Launched in October 2004, Ubuntu is one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions in the world with more than 10 million users. With users in homes, schools, businesses and governments around the world, Ubuntu is a powerful and secure open source operating system for desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers. Ubuntu contains all the applications you need and will always be free of charge. With the values of open source software at its core, Ubuntu costs nothing to download or update.
Freeform Dynamics’s new survey “of 1,275 IT professionals from the UK, USA, and other geographies” has just been published. Two-thirds of respondents said that cutting costs was a prime mover behind their decisions to switch to Linux on the desktop but that user acceptance was a key consideration in the decision to do so.
As of this writing (Tuesday Feb 16th) there don’t seem to be any new suggestions from Microsoft to assist XP users whose systems were rendered un-bootable after installing the February 9th patches. For example, the last entry on The Microsoft Security Response Center blog is four days old.
So let me offer a suggestion: boot to Linux and move some files around.
When Kveton was 31 years old he founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis. After working at various big tech companies for a few years, he had joined the University and cut its hardware budget by 75% the previous year – just by buying open source Linux servers. The school decided to put the budget surplus back into the paradigm that made the difference. Then Google, IBM and other big companies started giving the new Lab money to host open source projects they were working on. Soon Kveton had a staff of 25 students and contacts all over the Open Source world. That was 6 years ago and those contacts have been invaluable throughout the rest of his career.
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After continued success hosting other open source projects (like Drupal) at the Lab, Kveton decided he wanted to try something entrepreneurial.
I am pretty sure that if Microsoft wanted to invest the time and money to create the most secure and stable operating system, they could. They don’t have idiots working for them. I think it is that “if you scratch my back, I will scratch yours mentality.” It also doesn’t help that whenever a call is placed to a support center or when a PC is brought into a repair shop, the solution usually given by the technician is to re-image Windows. If I have a virus, why can’t you just remove the virus and I will be on my way?
I, as many of my readers, on the other hand know better and choose to rely on something a lot more stable and secure with (insert flavor of Linux or UNIX here). Why be bothered with constantly having to maintain or repair your OS. Sometimes you just need things to work. Maybe that is why you read stories about how repair shops such as Best Buy’s will refuse the repair of a computing device if you are not running a version of Windows. They probably don’t see any money it.
(Kassel, Germany: February 11, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate, LPI Central Europe (http://www.lpice.eu) will host a full program of activities at CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany. Open Source will be a top theme at this years edition of one of the world’s leading trade fairs for the ICT industry (http://www.cebit.de/opensource_e).
Similarly, GO-Global for UNIX Personal Edition publishes UNIX or Linux applications onto the Internet or network for remote access from any PC, Mac, or Web browser.
The new JoikuSpot Linux Edition contains enriched features such as Speed Measurement to allow users to accurately see their mobile internet connection speed. Users see exactly the mobile data speed they get with their mobile broadband subscription.
It appears that Comcast has no idea how to handle someone with an IQ over 30. This individual just wants setup fancast to watch hbo programming on his computer. Clearly Comcastic doesn’t know how to handle such a complicated question and the madness begins.
The below is a cut and paste of the IM discussion with Comcast this individual has.
Call it a rare triple play in the open source server market. Lenovo, Red Hat and Tech Data are partnering to give resellers discounts on select Lenovo ThinkServers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced. Here are the details — and the implications for open source solutions providers.
The new TPC-H benchmark result of 102,375 queries per hour (QphH) was recorded using Sybase IQ 15.1 with the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 server and running the Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux 5.3 platform, achieving a price/performance of $3.63 per transaction(1). The benchmark represents the best result among Linux and x86 vendors in the non-clustered marketplace at this scale factor(2) and is further proof of Sybase IQ’s ability to deliver maximum performance by utilizing available assets while reducing the cost of ownership for mid-tier organizations.
Enhancements to the ALSA code for HD audio codecs, a V4L/DVB driver for the Mantis TV chip, drivers for MSI laptops and drivers for newer AMD CPUs are just some of the improvements to Linux hardware support. Android drivers have now been escorted from the staging area, while Ramzswap (formerly Compcache) framework for compressing RAM has been added.
X Server 1.7.5 doesn’t have much to offer beyond the 1.7.5 release candidates from weeks ago, but mostly smaller changes scattered throughout the X Server code-base.
To benchmark the Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 for Nouveau we fired up the Phoronix Test Suite and ran the OpenArena, World of Padman, Urban Terror, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Warsow test profiles. We tested each of these OpenGL games at five different resolutions: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1680 x 1050, and 1920 x 1080.
In other words, there really isn’t much to get excited about if you are a Linux user when reading today’s press release. There are, however, other significant changes — for better or worse — coming to the Catalyst Linux driver this month or next. When we are allowed to share, you can be sure that we will. Maybe X Server 1.7 support will finally come too.
How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage.
Getting to know KDE shows me nifty things about Dolphin as a file manager. I mean, I’ve read about the features but it’s not the same as really getting around to using it on a more regular basis.
How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage.
Linux users have the unique privilege and challenge of picking the distribution that fits them best. Most start out their Linux-experience with a major distribution like Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE, and for some, that’s as far as they go. Others, curious or eager to try the variety of Linus Torvald-”flavors” available, start trying to find out what differences exist between “smaller” distributions like Elive or Crunchbang and the bigger ones.
Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the KDE 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity.
Those who expect everything to behave exactly as it did in the KDE 3 series may still struggle with 4.4. But, for those willing to accept change, 4.4 has no shortage of new features to offer, ranging from the implementation of several long-term directions to enhanced usability on the desktop — including Plasma Netbook, a new interface designed specifically for netbook computers.
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But, by far the greatest desktop innovation in KDE 4.4 is one that is also the simplest — the ability to group windows by tabs. This feature is implemented by a single item added to each window’s menu. Yet the implications for easing users’ workflow is immense.
With the rise of KDE 4.4 comes a new crop of desktop widgets (or Plasmoids). Earlier renditions of KDE 4.x saw the Plasmoids less than useful. The latest workings, however, have become quite useful, productive even.
In this article I will introduce you to five of those Plasmoids that can help your productivity in one way or another. I will also show you how the Plasmoids are now installed.
Some Linux distributions are light-weight (they’ll run just fine on your old laptop), some are targeted at people who just want to try out Linux without replacing their main OS while other desktop distros (say Ubuntu) include a more comprehensive collection of software applications and also support a wide variety of hardware devices.
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Arch Linux is a recommended distro for power (experienced) users as it allows them to create a customized Linux installation built from the ground up. It does not have a graphical install interface.
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Slackware is another distro that deserves mention in this context. As compared to Arch Linux, Slackware Linux provides more stable packages and is thus more conservative. However, Arch Linux provides a more usable package management system that takes care of dependencies.
The Russian developer Alexander Tratsevskiy proudly announced last week, on the Linux Questions forum, the availability of Calculate Linux 10.2, which includes all its derivatives: Calculate Linux Desktop, Calculate Linux Server, Calculate Linux Scratch and Calculate Linux XFCE.
Based on OpenSolaris snv128a.
JWM as WM, system monitor – conky, keyboard layout switcher – SCIM.
Now with fastest browser Midori – Twitter, Facebook and other sites is working well.
Fast start: boot LiveCD (LiveUSB), configure network (Menu ->Setup->Net Setup),
run zfsinstall (~pfexec zfsinstall), reboot and enjoy.
In partnership with Red Hat and Oracle; and in their endeavor to lead the market towards a more proficient, secure and better performing infrastructural solutions; Savvytek was chosen by Middle East Payment Services (MEPS) to implement their new core application – RS2 – based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle technologies. This technology migration project comes to support MEPS direction in building a Highly Available, Cost-Effective–Ready Data center that hosts and supports their mission-critical, dynamic operation.
Did you know that you can use Fedora trademarks to create skins, application themes, Firefox personas, and other such application sprucer-uppers, pursuant to our trademark guidelines? You can find this change, along with complete usage guidelines, through our trademark guidelines page on the Fedora wiki.
MEPIS has announced SimplyMEPIS 8.4.97, the fifth beta of MEPIS 8.5, now available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.97-b5_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.97-b5_64.iso respectively. Deltas, requested by the MEPIS community, are also available.
We are pleased to announce the launch of the brand new Ubuntu single sign on service. The goal of this service is to provide a single, central login service for all Ubuntu-related sites, thus making it more convenient for Ubuntu users and community members to access information, communicate, and contribute. This service will replace the existing Launchpad login service that is currently in use for many Ubuntu-related sites, although existing Launchpad accounts will continue to work in the new service.
Autonomic Resources, an IT and service integration firm serving the U.S. federal government, announced today that the General Services Administration (GSA) has approved the company to offer Canonical’s Ubuntu and Landscape to government customers.
For a long time, the Ubuntu family has had three members–Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu (sorry Edubuntu; we’re not counting you). But that may change, with a new project, Lubuntu, vying for official endorsement by Canonical. Here’s a look at Lubuntu, and thoughts on what its future may hold.
The Lubuntu project, which was established a year ago as a community endeavor, aims to create a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Towards this end, it uses the LXDE desktop environment in combination with the Openbox window manager to keep the demand on system resources low.
As a derivative of Ubuntu this ‘Live CD’ runs directly from the CD and doesn’t need installing on your hard-drive. Once booted you can use the included tools to perform penetration tests and ethically hack on your own network to ensure that it is secure from outside intruders. As well as the standard Linux networking tools the Live Hacking CD has tools for DNS enumeration and reconnaissance as well as utilities for foot-printing, password cracking and network sniffing. It also has programs for spoofing and a set of wireless networking utilities.
I came across this interesting article today and it brings up some very good arguments regarding the usability of Mint over Ubuntu for new Linux users.
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In my mind, Mint is not really a Linux derivative but more of a highly customized Ubuntu install. Most of the modifications in Mint I find I make in Ubuntu. Mint cannot survive without Ubuntu.
Wipro Technologies on Tuesday announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has tied up with Texas Instruments (TI) to offer services on TI’s OMAP processors. The services, which include Linux baseport, Android operating system porting on hardware platforms, middleware, third-party component integration, application development, and operator customisation, aim to address the commercialisation requirements for OEMs designing on Android, ensuring fast time to market.
RoweBots Research, Inc., a supplier of tiny embedded POSIX RTOS products, today announced the launch and release of Unison™ Version 5 and the open-source version of Unison Version 4. These two ultra-tiny embedded-Linux™ and POSIX compatible RTOSs open Renesas Technology Corp.’s SH-2A microcontroller (MCU) family to Linux and POSIX compatible development for the first time.
One of the greatest things about a more open platform for smartphones I believe, is the ability to (if you choose) customize it until you’re hearts content. From personal experience, I swap ROM’s every couple of days on my DROID trying out the updates and newcomers to the custom DROID ROM scene alike. But porting various ROM’s developed for your phone, or at the very least, the phone’s operating system, are rather easy all things considered. Especially so when comparing a simple ROM port from one Android device to the next against porting a full blown desktop OS to a Sony Xperia X1. Oh yeah, it’s real.
The joint SoC platform is based on the Cortex A9 processor and ARM’s physical IP, but taps GloFo’s experience with 28nm High-K Metal Gate process to create a proven reference design for manufacturers of smartphones, smartbooks, tablets and a host of other mobile devices.
Synology America announced a two-bay member of its DiskStation network-attached storage (NAS) family that can expand via an optional seven-bay expansion enclosure from 4TB to up to 14TB. Aimed at small-to-medium businesses, the DiskStation DS710+ runs Linux on an Intel Atom D410, and supplies gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity.
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Like the DS210j, the DS1010+, and other Synology NAS devices, the DS710+ runs version 2.2 of Synology’s Linux-based, DNLA-compliant Disk Station Manager software, which is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Mac workstations. DSM 2.2 enables automated backup features, remote file sharing, iSCSI target support, and multimedia streaming, says the company.
Sony Ericsson announced two compact, scaled-down members of its Xperia X10 Android smartphone line. The Xperia X10 Mini and the QWERTY-keyboard equipped X10 Mini Pro both offer Qualcomm processors clocked to 600MHz with 2.5-inch QVGA touchscreens, five-megapixel cameras, HSPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, aGPS, and Android 1.6, says the company.
Acer announced three new Android smartphones, as well as an Android 2.1 version of its Liquid phone. Acer’s BeTouch e400 and BeTouch E110 fall into the mid- and low-end range, while the Acer “Liquid e” and Formula One styled Acer Ferrari smartphone both appear to target the upper ranges of Android phones.
In its Cliq XT incarnation, the Quench appears to be intended as the next-generation version of Motorola’s first Android phone, the T-Mobile-sold Cliq. However, the company did not list which global carrier(s) would pick up the Quench version.
Lumigon Corp. announced three Android 2.1 phones — the T1, S1, and E1 — touted as the first smartphones to use Freescale’s 1GHz i.MX51 system-on-chip. Meanwhile, the company also reported contributing to Ulysse Nardin’s Chairman, an Android handset that will start at over $13,000, and Freescale announced an Android evaluation kit for the i.MX51.
High Tech Computer (HTC), the world’s biggest maker of Windows Mobile and Google Android OS smartphones, is working on technologies for applications used in handsets and application stores and plans to put this software to use but not until a later time.
For Google this is also good because with open source multiple people can start contributing to apps such that they can improve faster. Furthermore people can start new projects by simply reusing open source code of other Open Source Android applications. All in all it will spur innovation and improve quality of applications and in the end that’s good for Google because the platform will become more popular.
Furthermore it fits in the Google policy that they stimulate Open Source.
2. Google’s Android platform gained critical mass 18 months from launch, heralding the rise of the open source OS. Juniper said. Android had been as much about as enabling search and services across different devices as capturing OS market share. This had prompted Nokia to open-source its Symbian environment and was being followed by Nokia and Intel, which combined efforts to launch the Linux-based MeeGo platform .
Google, which became an important player in the mobile industry with the launch of Linux-based open platform Android in 2008 and last month’s release of the first Google phone, the Nexus One, denied that it is competing against mobile carriers.
Innovative architecture entrenched in the open-source world, elegant and sober design, yet stylish, security and mobility with the G-Key, a personal and bootable USB key, Gdium is an ultraportable computer that is one of the cornerstones of a wider environment dedicated to knowledge, communication and learning.
Since the desktop line of Windows currently doesn’t run on ARM processors, we can exclude XP/Vista/7 from the list of likely contenders as smartbook operating systems. Windows 7 successors are currently not planned to be ported to ARM and even that wouldn’t be a complete solution since Windows applications will have to be ported as well (a very wide, close-sourced ecosystem).
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Linux on the other hand has a very good technical background on ARM. It has no limitations for processing cores and operating memory and has targeted distributions for this architecture. Android is an outstanding example but several well-known distributions – like Ubuntu – have ARM ports in addition to their x86 base edition. Also, due to the fact that most of the Linux applications are open-source, they are at least possible to port, so we can expect the full usual complement of desktop Linux applications to show up on an ARM Linux distribution when the need becomes visible for them.
My personal favorites are Windows 7 Home Premium and Jolicloud, thanks to the ease use. My HP Mini is currently running Windows 7 Home Premium and runs Jolicloud off of a thumbdrive when I want a different experience. I am also testing out a Sony Vaio W which comes standard with Windows 7 Starter and despite the limitations of Starter I am getting by alright so far; though I couldn’t use it every day thanks to the lack of multi-monitor support.
In the end Jolicloud manages to keep a good mixture of native and web applications, and abstracts the differences between them so you can just focus on doing your work. This is one OS to look for when it releases.
No one has a clue how much an OpenTablet will cost, or when it will go on sale. Considering that we’re having a hard enough time figuring out who’s going to buy a $500 JooJoo, the folks at OpenPeak better aim low if they want to make Apple sweat. Some impressive battery life estimates wouldn’t hurt their cause, either.
There are many open platforms for software in the tech world from operating systems to development environments for various software. We rarely see open hardware or mobile devices though. Aava Mobile has unveiled what it calls the world’s first fully open mobile device at MWC.
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The reference design is aimed at Moblin 2.1 and Android for the OS options with plans for support of MeeGo in the future. Features include an extended touch screen, full HD video capability, micro USB port, HD video conferencing, dual mics, 3D sound and UI, GSM capable, and it has GPS, WiFi, compass, and an accelerometer.
Intel, Nokia and the MeeGo community are thinking much bigger than tablets, phones or netbooks. While MeeGo greets competition with the iPad head on, it will also compete in a variety of device categories not yet fully defined thanks to its approach to open source development and cross-device portability provided by Qt. The “killer app” is not a single device locked down with crippling DRM. The “killer app” is your content and the ability to access the Internet from anywhere: a phone, a car, a kitchen or television regardless of the device or who makes it.
It seems clear that Jobs miss-stepped by not thinking big enough because – despite his brilliance – Apple products are being confined to the limits of his team’s imaginations, while the future is about accessing content from anywhere.
Next: Enter the latest addition to the touchscreen devices set to da-beau in 2010: MeeGo. In a joint effort between the Intel and Nokia companies. MeeGo, a Linux based operating system, is going to be targeted at both ARM and x86 based devices (despite the former of the two not being made by Intel). While MeeGo is still in the very preliminary stages of development, other Linux-based touchscreen-orientated operating systems, such as Android and Maemo, have shown us that the Linux platform is more than capable of functioning on such devices in an elegant manner. With backing from such large companies MeeGo is going to be hard-pressed to not get at least some publicity.
The standard machine vision software HALCON Embedded runs on the mobile phone Nokia N900 (Linux-based operating system Maemo). Test runs by the manufacturer of HALCON, MVTec Software GmbH (Munich, Germany), have shown an outstanding performance.
Sure, the folks at Moblin recently announced that they were merging with the Maemo project to develop a new OS called MeeGo. But that hasn’t stopped PC makers from installing the latest version of the Moblin netbook operating system on their latest models and showing them off at trade shows like Mobile World Congress and CES.
Open source was Best Supporting Actor in the 2010 Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Awards. It plays an important part — in some cases, a star turn — for four of The Dozen top-category winners and for eleven of the thirty-six Ones to Watch. Noting that the awards reflect both current impact and our expectations — all forty-eight awardees, really, are “ones to watch” — clearly, in our estimation, open source has reached a new level of enterprise importance and promise.
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There’s really nothing new in my points, just a reaffirmation and extension of common knowledge regarding the value open source. Intelligent Enterprise clearly sees open source as delivering ever increasing value for enterprise information management and applications. 2011 should be no exception.
