $7.4 million in net income last quarter, is betting on Android in a big way. Today, Piper Jaffray predicted that Android’s market share will pass the 50 percent mark in the next five years.
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The carrier didn’t list a price or exact shipment date, merely saying that customers will be able to pre-order the device later in September and pointing to a site on which they can register to do so . Smartphones in this category have been selling for around $200 to $250 with a two-year contract.
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Both Archos and Toshiba will have app stores for their devices because their versions of the Android OS have not been designed for tablets like theirs. The issue of Android tablets being denied access to that operating system’s primary apps market emerged when Google’s global product management director for mobiles, Hugo Barra told a media briefing at the company’s London offices yesterday that, “If you want Android market on that platform, the apps just wouldn’t run, Froyo is not optimised for tablets.”
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Hugo Barra, director of products for mobile at Google, reportedly told UK tech news site TechRadar that Android 2.0, code-named Froyo, “is not optimised” (British spelling) to run on tablets. In addition, the Android Market won’t be available on Froyo tablets, a major shortcoming.
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In other words, Apple’s loss is Android’s gain. Much as iPhone fans might argue the reverse, it’s also no real surprise. In fact, there are three key reasons Android is stealing iOS’s thunder.
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There is a no doubt that Africa is a vast market whose profitability is mostly unrecognized or just glossed over by firms from advanced countries. With a population of over 850m people, there should be no question at all about how this market can help a firm dominate its competitors.
For quite sometime, I’ve been wondering why Google still had no Android powered phones here. Earlier this month, that prayer was answered with the introduction of the Android powered IDEOS smartphone in Kenya .
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A free Android app is a wonderful thing. The problem is, the Android App Marketplace is a bit freewheeling, and it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Lucky for you, we’ve done the job for you.
So let the downloading begin. Yes, you heard right – all of these fantastic 50 are completely free Android apps. Think of them as the best free apps the Android Marketplace has to offer.
1) ASTRO File Manager
This app is a full-featured file manager that lets you view and manage the files on your Droid without having to plug it into your computer. You can even use it to backup your Android apps to your SD card.
2) EStrongs File Explorer
This local and network file manager provides a file explorer for both the local phone and your remote computer. You can view files on your phone and in your computer’s shared folder and transfer files between them. You can even play audio and video, browse images and view text.
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Tablets
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Kno says the device will be be available for purchase “by late fall.” The company hasn’t said what the device will cost, but CEO Osman Rashid tells TechCrunch it will sell for under $1,000. Rashid is also the co-founder and chairman of textbook rental startup Chegg, which has raised its own big round last fall.
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We’ve been hearing about India’s plans for a $35 computer for a few months now, and for a while we thought it might be all talk. However, it seems India is pushing ahead with plans for the educational tablet.
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It’s very early days, but if it takes off, Plexus could have a very important side-effect. Imagine using it to manage Facebook, say, and then adding the free software replacement Diaspora (assuming it delivers on its promises) too. As the people you follow start to shift across from Facebook to Diaspora (well, I can dream, right?), you would see…precisely nothing, since Plexus would effectively act as a compatibility layer to different social networks, insulating you from the details.
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The reason it’s not a problem for open source as a whole is that what we are seeing in the world of commercial apps is part of something that has been under way ever since free software existed: the software stack is being progressively commoditised by open source code. A less charitable way of putting this is that open source has succeeded when it improves to the point of being able to replace all the rival proprietary systems – and makes that sector somewhat boring as a result.
This process began at the lowest level, with fundamental operating system code being written to create the basis of an entire free software ecosystem. Once that was on course to overtake commercial systems – and therefore beginning to run out of sufficiently appealing hacking challenges – people started to work on key middleware applications that would run on it, where there were new problems to be solved. That was some time back: remember, Apache has been around for 15 years, as has MySQL, and the LAMP stack combining them with GNU/Linux and programming languages goes back at least to 1998, when the term was coined.
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I’ll test that myself (but in a bit – I need to go do voter registration and socsec update first, though – I became a US citizen
last week).
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Events
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In short: Ben Goldacre‘s launching a project to keep track of abandoned or never-published medical trials. Keep also an eye out for Rob McKinnon’s Whoslobbying.com as well. The guys at Young Rewired State showed that despite the relatively poor provision of teaching code in schools, there are some great young talented enthusiastic hackers coming up and making things like this. I missed the talk about Frontline SMS but really like the idea – not everyone has a fancy smartphone after all (see also Terence’s excellent talk on designing for all phones). Finally, I will probably be playing a bit with Scraperwiki and the datasets on data.gov.uk, amongst other things…
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the OOoCon just ended, and we realize how little time we can spend together face2face each year. To properly fix that problem, we hereby announce the next event around OpenOffice.org – a HackFest in Hamburg, specifically targeted to developers, to give all of us more face time & collectively work on the code.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the HTML 5 crowd increasing in volume – both in terms of numbers and noise – Mozilla is looking to regain sole possession as standard-bearer for Web standards. Last Tuesday, with the release of Beta 5 of its upcoming Firefox 4, the organization opened up public comment on its own experiment with a possible browser-based API for audio, which may later open up doors for a video API as well. If it gains traction, it could enable Web developers to develop on-screen tools for visualizing and accessing the data contained within an audio stream.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What would you think about a sign on the highway stating “You need a Volkswagen to drive on this road. Contact your Volkswagen dealer for a gratis test drive – Your Government”? When it comes to PDF reading software, many governments do this every day.
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Free software is software you can study, modify and share without restriction. But unlike proprietary software, there is no big budget marketing campaign behind it. Rather, people discover it and come to value the freedom it provides.
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Blender
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Note that in the uploaded packages, the OBJ exporter is still broken. Read more below on how to get and install the correct version and more important note from the release logs.
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Sintel is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. Between, if you haven’t heard about it yet, you probably haven’t heard about 3 previous open source movie projects by Blender namely Yo Frankie, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny. The initial funding for the project was provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community.
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Government
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Calif. Secretary of State Debra Bowen on open source voting systems and digital literacy
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I understand your anxiety about the new government’s fixation on what they are pleased to call ‘transparency’, but you are distressing yourself unnecessarily. It afflicts all incoming administrations. It used to be called ‘open government’, and reflects the frustrations they felt when they were in opposition and could not find out what was going on, combined with an eagerness to discover and publicise the deception, distortions and disasters of their predecessors.
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Not so, says Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, one of the leading advocates for government transparency. On Tuesday at the Gov 2.0 Summit, she made it clear that transparency wasn’t enough. She also wants accuracy, relevance and quality in the data. Instead, Sunlight found $1.3 trillion in inaccuracies on USAspending.gov. She’s also got some choice words for data.gov and other Open Government initiatives. The keynote was a remarkable turn: the administration was completely eviscerated by one of its closest allies. Today, I read that Fast Company’s Austin Carr is similarly disillusioned by this week’s announcement of Challenge.gov. I think it’s safe to say there will be more pieces like this in the next few months.
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It’s true that our new lords and masters (and presumably ladies and mistresses) have made some vaguely encouraging noises about adopting open source, and opening things up in general (which, to be fair, is starting to happen) but so far there’s been precious little evidence of free software actually being used in UK government.
But moaning is one thing: making concrete suggestions how to get us out of this almighty mess, and to move us to a different procurement regime, quite another. That’s what makes a new report “Better for Less: How to make Government IT deliver savings” particular valuable: it goes beyond pointing out the almost painfully-obvious problems to offering steps that can be taken to address them today.
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Licensing
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Today I have received news that Dell has released the source code of the GPL licensed software on the Dell Streak at http://opensource.dell.com/releases/streak. This includes, among other things, the source code to the Linux kernel they are using on the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
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In a low-key announcement at the end of last week, Google’s open source supremo Chris DiBona announced that their project hosting service, Google Code, is ending its embargo on open source licenses they don’t like, such as the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) controversial AGPLv3 (a license designed to make the give-back compulsion of the Gnu GPL apply to web-hosted services like the ones Google provides) and Sun’s CDDL (the licence used by OpenSolaris and by many of the former Sun’s Java projects).
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This is a different issue from that of the license. Many projects licensed under the GPL are still subject to contributor agreements.
These agreements have their fans, and their purpose. They let business be done centrally, without having every minor decision subject to a veto by developers.
Having a corporate center to an open source business can be a very good thing, assuring regular updates, a quality Web presence, and software worthy of use by an enterprise.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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New tools will help tell stories, but they won’t make every aspect of World Bank data analysis easy. For one, World Bank workers have to integrate data input into their business processes, building a regular reporting framework. For another, there’s the classic challenge of instituting governance and quality for all of that data.
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Anyway, let me go on record now and say this: FreeBMD will complete this transcription, without cost to the taxpayer, given access to the source records. There’s just one condition: we have to be able to publish the complete transcription, free of charge, on the Internet. Of course, it’ll go a bit faster if we do get some money, so I won’t say we wouldn’t accept if it were offered!
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The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project has confirmed that it now has more than 300,000 registered contributors. Founded in August of 2004 by SteveCoast, OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data.
In recent years, the OSM project has become increasingly popular; in March of 2009 it surpassed 100,000 registered users and, in January of this year, hit its 200,000 user milestone. In mid-April, OSM’s Richard Weait stated that the project “gets hundreds of new registrations a day”. OSM statistics can be found on the OSM Statistics page and on the Stats wiki.