First, let’s talk about breadth of opportunity. Mark seems to assume that every student developer has the opportunity to engage in commercial development. This is demonstrably untrue. It may be true that an elite school like Georgia Tech provides these kinds of opportunities to most of their conputing students — but what about everywhere else? For that matter, what about the kids at Georgia Tech who, for whatever reason, don’t make the cut? Unless you can guarantee 100% co-op or internship placement for every computing student on Earth (and let’s be honest, we’ll never get even close to that number), there will always be aspirant student developers who have no chance at all to see a commercial codebase, or to engage in Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
More and more, open source software is used/bought, not because it is open source/free (speech/beer) but because it is a good software (intrinsic value). The fact that this software/solution is open source is not the determining factor that make customers buy it. On a head to head competition with closed source alternative, a bunch of open source players emerges (Firefox, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, etc.) and are in a position to become market-leaders.
Technology solutions provider for the igaming industry Cubeia, has announced the release of Firebase Community Edition, a scalable, enterprise server for multiplayer games.
It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers.
If you’re browsing the web looking for sites about open source healthcare, here are five I found interesting. There are a ton of sites out there, and I tried to stay away from those that talked strictly about software–instead focusing on those that tackled the issues in open source ways beyond technology.
Of course, though the fuel behind the fire, experts are also warning that there are obvious pitfalls to developers, in particular the possibility of decreasing standard as open source coding continues to become available across platforms.
Symbian’s recent mobile operating system dubbed S^3, will go down in history as the companies first entirely open source release to engage more people in creating an application environment free of restrictions.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Research In Motion announced an overhaul of its Blackberry phone web browser. Like the iPhone and Android systems, the new browser is WebKit based and is expected to be available on Blackberry devices later this year. in interviews Mike Lazardis, co-CEO of RIM said “You’ll see how quickly it downloads, how quickly it renders and how smooth it scrolls and zooms in”.
The Linux version of Google’s Chrome browser has received a tuneup. Updates fix a handful of bugs; they also bring in better support for custom fonts and improvements in GTK theme mode. The Linux and Mac versions of Chrome still trail the Windows version in terms of development, though it’s interesting that some Chrome features are appearing in Linux before they show up in Mac.
This is a must-read for Firefox fans! We’ll review 10 cool add-ons that will make your cross-platform Mozilla web browser even better. We’ll review add-ons to help fix annoyances, save time, discover advanced functionality, and stay connected.
Finally, they are becoming the industry standard and their interfaces are or will be incorporated into a variety of third party providers. One example is Linux distro vendor Ubuntu. They have an Enterprise Cloud offering that makes use of the same AWS programming interfaces, making it easier for developers to port their cloud applications to a private server running Ubuntu inside your corporate data center. Another is coming from Racemi, which plans on having tools that can import VMware virtual machines into and out of AWS later this year.
At the Cloud Law Summit in London on Wednesday last week, Andrew Charlesworth, director of the University of Bristol centre for IT and law, said the reasons some businesses choose open-source software — lower cost and lack of vendor lock-in — could be eroded by cloud services.
As part of its effort to find the best employees it can, Twitter has launched a directory to the open source projects it supports, with cute little icons representing the employees working on each one.
In recent months, there seems to be a mad rush of companies trying to one-up each other with how open-source they are. Twitter is the latest, as they have launched a directory of all the open source projects they’re currently working on and/or contributing to.The list is fairly impressive. It includes open source projects in Ruby, Scala, Java, C/C++, and other various tools.
When I saw Shlomi’s post on why not to use apt-get or yum for MySQL, I thought immediately that his conclusions are quite reasonable. What you get from the Linux distributions is not the same thing that you find in the official MySQL downloads page. Now, whether you value more the completeness of the server or the ease of administration through the distribution installation tools, it’s up to you and your business goals. We at the MySQL team have organized a meeting with the Linux distributions with the intent of finding out which differences and problems we may have with each other, and to solve them by improving communication. What follows is a summary of what happened in Brussels during the meeting.
The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle’s main message to Sun’s customers seems to be “Don’t worry, be happy.” That’s not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice and OpenSolaris.
Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced that 2009 was a record year for the company. For the tenth consecutive quarter, Talend achieved record performance, reflecting the company’s ability to deliver cost-optimized, high-performance data management solutions to global companies of all sizes.
The world of open source software—cited by Thomas Friedman as the most disruptive of the 10 forces making the world flat today—turns this notion of property on its head. The ownership society seems to be doing nothing to help—it’s sucking value out of our system by the trillions, and it acts as though its ownership is an entitlement rather than a responsibility for action.
For an open source company, nurturing a community around the software is as important as picking the right licence. Although developer communities tend to be more self-starting with a reasonably open development process, user communities, which are a source of valuable feedback, need more encouragement. The H went to the first meeting of the UK BIRT User Group (BUG) to see how one company was helping to create a user community.
The business suite application vendor OpenERP announces today that it raised 3 million euros. The investors are Sofinnova Partners, represented by Olivier Sichel, and the Iliad’s managers, Xavier Niel and Olivier Rosenfeld. The funds raised will allow OpenERP to achieve its ambition to be one of the leading application business suite vendors worldwide.
For most of us, thinking of the University of California Berkley doesn’t bring about images of nerdy software engineers, but instead makes us think more of LSD, hippies, the children’s revolt, and Vietnam… Despite all of that, they are a prominent uni, and they did create Berkley Unix. While BSDs are usually source compatible with AIX, HPUX, and Linux there are also two API layers available, Linux and WINE. Currently, there are four main flavors: OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin. OpenBSD is focused on security, FreeBSD is focused on being general purpose, and NetBSD is focused on running everywhere (really… everywhere like toasters, palmtop computers, servers, mainframes… you name it, NetBSD runs on it). The Berkley Software Distribution has long been considered one of the most stable, secure, and efficient platforms available.
The Unison Operating System offers an ultra tiny embedded POSIX environment for 32 bit microcontroller (MCU) based development that is also Linux compatible.
The BSD licensed operating system is designed to be small, highly portable and work in networked, but memory constrained systems, such as sensor network nodes.
Following nearly two years of development, the Gnumeric developers have announced the release of version 1.10.0 of their GNOME Office spreadsheet application. The first stable release in the 1.10.x series includes several changes, updates and improvements.
I read an interesting post last week by Morton Hansen (author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results) entitled Obama’s Five Collaboration Mistakes. In the comments below the post, some folks interpreted his words as an attack on the Obama administration. Me? I’d probably interpret Hansen’s words more broadly. Perhaps something like:
Politicians are pretty darned bad at collaborating a lot of the time.
india’s draft policy on the software platform for e-governance has made a concession for proprietary software businesses like Microsoft. Proponents of open-source software called it a major departure from the Union government’s earlier stand, saying allowing proprietary software in the standards will limit people who can e-access the government. At the heart of this controversy is a change in the ‘Recommended Policy on Open Standards for e-governance’.
Copyrights used to expire after a few years; now some corporations want them to last forever to protect their revenue streams on copyrighted works. Stallman continues to influence this conversation with an eye toward protecting computer users’ freedom and making software more conducive to a genuine education.
“The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments for copyright violations and to increase their copyright powers while suppressing public access to technology,” says Stallman. “If we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright– to promote progress for the benefit of the public — then we must make changes in the other direction.”
The New Jersey Linux User’s group will present a film titled “Revolution OS” at the Darress Theatre in Boonton on Wednesday, March 31. This is a documentary detailing the roots of the Free Software and Open Source movements that resulted in Linux, as well as many other free software projects.
Google is giving the Wikimedia Foundation a $2m donation, meaning the online fact dump can continue to serve up instant research to hard-pressed college students and broadcast researchers.
Pros:
- Has the latest commits right up front, providing a good overview of what’s been happening and what’s available.
- The wiki-type front pages are a bit easier to navigate. The whole site feels less cluttered than GitHub.
- Much easier to see up front who’s part of a project and who’s cloned it.
Cons:
- Gitorious takes longer when searching for stuff; it’s also a little slower just to click through trees and links, like the Neuvoo project.
- Business model? What business model? How are they gonna stay open on down the road?
- Doesn’t seem to offer private repos, should I need one in the future.
So, a few days back, I started with an idea of a periodic summary of what is going on around the Vala programming language, mainly for those subscribed to the mailing list who are not that much interested in bugzilla.
The French military deliberately exposed enlisted men to nuclear radiation in the Sahara Desert in 1961 in order to study resulting physical and psychological effects, according to a classified 1998 report published Tuesday by a French daily, Le Parisien.
Last month I announced a contest to redesign the TSA logo. Here are the finalists. Clicking on them will bring up a larger, and easier to read, version.
Crime and policing minister David Hanson put forward five case studies to a select committee, but due to an “administrative error” one was a copy of one of the other cases with the name altered.
The Metropolitan Police and Hackney Council have apologised after 83 people were searched in a churchyard while a funeral was being held.
They were taken to a marquee put up in St John’s Churchyard, in Hackney, after being arrested elsewhere as part of an operation targeting youth knife crime.
I learned in my time at the Bar that it is precisely when the odds are stacked against a defendant that he most needs the benefit of a fair justice system – that it is when the evidence is apparently strongest that the rule of law is most important. Megarry J said in John v Rees [1970] that the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases whcih, somehow, were not; of unnswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of inexplicable conduct which was fully explained… Coughlin is not interested in those notions – of testing evidence by due process, of a fair trial acting as a buffer between the wrath of the people and the individual.
A group of Women’s Institute members have been threatened with £80 fines for handing out flyers for a charity art exhibition.
Grandmother Liz Day, 68, was confronted by a council litter warden who warned her and three other WI members it was illegal to hand out the charity adverts.
The women were told they narrowly escaped an on-the-spot fixed penalty notice because the East Hertfordshire Council warden was in a ‘good mood’.
Rep. Matt Wingard, who has a degree in broadcast journalism, admitted on Monday that he lifted his speech from an editorial entitled “Osama and Obama on global warming,” which sought to link Osama bin Laden’s recent declaration on global warming to the US president’s policies.
President Obama, speaking to an enthusiastic audience of union officials in Lanham, Md., on Tuesday, underscored his embrace of nuclear power as a clean energy source, announcing that the Energy Department had approved financial help for the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia.
It was one of the most expensive fish ever sold. A few weeks ago, a giant bluefin tuna achieved a price of 16.3m yen – about £111,000 – at auction in Tokyo. The rich, buttery taste of the tuna’s flesh made the 513lb fish irresistible for one group of restaurateurs. The bluefin’s fillets ended up on hundreds of sushi platters across Tokyo within hours of the sale.
Greece’s embattled government will come under added pressure tomorrow to enforce even tougher austerity measures to combat the country’s debt at a meeting of EU finance ministers expected to focus solely on the crisis.
Simmons, 64, who has been a director since 2000, will not stand for reelection at the company’s annual shareholder meeting later this spring, according to a statement from the New York-based investment firm.
Goldman wasn’t the only bank named, although it was clearly the villain of the piece. JPMorgan Chase had a supporting role for a round of stealth borrowing it was said to have arranged for Italy (there seems to be an inverse relationship among European nations between fiscal rectitude and olive oil production).
Greece is turning into a battle royal between the global financial elites and the average worker in the industrial West. This started out as a more limited struggle, pitting the finance ministers and central banks of the European Union against the Greek unions, but the fight has unexpectedly broadened with news of the surreptitious involvement of Goldman Sachs in helping Greece avoid borrowing constraints.
The picture painted in the Western financial press makes the unions the villain in this play. The unions are described as greedy, lazy, too quick to strike, and insensitive to the burdens they were imposing on the Greek economy. To cope with union threats and extortion, various Greek governments had no choice but to borrow excessively, and well beyond the European Union target range that allowed domestic budget deficits to be no higher than 3% of GDP. As of last year, Greece’s budget deficit was 12.7% of GDP.
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The answer to that is a corrupt, broken, secretive, and exploitative international financial system – one that grants enormous power and wealth to a handful of private sector firms. This is the reality the citizens of Greece – not just the unions – are now facing. It is a reality that justifiably will create disgust and anger among the people of Greece, who may well reject the shock therapy being offered by the EU finance officials, thereby calling their bluff. If so, it will be the second rebuff of the international financial elites, following the rejection of austerity measures by Iceland to repay its debt.
EU officials are still talking and acting as if they have matters under control, and their pronouncements carry the weight of law. They may be about to find out otherwise, and if so, the global financial system and global markets are in for an economic version of shock and awe.
While the younger generation, very visibly led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, lobbies Congress against such regulation, their spiritual elders support the reform proposed by Paul A. Volcker and, surprisingly, even more restrictions. “I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform,” said Mr. Bogle, the 80-year-old founder and for many years chief executive of the Vanguard Group, the huge mutual fund company.
If you weren’t making things 100 years ago, you’d be dead. Your home, your food, your clothes and even your toys were all made by you or someone you knew. Somewhere along the way, humans seem to have forgotten that we were makers, and instead became consumers.
Now, when some people build, sew and bake they are making a conscious choice to return to our maker roots. This movement is MakerCulture. Today, makers challenge the mainstream and make instead of buy.
With the federal government, massive cost overruns are the rule, not the exception. The $700 billion cost of the war in Iraq dwarfs the $50 billion to $60 billion that Mitch Daniels, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, predicted at the outset. In 1967 long-run forecasts estimated that Medicare would cost about $12 billion by 1990. In reality, it cost more than $98 billion that year. Today it costs $500 billion.
Due to massive construction projects associated with the Olympics, from venues to infrastructure, there is both widespread environmental destruction, as well as huge public debts. As part of security operations, police, military, and intelligence agencies receive millions of dollars for new personnel, equipment, weapons, et cetera—strengthening the creeping police states we see around the world (and south of the border) and further eroding our alleged “freedoms” and civil liberties.
PROTEST ORGANISER: You know, you probably heard these base rumours that they spent $6, $7 billion on the Olympics, the OWElympics, O.W.E lympics. We are the Poverty Olympics – our budget wasn’t quite that – they’re probably looking at $6 billion, we’re $6. Look what we’re doing; what we’re doing on six bucks that’s so great.
LISA MILLAR: A loose coalition of anti-Olympic, anti-global, anti-poverty protesters are threatening to derail the Games.
Today was the first taste of what they say will be weeks of noisy rallies, street marches and attempts to block spectators and competitors.
The lucky hire, who will have to run the White House’s Twitter, Facebook and Myspace accounts, should have, “Excellent writing and editing skills with strong attention to detail; your writing is strong, sharp, and personable,” which makes us wonder what blogs, tweets and Facebook pages he has been looking at as comparisons.
Google and Yahoo! have joined a pressure group which seeks to stop Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s doomed attempt to filter Aussie web traffic.
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It is also concerned that Conroy’s mandatory filer will include content that is educational or social. Trials last year did wrongly blacklist websites promoting a Queensland dentist, a photographer and a travel agent.
Finally, the group warned that sites like YouTube, which is bound to have some pages on the filter blacklist, would effectively overload the filter and create bottlenecks.
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook over changes that the social networking site made to its privacy settings last November and December.
With the Super Bowl just concluded and baseball’s spring training only weeks away, a question occurred to us: whatever happened to the push for copyright holders to tone down their copyright notices?
Google’s recently announced plan to set up trial fiber optic networks in the US with ultra-high speed Internet connections puts the long running national debate over Net Neutrality back into high gear.
A hot topic of discussion and debate in government and telecom circles since at least 2003, Net Neutrality, actually involves a broad array of topics, technologies and players
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m very much against enforcing net neutrality through legislation (too many unintended consequences) but I’m stunned at the ridiculous and totally bogus reasons given by those fighting against those regulations in support of their claims. The latest on this front is Stephen Titch, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (a group whose work I usually think is quite good), coming out with a policy brief making the ludicrous argument that network neutrality would mean no more iPhones.
The whole thing makes no sense at all. Warner Bros. mistakenly thinks that if people can’t rent a particular DVD in the first four weeks of release, they’re more likely to shell out money to actually buy the DVD. This is Warner Bros. pretending that it can influence customer behavior by denying them what they want.
Lower licensing fees and more selective video game companies could be bad news for some music companies. Video games have provided a boost to licensing revenues and overall awareness for many artists. But sales are down sharply. An analyst with Wedbush Securities estimated, that two-thirds of December’s 12% year-over-year decline in video game sales came from the music category.
1) strengthen fair use, including reforming outrageously high statutory damages, which deter innovation and creativity; 2) reform the DMCA to permit circumvention of digital locks for lawful purposes; 3) update the limitations and exceptions to copyright protection to better conform with how digital technologies work; 4) provide recourse for people and companies who are recklessly accused of copyright infringement and who are recklessly sent improper DMCA take-down notices; and 5) streamline arcane music licensing laws to encourage new and better business models for selling music.
In order to step up the pressure on illicit file-sharers and others that violate intellectual property laws, Swedish police and prosecutors are heading up a new specialist team of investigators to deal with infringements. Team members will be designated their own areas but will also be able to operate nationally.
There’s only a few hours left to submit your comments to the US Trade Representative opposing export of draconian copyright restrictions to other countries.
A lot of people have been incorrectly claiming that these comments are about ACTA, but they’re not. The Special 301 report basically just tries to determine which countries the US should put more pressure on to “get with the program,” diplomatically speaking, when it comes to copyright issues. In the past, it’s been used to bully countries like Canada and Israel — both of which have strong copyright that is very much in compliance with international obligations.
Dean Walden is an avid internet user, watcher, promoter, website builder and researcher. The Ubuntu version of the Linux operating system is easy to use if you can use Windows.
Another of the keys of your future success is the fact than many issues are already resolved due to the widespread use of desktop environments KDE and GNOME. There are other options in this segment, of course, but both alternatives have proved to be very valid in this field.
5. Price
Of course, this is a key to the implementation of Linux in an enterprise. Although there are free versions, often corporate usage imposes a charge that is associated with a contract for tech support and such.
Some expect the end of monopoly to be a catastrophic implosion but M$ has so many locked-in so firmly that it will be many years before the decrease in revenue bites. As long as they get paid for doing little, the shareholders will get their dividends and success will be guaranteed. When the money does shrink seriously as it did in the year of GNU/Linux (2009) the monopoly will collapse with a whimper, not a bang. They just have too many customers fooled and too much money to disappear quickly. The world could be a very different place for IT in a couple of years, however. “7″ is not going to give them earth-shaking results and that was their best shot. It will take a couple of years for some to realize M$ no longer has anything to offer except licences to use its same old software. That they tried to increase prices and failed in a down-turned economy is proof that they are not only losing it but that they are nearly irrelevant.
Last year, 2009, was good for GNU/Linux but many businesses had to fight hard to stay even. SJVN reports that a bunch of the regular FLOSS apps were in demand by businesses looking to the future. The thing that may be surprising to some is that Java servery is hot in commercial users of FLOSS.