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Standards/Consortia
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What lurks beneath the EPUB spec
The secret among those who have poked around EPUB, the open specification for ebooks, is that an .epub file is really just a website, written in XHTML, with a few special characteristics, and wrapped up. It’s wrapped up so that it is self-contained (like a book! between covers!), so that it doesn’t appear to be a website, and so that it’s harder to do the things with an ebook that one expects to be able to do with a website. EPUB is really a way to build a website without letting readers or publishers know it.
But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious — but frightening — step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications.
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Last week, OASIS held the ODF 1.2 Interoperability Demonstration to showcase support for ODF 1.2 and the interoperability across eight implementations. The Demo showcased both open source and commercial software applications processing ODF documents on the desktop, in the cloud and on mobile devices, including IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice, OpenOffice.org Novell Edition, Oracle Open Office, the Python programming library IpOD, Nokia Maemo FreOffice, and Open Framework Systems (OFS).
The ODF 1.2 Interoperability Demonstration was held in conjunction with the OpenOffice.org Conference in Budapest, Hungary, at Central European University. Real-world documents, provided by scenario partner Louvre Labs, many containing images of artwork in various states of restoration, were programmatically extracted and stored as a new ODF presentation file. This new presentation file was reformatted with the lpOD Python programming library, applying templates provided by KOffice and OpenOffice.org for automated styling. The resulting ODF file was read and edited by a number of desktop ODF applications including Oracle Open Office and KOffice. The edited document were then reviewed a colleague using a Nokia N900 smart phone. By accessing the embedded RDF metadata, including the author’s vCard data, the N900 automatically connected to the author where a discussion completed the review and approval process.
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The Open Document Format is a means of saving and encoding documents so that they can be freely opened and edited by non proprietary software. As an example, Microsoft’s .doc format for their Word documents is proprietary and requires that you use Microsoft software to open, edit and save the document. In contrast, the Novus .ODT format is an “open document format” and can be freely opened, edited and saved by numerous software applications.
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Critics of open standards do not like the equalizing effect of openness on the market. Open standards are best for business. Open standards are best for governments. Those two facts make open standards a panacea. Recalling for a moment that in Greek mythology, Panacea was the goddess of healing, we can simply say that open standards are pure goodness. Those who defend them are heroes. Superheroes, even. Little iron men and women working silently in small meeting rooms for hours, days, months, years.
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Someday, somehow, the U.S. Navy would like to run its networks — maybe even own its computers again. After 10 years and nearly $10 billion, many sailors are tired of leasing their PCs, and relying on a private contractor to operate most of their data systems. Troops are sick of getting stuck with inboxes that hold 150 times less than a Gmail account, and local networks that go down for days while Microsoft Office 2007 gets installed … in 2010. But the Navy just can’t quit its tangled relationship with Hewlett-Packard. The admirals and the firm recently signed another $3.3 billion no-bid contract that begins Oct. 1st. It’s a final, five-year deal, both sides promise, to let the Navy gently wean itself from its reliance on HP. But that’s what they said the last time, and the time before that.
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It remains unclear whether Pastor Terry Jones will go ahead with his plan to burn Korans in Florida on Saturday. His daughter Emma has begged him not to go through with it. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, she describes a man who became a victim of his own delusions.
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A top Belgian politician warned the country’s citizens on Sunday to “get ready for the break-up of Belgium,” as King Albert II seeks to relaunch knife-edge coalition talks.
Leading francophone Socialist Laurette Onkelinx, considered a potential successor to party chief Elio Di Rupo, who gave up on negotiations with separatist Flemish leaders on Friday, gave her prognosis in a newspaper interview.
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Cisco Systems and distie Westcon Group North America, owned by South African firm Datatec, are to pay $48m to end an investigation by the US Department of Justice into overcharging.
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Oh dear HP, what have you done, what Pandora’s box have you opened to unleash terror and despair on yourself?
This is all to do with ejected HP CEO Mark Hurd who is joining Oracle as its co-president.
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While the website’s homepage is present, clicking on any story leads to a blank page that just has the word “OK” in the top left hand corner. But what would seem like a total meltdown of the Media Mogul’s beloved walled garden’s wall is said to be only “maintenance”.
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The SkyRider is a saddle-style airplane seat which will allow airlines to squeeze even more passengers into already cramped cabins. The poor passenger will perch atop a sculpted squab that has more in common with a horse-saddle than a comfy chair.
The new seats are due to be launched next week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Americas conference in Long Beach, by manufacturer Aviointeriors. They’re intended to introduce a new cabin-class, below economy. It should probably be called cattle-class.
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Pia Beathe Pedersen accused her employers at the regional radio station of public broadcaster NRK of putting too much pressure on the staff.
Pedersen said in the live Saturday broadcast that she was “quitting and walking away” because she “wanted to be able to eat properly again and be able to breathe.”
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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Craigslist against South Carolina’s attorney general, who is trying to prosecute the Internet company for carrying ads for prostitution.
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Science
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This chart demonstrates that we hit the era of what I’m calling Peak MHz in about 2004. That’s the point when processor speed effectively peaked as chip manufacturers began competing along other dimensions. Those other dimensions–energy efficiency, size and cost–are driving ubiquitous computing, as their chips become more efficient, smaller and cheaper, thus making them increasingly easier to include into everyday objects.
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Interestingly, the Berkeley team mentions their prosthetic skin not only has applications for biomedical devices, but also applies to the interactions of artificial intelligence and humans (Data’s artificial skin in First Contact anyone?). They also mention that while such technology has been explored before, it has yet to be created in a cost-effective and sufficiently sensitive way.
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Getting complicated systems onboard a single spacecraft to operate as one integrated unit can be hard enough but some space agencies are trying to address the challenges of getting multiple spacecraft to fly in formation and operate together as one unit.
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Security/Aggression
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Something is wrong in America when the police electrocute folks on a WEEKLY basis with their taser arsenal … and the public is mute in its response.
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A shocking new report obtained by ABC News says that as many as three out of four guns used in crimes in Mexico and recovered and capable of being traced can be traced to gun stores just across the border in the U.S. The numbers bolster complaints by Mexican officials that the country’s unprecedented bloodshed – 28,000 people have died in drug-cartel violence since 2006 – is being fueled both by the U.S. appetite for drugs, and by American weapons.
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Report says US has failed to create systems to deal with homegrown terror
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Criticism of Wikileaks mouthpiece Julian Assange is growing, with more voices joining the chorus calling for him to step aside while his various Swedish legal problems are sorted out.
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As WikiLeaks prepares a new dump of secret war documents, the feds’ intel SWAT team races to do damage control. Philip Shenon reports on its leader and its inner workings.
In a nondescript suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon, nearly 120 intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and others are at work—24 hours a day, seven days a week—on the frontlines of the government’s secret war against WikiLeaks.
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The coalition government’s decision to review extradition law has been welcomed by family and supporters of Gary McKinnon, even though it’s unlikely to have an immediate effect on his case.
Home Secretary Teresa May announced plans to review the UK’s extradition arrangements on Tuesday in response to long-running complaints that the existing system, introduced in 2004, is unfair. US authorities are not required to present evidence in making extradition requests, a requirement of reciprocal extradition proceedings from the US to the UK.
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More than a quarter of people online have lied about their name and more than one in five has done something online they regret, says a new report.
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The curse of the unencrypted memory stick has stuck Manchester Police, which has suffered embarrassment as a drive containing apparently sensitive information was found lying in the street.
The unsecured data on the drive related to training information on coping with riots, violent suspects, and public disorder. According to the Daily Star, the red top newspaper to which the drive was handed in by a passer-by, some of the information has bearing on terrorism training, including blast control, firearms handling and strategies for dealing with petrol and bomb attacks.
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A police officer who was jailed for six months after he was caught on CCTV throwing a woman into a cell has been granted bail pending an appeal.
Sgt Mark Andrews was filmed dragging Pamela Somerville, 59, through Melksham police station in Wiltshire.
The 37-year-old was jailed last week after being found guilty of causing her actual bodily harm at a trial in July.
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DARPA has been trying to crawl inside the minds of soldiers for a while now, but a new ultrasound technology could let them get deeper inside than ever. Working under a DARPA grant, a researcher at Arizona State is developing transcranial pulsed ultrasound technology that could be implanted in troops’ battle helmets, allowing soldiers to manipulate brain functions to boost alertness, relieve stress, or even reduce the effects of traumatic brain injury.
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Of the many military coups faced by the republics of Latin America, it is the coup of 11 September 1973 that has engraved itself most permanently on the collective memory. The images of the bombing of the Moneda Palace, of the despair on the face of Salvador Allende shortly before his suicide, of the defiant expression worn by Pinochet behind his dark glasses and of the public burning of books that circulated around the world and became the symbol of military brutality.
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Fidel Castro said today that his comment to a US journalist about Cuba’s system not working had been misinterpreted.
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Last month, we reported on Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI), a biometrics R&D firm that’s bringing iris scanning technology to Leon, Mexico. GRI aims to make Leon “the most secure city in the world” by dotting the city with scanners and creating an iris database to track all residents. Now, it appears the technology will be crossing the border sooner than we expected.