It’s not often that geeks wax philosophical about the World of Amour, but HeliOS’s Ken Starks was recently brave enough to venture into those treacherous waters — and treacherous they were.
“When Linux nerds choose mates from the Windows herd” is the title of Starks’ post, and he paints a grim picture of the dating scene on the FOSS side of the fence.
“You come to realize that there is more to life than bash scripts and LAN parties with other Linux Geeks,” Starks writes. “So you decide to put yourself back on the dating market. Where do you start?”
It might be a day too late for Valentine’s Day, but it’s never too late to show your love for Free Software. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) asked users to show their love for Free Software on Valentine’s Day — but there’s no reason why that can’t run all year long.
The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo, a merger of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo projects as a single project under the leadership of the Foundation. The news came in a posting by Linux Foundation’s CEO Jim Zemlin who called MeeGo “a next generation mobile operating system designed for the next generation of mobile devices”.
The mobile technology world is buzzing today about the merger of Moblin and Maemo, the two Linux-based mobile initiatives that have been backed by Intel and Nokia respectively. Together, they have formed MeeGo, which is being hosted by the Linux Foundation.
We reached out to industry experts for their reactions to today’s news. The theme that surfaces among industry pundits most is the one of mobile OS unification and the hope for a platform that can support a broad range of devices by using common technologies and developer tools.
If using the latest ATI open-source driver Git code for kernel mode-setting, there may be slightly better X-Video support without any visual slowdowns/problems.
In the continued mission to inspire and encourage opportunistic developers to write cool little apps that scratch an itch, no matter how specific and niche, I have started work on App Of Jaq: a desktop app that scratches my itch to build the Shot Of Jaq experience right into the desktop. The first cut of the app will:
* Provide simple and easy access to listening to the latest shot, using GStreamer to play back the shot.
YouAmp is yet another music player for Linux. But it is different than the other players ,if you are convinced by these outstanding features you can give it a try here. Do not be afraid if nothing happens on first startup as it will index your whole home directory which takes a while.
Last week, the KDE community officially released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, a significant update of the open source desktop environment and its associated application stack. The new version delivers some user interface improvements, enhanced usability, new features, additional software, and a number of important bug fixes.
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KDE has come a very long way since the initial 4.0 release in 2008. It’s a very modern desktop with a lot of rich and impressive features. KDE enthusiasts will find a whole lot to like in 4.4, and users who were put off by the instability and missing functionality of previous releases might want to give it another look.
Pardus is a Linux based operating system, which does not require much knowledge to operate. Its name was taken from the Latin name for the Anatolian leopard. Pardus 2009 is the latest version of Pardus. It features the OpenOffice.org office suite, internet tools like web browser, e-mail, instant messaging, etc.
Also, it supports various multimedia and graphics tools, games, and many other applications. Its package management system is called as PiSi (Packages installed Successfully as intended), which is written in XML and Python, and uses the LZMA Compression Algorithm.
KolibriOS is is an operating system that fits on a single 1.44MB Floppy (many applications are compressed) and runs with 8MB of Ram !!! The surprise is that the system come with a graphical environment complete with text editors, system utilities, games, browser, media players and lots of other stuff.
When Google announced their ChromeOS there was a flurry of comment and opinion on what this could mean for the GNU/Linux user and the future of free software. Our esteemed editor, Tony Mobily made a bold statement (albeit framed as a question) at the time that Google’s ChromeOS could turn GNU/Linux into a “desktop winner”. I’m not sure that it’s true.
Whatever happens of course the fact is that when somebody of Google’s size and impact enters a market, there will be winners and losers, losses and gains. Now that the dust has well and truly settled let’s have another look at the potential impact of ChromeOS.
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of its fourth annual Red Hat Innovation awards to be presented at the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located in Boston, June 22-25, 2010. The Innovation Awards recognize and honor the creative use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by customers, partners and the community.
Fedora Linux 12 was officially released on November 17th, 2009 and it introduced Linux kernel 2.6.31, KDE SC 4.3 and GNOME 2.28, support for Moblin, as well as improved power management and webcam support, audio/video codec support and many more!
The quest to discover something new and fresh about Ubuntu, which is arguably the world’s most popular and best documented Linux distribution, is an almost ridiculous one to accept and an almost impossible one to fulfill. I felt like the Mission Impossible character, Jim Phelps, as I read the request from my editor. I expected to see the words, “This is your mission, Ken, should you choose to accept it. This email will self-destruct in five seconds” at the end of that message.
I felt no less trepidation at the request than I imagine that Mr. Phelps did at the beginning of every one of his assignments. I accepted the assignment, and here is, submitted for your approval, the result of that quest: Five Ubuntu features you didn’t know about.
What’s small and pink, incorporates a Linux kernel and an embedded ARM compatible processor, and let’s you set up your own personal cloud? The answer is the latest Pogoplug device from Cloud Engines Inc. Combine this insanely easy to set up bit of kit with a free iPhone app and you have a secure environment for privately viewing and sharing content anywhere on the Internet – and all without changing your network configuration, firewall settings or fiddling with anything more complicated than plugging a box into your router, a USB drive or four into the box and activating it all through a web browser interface.
Functioning Aava Mobile devices measure 64mm by 125mm and only 11.7 millimeters thin—making them the world’s thinnest x86 based smartphone devices. The reference design provides support for Linux-based Moblin 2.1 and Android OSs today, with plans to support MeeGo in the future. Earlier this week, Intel and Nokia announced MeeGo, a merger of the Linux-based Moblin and Maemo software platforms with a goal to enable an open software environment for rapid development of exciting new user experiences.
Texas Instruments (TI) says it is now sampling its OMAP4 mobile application processors, using dual-core versions of ARM’s high-end Cortex-A9. The chipmaker is also showing off the Linux- and Android-compatible Blaze, a development platform that sports a pico projector, dual 3.7-inch displays, three cameras, an HDMI output, a compass, plus a barometer and a bevy of other sensors.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress(MWC) in Barcelona, while Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7 Series this week, a number of other companies are announcing their new Android-based devices. The open source Android OS devices, which range from mobile phones and notebooks, to tablets and Internet Devices, include updates to popular well known handsets and several new mobiles.
If you thought the Dell Mini 5 (5-inch screen) was big for a phone, you haven’t seen the Huawei SmaKit S7 (7-inch screen)! In all due fairness, the device is considered a MID with 3G voice capabilities, and with Bluetooth you’ll probably be using a headset to talk more often than not. Either way, it looks like another winning announcement from Huawei.
Executives from Sony Ericsson, the struggling European handset maker working hard to make a turnaround in 2010, said most of its new phones introduced this coming year will sport the Google Android operating system.
Google Inc.’s Android open-source operating system will run on Bug Labs Inc. devices, expanding its hardware lineup and developer community beyond mobile phones and netbooks.
THE RUMOUR MILL is saying that Dell’s upcoming Mini 5 tablet will run on a currently unreleased version of Google’s Linux-based Android operating system.
According to Engadget, the tablet device will run on a new version the increasingly popular Android OS that has never been seen in the wild before.
HP has announced a partnership with Telefonica for their brand spankin’ new Airlife 100. The smartbook (half smart phone, half netbook) is will offered with carrier subsidy in Europe and Latin America as part their mobile broadband service. Naturally, this thing has Android under the hood, or we wouldn’t be talking about it.
Conclusions: I liked Moblin quite a bit. It was easy to use and generally intuitive. I didn’t try to customize it very much, but look forward to a long-term test drive on my laptop to see how flexible it is in extended everyday use. The project has a lot of potential to improve Linux’s reputation in terms of usability and polish, and has already attracted corporate sponsors who could put badly-needed marketing muscle behind it.
We are only a few weeks into 2010 and there is word that ARM will be doing the SMP/multi-core thing and still run 12 hours on a charge. Are we there yet? Yes. These devices have all the power normal users need, in a phone handset. Imagine what ARM can put in a desktop or notebook. The reign of x86-64 is nearing an end.
The Commonwealth Bank’s chief information officer will visit Darwin tomorrow for meetings with Aboriginal elders to garner additional support for the One Laptop Per Child programme in advance of the roll out of the next version of the machine and Telstra’s official sponsorship of the programme starting next month.
It breaks my heart and makes me sick to have to address this. But it needs to be addressed. Bitfrost is extremely secure. However, no amount of security can protect kids from themselves. Or teachers and admins from children’s actions in the USA school system.
99.999% of the time, XOs are used for innocuous pursuits. What bothers me in the extreme are the ramifications of that other potential 0.001% or whatever infinitesimal number. Now this is the sort of thing that I do not want to even think about, let alone write about. But it only takes a single incident to ruin lives.
With all the buzz and speculation that surrounded the months leading up to the official unveiling of the Apple iPad, most of us expected to see a rush of similar tablet computers hit the market. One of the newest tablets to be unveiled in the wake of the iPad is the Notion Ink Adam tablet. The Adam tablet has features that sound a lot like a netbook at first glance.
A few days ago, during an email conversation about efficient public services and waste of money in Public Administrations, I had to answer a couple of questions. Since those answers may interest many other people, here they are.
(note for newcomers: the “Free Software” discussed here is software like Ubuntu (a distribution of Linux) or OpenOffice: software that can be legally copied and installed without license costs, supported by politicians of all parties, even in the European Union)
First question: in my opinion, people saying that Free Software saves money overlooks the fact that those who use it on their job, for example a public employee, may need some training to use all its features. If you consider this, Free Software saves money only in the long run, doesn’t it?
Of course, in medium and big organizations, the costs of software licenses are only a small part of the total costs of using and maintaining that same software (even if, only in Italy, the total amount of software licensing costs in local and national PAs is hundreds millions of Euros every year), but let’s look at the whole picture. If you only consider the cost of software licenses, it’s easy: Free Software wins.
Another possibility is that he is simply writing something attacking Redhat based upon some very loose research. His “Who am I” page mentions being very close to Microsoft, even enough to have had actual meetings with Bill Gates.
At the end of the first OggCamp we all loved it so much we decided to do it again. The conversation went something like: “Lets do another one, we will book out a hotel so we are all staying together, somewhere not so far north, maybe Southampton.” some of the details changed since that conversation (it is in Liverpool and not in a hotel) but the important bit remains: we are doing it again and it will be awesome!
That is so sad. The idea that GNU/Linux threatens jobs is nonsense. M$ has the whole world working for them for free. It’s pretty easy to see that FLOSS creates a lot of jobs all over the world, not just in Redmond. There may be fewer fixit jobs in the fallout but hardware still needs to be fixed and there are lots of opportunities to network systems.
The possibility of tailor-made VoIP phones took a step closer today with the announcement of the launch of the Symbian^3 (S^3) platform, a new, entirely open source operating system by the Symbian Foundation.
- Amnesty has adopted the policy of using Open Source solutions whenever possible. In the light of this, they were running a small project of investigating Open Source alternatives for monitoring systems. They came across solutions like Nagios but also heard about op5 as a Nagios value-added implementation.
A UK-based Open Source company today announced a major upgrade of its award winning systems monitoring platform to meet the demands of its growing enterprise install base. Opsview Enterprise is already in use by global brands like Harvard University, Allianz and Electronic Arts.
On the other hand, Open Source continues to upset packaged software business models. Major open source projects have expanded across nearly all layers of the stack, including web browsers (Mozilla Firefox), application servers (JBoss, JOnAS, Geronimo), web servers (Apache, Tomcat), mail servers (Sendmail, QMail), databases (MySQL, MaxDB), operating systems (Linux, BSD, RTOS), and programming languages (Perl, PHP, Smalltalk, Java).
i/OS developers are among those who can benefit from MuleSoft’s launch last week of Cloudcat, a hosted version of Apache’s Tomcat Web application server. By hosting Tomcat in the cloud, Mulesoft aims to make it easier for developers and quality assurance professionals to test their Java-based Tomcat applications prior to making them live.
As noted yesterday, there are many good things about Mozilla’s various websites, but the big picture of how they’re organized and work together leaves a lot of room for improvement. Entering our web universe can be really confusing for users, and the current setup limits the ways we can spread the word about all the stuff that’s happening around the organization and community.
That one (point 5) seems to be where Baker is at at the moment, although she’s fairly guarded about it. Speaking earlier at a session at DLD in Munich, (video) Baker had described Firefox as the “first necessary step”, a mechanism for breaking the monopoly.
This was a process of disruption, and “we still intend to continue disruption… not based so much on cost, because we’ve now moved into a phase where everything is free of charge to consumers. For Mozilla and Firefox the key to disruption is the control point, so our original disruption of the first monopoly was to actually build an industry and to crack the control point open to get to the stage… of creating value.”
Google’s Chrome browser is quickly gaining market share, with one estimate putting it at about 5 percent of total usage, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is seeing a drop in overall share. But among TechCrunch readers Chrome is already beating every browser except for Firefox.
Mark Hamilton, former Sun employee and now Vice President, HPC Sales Support, at Oracle, has assured users of the Lustre open source distributed file system, that Oracle plans to continue to invest in engineering, sales and support.
As an open source project, WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). The code for WordPress is created both by Automattic developers as well as a community of hundreds of third-party developers. The open source nature of the product means it can be used by anyone and for anything without paying a licence fee.
Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and T J Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for Drupal users of all experience levels, including module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even themers.
Daniel James is the director of the Studio 64 GNU/Linux distribution, which serves as a basis for professional music studio mixing installations, as well as an experienced writer and editor. Thus it is not surprising that he should create an excellent book on music mixing. What did surprise me was how well he covered visual arts as well — photography, drawing, animation, and video production.
The government of Galicia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants to boost the use of free and open source software by its public administrations and citizens. The regional ministry for Modernisation and Innovation aims to bring together its previous initiatives on open source, it explains in a statement published on 27 January.
Last autumn we released the first draft of a working paper on opening up data related to international development. The report covers how to legally and technically open up aid data, as well as recommendations for how to make aid data easier to find and reuse.
Led by Radu Horaud, Director of Research at INRIA, the three-year project, which has attracted 2.6m euros in European Commission funding, builds on the POP project (see Wired’s December report), which provided proof-of-concept for the idea that combining auditory and visual information improves a bot’s ability to pick identify human speakers in the midst of background noise.
In their efforts to derail the onward march of Open Access (OA) opponents have conjured up a number of bogeymen about Open Access publishing. First, they maintain, asking authors to pay to publish could turn scholarly publishing into a vanity press. Second, they say, OA publishing will in any case inevitably lead to lax or even non-existent peer review. Third, they argue, OA publishing is not financially sustainable. I felt the breath of all three bogeymen on the back of my neck recently, as I conducted an email interview with the CEO of OA publisher Sciyo, Aleksandar Lazinica — an interview that led the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) to ask Sciyo to remove OASPA’s logo from its web site.
At the heart of the criticism deployed against OA publishing is the claim that levying an article processing charge (APC) on authors will inevitably corrupt the age-old process of scholarly publishing, and the independent peer review system on which it is based.
It’s been a decade since the last HTML specification was released. In this article, the first of a two-part series, David Chisnall looks at what is in store for the next version.
For the past four years, the OpenDocument Format Alliance has been promoting an XML-based format that makes Office Suite documents accessible across platforms and applications. ODF enjoys endorsements from international governments and support in products like Google Docs and Open Office. But until Microsoft beefs up its support for ODF, that movement isn’t going anywhere.
According to The Times, Orange, Telefonica, AT&T and nine other operators will work together with a view to building an open tech platform that will produce apps for all mobile phone users. If successful, developers should gradually see it become easier to develop applications for the scope of devices out there.
The former chairman of one of China’s largest electronics companies, Gome Electrical Appliances Holding, has been charged with operating illegal businesses, insider stock trading and bribery, according to the government’s China Daily newspaper.
Hewlett-Packard’s efforts to be more socially and environmentally sustainable have taken it to an unexpected–and uncomfortable–place: the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Proceeds from illegal mining operations, which are controlled by military factions, are helping fuel a complex conflict that crosses between the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring Rwanda.
Aid groups say the federal government is casting a chill over advocacy work that takes positions on policy or political issues – and one claims a senior Conservative aide warned them against such activities.
An official with a mainstream non-governmental aid group said that Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, gave a verbal warning that the organization’s policy positions were under scrutiny: “Be careful about your advocacy.”
Researchers followed the medical histories of more than nine million Ontarians for 16 years, between April 1991 and March 2007. A study of the data found the lifetime risk of developing asthma was 33.9 per cent.
France used soldiers as guinea pigs in nuclear tests in the 1960s, deliberately exposing them to radiation from atomic blasts to test the effects, according to a report revealed on Tuesday.
The secret military report, obtained by AFP, said that between 1960 and 1966 France sent troops onto Algerian desert test sites “to study the physiological and psychological effects caused on humans by an atomic weapon.”
In their effort to beat the statutes of limitations that prevent people from being charged with a crime after a certain amount of time has passed, prosecutors in some parts of the US are trying a new tactic: They’re charging half-eaten food, saliva-crusted glasses or other inanimate objects with the crime.
The warrant was issued January 28 after French anti-doping authorities accused Landis of hacking into one of their laboratory computers, Pierre Boudry, the president of France’s anti-doping agency, the Agence Francaise de Lutte contre le Dopage, told Reuters on Monday.
In arguing against airport body scanners, I’ve been met with variations on an increasingly prevalent fallacy: “if it makes us a little safer, it’s worth it”; “if it saves one life, stops one crime…” What a specious argument that is. It would “save one child” to ban the car, but we don’t, because it would be disproportionate and we have to get on with normal life, even if we incur a slightly higher element of risk in doing so. Safety, in and of itself, is not an absolute good.
A bus driver told a passenger he could not board his vehicle because he was carrying a tin of fence paint.
Brian Wakley, from Sandford in Dorset, was 10 miles (16km) from home when told he could not board the 1B Bournemouth to Poole Transdev Yellow Buses service.
People already feel that there is excessive surveillance in the UK without the police flying around CCTV cameras to catch us littering or parking in the wrong place.
Before the Terrorism Act 2006, UK based internet and telecommunications companies always cooperated voluntarily with the Police, and they appear to have done so since.
Philadelphia TSA screeners forced the developmentally delayed, four-year-old son of a Camden, PA police officer to remove his leg-braces and wobble through a checkpoint, despite the fact that their procedure calls for such a case to be handled through a swabbing in a private room. When the police officer complained, the supervising TSA screener turned around and walked away. Then a Philadelphia police officer asked what was wrong and “suggested he calm down and enjoy his vacation.”
Anderson happily admits that he could not think his way round this. “I have come to the conclusion that there is only one answer to Sydney’s question. Torture the wife and children. It is a disgusting idea. It is almost a tragedy that we even have to discuss it, let alone think of acting upon it.”