Today, it surfaced that the Department of Homeland Security is planning to test GRI’s tech at a border patrol station in Texas, where it will be used to monitor illegal immigrants. Rather than continue to rely on oft-unreliable fingerprints, the DHS is experimenting with the scanners to see whether they have a viable future for border security.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Sadly, all four of our climbers will not be coming back to the Esperanza after all. Jens, Sim, Timo and Matt are flying home to Germany, USA, Finland and Poland respectively. Their personal belongings are still on board and they are going home in spare clothes bought for them by friends in Greenland. I’m sure they’ll be glad to see their families again but we’re really going to miss them on the ship and we haven’t finished our ‘Go Beyond Oil’ tour yet.
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After more than two years of political prosecution, my colleagues Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were this week handed a one-year jail sentence, suspended for three years. Their crime: exposing corruption in the Japanese whaling programme.
Over the course of their trial, Junichi and Toru produced substantial evidence of embezzlement within the decaying relic that is Japan’s whaling industry. When I came to Japan in February for the start of this trial I was shocked that Junichi and Toru were even in court. What I saw in the Aomori court is deeply concerning.
[...]
Greenpeace activists are keenly aware of any risks they may take with life, limb, and liberty, and all are prepared face the consequences of their actions. Activists are not above the law, but neither are the authorities. When activists challenge the authorities they do so in the public interest and not for personal gain. It is unacceptable for authorities to abuse their power to try to silence them.
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As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.
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New solar powered street lights installed in Angkor Wat, Cambodia add much needed public lighting to the area, in a fun, low-energy design that increases night-time safety and facilitates greater earnings for local businesses. Nothing Design Group conceived of the tree-like design, and developed the lights in partnership with Asiana Airlines and Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). The project team wished to create lights that would both increase night-time safety and help elevate Cambodia’s image.
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Scientists meeting in the UK this week are crafting a revolutionary new project aimed at transforming their ability to predict meteorological disasters. The goal, as reported by the Guardian, “is to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of unprecedented precision.” To make that happen, the scientists behind the project are contemplating something even more radical: enlisting thousands of ordinary citizens around the world to gather, classify and even help analyze the meteorological data required to build more accurate, real-time models of the Earth’s climate.
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Weather has caused great disruption to many lives in both Russia and Pakistan in recent months. While these are separate circumstances, they share common physical factors. The following is a look at how events in one part of the world influence weather elsewhere.
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Oil giant BP is telling lawmakers that if it isn’t allowed to get new offshore drilling permits in the Gulf, it will not be able to afford to pay for the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the New York Times reported in its Friday edition.
The Times reports the UK-based oil giant is on the warpath against a drilling reform bill passed by the House earlier this summer that would effectively bar BP from getting new drilling permits in the US.
The CLEAR Act, passed by the House in July, includes an amendment (PDF) that states any oil company that has received more than $10 million in safety fines, or has seen more than 10 workers killed in the past seven years, is barred from being granted new drilling permits. The Times notes that, currently, only BP fits that criteria.
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One reason is that the Department for Transport can no longer afford to help me buy one. The government has allocated £43m to subsidise ultra-low-carbon cars, but at £5,000 a car that’s only enough to help the first few thousand of us who switch over. So whether or not I end up with an electric car doesn’t have a great deal to do with consumer subsidies.
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Finance
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Monetary theory seems to have fallen in disgrace. Very few academics actually focus on macro monetary theory as it is judged irrelevant. Austrians treat money as if it didn’t exist. Keynesians barely scratch the subject. Ironically I had to read marxists to actually make sense of the banking system (critical eye I suppose). Yet the macro cycle, the minsky cycle, receives a huge contribution from monetary levels. As monetary mass increases (say subprime debt) the price of assets run-away in a positive feedback loop (more debt, more money, more expensive assets, better returns, more debt). This is why the initial phase of a monetary minsky cycle is such a political aphrodisiac. Open the money valves and watch your economy grow in nominal and real terms.
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The financial crisis that rocked the world in 2008 and still reverberates today was “due at least in part” to the Iraq war, which also made it more difficult for the government to react when economic problems happened, argue two prominent policy makers.
In an article in Sunday’s Washington Post, former Clinton-era economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes say that the Iraq war forced the US to take on more debt than it had to, and caused in part the rising oil prices that resulted in large amounts of money flowing out of the US economy.
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The government’s programme of drastic spending cuts is putting the British economy in “great danger”, the Trades Union Congress has warned ahead of its annual conference opening in Manchester on Monday.
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President Barack Obama spent last week rolling out new plans to help America’s struggling economy — $50 billion in infrastructure spending and about $200 billion in tax cuts for companies’ investments in research and development. But just how many jobs will these pricey proposals create?
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Executive bonuses are close to their level before the financial crisis, a survey by business advisory firm Deloitte says.