So Anderson appears to recommends torturing innocent women and children to make a man talk. Perhaps we should probe the hypothesis a bit further because for one thing, it makes the assumption that the authorities know for certain that the suspect has definite knowledge about an imminent attack. How? By intelligence produced from other torture sessions, in which men say anything to stop the pain? And where does the collateral torture stop? Would Anderson torture the suspect’s parents and friends? Perhaps he would round up entire communities of people who are deemed to have some slight knowledge of the ticking bomb, or whose screams might induce the suspect to talk?
Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco programmer with the longtime open source Tor Project, a cloaking program used by corporations and free speech activists alike, said closed systems like Haystack concern him. He said it has no peer review the way the Tor Project does, which has been created and vetted by programmers around the world over many years.
“He has not opened it up for research,” Appelbaum said. “No one has seen a copy of his specifications. There is no way we can understand if the claims that are made (by Haystack) are true.”
At worst, a faulty program could put its users in Iran at risk, he said. “That very much concerns me,” Appelbaum added. “When people’s lives are at risk, it’s not a good idea to be arrogant.”
Two Greenpeace activists who were arrested after attempting to expose embezzlement in Japan’s whaling fleet will go on trial tomorrow in a case campaigners hope will spark a domestic backlash against the heavily-subsidised industry.
Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?
[...]
Overall then, the IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam.
Much noise this morning surrounding the news that Goldman Sachs (and a number of other banks) allegedly helped Greece to hide the full scale of its ballooning government debts through financial jiggery-pokery over the past decade or so. Eurostat has now demanded an explanation from the Greeks for $1bn of currency swaps it says it was unaware of (though Greece seems to be insisting the authorities did know).
The original story about Goldman’s involvement appeared in Der Spiegel last week (though the theme has been the subject of investigation by the excellent euro blog A Fistful of Euros for some time), and over the weekend the New York Times produced an excellent feature filling in the gaps. One of the more intriguing lines from that latter piece says: “Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.”
Bottom line: It appears that Goldman Sachs has turned many governments throughout the world into Super-Enrons, with off-balance sheet shenanigans, financial sleight of hand and convoluted accounting. Governments generally don’t need help in this kind of maneuvering, but Goldman with its collection of whiz kid derivative designers has taken the entire process to a new level. A new level so unique that it could very will collapse the financial structure of the manipulated world.
At the time, Goldman said no way. They plan to remain in the banking biz — despite the fact that the company only became a bank to save itself during the financial collapse.
Talking to friends over the weekend about the revelations of Goldman Sachs involvement in Greek “fantasy accounting”, I said the EU should throw Goldman out and refuse to do any further business with the bank, but that I didn’t think they would given Goldman’s power in the financial markets. Late last night, former IMF man Simon Johnson wrote that he thinks the EU will indeed ban Goldman. Well, it would certainly would be a good step. Don’t kick Greece out of the EU, but Goldman Sachs.
We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November. These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets. When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.
Goldman Sachs arranged swaps that effectively allowed Greece to borrow 1 billion Euros without adding to its official public debt. While it arranged the swaps, Goldman also sought to buy insurance on Greek debt and engage in other trades to protect itself against the risk of a default on those swaps. Eventually, Goldman sold the swaps to the national bank of Greece.
Greece’s vast deficits caused it to fail the criteria for joining the single European currency in 1999, but it succeeded in 2001.
Member nations had to reduce their budget deficit to less than 3 per cent of gross domestic product and trim national debt to less than 60 per cent of GDP.
A dispute is unfolding about how long European Union officials have known that Greece used derivatives to conceal its growing budget deficit.
Greece turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2002, just after adopting the euro, to get $1 billion in funding through a swap on $10 billion of debt, Christoforos Sardelis, head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency at the time, said in an interview last week. Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, was aware of the plan, he said. Risk Magazine also reported on the swap in July 2003.
How come Goldman Sachs is part of so many catastrophic economic scenes? The latest? Greece! Greece is on the edge and it turns out that the country is up to it’s eyeballs in deals that mislead investors and regulators.
A Greek government inquiry uncovered a series of swaps agreements with securities firms that may have allowed it to mask its growing debts.
Greece used the swaps to defer interest repayments by several years, according to a Feb. 1 report commissioned by the Finance Ministry in Athens. The document didn’t identify the securities firms Greece used. The government turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2002 to obtain $1 billion through a swap agreement, Christoforos Sardelis, head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency between 1999 and 2004, said in an interview last week.
Now Goldman Sachs (GS) is being painted into the center of the emerging picture of the Greek crisis. An article in Satuday’s New York Times by Louise Story, Landon Thomas Jr. and Nelson D. Schwartz describes how Goldman designed vehicles to transfer current obligations of the Greek government far into the future. This helped Greece to appear to be satisfying the fiscal requirements of the EU (European Union) by practicing deception.
The Robin Hood Tax campaign alleged that a Goldman computer was one of two computers that allegedly “spammed” the internet poll with more than 4,600 “no” votes in less than 20 minutes on Thursday.
Senator Conroy’s internet filter has been the cause of much news and action from local residents and the world at large, most recently sparking attacks on government websites.
State leaders in Florida are in a battle with technology: new forms of communications that make it difficult for public officials to follow the law.
The state has one of the best government public record laws in the country. Virtually every public document is accessible to the public. And though the state is embracing the perks of advanced technology — the Legislature just started piloting the use of electronic meeting packets, instead of printing them on paper — the use of cell phones and BlackBerrys is causing concern. It’s simply too difficult to archive all communications.
In the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) defended its choice of China by arguing that the Games could contribute to the democratisation of an authoritarian regime, making a closed society more open and bringing the force of international law to bear on the hosts. As we now know, the record proved less impressive than the claims. In fact, there is a stronger case to be made for the obverse—that the Olympics can contribute to the coarsening of democracy. The 2010 Winter Olympic Games, which start on 12th February in Vancouver, is a case in point.
In my role as WikiLeaks editor, I’ve been involved in fighting off more than 100 legal attacks over the past three years. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.
We’ve become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can’t expect everyone to make such extraordinary efforts. Large newspapers, including the Guardian, are forced to remove or water down investigative stories rather than risk legal costs. Even internet-only publishers writing about corruption find themselves disconnected by their ISPs after legal threats. Should these publications not relent, they are hounded, like the Turks & Caicos Islands Journal, from one jurisdiction to other. There’s a new type of refugee – “publishers” – and a new type of internet business developing, “refugee hosting”. Malaysia Today is no longer published in Malaysia. Even the American Homeowners Association has moved its servers to Stockholm after relentless legal attacks in the United States.
The last thing the government wanted to do in the middle of a recession was help fund an innovative startup that would disrupt a big employer. But there was one interesting aspect of the stimulus package: it suggested that anyone taking the government money would have to share access to infrastructure — something that makes a lot of sense, if you’re encouraging competition.
Last week, the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council came up with a new draft resolution1 in response to the Commission’s communication on enhancing the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) in the internal market.
ODDLY ENOUGH, THE Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to–while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite–the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets–and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.
The main problem of this approach is that over the years of free access, the New York Times has trained its readers for years that the right price (or the Anchor) is $0 — and since this is the starting point it is very hard to change it….
Because we’re not very good at figuring out what we are willing to pay for different products and services, the initial prices that new products are presented with can have a long term effect on how much we are willing to pay for them. We basically can’t figure out how much pleasure the New York Times gives us in terms of $ — so we go back and pay the same price we have paid before. This means that getting people to pay for something that was free for a long time will be very challenging, but it also means that if the New York Times were to offer some new service at the same time that they start charging, they might be more likely to pull it off.
Another week, and another newspaper opts for a paid-content model: French daily Le Figaro has now announced price tiers for its delayed, previously announced offering, which will go live on Monday…
But, instead of hoisting up a paywall around all its news conent, Le Fig is going for a freemium model, charging only for extras like newsletters, a digital copy of its printed edition, social media features – and booking you a dinner table. The new features come in three tiers, but spokesperson Antoine Daccord tells paidContent:UK: “News will be free forever…”
FACT originally claimed that the site “facilitated” copyright infringement on the internet, despite that not being a part of UK law. Eventually, the official charges were “Conspiracy to Defraud and breaches of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act,” which is quite similar to what OiNK’s admin was charged with. And just like how OiNK’s Alan Ellis was found not guilty, the court has sided with TV links, noting that it didn’t actually infringe on anyone’s copyrights directly. Of course, this still took years of having to fight it out in court and a ton of resources — some of which were frozen by a “financial restraining order” during the case itself.
He goes on to suggest that a statement like that, so revealing in how Timms views the world, should get Timms fired, as he’s basically admitting that he’s only there to protect corporate interests, rather than actual creativity.
Yeah, good luck with that. Between you and Warner Music opting-out of online streaming services, it’s as if the major record labels are simply trying to accelerate their own demise. Have they taken out life insurance policies on themselves? In the meantime, Vivendi, who’s watching over Universal Music these days?
In what has to be one of the more bizarre copyright disputes, the underwear manufacturer Triumph sued Sony because Beyoncé was wearing copyright infringing underwear in her music video “Video Phone”. Seriously.
And here we are today, as EMI/Capitol (who, last we saw, was trying to bootstrap a fake word of mouth viral campaign, after its suits blocked a real viral campaign) is fighting to stay alive, as it is massively in debt, with little hope of getting out of it.
This is an amazing animation by Nina Paley, “America’s Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist.” Entitled “All Creative Work Is Derivative” (and blogged here on her blog), and concluding “All creative work builds on what came before,” the video is built from images of of statues and paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
This brings me to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). It is an anti-democratic outrage, not to have published the terms of the draft agreement and suggests to the skeptical that the USTR is engaged in a shady deal which will not stand the light of public disclosure and discussion. One must assume that we are trying to browbeat our trading partners into accepting terms that they are resisting rather than examining the pluses and minuses of such an agreement for each of the concerned parties.
…dragging in healthcare, criminal sanctions, ACTA, and simple, old-fashioned, rights-holder blackmail: ” clear the net, and we’ll set up legal offers”.
After the Telecoms Package has opened up the possibilities for restricting the Internet, the EU is trying to move in closer on copyright and IP enforcement. A new European Council document is calling for stronger penalties for IP infringement and seeks to re-open a shelved proposal for criminal measures.
The document is an internal one drawn up by the Spanish Presidency, and is being discussed in a series of
meetings which began last October, in parallel with Council discussions on the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
Always on top
The ability to keep any window on top of all the others at any given time is a blessing Linux that I am yet to see on Windows. It comes in really handy when you need to have more than one window visible to get things done or when you want to be working but have VLC lurking on the lower part of the screen.
[...]
Multiple desktops
On a typical day, I have about 6 worksheets open, with Google Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, and some other folders open. On Linux, in order not to clutter my desktop, I just move some of he open windows to another desktop and all is well with the world. Windows? Well I do not know of any such function.
Reboot, Reboot and reboot
Again, lots of applications I install tell me to reboot before the installation will be complete. If I make an installation of 5 such programs, it means for 5 times I have to reboot my system. Linux? Sudo-apt get install XYZ and bam, its done.
The HTC Hero has been around for a while now, so I’m not planning to write a detailed review of it here, except to say that I am absolutely delighted with it in every respect. And then things got even better.
Polaris Software Lab said that its wholly-owned subsidiary Polaris Retail Infotech (PRIL) has launched a Linux-powered retail store management solution called ‘ iStore Linux.’
It only took 126 career hops — the first one being a soulless teen model — for Barbie to land a job as a computer software engineer. All we know now is that she has a dual monitor setup and a picture of Ken at her cubicle. Oh, and she uses Linux on the world’s smallest netbook.
Barbie and her dual monitor set-up with laptop (pink) running Linux, geeky binary t-shirt, smartphone, Bluetooth headset and of course, glasses, will hit the shelves Winter 2010. I’ve heard on the grapevine that you can pre-order so I’m currently trawling the Mattel store for the goods but I’m not having any luck so far.
It did not take me too long to find the first offering that met my needs: TurnKey Linux has, among several other free virtual appliance offerings, a full Joomla! instance running on top of a LAMP stack. Everything is put together for you: the Joomla! configuration, the PHPMyAdmin front-end, Postfix MTA configuration, and Apache, PHP, and MySQL modules for Webmin.
SGI says Cyclone is backed by the industry’s fastest supercomputing hardware architectures, including SGI Altix scale-up, Altix ICE scale-out and Altix XE hybrid clusters, all based on Intel Xeon or Itanium processors. Customers can also choose between Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux, with further performance offered by SGI ProPack. Altair PBS Professional and SGI ISLE Cluster Manager provide system scheduling and management.
Nanny is a pretty good software and probably the only Parental control system for Linux I know. But it connects the tasks with the respective applicaitons e.g. pidgin with chatting, thunderbird with emails and browser with web surfing. This seems logical but now a days each of these activities are possible on the browser. You can’t expect a 10-12 year old kid to use a mail client . There are tons of social networking sites out there that can keep him “busy”. Although my point seems a little vague here because you can manage and control websites the user can access using Nanny’s web content filtering system.
Movial, the company that inspires rich and intuitive Internet experiences today announced it will demo an innovative contextual version of its Movial IXS Browser — which provides desktop-like browsing on mobile devices — showcasing the blazing speed and power of the latest OMAP(TM) platform from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) at Mobile World Congress (MWC).
The most exciting prospect of KDE 4.4 is the social desktop and the netbook Plasma. The social desktop will bring your social network to widgets on your Plasma desktop. And the netbook Plasma will offer a much more modern desktop to those adorable little mini-laptops.
But with KDE 4 finally reaching a point where it is once again one of the most solid desktops available, the innovation it forces will make the Linux desktops a temptation many simply can not pass up.
Welcome to part 5, the final article in our little series on the KDE 4.3 System Settings control panel. I first off want to thank the KDE devs for creating such a great desktop environment (DE) and for simplifying the control panel (now known as “System Settings”). The last time I had to do an article series like this, it took me 10 articles and nearly a month to pull it off.
We are pleased to announce the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. This friendly competition will reward creators of the most original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition.
Skolelinux / Debian Edu is a complete and free “out of the box” software solution for schools that reduces costs, prolongs the lifetime of hardware and covers almost every aspect of the schools’ IT needs.
We are proud to announce the release of PC/OS VirtualServer System 8.5. VirtualServer System 8.5 is a release of PC/OS OpenServer System 8.5 designed to be run on Sun Virtualbox. Its a virtual hard drive image with the Sun Virtualbox tools preinstalled. This takes out the necessary step of having to install the Virtualbox toolset.
I’ve been happily using Mandriva 2010 as my desktop system since its release last November. The few issues I’ve had could be traced back to KDE 4.3.2. I had run the Update Manager a couple times at the beginning, but soon became lax and haven’t updated since. Honestly, I just didn’t want to risk an upgrade ruining what was essentially a completely enjoyable experience. But when Juan Luis Baptiste posted that KDE 4.4 packages were available for Mandriva 2010, it seemed worth risking a re-install.
# KDE has been updated to final version 4.4.0. New features since KDE 4.3 include integrated desktop search in Dolphin, a new Plasma desktop interface optimized for netbooks, Palapelli (a jigsaw puzzle game), Cantor (a scientific maths application) and many others.
No distribution has all the features in this list. The only one that comes close is Mandriva Linux. The task for the next few weeks is to identify a list of desktop distributions that come close to being “perfect.” Will your distro make the list? Keep in mind that because of their philosophical stand on freedom in software, some distributions will never make the list.
The blog post had listed a number of reasons why the writer thought Ubuntu was allegedly becoming the new Microsoft: the inclusion of Mono as a default; the creation of Ubuntu One, a proprietary software repository; removing the GIMP and other applications from Ubuntu; changing the default search engine to Yahoo!; discussion about what proprietary applications should be included in the Ubuntu repositories; and the appointment of Matt Asay as chief operating officer.
Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, is an LTS (Long Term Support) release. This means that this version of Ubuntu will be supported for five years after its release. The last LTS was Ubuntu 8.04.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #180 for the week February 7th – February 13th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week: Call For Participation, Interview With Jono by Joe Barker, Interview with Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Core Developer about encryption in Ubuntu, Upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam and your Loco Team, Ubuntu Honduras Loco Team at the T3 conference, Call for feedback on preferred desktop fonts, and much, much more!
Linux Mint is one of the most popular Ubuntu based distro’s, possibly for the fact it brings something new to the table rather than just a different set of wallpapers. Its always been one of my favorite distros, and like the main Ubuntu project, it has more than one ‘flavour’. The main edition, which features the GNOME desktop has been out for a while, but the latest KDE release, was released about a week ago.
French consumer electronics firm Sagemcom has joined with Belgian software company SoftAtHome to collaborate on an MPEG4-ready HD set-top box combining IPTV, satellite, and terrestrial delivery. The “Universal Set Top Box” offers DLNA-compliant content sharing, removable storage, and an open Linux SoftAtHome development environment.
The router’s firmware (operating system) is a Dharamsala-brewed Linux clone, based on multiple open-source projects. Thanks to the amazing and promising development of the OpenWRT project, we now need very little additions of our own. The core of OpenWRT is based on UCLIBC and Busybox. With so many supporters and contributors, today one can find a very rich selection of pre-compiled packages and tools. This allows people on the ground to focus on local issues, while enjoying pre-tested and fully functional OS. Multiple Mesh routing protocols were tested and are supported optionally.
U.S. software firm Adobe and three other firms joined the wireless Linux group LiMo on Monday, underlying the growing role of the Linux computer operating system in cellphones.
SRS Labs (Nasdaq: SRSL), the industry leader in surround sound, audio, and voice technologies, announced today that it has joined the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation™ to become the first sound technology company to join the ranks of the mobile industry’s global consortium.
Adobe will also announce that it is joining the LiMo Foundation in order to support Flash on mobile Linux and name new partners for its Flash-based Open Screen Project including the Symbian Foundation, Freescale and Opera.
Not content with releasing one Xperia X10 smartphone, Sony Ericsson is planning to offer two more.
The two additions to the Android phone family are the X10 Mini and the X10 Mini Pro. Both were said by SE to be “smaller than a credit card” and to sport an “intuitive four-corner touchscreen user interface”.
Motorola today took the wraps of yet another Android smartphone, this one called Quench and based around a 3.1in touchscreen.
If the Quench seems familiar, it’s because its already been annouced, kind of. Recently, Motorola unveiled the Cliq XT in the US, and the Quench is the same handset, tweaked for the European market just as it renamed the US-oriented Droid as the Milestone over here.
Android 2.1 entered the world with the release of Google’s Nexus One last month. At the time of the launch, Motorola said the software update would be reaching the Droid and other Android phones at some point in the near future.
Garmin-Asus announced a multi-touch enabled Android version of its navigation-focused Nuvifone smartphones for the European market. The Nuvifone A50 appears to have similar specs to the earlier Linux-based Nuvifone G60, but adds a comprehensive suite of Google apps, as well as new styling and a touchpad.
ST-ERICSSON AND ARM have been telling the Mobile World Congress that their cunning plan to optimise Android to take advantage of Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) on the ST-Ericsson U8500 platform is nearly ready.
We talked extensively about why Android is better than some other smartphone OSes, its openness, its multitasking characteristics, but have you ever thought that its customization features could actually save lives? Well read on.
I am a big fan of the Maemo 5 platform as you can see in my Definitive Nokia N900 Guide so the news that Nokia and Intel are combining Moblin and Maemo to create the MeeGo Linux-based software platform for future mobile computers, notebooks, tablets, and more is quite exciting. MeeGo will also offer the Qt application development environment and allow developers to feature applications in the Ovi Store and Intel’s AppUpSM Center. Looking at the Nokia plot of their operating systems it looks like Maemo is out while MeeGo replaces it moving forward too.
We decided to expand the relationship we started already last spring. We merge Maemo and Moblin projects into one single project called MeeGo. MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
Third, Intel and Nokia announced they would merge their Moblin and Maemo software projects to create MeeGo, a unified Linux-based platform that will run on pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media-rich smartphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle “infotainment” systems, ideally but not exclusively all based on Intel’s Atom microprocessor.
This promises to be the West’s answer to LiMo, the Linux Mobile initiative that has drawn support from Asia-Pacific handset makers.
It seems like not a week goes by without some clever hacker finding something unusual to do with their Nokia N900, and the device itself is proving more versatile than ever. The latest hack is the ability to hook up a Bluetooth PS3 controller, and play your Nokia N900 games with complete control. Read on after the break to find out more…
Besides the design and the speed, many of its functionalities strongly depend on the phone’s operating system. Nokia always uses Symbian OS for high-end mobile phones. Symbian enables installing applications, and also managing your agenda and email account is easy and straightforward. Besides Symbian, Nokia also uses a further developed Open Source operating system, the Linux-based Maemo.
Joikusoft Ltd. today announces the next wave of mobile WiFi Tethering by extending JoikuSpot Mobile 3G HotSpotting to new Linux based Maemo devices from Nokia.
Jolicloud is the most distinctly netbook-oriented operating system in this Hive Five. It’s not just pretty good on a netbook—it was actually designed from the ground up to be a netbook operating system, so it’s a great fit. (For the curious, it’s a combination of Debian and Fedora Linux with WINE mixed in to support Windows-only apps.) Jolicloud has been tweaked and tuned to make it shine even on systems with low resources and small displays. The emphasis is not on a traditional computing experience but on harnessing web-based applications and storage services so that much of the heavy lifting and deep-storage of the netbook is transferred from the netbook to more powerful and larger servers. The application launcher—see in the screenshot here—makes it easy to organize and select your applications. The launcher emphasizes easy to read and identify text and logos, and all applications launch in full-screen mode by default. In addition to the default applications, you can browse the app directory to find new applications—the Jolicloud team curates the list to ensure compatibility.
Instead of Windows or Linux, the AirLife uses the same operating system and device drivers as many smartphones, Google Android. The AirLife’s screen will measure 10.1 inches, be touch-sensitive, and be able to display images at a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The keyboard will be 92 percent as large as a standard-size, and will include a touch pad.
The truly revolutionary component on this tablet is its screen, which incorporates Pixel Qi technology to give a similar experience as e-Ink when the backlight is off. This gives the tablet its godly battery life, and allows it to directly challenge the reading experience of eReaders. It is a powerful tablet, and the device’s multitasking with Flash support is undoubtedly a response to the iPad’s inability to do either.
I’m delighted to be writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) for Practical eCommerce! When I started in the Internet industry, the few eCommerce stores were custom-programmed, they cost millions of dollars and employed large teams of programmers. osCommerce changed all that at the turn of the century with the first free, open source eCommerce program.
Over at cool-stuff blog Cool Tools, former TV commercial director and producer Jeff Bragg gives TeleKast a runthrough in the video below:
TeleKast if a free download for Windows and Linux only. It’s currently an alpha release, so you might expect a little bugginess—but it worked like a charm in my tests. If you’d prefer a little teleprompter action without installing an application, check out previously mentioned CuePrompter.
hSenid Mobile Solutions, a leading mobile solution provider, will be launching their latest revolutionary products mChoice Soltura, community VAS platform, and mChoice Vishma, an open source application store at this years Mobile world congress held in Barcelona.
Toronto-based Enomaly severed its links with open source software with the release of the latest version of its Elastic Computing Platform (ECP). Not only did the company remove all traces of the open source Community Edition from the product but it also moved ECP from the open source repository, SourceForge, moves which caused great disquiet among the company’s customer base.
CA announced it has extended its world-class Web access security technology to include support for Web applications and Web services hosted on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
Zenoss, Inc., a leading commercial open source provider of Unlegacy enterprise IT management products, today announced that the City of Houston is using the company to manage the mission-critical network infrastructure at the Houston Airport System (HAS), the world’s sixth largest airport system. Using Zenoss Enterprise, The City of Houston has been able to reduce the total cost of operating its large and complex HAS network by over 500% while more efficiently meeting the demands of managing a network consisting of hundreds of Cisco routers, switches and firewalls spread across the city’s three airports.
I had a good long chat with Pete Cittadini, CEO of open source business intelligence firm Actuate recently. The company is doing somewhere between $120m and $140m a year, having founded and still co-leading the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) open source project.
Canonical has done a fine job of making the Linux user experience more coherent, and for the kind of dinky 3lb laptops that Apple doesn’t make, Ubuntu is preferable in many ways to Windows 7 or XP for reliability and ease of use. So there are high expectations for the official NetBook-specific distro, originally called NetBook Remix but now called NetBook Edition. It promises all the benefits of Google’s ChromeOS, but without the mandatory built-in Google creepware.
OpenOffice.org, the open-source office software package, has released version 3.2 of its free Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access replacement tools. Simultaneously, the team also revealed that it’s hit 300 million downloads since the suite launched in 2002.
The impressive open source office software suite Open Office a free alternative to Microsoft’s office desktop software has reported over 300 million people have downloaded the application since its debut in April 2002. Eat your heart out Microsoft.
Microsoft-bating open source software maker OpenOffice.org has announced the latest release of its ‘anything you can do we can do cheaper’ suite of office productivity tools.
More than 300 million downloads later, OpenOffice.org – the world’s leading free personal productivity software — is updating its office suite to make it faster and more compatible with other office software programs.
In an upcoming version, Firefox will be a multiprocessing browser. The developers of Firefox at Mozilla are preparing for one of the most important changes in the history of this browser. It will not be the version of Firefox 3.5 which will make the Firefox browser a multithreaded one. But it is expected to be so in any of the following versions, such as version 3.6, which we have already spoken of. Or in version 4.0 Firefox can become a multi-browser. For those of you who do not know what a multithreaded browser means, you can keep an eye on the post explaining what a multi-browser is all about.
WordPress, the gold standard in blogging platforms, has just announced that they now have WordPress applications for RIM’s BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) platform, Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Android, and the iPhone. They’re all free, and they’re all open source, so the community can help make them better. They’ve also announced that in a few weeks they’ll be playing with Qt and releasing a beta for not only Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Symbian platform, but the Linux based Maemo too.
Accuity, the leading worldwide provider of payment routing data, AML screening software and services, is pleased to announce that it has acquired a significant minority stake in World Compliance, Inc., the Miami, Florida-based Open Source Intelligence company.
Infrastructure company Swissport is to use Pentaho’s open source business intelligence (BI) suite as its standard corporate management reporting environment, claiming the rollout will cut the cost of flying.
Nuxeo, the open source enterprise content management vendor, released a new digital asset management system last week with support for the most current OASIS CMIS specification. This should make it easier for companies using the Nuxeo solution to share multimedia content across different repositories whether or not they are using Nuxeo tools.
In fact, as the economy stabilizes, Digium firmly believes that the momentum the open source community has gained will continue. After all, though the recession helped boost the open source space to its current market position, the growth of the open source community and the stability of open source platforms (Asterisk is a decade old now) have helped create a new market dynamic that is driving interest in alternative vendors, including those in the open source community, as well as Skype,Microsoft ( News – Alert), and others.
Chandhok: Open source has become increasingly important to mobile, and QuIC was formed to bring increased focus to open source initiatives. Qualcomm is unique in its market reach, powering the vast majority of 3G handsets as a whole as well as smartphones that are commercially available today. This puts us into a very good position to drive innovation forward for the wireless industry.
Cynapse, provider of open source Enterprise 2.0 software for small, medium and large organizations, today announced a partnership with Virtual Network Consult GmbH (VNC), a Value Added Distributor for Commercial Open Source & Cloud Solutions, to deliver its product Cyn.in in the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets.
Yesterday, Equinox Software, which has built its name and business supporting the Evergreen open source integrated library system (ILS) its founders helped develop, announced plans to support Koha, the other major open source ILS.
By facilitating text donations to several non-profit organizations, XIPWIRE would like to give back to the community, stated the company. Currently, donations can be directed to the Apache Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, GNOME Foundation, KDE e.V. and the Linux Foundation.
Since the inception of Opera Dragonfly, we planned for it to become an open source project. It has always been released under an open source BSD licence, but the source repositories were on Opera servers. Starting today, Opera Dragonfly is a fully open source project, hosted on BitBucket. Since the previous version of Opera Dragonfly, a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes replacing the existing architecture with a modern version of the Scope Protocol – STP-1. Opera Dragonfly has been rewritten to use this faster and more efficient version of Scope. Now that we believe that the underlying protocol is stable and performant, and a public desktop build has been released with this included, it is time to put Opera Dragonfly on a public Mercurial repository.
eXo Platform today introduced xCMIS, an open source implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Fully compliant with the latest CMIS 1.0 – cd06 specification, xCMIS supports eXo’s standards-based Java content repository (JCR) and works with third-party CMIS clients as well as a new eXo CMIS client based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Cubeia Ltd, a technology solutions provider for the online gambling and gaming industry, are pleased to announce the ground-breaking release of Firebase Community Edition – a scalable, enterprise server for multiplayer games. Firebase Community Edition is the first ever open-source game server in the online gambling industry.
Version 1.7 of the free Git distributed version control system (DVCS) is now available to download. The new release offers numerous changes that have been discussed for some time, changes that have made the new version incompatible with its predecessor, Git 1.6.6, but the repository format is unchanged. The changes appear to have been important enough for the developers to choose to introduce them rather than maintain the system’s backward compatibility with previous releases.
Since early 2004, it has been the government’s stated policy to use open-source software in the public sector wherever possible, as long as it offers the best value for money.
To date, the policy has had little impact. So will the latest tweaks to its open-source action plan make a difference?
Software is “open-source” when the source code is freely available to be viewed, shared or changed — things that you can’t do with conventional proprietary software. Crucially, open-source is also the cheaper option in many cases.
When I blogged about the UK government’s open source initiative (or rather the lack of it) a couple of weeks ago. It was obvious to me – and to many of the people in the open source community that the government wasn’t exactly pulling out all the stops in its attempts to cut waste in the tendering process.
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So, the open source commentators who say that the government has not been enthusiastic about pursuing are completely missing the point. It’s not about inertia; it’s not about the influence of proprietary software companies; it’s not about the perceived lack of maturity of open source companies – it’s simply that those newer competitors aren’t expensive enough. Those pitches proving cost savings have been going down the wrong path – it’s as if they were setting off to play golf and keeping under par the whole way round, only to be told at the end of the game that the object was to take as many shots as possible.
Finally, Cameron had a populist swipe at lobbyists. Which is fine. No-one likes lobbyists. But Cameron’s attitude towards lobbying is instructive, for it demonstrates the extent to which, despite his rhetoric, he remains a centraliser. The problem with lobbying is a “lack of transparency” and so he’ll also slow down the revolving door, making it harder to ministers to move seamlessly into lobbying. Which is also fine but no more than tackling a symptom while ignoring the cause of the disease. Which is, silly, government.
“No ICT project will be commissioned without first seeing if it can be done for free or at very low cost. We will set open standards to encourage interoperability between ICT systems and open up ICT procurement to more companies by creating a level playing field for open source software throughout government.”
With a population of over 31 million, the Indian state of Kerala — home to the IT@school initiative — has more people than all but two of the countries listed here. IT@school, which provides ICT-enabled education to 1.6 million students per year in the state, is considered by some to be the largest educational program of its kind utilizing primarily free and open source software.
Yes. Free open source textbooks are alive and well at both the college and k-12 level. Check out CK12.org. Initial free STEM textbooks are available now and more digital materials will be forthcoming as the company progresses and leverages more of an open source community for standards-aligned open digital materials.
The Cyberinfrastructure for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CYCORE) project for cancer research will be scalable, open-source and user-friendly. CYCORE will aggregate data from clinical trials, patient medical records, self-reported and objectively monitored social and behavioral data, data on cancer outcomes from regional cancer registries, and cost-benefit analyses.
In contrast, the Copenhagen “anarconomy” vision of anarchy is not particularly anarchistic. In fact, it is rather rule-based, albeit the collectivist social rules of open source copyleft communities. Jaron Lanier has called fundamentalist manifestations of this “Digital Maoism”, which is catchier than it is historically accurate, but you get the idea… Another variant is expressed in the sometimes fickle wrath of the tough love inflicted by open source gatekeepers when cool new ideas conflict somehow with “community standards.”
Matthew Todd, a chemist at the University of Sydney has obtained funding amounting to US$350,000 to support his project. He intends to go about the work using an approach known as “open-source science”.
Process: While the curriculum will be “open source,” in that permission will be given to modify, add, etc. to the educational products in process, there will have to be a screening process for collaborators to avoid the wikipedia fallacy, otherwise known as the blind leading the blind. Those who collaborate will have to have been trained and perhaps credentialed in recognized ways so that there is a serious element of quality control.
While dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python dominate Web engineering, the signs that they are breaking Java and .Net’s hold on the enterprise are less clear. Forrester recently reported that PHP claims the highest instance of open source use within enterprises, at 57 percent penetration.
Oracle has issued a call for papers for a rescheduled JavaOne conference, to be held this year alongside Oracle OpenWorld, Sept. 19-23, in San Francisco.
Potential presenters have until March 14 to submit their proposals.
Torture is revolting. A man can retain his human dignity in front of a firing squad or on the scaffold: not in a torture chamber. Torturers set out to break their victim: to take a human being and reduce him to a whimpering wreck. In so doing, they defile themselves and their society. In Britain, torture has been illegal for more than 300 years. Shortly after torture was abjured, we stopped executing witches: all part of a move away from medieval legal mores and their replacement with the modern rule of law. Until recently, at least in the UK, torture and witch-finding appeared to be safely immured in a museum of ancient atrocities.
Yet men cannot live like angels. However repugnant we may find torture, there are worse horrors, such as the nuclear devastation of central London, killing hundreds of thousands of people and inflicting irreparable damage on mankind’s cultural heritage. We also face new and terrible dangers. In the past, the threat came from other states. If they struck at us, we knew where to strike back. Now, we can almost feel nostalgic for mutually assured destruction.
Iraq has ordered former employees of the private military contractor once known as Blackwater to leave the country, its interior minister announced Wednesday.
Shell has been hit by a massive data breach – the contact database for 176,000 staff and contractors at the firm has been copied and forwarded to lobbyists and activists opposed to the company.
Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.
As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.
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Wall Street did not create Europe’s debt problem. But bankers enabled Greece and others to borrow beyond their means, in deals that were perfectly legal. Few rules govern how nations can borrow the money they need for expenses like the military and health care. The market for sovereign debt — the Wall Street term for loans to governments — is as unfettered as it is vast.
If we are to believe the G7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full “forgiveness” of its foreign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told al-Jazeera English, but: “It’s time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt.” In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor – and it is we, in the west, who are deeply in arrears.
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A reckoning with the debts the world owes to Haiti would radically change this poisonous dynamic. This is where the road to repair begins – by recognising the right of Haitians to reparations.
For all the power and spectacle of the Olympic Games, the down-sides may seem to some a necessary evil. But not to all.
“The Olympics have a history of leaving host cities in debt, and relocating the poor and homeless away from the sanitized corridors of host cities,” The Christian Science Monitor noted on Friday. “Vancouver is no exception.”
Today we got a message from Youtube informing us that the ability to post new videos on Youtube has been temporarily disabled for violating the YouTube Community Guidelines because of a video deemed “inappropriate.”
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And while we are not complaining about all the censorship and attacks targeting us, as we are totally aware that these are the consequences of the fight we are waging against the Tunisian regime to win back our freedom of expression, we really don’t want and don’t expect to see this battle front extended to Google services.
Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco programmer with the long-time open source Tor Project, a cloaking program used by corporations and free speech activists alike, said closed systems like Haystack concern him. He said it has no peer review the way the Tor Project does, which has been created and vetted by programmers around the world over many years.
Shoppers will have internet adverts displayed to them based on their offline shopping habits in a new scheme being developed by internet publisher Yahoo! and customer loyalty scheme Nectar.
But while Google may intend for its network to serve as a model for other carriers, there is no guarantee that it will lead the incumbent carriers to follow suit. After all, the success of the open source Android operating system hasn’t made proprietary operating systems such as the iPhone OS or BlackBerry any less popular or profitable. What remains to be seen, then, will be whether the Google network will lead to a revolution or will remain just a pretty model.
The task force will work closely with the recently established White House Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), which has the responsibility of drafting a strategic plan on IP for President Barack Obama’s administration. The task force will recommend ways to improve IP enforcement, the DOJ said.
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There are some indications that the DOJ may target peer-to-peer file sharers, however. The DOJ, under Obama, has hired five former lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America, and the DOJ this year supported a US$675,000 file-sharing verdict in Massachusetts.
Ubuntu: Although it is not my desktop distribution of choice, it is my “go-to” distribution in just about any situation. And the only reason it is not my desktop distribution is because of the next entry.
Elive: Elive combines my two favorite desktop tools – Enlightenment and Compiz. Without Elive, these two would not work together.
Debian: It is that which Ubuntu is based. Need I say more?
OpenSuSE: The YaST tool alone puts this distro in just about any top ten.
Fedora: I was a long standing Red Hat user so Fedora is a natural for a top ten distribution. And even though Fedora is “bleeding edge”, it’s still rock solid.