It found that the average bonuses for directors of FTSE 100 firms amounted to 100% of their basic salary, rising to 140% in the top 30 public companies.
However, Deloitte said the days of fast increases in executive salaries were over for the present.
And in mid-sized FTSE 250 firms, one in seven paid no bosses’ bonus last year.
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“Now what happens is you have very sophisticated people whose primary objective is material gain,” says Harvey Miller, a veteran bankruptcy lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. “You’ve changed [bankruptcy] from at least the semblance of a rehabilitative approach to a casino approach of ‘how do I make more money?’”
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The bankruptcy trustee for Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler is casting a wider net to recover money distributed by the insolvent Fort Lauderdale, Fla., law firm in the final months before it tanked in a spectacular $1.2 billion fraud.
Berger Singerman attorney David L. Gay, representing court-appointed trustee Herbert Stettin, filed a series of eight clawback actions late Friday seeking $14.2 million that went out the door within 90 days of the bankruptcy at Scott Rothstein’s law firm.
The investment commitments illustrate the success of Rothstein’s Ponzi scheme as he recruited investors with promises of annual returns as high as 164 percent.
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It took a Congressional inquiry this year to force Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to disclose how much it made in the mortgage market — and that was only for 2007.
Goldman Sachs hasn’t revealed mortgage-trading revenue since then, leaving investors to guess how much it contributes to the fixed-income, currency and commodities division, or FICC, which also trades junk bonds, yen, oil and uranium, sells weather derivatives and operates power plants. The division brought in $23.3 billion last year, or 52 percent of the New York-based firm’s total, and by itself would rank 90th by revenue in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, just ahead of McDonald’s Corp., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The Dodd-Frank Act, designed to prevent future financial crises, does little to improve investors’ ability to analyze results at the five biggest U.S. firms that trade securities, which together lost $38.6 billion as markets froze in the fourth quarter of 2008. Since taxpayers may have to bail out banks again, firms should be forced to disclose more, said Tanya Azarchs, former head of North American bank research at Standard & Poor’s.
“The health of the banking system impinges on all areas of the economy,” said Azarchs, now a consultant in Briarcliff Manor, New York. “So their disclosure has to be top-notch.”
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Bankers and analysts said new global rules could mean less money available to lend to businesses and consumers, but praised a decision to leave plenty of time – until 2019 – before the financial stability requirements come into full force.
The so-called Basel III rules, which will gradually require banks to hold greater capital buffers to absorb potential losses, are likely to affect the credit industry by imposing stricter discipline on credit cards, mortgages and other loans.
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Do those unemployed really need jobs? Some economists suggest that many are just free-riding on the rest of us by taking extended unemployment benefits. In last week’s post, I argued that a focus on the decline in wage and salary jobs is useful, because it sidesteps the assertion that the unemployed are just pretending to want work.
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A warm response to new global banking rules and robust Chinese economic data shored up sentiment in the markets Monday, with stocks up strongly, the euro climbing over a cent against the dollar and oil prices spiking to a one-month high.
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The world’s top bank regulators agreed Sunday on far-reaching new rules intended to make the global banking industry safer and protect international economies from future financial disasters.
The new requirements will more than triple the amount of capital that banks must hold in reserve, an effort to move banks toward more conservative positions and force them to maintain a larger cushion against potential losses. They come two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a worldwide banking crisis that required billions in government bailouts.
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The proposed deal freezes employees’ pay, slashes hundreds of production jobs and assigns large volumes of work to part-time workers. But it also saves at hundreds of other jobs, at least in the short-term.
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Regulators meeting in Basel, Switzerland, on Sunday agreed to take new steps to immunize the financial system from the sort of crisis that pushed the world into recession two years ago.
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Banks will have to significantly increase their capital reserves under rules endorsed Sunday by the world’s major central banks, which are trying to prevent another financial collapse without impeding the fragile economic recovery.
The new banking rules are designed to strengthen bank finances and rein in excessive risk-taking, but some banks have protested that they may dampen the recovery by forcing them to reduce the lending that fuels economic growth.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Turns out politics, for all its focus on the gloomy economy, is a recession-proof industry.
This year’s volatile election is bursting with money, setting fundraising and spending records in a high-stakes struggle for control of Congress amid looser but still fuzzy campaign finance rules.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Brooks was summoned to give evidence for the committee’s report, Press Standards, Privacy and Libel. Most of the hearings were held in early 2009. But a second round of hearings were held in the summer after fresh allegations about phone hacking were published by the Guardian in July 2009.
The committee was highly critical of News International, which said that the News of the World’s former royal editor Clive Goodman, jailed for his role in phone hacking, was a rogue reporter. The committee accused Rupert Murdoch’s company of “collective amnesia”.