As planned, I did my talk about the thriving fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement at yesterday’s FSFE Berlin Fellowship meeting. I started with the basics of the Free Software ideal, moved on to the problematic issues concerning mainstream GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian and then discussed the solutions to these problems. I also had the chance to share some of my favorite fully free GNU/Linux distributions.
Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux, today announced the release of Userful Multiplier V.3.7, the latest version of their software which turns 1 PC into 10. Demand for its $69 virtual desktops (education pricing, includes the software and multiseat hardware) has accelerated as budget-strapped governments, educational organizations, and businesses turn to Userful to lower costs. The improvements brought with V.3.7 will bring the benefits of Userful’s desktop virtualization to even more users around the world.
As I do every year, I’ve created a video to highlight the activities and give a taste for the event. It’s not a closed event: I hope you’ll join us in 2011.
A year has passed and we are happy to announce Linux Conference 2010, which will be held on 27. and 28. September 2010 in Portorož, Slovenia. Once again we have the honor to select best of your submissions / topics in fields of Linux usage in business environment and open source applications. With your help, we will organize leading Slovenian IT Linux and open source event, so we invite you to contact us with your submissions.
A year has passed and we are happy to announce Linux Conference 2010, which will be held on 27. and 28. September 2010 in Portorož, Slovenia. Once again we have the honor to select best of your submissions / topics in fields of Linux usage in business environment and open source applications.
LPI-Central Europe will also provide networking service for both LPI alumni and prospective employers. Companies seeking Linux professionals and LPI alumni interested in new employment prospects can connect at the LPI booth in Hall 2, Floor D39 of the Hanover Exhibition and Convention Center, Hanover, Germany.
Accessing your bank account through a computer that isn’t used for anything else—no email or Web surfing—and isn’t connected to the local network offers strong protection, says William Nelson, president of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group that collects and shares threat data.
Another option is to use an obscure computer operating system such as Ubuntu or Web browser such as Opera because attackers rarely create malware for them, security experts say.
The first thing we were concerned with, was what’s out there in terms of technology? As we can see in the figure, the results highlighted the high degree of confidence that traditional enterprise server operating systems hold as high-performance work horses. UNIX, Linux and z/OS are all seen positively for the majority of requirements, high-performance or otherwise.
That’s the second purchase this week for Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), which is not normally an acquisitive company. Earlier in the week, it purchased the assets of Exanet, a bankrupt Israeli company that makes Linux-based clustered network-attached storage management software.
The software is designed for small to mid-sized businesses as well as government, education and health institutions. Its primary software product family is called Kbox and it supports systems that run Windows, Macintosh and Linux software.
Google Chrome OS will also consider a distribution of Linux, which is based on kernel / kernel of Linux. On this Linux kernel, it will run the windows and web applications from Google Chrome OS. Since Google Chrome an OS kernel using Linux, your video should be released to the public, so everyone who wants can have access to it. Also, Google Chrome OS must also be free, something that surely will encourage many people to use Google’s operating system.
We are getting more and more news about more industry leading Netbook maker planing on releasing Chrome OS featured NetBook. We might have to wait till end of the year. We already have few specification about some of those NetBook. Google Already Released its code base, still no downloadable iso or burnable disk image, but we already have Chromium OS source code so developer could make their own package, but it’s currently limited to Linux only OS.
I use Linux as my operating system instead of Windows, specifically Kubuntu (kubuntu.org). Deep down, it is very different from Microsoft’s offering, but in general they run a lot of the same programs. Google’s Chromium browser has been available for some time for Windows, but still is not a stable release for Linux, so I have been waiting to try it out. Finally, I decided it was time. Here are my opinions.
I think this is going to be the last -rc of the series, so please do test it out. A number of regressions should be fixed, and while the regression list doesn’t make me _happy_, we didn’t have the kind of nasty things that went on before -rc7 and made me worried.
Linus has released the 2.6.33-rc8 prepatch. “I think this is going to be the last -rc of the series, so please do test it out. A number of regressions should be fixed, and while the regression list doesn’t make me _happy_, we didn’t have the kind of nasty things that went on before -rc7 and made me worried.”
While it’s exciting to have kernel mode-setting, RandR, and EXA / X-Video acceleration for NVIDIA hardware in an open-source driver that is reliable since the mainlining of its DRM code and its adoption in Ubuntu 10.04 and other distributions, Fedora has already employed Nouveau support to various extents in their recent releases.
That’s Spring. What’s Spring? Well, it’s a fairly neat open source RTS framework that started out as a Total Annihilation clone, but more to the point, it’s a pretty complex 3D game. What’s cool about the picture? Well, it’s in the renderer info in the console (which you probably can’t quite make out, never mind). Yup, that’s Spring…running on Nouveau!
Keith Packard has just made available the first release candidate of X Server 1.8 and confirms that its release schedule is still on track. Snapshots and the Git code for X Server 1.8 go back to last year, but with a planned release by the end of March, Keith has now started working on release candidates.
A document processor is a document preparation system. Unlike a word processor, this type of application leads the author to concentrate on the structure of the document rather than its appearance. The author therefore focuses on what he/she wants to say, instead of fretting over page borders, font attributes, or formatting. Moreover, the author will be guided in the organisation, structure, and flow within the document.
The software featured in this article all produce high quality professional documents. The majority of them rely on LaTeX as their rendering engine. LaTeX is a distinguished typesetting system which is designed for the production of scientific and technical documentation. It employs beautifully crafted typesetting algorithms. Academic journals will often accept submission in this format.
Google has announced the availability of version 5.0.307.7 of Chrome for Mac and Linux, the latest betas of its Chrome WebKit-based browser for each platform. According to the developers, Chrome on both platforms features stability improvements to plug-ins, such the Adobe Flash Player, and is now even more reliable.
OProfile is a very handy, useful tool. In the hands of a smart system administrator, it can be used to detect application slowness problems, analyze system bottlenecks, optimize system performance and utilization, and resolve resource/usage conflicts. Combined with a range of other admin programs, some of which we’ve talked about and others we are yet to see, OProfile is a must-have item on the system debugging checklist.
Further, I discovered as I played the game, that it’s fun, and ‘missions’ is a better game metaphore than ‘quests’, in my humble opinion. That is, in World of Warcraft, I always felt like I was a dog, and each quest was an instruction to ‘fetch’. And why on earth does Lieutenant Farren Orinelle need so many Merlock heads? But rescuing a freighter seems like a legitimate thing to do, and if you have to destroy a bunch of Orion ships on the way, well that sort of makes sense as well.
So I’m hoping that my wife and I can play this game for a while. But in order for that to happen, I’ve got to have a release of CrossOver to use to play it. So I put together an unsupported build, and did some basic testing, trying not to take anything away from our efforts on ‘Snow Mallard’. It runs Company of Heroes more nicely, but seems to cause trouble with Left 4 Dead 1 and 2.
Fluendo employs several of the central developers of the GStreamer multimedia framework, which is quickly establishing itself as the de-facto standard multimedia framework for GNU/Linux and UNIX systems.
While there are many open-source games available (just see the recent discussion about the most advanced GPL-ed FPS), most of them are based upon the ioquake3 game engine that in turn is based upon id Software’s open-source id Tech 3 engine. There’s also games like Nexuiz that use the DarkPlaces engine and then also Warsow that uses QFusion. There have also been projects like XreaL that seek to greatly expand upon the visual capabilities of the ioquake3 engine, but many of these projects go on without ever making it to a release stage. Today there is yet another open-source game engine in development.
This question of KDE versus GNOME is something that is so debatable. It is something flame wars are made of. It is a matter of preference, of course. I’ve been using KDE lately and I am seeing some good things about it and some not so good things, at least for me. But I can’t say that it’s a totally useless desktop environment either. It’s pretty good, I think.
A new version of KChildlock v0.57.1 has been released. KChildlock is a tool to monitor and restrict the time a children spends on the computer. The limits can be specified per day of the week, by lower and upper hour limits, maximum daily usage time, and maximum weekly usage time.
This last Tuesday KDE SC 4.4 was released and on a lightning-fast time, neoclust managed to have packages available for Mandriva 2010 on KDE official FTP mirrors (thanks neoclust !!). If you want to upgrade to it, it’s really easy.
If you are interested in joining the team, please join the gnome-infrastructure mailing list and introduce yourself, why you want to join and any relevant skills or experience you have. It is helpful if you have been active in other GNOME teams and can have someone vouch for you. (We are talking about giving you root access to GNOME servers, after all!)
If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email, email the infrastructure list or stop by the #sysadmin IRC channel on GIMPNet IRC.
Dr. Ali Jahangiri, the well known security expert and author of Live Hacking: The Ultimate Guide to Hacking Techniques & Countermeasures for Ethical Hackers & IT Security Experts, is pleased to announce the launch of the Live Hacking CD, a new Linux distribution designed for ethical hacking. The Live Hacking CD contains the tools and utilities you need to test and hack your own network but using the tools and techniques that more malicious hackers would use.
Red Hat released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5, providing memory allocation enhancements to the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor. RHEL 5.5 also introduces new storage and WiFi drivers, and supports new AMD, IBM, and Intel processors, says the company.
Red Hat recently announced financial results for its fiscal year 2010 third quarter ended November 30, 2009. Total revenue for the quarter was $194.3 million, an increase of 18% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $164.4 million, up 21% year-over-year.
Ok, I am a linux guy and most of you will be thinking that why I am writing this . Let me say , even though many people are agreeing with the statement Ubuntu is always better than Windows , there are a lot of people how think that Ubuntu has too few applications available for use . Ubuntu would be more secure , most faster and more stable , but is it up to par with Windows in doing things , like can we use photoshop cs 4 in linux , or can we play assassins creed 2 in Ubuntu . I am not promising you that you could , but I assure you that you can make your ubuntu linux much more better in doing things . Let me show a handful of essential applications for your linux machine which would transform your ubuntu to a real star performer , doing almost everything you can do in windows .
Edubuntu is a Linux based, educational operating system of the Ubuntu version. With Edbuntu, Linux and Ubuntu wants to offer students, children, parents, teachers, schools and other education institutions with a great computer utility meant to enhance their learning process.
With the addition of KDE, Fluxbox as well as 64-bit editions, it turns out that Linux Mint is turning out to be a more than “just another Ubuntu fork”. Let’s hope other Linux Distributions try to provide the user experience that the Linux Mint guys have managed to accomplish.
Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox Community Edition can be downloaded from here and Linux Mint 8 KDE64 Community Edition can be downloaded from here.
Openembedded is the build framework designed to create embedded Linux distributions.
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Based on the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, this release includes the complete kernel with all necessary device drivers for the Chipwrights hardware development kit, source code for media player, media browser and IP camera applications integrated with the Openembedded build environment.
“We plan to use the new capital to pay expenses related to our VoIP operations,” continued Riss. “In addition to the HTC smart phone that utilizes our mobile VoIP service, we are excited about the emergence of Linux-based smart phones that employ session initiation protocol (SIP). We built our VoIP carrier, VoX Communications, to run on a Linux-based SIP product. We believe the new Linux-based mobile devices that use SIP will help our sales growth, as these smart phones are a natural fit for our mobile VoIP product, which runs over the 3G network.”
TES Electronics is shipping a Linux- and Android-ready hardware/software development kit for home automation, transportation entertainment systems, and industrial displays. The Magik-MX Kit offers a module based on a TI OMAP3530 system-on-chip, an I/O board, a seven-inch multi-touch display, and TES’ Guiliani GUI/HMI framework.
NEC Electronics announced an ARM Cortex-A9 version of its Linux-ready EMMA Mobile series of multimedia system-on-chips, and it’s also shipping a Linux/Android hardware/software kit for its earlier EMMA Mobile 1.
With the N900 Nokia was clearly looking to bridge the gap between laptop and smartphone – and it’s certainly feels like having a mini laptop in your pocket. Aside from the text input issue, it’s more powerful than a basic netbook. It’s inevitably a little awkward to use a phone, but it can be done, and as technology exercise it’s impressive. As such we’d recommend it for geekier gadget hounds, but for the normal – an Android device is a more sensible way to go.
A bit about the Maemo operating system running the Nokia N900 smart phone. Maemo is a sophisticated linux orientated operating system which Nokia have used to power their Nokia N900 smart phone. Most likely we will see this operating system develop into over several different versions on the next generation Nokia’s like Google release new and improved Androids platforms.
One of the great aspects of the Maemo operating being linux based is that it is open source software. This allows the growing list of developer and the flowing community like with HTC followers. Their commitment for improvements and modifications to the Maemo software to help Maemo users with their user experience. Also to help Nokia to effectively improve its operating system as to the mass user requirement. Giving what people want. Not what you think they might need.
Teleca (STO:TELCB) demonstrates how the mobile world can “Love Smart Solutions” at this year’s MWC. Focusing on three solution areas, Mobile Linux, User Experiences and Mobile Applications, the company will be showing the way to increased profitability.
To enter a word, a user slides a finger or stylus from letter to letter, passing through each required letter as well as others that are “in the way,” and lifting only when the word is completed.
However, whilst the new version’s name was mentioned, any other given facts seemed to be severely lacking. Working out of the Mountain View based centre for Android’s Linux-based kernel, Mr Swetland released only the name of the new version, and said that because development was moving so swiftly, by the time ‘Gingerbread’ became widely available they would “likely be on (Linux kernel 2.6.).33 or .34.”
Members of the device tinkering community have managed successfully get a Droid device to connect to USB peripherals. The Linux-based Android OS should be readily extensible, but the hardware that is wrapped around the OS isn’t always conducive to all the possibilities. The trick isn’t quite polished, it involves making your own USB cord and some cable swapping during a hard boot. It’s still a little buggy, but it’s a great step forward.
Branded as a Compaq device, HP’s Airlife 100 netbook is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM processor that’s found in a number of recently released smartphones including Google’s Nexus One.
With eeeBuntu on the Asus Netbook, this capability is available through the on-board Bluetooth radio. It’s theoretically possible to transfer files and browse the directories on most Bluetooth-equipped phones. Today, we’ll look at how some of the features work and explore some of the quirks of using Bluetooth that might trip you up.
My tests were carried out running eeeBuntu 3.0 (kernel version 2.6.29-1-netbook) on an Asus eeePC 1000HE with a 130 GB disk and 2 GB of memory. The little machine also had a Logitech Nano notebook mouse and uses the Atom N280 processor.
Since my dad taught me how to dual-boot Mandrake Linux 7 with Windows ME in my early pre-teen years, I have not owned a single computer that hasn’t had a Linux distribution on it. And for many years, KDE was my desktop manager of choice. Sometime around KDE 3.4, I deemed KDE too clunky and left it to experiment with other desktop managers.
Still, I never forgot about my roots in the Linux world, and indeed KDE 4 brought KDE significantly forward towards modern desktops. Now, KDE seems to be turning towards everyone’s favorite rising PC market: netbooks.
When I first began looking at Moblin a while back, people told me that it was nice, but that I’d miss the standard application set of my operating system of choice, Ubuntu. Interestingly, the trend in the space is actually towards even fewer applications than Moblin allows; the Lenovo Skylight, one intriguing option, is preloaded not with a standard application set, but with widgets running on top of a thin Linux film. Chrome OS, of course, goes even further, dispensing with the idea of applications entirely and pushing a browser only experience.
In 2001 Apple released the iPod, making it a revolutionary year in consumer electronics . Apple began to turn things around, embracing design, making tech cool and, most importantly of all, making relatively complicated computer technology available to the masses.
I’m in the midst of creating a local Linux Users Group and I’m cobbling together a quick logo using a Creative Commons photograph, GIMP for making the image properly black and white, and Inkscape for setting the type (FreeSans) and bringing all the elements together.
Every time I use Inkscape it is a joy and a pleasure. In terms of usability and interface, it is so much nicer than Adobe Illustrator (and I used Illustrator every day for 10 years!). It is also so much cheaper. Like, Free. And it’s available for Windows.
For years, we’ve heard claims that, for all the wonders of “free software,” the “real” CIO would never use free software, as they would need to have a clear monetary relationship with the provider to ensure things wouldn’t go bad. Of course, that’s pretty silly. Lots of IT departments have made use of all sorts of free software such as Linux and Apache, but a new study suggests that CIOs are quite comfortable with using free software, finding that “76% of CIOs surveyed say they use free software at the enterprise level and 88% said they have free software deployed at the department level.”
Phipps continued, adding that, “Ultimately, the choice between packaged, sealed-edge, closed software and open source software, is the choice between viewing your IT as a cost center or a competitive weapon. Companies that see IT as a competitive weapon have tended to pick UNIX and the Java platform among other technologies, because it leaves them in control of their IT architecture.”
Donatella Both my kids use three operating systems without any problems, in spite of cliches and of Nikko’s autism. They watch YouTube, listen to music and do many other things on Windows, Linux and Mac without noticing any difference, with the exception of the unintelligible error messages that Windows sends every time it crashes. I prefer when they use the other systems because I am the one who has to restart the computer when that happens!
Stop: Apart from being forced to use an operating system that you really don’t like, did you have other problems while using computers or the Internet?
After six weeks of full-time hacking, with the help of a few friends, we have made it to receiving actual BCCH data from a GSM cell.
So what does this mean? As I have indicated publicly at the 26C3 conference: Now, that we have managed to create a working GSM network-side implementation (OpenBSC) during the last year, we will proceed to do the same with the phone side.
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So, if you want to write Free Software for such a device, you have two options:
* Reverse engineering the existing hardware and writing your code based on that information
* Building your own hardware and then writing the software you wanted to write.
The great hope nurtured by many of us who spend our days in the open source software communities is that the fundamental principles upon which open source software is built — The Open Source Way — will permeate other industries and walks of life over time, allowing all sorts of new and exciting problems to be solved using methods that value transparency, collaboration, and a meritocracy of ideas.
Beehive, an Apache Software Foundation open source project providing a Java programming model, has been retired due to inactivity, the foundation said on Wednesday.
In a revision of what the company had said previously, Oracle now will enable projects hosted on the soon-to-be-shut Project Kenai site to be moved to the java.net site.
If Oracle can provide a first-rate connect-anywhere, edit-anywhere online office suite, it might have finally found something that can break Microsoft’s stronghold on business productivity tools.
That’s what I’d be looking for in follow on versions to OpenOffice 3.2.
If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive. Nearly 10 years in the making, OpenOffice.org has evolved from a clunky proprietary offering that struggled to import Microsoft Office documents to a productivity powerhouse that is faster, supports a fully open document format (ODF) and handles most proprietary formats with grace.
IBM is taking Lotus Symphony, a suite built on OpenOffice.org, to the Mac platform and recently launched a next-gen beta for the office suite.
“Customers are looking for options and choice,” said Rennie. They are looking for options to bring employees and people together and edit, write and change documents in an open standards based way.”
As Mozilla Messaging looks to monetize its services, the project should think strongly about providing a top-to-bottom solution. Not just connecting with other services, but providing the mail hosting and services that users want. Mozilla Messaging and Status.net (which provides the popular Identi.ca microblogging service) seem like natural allies, for example. I’m not entirely sure what a successful model would look like — but merely providing a client or add-on for existing services doesn’t seem the surest path to success. And I do want to see Mozilla succeed here, for a couple of reasons.
There are lots of content management systems out there. Most of which are open source and normally get the job done. However, Drupal stands out amongst them for a host of reasons, five of which are
The Keil CA51 Compiler for PSoC 3 and the GNU GCC-ARM Compiler for PSoC 5 are both bundled with the PSoC Creator distribution. The Keil Vision 4 IDE and debugger are also available for use with the Cypress PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 devices.
When you write code in Python you can be almost sure your code will run on different operating systems. I say almost sure, not completely sure, because some of the libraries and packages you are using can have different behaviors on different systems.
Python for S60 (PyS60) has been in flux for some time, with various project forks, but with the official release of Python S60 v2.0, it appears that time is over.
JAPANESE ELECTRONICS OUTFIT Toshiba and Keio University in Tokyo have made a technological breakthrough that allows SSDs of up to 1TB capacity to be made the size of a postage stamp.
That is about a 90 per cent reduction in size compared to a standard 2.5-inch hard disk drive.
People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.
People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk, the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.
If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to college education, the less educated your audience, the more likely they are to click through on an advertisement.
The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO, has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives.
Three unarmed security guards were following orders last month when they stood by without intervening as a 15-year-old girl was badly beaten in a downtown Seattle bus tunnel. Now the company they work for and government officials say those orders should be revised.
Except… perhaps that’s not always true. Eric points us to the news that Indian movie star Shahrukh Khan (oddly, I just saw one of his movies) is claiming that the staff at London’s Heathrow airport had not just connected his scan to who he was, but also printed it out and circulated it among some staff.
The law of unintended consequences has arrived in full force on British campuses, as government policies designed to control immigration turn academic staff into state informers and impose draconian surveillance on UK students and academics.
The US military in Iraq freed an Iraqi freelance journalist working for the Thomson Reuters media group on Wednesday after holding him for 17 months without charge, the company said.
Thus governments cannot substantially reduce drug use, prostitution, or immigration by raising the penalty (supply costs): If demand is strong, underground markets will accommodate it. Whether policy should attempt to reduce these demands is a different question. Regardless, policies that only address the supply side cost a lot and afford minimal results.
Security updates 10.0.45.2 for the Adobe Flash Player and 1.5.3.1930 for AIR fix a critical security vulnerability which allows Flash applets to circumvent certain security functions in order to access other websites without obtaining the user’s permission. A specially crafted Flash file on a malicious web page could read data, including banking data or similar, displayed in other open browser windows.
The proposed entity would provide “user-friendly” information to help governments and businesses adapt to climate change, creating a central federal source of information on everything from projections of sea level rise to maps of the nation’s best sites for wind and solar power.
“Even with our best efforts, we know that some degree of climate change is inevitable,” said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department includes NOAA. “American citizens, businesses and governments — from local to federal — must be able to rise to the challenges that lie ahead. And that’s where NOAA’s climate service will prove absolutely invaluable.”
Rich nations furthered their “conspiracy to divide the developing world” at December’s UN climate summit in Copenhagen, while Canada “connived” and the EU acted “to please the United States”, according to an internal document from a Chinese government thinktank obtained by the Guardian.
A new breed of colonialism is rampaging across the world, with rich nations buying up the natural resources of developing countries that can ill afford to sell. Some staggering deals have already been done, says Paul Vallely, but angry locals are now trying to stop the landgrabs
Carbon dioxide is “essentially harmless” to human beings and good for plants. So now will you stop worrying about global warming?
Utah’s House of Representatives apparently has at least. Officially the most Republican state in America, its political masters have adopted a resolution condemning “climate alarmists”, and disputing any scientific basis for global warming.
The measure, which passed by 56-17, has no legal force, though it was predictably claimed by climate change sceptics as a great victory in the wake of the controversy caused by a mistake over Himalayan glaciers in the UN’s landmark report on global warming.
Auction rate securities are again in the news, and they are still garbage, but some smell worse than others link here. Some actually have modest value but new ones are not being sold. What went wrong?
The first problem was that no one bothered to look at the underlying securities. When prospectuses were sought long after the market crashed, they were hard to find. But why bother, as the derivatives were repriced and could be rolled over in monthly auctions. They came with high ratings from S & P or Moody’s or Fitch and they were apparently completely liquid but paid better than other short term securities.
There is an established legal principle that people should not have to repay their government’s debt to the extent that it is incurred to launch aggressive wars or to oppress the people.
These “odious debts” are considered to be the personal debts of the tyrants who incurred them, rather than the country’s debt.
Given China’s success and the way power and wealth are shifting east, Google’s recent announcement on China generated a lot of debate at Davos. It was a decision seen as both courageous and foolish, often at the same time. Weren’t we quitting the Yukon just as gold was found? It’s a good question. But in the end, you have to do what you believe is right.
After about two dozen years in Congress, Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana was after bigger game — the giant, 200-pound whitetail deer that run through the area of south Texas that hunters call the Golden Triangle.
The longer this goes on and the larger the loss in potential company profits, the less likely any reform seems. Consider now that none of this would be happening if drugs weren’t patented.
Well, now, instead of allowing a real “word of mouth” viral campaign with the video, it looks like EMI/Capitol has decided to bootstrap a fake viral word of mouth campaign, by sending around emails (and even submitting directly to us) a request to “get a free Ok Go” song if you just Tweet about it. Seriously. So rather than letting people organically share what they wanted to share, EMI is trying to bribe people into promoting something else.
The Court of Appeal rejected that claim, saying that according to a precedent set in a previous case domestic law will apply so long as much of the activity in question took place in the UK.
Recent DDoS chaos on the Australian internet may have been great fun for all involved – but behind the good-humoured anarchy lies a growing concern that the government really does have a dark and Big Brotherly vision for the future of politics in the country.
As reported in The Register this week, groups exasperated by government plans for a mandatory firewall that will censor far more than the child porn material claimed, finally resorted to long-promised direct action, with a short and successful DDoS attack on government sites and offices.
Google says it will not “voluntarily” comply with the government’s request that it censor YouTube videos in accordance with broad “refused classification” (RC) content rules.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google’s censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.
In the wake of iiNet’s recent court win, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy has said that he wants the film and internet industries to sit down and try and work out a code of conduct to prevent pirating of copyrighted works rather than working towards legislation changes.
I think this is a great idea — and the world needs places where free speech is much more seriously protected, but I do wonder how it will work in practice.
It’s a horrible situation all around, but it looks like the International Olympic Committee is trying to stifle the whole thing by using copyright claims to take down videos on YouTube, saying that only those who paid for broadcast rights can show the video. Now, this could be part of a pre-arranged effort by the Olympics to try to stop any Olympics videos from hitting YouTube, but it shows the problem with such a blanket policy.
Flirting with 90 mph on a $100 million track pushing speed to the outer limits, the luger from the republic of Georgia tilted his head slightly forward as his sled climbed the high-banked wall.
Tania Branigan reports from Beijing on the 11-year sentence handed to Liu Xiaobo Link to this video
The US and European Union today renewed calls for the immediate release of high profile dissident Liu Xiaobo, as a Chinese court upheld his 11-year-sentence.
Now, we’ve got a bit more to throw at you, LBers. One of the lawyers handling the case for the defendants (that is, defending the constitutionality of Prop. 8) sent us a note recently attacking the plaintiffs’ approach in the case. Specifically, Brian Raum, the head of marriage litigation for the Alliance Defense Fund, has accused the plaintiffs and their lead lawyers, David Boies and Ted Olson, of unfairly attacking religion.
You may remember last year that the Conference Board of Canada (who, until then, was pretty well respected) released a report on “intellectual property policy” that was blatantly plagiarized from US copyright industry lobbyists.
Online video sharing site Veoh is going out of business. The AllThingsD blog says it cut the entire staff yesterday and a bankruptcy filing is expected soon.
[...]
“Veoh is dead. Universal Music lawsuit was the main killer. Veoh won resoundingly but was mortally wounded by the senseless suit.”
Dmitry Shapiro, CEO and founder of Veoh, said part of the company’s problems were due to a costly legal battle with Universal Music Group over copyright infringement and the challenging economic environment.
Veoh basically won big in the lawsuit. Time and time again, every trick that Universal Music tried — including suing Veoh’s investors directly, was rejected by the judge, and the final ruling late last year was that Veoh abided by the DMCA and was protected by its safe harbors from Universal Music’s lawsuit. It was a complete victory.
You don’t compete with “free” by taking your ball and going home. You don’t compete with “free” by pretending that old artificial scarcities are coming back after the wall has been broken down. You don’t compete with “free” by suing customers. You don’t compete with “free” by shunning those who have business models that work. You compete with free by offering a better product and a better business model. WMG is choosing to go in the other direction.
But apparently Lone Wolf has been sending out cease-and-desists to websites that have nothing to do with Lone Wolf’s Army Builder, and demanding that the phrase be blocked in forums on totally different subjects. Yes, they’re saying that no one can use the term in conversation
[...]
Update: As pointed out in the comments — and in a friendly email from Lone Wolf’s lawyers — Lone Wolf has backed down a bit and sorta, but not really, apologized. The guy claims that he’s not a lawyer (though, whoever emailed us said they were a lawyer representing the company), and didn’t quite realize what he was doing (and it showed).
As for the copyright claim, again, that seems rather weak, as it seems to focus on still images. There may be an issue with the unauthorized documentary makers originally using a cover that was similar to the original cover pitched by Heckelsville, but even then, the makers of the unauthorized documentary have already agreed to change the cover to make it different.
nfarrell writes “Last week, an Australian Judge ruled that copyright laws do not apply to collections of facts, regardless of the amount of effort that was spent collecting them. In this case, the case surrounded the reproduction of entries from the White and Yellow Pages, but the ruling referred to a previous case involving IceTV, which republishes TV guides. Does this mean that other databases of facts, such as financial data, are also legally able to be copied and redistributed?” Here are analyses from a former legal adviser to the directory publisher which prevailed as the defendant in this case, and from Smart Company.
There are some places that do allow copyrights on aggregated facts, but a growing body of research has found that such “database rights” or copyrights on aggregated facts tends to hinder innovation rather than encourage it — and if the purpose of copyright law is to create incentives for new works and for innovation, allowing copyrights on collections of factual information is a bad idea. So, congrats to Australia on another good copyright ruling.
Google’s deletion of music blogs accused of distributing music without permission has proven to be a controversial topic this week, as one might expect. Some are calling it “Musicblogocide 2010,” according to The Guardian, whose in-depth article on the topic is titled: “Google shuts down music blogs without warning.”
Nobody likes to hear that music bloggers — who tend to write with infectious enthusiasm benefiting both fans and copyright holders — lost years of work when they may not so much have broken the law as grazed up against it. It seems especially unfortunate if they enabled an avoidable outcome by ignoring or being ignorant of the stakes of not taking the proper corrective actions when formally warned they were in violation of dreaded (and widely ignored) terms of service. (Deleted blogs include Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap, Ryan’s Smashing Life, and Living Ears.)
Remember back in December when Vice President Joe Biden hosted a one-sided “piracy summit”, ridiculously declaring that “all of the stakeholders” were present (despite there not being a single representative from the technology industry, nor anyone representing consumer interests or ISPs). The “stakeholders” were entirely the entertainment industry. And, even better, despite promises of openness and transparency, the press was kicked out so top execs from most of the major entertainment industry companies could collude talk directly with many of the top administration officials, including Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and others. You knew that this wasn’t just a random meet and greet and that something would come out of it.
And, indeed, less than two months later, we have Eric Holder announcing a special “IP task force” within the Justice Department designed to take on “the rise in intellectual property crime.”
The department said the new task force emerged out of a White House meeting hosted by Vice President Biden in December, which included Holder and other members of the president’s Cabinet as well as executives from the movie studios, record companies, book publishers and television networks. Biden said in a statement that the Obama administration “is committed to stronger and stricter enforcement of intellectual property rights, and this new task force is a step in the right direction.”
Indeed, what many people have pointed out is that the really pernicious part of ACTA is in reading between the lines. There are already international agreements on intellectual property that include clear safe harbors and consumer protection. What’s notable in the leaked drafts of ACTA is that such things are missing. So even if it doesn’t force the US to change the law, it could very much hinder attempts by US to come to its senses and fix the broken parts of the law.
The Bill provides for the Secretary of State to have the power to require ISPs to take “technical measures” in respect of account holders who have been the subject of copyright infringement reports. The scope of the measures will be defined in secondary legislation and could be wide-ranging.
We do not believe that such a skeletal approach to powers which engage human rights is appropriate. There is potential for these powers to be applied in a disproportionate manner which could lead to a breach of internet users’ rights to respect for correspondence and freedom of expression.
Today’s news that Google shut down music blogs that were accused of copyright infringement is rightfully getting plenty of coverage. Mostly, it is being held up as another in a long line of examples of problems with the DMCA notice-and-takedown system. This is a great example of a problem with the DMCA because, at least according to The Guardian, the notices that Google relied on to delete the blogs were woefully incomplete. Google should not have acted until it had proper notices from rights holders, including the name of the actual work allegedly infringed. Since many of the notices did not even include this information, there was no way for the bloggers to file a DMCA counternotice.
They’re based on the false belief that copyright infringement is an easy “yes” or “no” decision that can be determined upon seeing it. But what we’re discovering in both this situation and in the Viacom situation is that even the copyright holders are really bad at figuring out if something is infringing or not. So why should anyone expect third parties to be able to do a better job?
And, really, what’s the problem here? Some might claim that it’s unfair to the original authors whose work she used — but the author of the largest segments, named Airen, is getting a ton of attention for Airen’s own book, which received little actual attention when originally published.
Mandriva, Europe’s leading Linux publisher, devolps and releases every six months a new version designed to respond simply and efficiently to all users’ needs, whether they are destined for professional or private activities.
I have tried to do business with Dell and I have worked with a lot of good equipment from Dell, but they make everything so hard. Try:
* finding anything with Linux on their site
* finding anything on their site if you are in the wrong class of customers
* finding identical kit running GNU/Linux or that other OS as options
* now, installing a hard drive on their servers just got harder
Often I get the question, “Why should I use Linux?”. Obviously this is a very nebulous question that may have as many different reasons as there are Linux users, but let’s try and answer it anyway.
Several changes to the X86 and KVM code are to speed up the kernel’s own hypervisor. The kernel developers once again revised and considerably extended the still emerging tracing infrastructure. The Power and PowerPC code now also supports the Gamecube and Wii games consoles.
When releasing Linux 2.6.33-rc7 at the end of last week, Linus Torvalds expressed some dissatisfaction because the main development branch currently contains more flaws than he would like. He asked the developers to take another close look at the list of known bugs in the predecessor of 2.6.33 and indicated that he will probably release an eighth RC before finalising Linux 2.6.33.
A docky helper is a small plugin that adds functionality to the dock icon when the application is open. We’ve already seen Banshee, Pidgin and Rhythmbox helpers, Zeitgeist, Liferea and torrent application Deluge have one too. Now GTG! joins the ranks of the super-helpful!
Once installed the cover-art mode is fully toggle-able. Double clicking on a cover will play that album and drag n’ dropping a picture on to an album square sets it as the artwork.
Mike Day, chief virtualization architect at IBM, noted during the Red Hat-sponsored Open Source Cloud Computing Forum this week that the KVM development community has become very active in 2009 — encompassing a wide array of organizations.
He said that after examining the project’s mailing list to gauge the activity taking place in KVM development, he found that there were some 884 unique participants in the mailing list, roughly equivalent to the number of active KVM developers. Those participants were spread across 382 unique address domains from somewhere in the range of 250 to 300 separate. According to Day, organizations that participate in KVM range from large corporations, to government and educational organization, as well as individual contributors.
The Fedora-related Fedora Unity project has made respins of Fedora 12, which was released last autumn, available to download as ISO files for i386 and x86_64 systems. The respins are updated versions of the traditional CD and DVD installation media of Fedora 12 which already contain many updates that have since been released; once installation via such a respin is complete, users only need to install the package updates released by the Fedora project in the past few days.
Despite being a self-confessed distro-hopper, I have dwelled for a long time with Sidux. As a hardcore KDE fan, the obvious choice was to test Simply Mepis 8.5 beta 4. I carry a high opinion about Simply Mepis since I have used it some 5 years ago. It was a perfect desktop and the reason for my liking towards KDE. Later I have hopped to Kubuntu, Debian testing and finally to Sidux.
Parsix is a Linux distribution based on Kanotix and Debian. It is purely a desktop-focused distribution. The last major release was Parsix 3.0r0 (aka Kev). This review is of Parsix 3.0r2, the second update release of Kev.
One of the slated features for Ubuntu 10.04 early on in its development cycle was support for the Nouveau graphics driver on NVIDIA hardware since it’s much better than the xf86-video-nv driver mess and has a much brighter future, which is especially important with 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release. This was prior to Nouveau going mainline with Linux 2.6.33, but Ubuntu Lucid is running with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel so as a result Nouveau’s DRM was back-ported.
Weta Digital is the digital visual effects company which worked on the visual effects of the flora and fauna of Pandora. To achieve the impressive visual effects, Weta Digital have modified their in-house software Massive and used their 10,000 square foot Data Center with more than 40,000 CPUs.
While I almost completely switched to Arch Linux for all of my computers, my wife is still an Ubuntu girl, and probably always will be. She just loves it, and all of her computers run it. She recently purchased a netbook that came with Windows 7, and she immediately wanted me to wipe it and put Ubuntu on it. While I offered to install the UNR version (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) on it she made it clear that she just wanted standard Ubuntu, and that’s what I did. In addition, I inherited a netbook as well, though I decided that I would give the UNR edition a try.
I’ve used Crunchbang Linux (‘#!’ to its friends) for the last several months as the secondary Linux distro on my Aspire AS1410. It’s simple and elegant, although its default settings tend towards dark themes — if #! had a favorite color, it be black. The distro is built on the base provided by Ubuntu 9.04, but replaces Gnome with the lightweight and flexible Openbox environment and a different selection of default applications and utilities.