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Zimbabwe’s government has banned South African group Freshlyground over a music video that portrays President Mugabe as a chicken afraid to relinquish power.
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Swaziland has threatened pro-democracy activists with torture as tensions in sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy continue to grow.
The warning that sipakatane – beating people’s feet with spikes – could be used against protesters was condemned by trade unions in the country after a week in which 50 protesters were arrested and several foreigners treated roughly and deported.
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Eric Idle of Monty Python discusses the popularity of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” one of the songs a Roman Catholic leader in Australia does not want to hear during funerals.
On Thursday in Australia, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne announced a ban on the playing of pop music at funerals, which, he said, are not to be described as “a celebration of the life of” the deceased.
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In a triumph of legal formalism over reality, the Court held that the copyright’s first sale doctrine – the law that allows you to resell books and that protects libraries and archives from claims of copyright infringement – doesn’t apply to software (and possibly DVDs, CDs and other “licensed” content) as long as the vendor saddles the transfer with enough restrictions to transform what the buyer may think is sale into a mere license.
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A high school in the town of Trophy Club, TX suspended a 16-year-old boy because he came to school with bloodshot eyes. School administrators say that’s enough to make the case he was using marijuana.
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Documents reveal federal researchers, whose work is financed by taxpayers, need approval from Ottawa before speaking with media
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Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff has been monitoring worker communications to identify key employees.
Chatter is a Salesforce social networking tool designed to plug into the companies’ customer relationship management software. Chatter lets staff post status updates in a similar manner to Twitter, and review feeds, like Facebook.
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It’s really quite stunning how frequently people sue review sites because they’re unhappy about reviews of their business. You would hope that the lawyers these upset business owners use would know better — but all too often the lawyers appear to be totally unfamiliar with Section 230 of the CDA and with the basic concept of properly applying liability to the party who actually did the action. And every time this happens, the case gets thrown out on 230 grounds. It’s happened yet again, with a dentist having a case against Yelp dismissed thanks to Section 230.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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So to get back to spectrum policy, the ideal regime would be one in which there was no spectrum rules at all and devices self-organized to avoid interfering with one another. Given that that’s not within the realm of technical possibility, the questions we should ask are: which set of regulations maximizes the freedom of individuals to use the spectrum as they choose? And which set of regulations will lead to the most efficient utilization of spectrum? Jerry’s preferred scheme of exclusive licenses for the entire spectrum doesn’t fit the bill because it puts a thumb on the scale in favor of large, capital-intensive firms that can win multi-billion dollar auctions. (Yes, some firm or charity might win an auction and choose to create a WiFi-style band, but such applications would be very much second-class citizens.) Similarly, a “pure” commons regime doesn’t fit the bill because it only leaves room for small-scale, short-range applications like WiFi. What’s needed is a policy that accommodates both uses.
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British Telecomm and Cisco are quietly putting their own answer to Network Neutrality in place: Set up an entirely separate national wide network, Content Connect This will be used to deliver the BBC’s forthcoming Internet video and Video on Demand (VoD) service Project Canvas to users.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Vodaphone, the provider of mobile and broadband services has allegedly prohibited the use of p2p protocols on its networks albeit verbally. Whilst a p2p blow to the phone service would be bad enough, the fact that they have taken the step to hit the desktop services aswel would be for many, a step too far.
Looking past the customers that would be driven to other providers who have not taken this stance, I would like to address a point raised by The Mad Hatter and where previously my own lack of foresight negated to consider a potential problem when p2p was linked with “piracy”.
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Nikolas Sarkozy has become the latest high profile victim of a Google bomb, after bloggers linked his Facebook page to the phrase “trou du cul”.
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An Indian firm claims it was hired to carry out denial of service attacks against film download and torrent tracker websites at the behest of Bollywood movie distributors in India.
Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software, said it was paid to search for sites offering download of newly released films, before issuing copyright takedown notices.
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Putting digital diversions in more people’s hands and letting them pay what they want, when they want, has the potential to massively expand gaming’s reach and profitability. By taking the same approach Google has to online advertising, clever game makers could turn rampant copying of games not only into the sincerest form of flattery but into a workable future.
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In a development that could have fallout in the world of digital music, Eminem stands to gain tens of millions of dollars in a federal court decision handed down Friday.
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A copy of the famous xkcd comic “Duty Calls” hangs just outside my office door, signed by creator Randall Munroe. I didn’t have to pay for the comic; it was free to view anytime, and I could have printed the (smaller) Web version if I desperately needed it on my wall. But xkcd is funny, Randall comes across as a good guy whose work I’d like to support, the print came signed on thick paper stock and printed at a higher resolution, and it was about $15. The real question isn’t why I paid; it’s why wouldn’t I pay?
Munroe’s approach to “protecting” his content might be best defined as “lenient.”
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Some very interesting copyright events being reported this weekend. The most concerning is from the New York Times, who report that Microsoft lawyers are co-operating with Russian police to suppress environmental and civil society campaign groups, by taking the groups to court for violations of Microsoft copyright.
The strategy seems to be to pick government enemies exclusively, and raid their premises to find copyright violations; ie, copied, unlicensed software. Since illicit copying of software is rampant in Russia, the chances of success are high, and the penalties are conveniently very severe.
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More cars, more highways, stricter copyright, censorship – absolutely primitive ideas!
In a fragile democracy like the mexican one, with few formal ways of influencing policy, we have to be alert and protest every time copyright is used to censor the voice of citizens or control public space.
Even though YouTube shows in this broken link that the department of communication of the state of Jalisco as the ones that asking for the removal of the video, the government has issue official statements through Twitter, denying their involvement in the removal of “Via Express en el mundo”.
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Last week the music industry was shaken by court decision on a lawsuit. Universal Music, one of the big four record companies. has been ordered to distribute more of the money collected in royalties to the rap star Eminem.
[...]
Universal is unwilling to give creator Eminem 50% of the profits.
This record company is going to go back to court and fight this.
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This is a win-win situation for the educational sector and creators of educational works. The savings happen not by not paying creators, but by getting rid of unnecessary overhead that exists in the educational publishing sector. It also gets rid of the necessity for per-student licensing from organisations like Access Copyright, with the educational sector then calling upon collectives as a “one stop shopping” for the remaining (primarily fiction) materials that students still require that use royalty-based licensing models.
Will the Canadian educational sector make the right decision, or will they continue to be behind the times in their adoption of Open Access? Lets not take these articles as a justification for feeling sorry for the educational sector’s self-inflicted wounds, but as a reminder that they have some forward-facing choices to make.
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Creative Commons licensing is a marvelous tool that allows creators to get around the detrimental and restrictive aspects of copyright law. Creators can release their work in the way that they want to.
The reason I love Raffaella Traniello’s film so much is because it does such a good job getting the message across. Every song I’ve heard, every movie I’ve watched, every picture I’ve seen, every bit of art I’ve ever been exposed to, everything that has danced across my senses has been absorbed and makes me who I am. The creativity of others has become part of my life experience, and as it’s distilled through my unconscious and forms the basis of my own creativity. No art comes out of a vacuum; it collaborates with a culture. Art needs to share and be shared, which is why I believe that the current copyright law has already gone too far.
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We’ve covered how Vandals’ bass player, Joe Escalante, a former entertainment industry lawyer, is currently in the middle of a legal fight with Reed Elsevier over a parody logo the band briefly used — but has since stopped using. His discussions of the lawsuit have been interesting and informative, so I’m a bit shocked to see the following article, submitted by a bunch of folks where Escalante goes a bit off his rocker in attacking the public domain as “communism.” Honestly, I had to read it a few times, and am still sort of wondering if this is pure satire. If it is, bravo. If it’s not, Escalante may have taken cluelessness about the public domain to previously unheard of levels.
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The project, Musopen, aims to deal with a problem caused by the way copyright laws work. Although the actual symphonies written by composers in, for example, the 19th century are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra. That means that in most cases, the only recordings currently in the public domain are very old performances generally recorded with poor quality equipment and plagued with hiss and crackle.
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The most basic element included in all of the six standard Creative Commons licenses is “Attribution“.
In other words, when using the the digital works of others, the license requirement is to give the artist credit for the work we are using. As far as I know, the only CC license that doesn’t require this is the public domain license.
Even so, I prefer to credit the artist if I know who it is. For pre-digital creative work, a lot of effort can go into trying to find out who the artist was. There’s speculation that Shakespeare didn’t really write the plays he is attributed with having written.
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ACTA
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Ironically, this DRM push comes just as the US courts and regulators have begun to erode the US’s own extreme rules on the subject. Or perhaps this isn’t so surprising: in the past, the US copyright lobby has torpedoed the courts and Congress by getting USA to commit to international agreements that went far beyond the rules that they could push through on their own at home.
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The representatives of Act Up-Paris, April and La Quadrature du Net met on September 10th with one of the French officials in charge of the ACTA negotiations. Strong concerns remain regarding the way this anti-Counterfeiting agreement is bypassing democratic processes. Whether it is access to medicines in poor countries, free communication on the Internet or the protection of Free software, the recent modifications to the text don’t change anything to the dangerous nature of ACTA. Ironically, the hopes to see this illegitimate agreement rejected now depend on the ability of the European Union to defend its camembert, its parmesan and its champagne…
Qt for S60 – PLC Realtime data
Credit: TinyOgg
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