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To sum up, Crunchbang is a fabulous distro for an intermediate-or-above Linux user. The CLI-phobic should not apply, nor those afraid to edit a config file. #! is not my main distribution, mainly because I use it to play with, discover and experiment. (Not Crunchbang’s fault, but I’ve learned the hard way over time to keep things I depend on having around safely on another partition, if not on a completely different machine.) It is a good fit for users with a good technical abilities or newbies with the curiosity (and occasional intestinal fortitude) to explore the possibilities it offers, and who don’t need or want to do everything through a GUI. It stands as another great example of what a small but inspired group can do in the OSS world.
A few minutes ago, Clement Lefebvre and the hard working community behind the Linux Mint community announced the immediate availability of two new editions for the Helena release: Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox and Linux Mint 8 KDE64! While the latter contains exactly the same amount of new features like the Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition, but compiled especially for 64-bit processors, such as Intel Core 2 Quad, Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2 64, the Fluxbox edition is brand-new and it is powered by Linux 2.6.31, X.Org 7.4 and Fluxbox 1.1.1.
NetGear announced a Linux-based 3G mobile router developed in collaboration with Ericsson. The NetGear MBRN3300E 3G Mobile Broadband Router combines an internal 3G radio, an 802.11n WiFi access point, an Ethernet swtich, and four Ethernet ports, sharing 3G bandwidth over WiFi and Ethernet, says the company.
Mobile World Congress — the global annual gathering of mobile mavericks — kicks off in Barcelona, Spain on Feb. 15 but is already being anointed as an All-About-Android affair.
Like any other operating system, most Android phones come preinstalled only with a minimum set of applications that are sufficient to get you started. But to really get the best out of it, you have to go into the Marketplace and grab the third-party apps.
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 15-18, 2010 will have the Garmin and Asus alliance presenting their nüvifone A50, a smartphone with navigation capabilities.
HP has tipped an Android-based netbook, heading for the Spanish carrier Telefonica, according to several reports. HP’s Compaq Airlife 100 is said to run a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor clocked to 1GHz, with 16GB of flash storage and a 10-inch 1,024 x 600 touchscreen.
Overall I still like the KDE Netbook desktop better than the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is Gnome-based. I hope that in addition to Kubuntu, some of my other favorite distributions will include the KDE Netbook desktop in their next release.
Research Group, to whom we have made some questions to better understand what the project iFreeTablet, where to expect to get with him and what future awaits us in the digital home.
[...]
The iFreeTablet, like OLPC (one computer per child), intended as a solidarity project. Special Network Foundation Spain’s main objective is to try to reduce the digital divide. Obviously, we can not conduct ourselves as a partner and we have a technology-based companies and
In an open letter to Jobs, the FSF writes: “DRM will give Apple and their corporate partners the power to disable features, block competing products (especially free software) censor news, and even delete books, videos, or news stories from users’ computers without notice – using the device’s ‘always on’ network connection”.
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If you want to add your name to the list, then you can head over the DefectiveByDesign site now where there’s more info to be had on why the “iPad is iBad for freedom.”
Carsten Fuchs Software has open sourced its Cafu 3D graphics engine and game development kit, formerly known as the Ca3D-Engine. The Cafu Engine includes support for a number of 3D rendering and material system features, multi-player network support, and cross-platform and cross-compiler portability.
A development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process is how it is often defined by The Open Source Initiative (OSI). This non-profit corporation was formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community. The promise of open source is simply better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.
[...]
The common misconception is that open source is about free as in software thats costs nothing. On the contrary it’s about freedom. It’s about control. Access to the source code gives you the freedom to tailor make it to your requirement and situation. Public domain information must be free from barriers to access or reuse traditionally copyrighted, so when you create make it free from any copyright protection or if you have already created something, let it free and watch it soar.
However, the presence of an open source product in one-third of an established market is still nothing to sneeze at. And a majority of companies are, to some extent, embracing the LAMP (Linux operating system, Apache middleware, MySQL, and Perl, Python and PHP programming languages) stack at least for some applications.
This week on Linux Outlaws: Company tries to patent Bradley Kuhn, Symbian now open source, Matt Asay becomes new Canonical COO, Windows 7 kills laptop batteries and much more…
If you never got a chance to join the Open Source Think Tank, the leading invitation-only commercial open source brainstorm and networking conference, get a gist of what you can hear, below an excerpt of my notes from the 4th Open Source Think Tank.
The GPL is what makes FLOSS work. Period. There is nothing wrong with the licence that folks trying to sidestep it would fix. Live with it Matt.
The world needs cheap IT and they can get it using mass production/Moore’s Law/FLOSS. A side effect of Free Software licences is that you cannot charge a high price for it because others can distribute the same stuff for less. This is a good thing, Matt. It means more affordable IT in emerging markets and greater innovation because the barriers to entry in any field of IT is less. Sell services, not FLOSS.
How does OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office (MSO)? The question is harder to answer than you might expect. Few users have the experience or patience to do a thorough comparison. Too often, they miss features that have different names or are in different positions in the editing window. Or, perhaps they overlook the fact that some features, although missing in one, easily can be added through customization. Yet another problem when comparing something to MSO is which of the eight current versions of MSO do you use for the comparison?
The concept of an office suite, with word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, is one that is well understood by users, which is also why it’s often difficult to improve them. Users already expect their office suites to do certain things, making the job of office suite developers often one of fit and finish.
If you’re a database manager, and your database runs on multiple platforms, your job is pretty complex. Ensuring the consistency of a schema under active development across different operating systems is a tedious task. But take heart – a tool called SchemaCrawler may make your job easier.
Valentines Day is a celebration of love and affection between intimate companions. This year why not take the opportunity to show you care about the people and Free Software that show you love all year round? Here are our suggestions for making this February the fourteenth a very special day.
A month of the Hurd: Arch Hurd, FOSDEM preparations and a thesis on mobile Hurd objects.
This month, we saw the first booting version of an Arch Hurd system, which seconds the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution that already provides two third of the Debian software archive compiled for GNU/Hurd.
Nine Hurd developers will meet at FOSDEM 2010 on February 6th and 7th in Bruxelles, Belgium. On Sunday, Olaf will be giving two presentations in the Alt-OS Developer Room: Why is Anyone Still Working on the GNU Hurd? (10:30), and Porting KGI graphics drivers from Linux to GNU Hurd (13:00). The day before, on Saturday, Bas will be giving a talk about Iris, his new kernel (18:00, Embedded Developer Room).
The bad news – his talk will be in the Innovations Center and it’s going to fill to capacity before 200 people get in the door.
I asked and was told that they will be setting up video in other rooms, but I’m going to suggest you contact RIT and ask them to find a bigger space and/or stream the talk live.
I would also suggest that you not let the space limitations and time of day stop you from making plans to attend or prevent you tweeting, forwarding, etc to anyone you think might want to attend.
On Thursday, 11 February 2010 at 1 pm, Richard Stallman, co-founder of GNU/Linux, will lead a protest on the Unterer Waisenhausplatz in Berne against the Berne Copyright Convention.
The protest criticizes the Berne Copyright Convention as unacceptable in the Internet era, for several reasons.
* Copyright lasts far too long.
* Works should only be covered by copyright if published with copyright notices.
* The “three step test” for exceptions to copyright places the copyright holders above the public, and interferes with liberties that the Internet-using public must have.
Even if the guy has his weirdnesses (but which genious doesn’t?), I’ve always admired Richard “rms” Stallman for his uncompromised integrity. As Gruber puts it, say what you want about him but he walks the walk.
But after watching [fr] the discussion RMS held about [fr] his biography, I find myself reconsidering the reasons of my admiration. For integrity is not a quality, it is one of the perceived results of intrinsical qualities.
I will be giving a talk about the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement in the Free Software Foundation Europe’s Berlin meeting on Thursday, February 11th, next week. The talk will start at 19:30 in the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystraße 48. Hopefully, we will have a chance to continue discussing the topic over a few beers right after the meeting, too.
At least three open source projects in the Czech Republic are working to allow platform independent access to the government’s electronic message service. The mandatory service, called ‘Datove schranky’ (Data boxes) is currently only accessible on computers running Microsoft’s proprietary operating system.
Every year, Wikipedia usage goes upward, and every year the technical folks working and volunteering with Wikimedia have to plan, purchase, and implement new servers to keep up to the growing popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects. With the advances in computing, running 9 new application servers this year took the load of 36 application servers from 3 years ago.
A 9-cubic millimeter solar-powered sensor system developed at the University of Michigan is the smallest that can harvest energy from its surroundings to operate nearly perpetually.
Google has emerged as a surprise contender to invest in Britain’s fibre broadband network.
The search giant yesterday announced plans to build a gigabit fibre broadband network in the US. The test network will see Google deliver fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) connections to up to half a million US homes.
The guys at thinkbigworksmall link all the pieces together about how Goldman’s elite have once again rigged the game against the taxpayer in a sweetheart deal.
With hindsight, perhaps it should have looked fishy from the start that the British public had decided to take sides with the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Campaigners for a “Robin Hood tax” watched with alarm as thousands of votes poured into their website, rejecting their proposal for a levy on City wheeler-dealing, to raise money to fight poverty and climate change.
After a bit more investigation, though, the unlikely backlash against the rob-the-rich plan – almost 5,000 no votes against the Robin Hood tax within 20 minutes – turned out to emanate from just two computer servers, one of which was registered to the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
A former Goldman Sachs Group programer was indicted on charges he stole computer code for the investment bank’s high-frequency trading platform, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.
The OpenNet Initiative is proud to release its 2009 Year in Review, a look into instances of filtering, surveillance, and information warfare around the world in 2009.
Like many other people, our church and, more importantly, our Christian school, ran the Windows operating system on all computers. We have about 15 computers in classrooms in addition to our computer lab of 25 computers. They were not the greatest computers to begin with – Pentium 3, 8GB HDD, 64-128 Mb of RAM – but that soon changed. We were given a large donation of 65 Dell Optiplex GX260s one year ago. Still not up to today’s standards, but a huge improvement over what we had and adequate for our current needs.
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There had to be a responsible alternative. And there was. The answer was found in the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Now, there are many variations (distributions) of Linux, but I have been using Ubuntu since 2006 on my personal computers.
Cyclone is not restricted to running the 16 applications mentioned above in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) manner (with others coming out shortly), but can also be used as raw computing to run homegrown code or any other Linux applications that HPC shops have a license to run (known as IaaS in the cloud lingo).
Our test system was made up of an Intel Core i3 530 clocked at 3.31GHz, an ECS H55H-M motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, and a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD. On the software side we were running a snapshot of Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” that included the Linux 2.6.32-12 (x86_64) kernel, GNOME 2.29.6, X Server 1.7.4 RC2, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.99, Mesa 7.7, and an EXT4 file-system. Many other distributions this quarter and next are shipping with Mesa 7.7 and the Linux 2.6.32 kernel so this should provide an overall look at what to expect in terms of the open-source R500/600/700 3D performance. Besides the already mentioned plans for future articles, we will also be delivering fresh ATI Radeon benchmarks from Fedora 13 to see how the latest bleeding edge code is performing.
LottaNZB 0.5.3 Usenet client for Linux is released. It both features some new bells and whistles, making the application ready for future releases of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but also includes numerous bug fixes.
There is one caveat with this program though. It cannot import any proprietary files, i.e. PageMaker files. If you have old files that you created in a proprietary program, you must recreate the file from scratch. Apparently the developers of Scribus did not want to encounter any issues with the proprietary programs, so they decided to stay away and make Scribus completely independent.
By now, you should have already heard of the popular Wine software that allows you to install Windows applications in Linux. There is also another paid application – CrossOver that utilities Wine and comes with a simplified GUI to help you get the job done easier. Now, here’s another software that is as powerful as Wine and as user-friendly as Crossover, and best of all, it is free.
Next time you hear someone say that Linux is “no good for games” remind them of this small snapshot of what is available. There are many other great RPG’s available natively for Linux and whilst this article only covers RPG titles you will find that sims, fps’s et al have a range of titles equally as impressive. When you add the emulation scene in too, you can start to see how silly the “no good for games” is. True the latest GTA is not yet written with Linux in mind, but with the maturing of Wine, modern games are making it onto the Linux platform.
Again, after comparing Ubuntu 9.10 versus Mandriva 2010, I try to write my own opinion regarding comparison between Gnome and KDE. I think most of Linux users agree that Gnome used by most Linux users better than KDE. But, is Gnome better than KDE?
KDE 4.4 comes with Amarok 2.2.2 as the music player. Amarok can make use of KNotify for displaying Now Playing information, instead of its OSD feature.
The RunnerManager interface in libplasma which powers KRunner (among other interfaces) was designed to allow plugins a-plenty so that one search term could be matched in “real time” by several different components, each one looking for answers in different ways or places. This isn’t a particularly unique design by any means, and the concept can be seen in many search interfaces out there.
KDE SC 4.4 comes with vastly improved and expanded Javascript Plasmoid support, and I’d like to personally introduce them to you. I will therefore be hosting open training sessions on both Friday and Saturday at 18:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net in #plasma-training.
Been meaning to do this for a while. Here’s a walkthrough of install Cedega atop a KDE4 desktop. As a precursor note, Cedega does not yet actually work on the hardware platform I used to write this guide. There’s an issue with Cedega’s hardware identification failing to recognize a mobile RadeonHD 2600 with Catalyst 10.1 atop a 2.6.32 kernel.
The GNOME release team has announced the availability of the first beta for what will become version 2.30 of GNOME. The 2.29.90 development release of the GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix marks the beginning of the UI freeze and includes several bug fixes, changes and updates.
The first cut of the test plan is on the live.gnome.org wiki with those 36 hypotheses. I would love to hear what you think about them and if you have ideas for other GNOME Shell design assumptions you’d like to see tested. I would also love to hear your ideas on how we might devise some tests for each hypotheses. I’ve set up a page for commentary on the wiki so please feel free to add your comments and suggestions! (Although of course you can feel free to leave your feedback in the comments area of this blog post instead.)
Salix is a solid distribuiton built on a Slackware foundation. It does what many among the Slackware faithful would consider heresy: makes Slackware behave more like a modern Linux operating system that’s simpler to install and manage. I for one welcome our heretical Bonsai overlords.
If I’m ever in the mood for a lightweight Slack-based distribution with minimal fuss involved, Salix has made my short list. I look forward to seeing future releases from this group.
Good idea right? I thought, that I would definitely do that for the next distro of Bauer-Puntu. So what’s the big deal? Well, Bauer-Puntu 10.04 will not be available until after April. I wanted something a little sooner than that! That is when I decided I would just re-lease another version of Bauer-Puntu 9.10, and call it R2! Why not right? It works for Microshaft!
We’re happy to announce the first Release Candidate of Yoper Linux
2010 – Codename Dresden an i686 Linux distribution optimized for simple desktop use. This is one step closer to a simple, yet powerful Linux desktop for the enthusiastic Linux user, that just works, but still leaves you in control.
Let’s get one thing straight. We don’t like the term cloud computing any more than you do
Of course, Richard Stallman doesn’t like when we call it Linux rather than GNU/Linux. He’s gotta live with Linux. And, well, we’ve gotta live with cloud computing. It’s not going away.
Commercial Linux and middleware distributor Red Hat is, like other platform providers, trying to get money from IT departments that buy software. But Red Hat can’t say that. For one, the company can’t sell software because that violates open source licensing, and two, it’s too boring to just come out and say that.
To eliminate having to freeze the bleeding-edge Fedora Rawhide repository once the next release of this free software Linux distribution enters its own alpha/feature freeze, a new development branch has been created so that Rawhide can immediately begin hosting packaged for the next Fedora release.
For a geek, the situation is much the same. When Andrew McMillan (below), a senior Debian GNU/Linux developer and a free software geek, found out that his elder son, Max, was unusually gifted, he reacted as any loving parent would.
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Open Elastic Computing Platform (OpenECP) Version 4.0 Alpha (openecp-4.0alpha.tar.gz), provisionally tested on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (screenshots).
The default installation comes bundled with Abiword and Gnumeric for word processing and spreadsheets. It also comes with the Kazehakase web browser and Sylpheed mail client.
Within hours of the launch Ubuntu Québec team members started complaining on the mailing list and on tou.tv’s Facebook group. We wrote to their admins, provided details, wrote to the ombudsman, got canned replies for all communications. We then put together a Facebook group, and started inviting people to join and we shared our findings (now all on a public wiki). 451 people joined the group which is an amazing number for Quebec province, given the context. I never ever thought I’d use Facebook for open formats and Linux support advocacy in such a way!
As for Kopete. As protocols start to use XMPP, the need of hiding XMPP for the end user arises. The account wizard should display the services known by name, and do the XMPP setup with the known preferences. May be something I can work on now that I don’t need to maintain the protocol anymore. And I almost forget: we need a way to migrate current users of the plugin.
Amazingly, this nettop also supports 802.11n wireless. Ubuntu found the wireless chipset and we were able to attach to a D-Link DIR-855 router in seconds. Most netbooks from HP and Asus do not support the fast N standard yet, running at over 100Mbps, so this was a welcome surprise, especially for a system that could work as a prime media server (with 160GB of storage) for streaming movies from a NAS.
I’ve been an Ubuntu fan for some time now. No matter which distro I tried, I always found it lacked some feature or another and I eventually made my way back to Ubuntu. Then I found Mint. Linux Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu which is a derivative of Debian (Debian’ = Ubuntu and Ubuntu’ = Linux Mint). Why use a derivative of Ubuntu (or Debian for that matter) instead of just using the original product?
To play a DVD on Linux Mint, you will need to install libdvdcss2. In Linux Mint 8 just as with previous versions and Ubuntu, there is no need to manually configure the repository, all you need do is the following:
* Open a Terminal Window (Menu > Terminal) and type the following:
sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
* Next type the following:
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
Once you have done that, next time you insert a DVD you should get the option to auto run with MPlayer Media Player. Enjoy.
Bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc said on Monday that its Nook electronic reader would be available in most of its physical stores as of Wednesday, ahead of Valentine’s Day, ending weeks of delays.
TES Electronics is shipping a Linux- and Android-ready hardware/software development kit for home automation, transportation entertainment systems, and industrial displays. The Magik-MX Kit offers a module based on a TI OMAP3530 system-on-chip, an I/O board, a seven-inch multi-touch display, and TES’ Guiliani GUI/HMI framework.
Google is moving quickly to get beyond its bumpy start as a mobile device retailer, dealing with some of the complaints around its Nexus One smartphone.
The first reversal earlier this week that saw AbiWord and GNUMeric step in as replacements. Now the decision has been fully reversed: OpenOffice WILL be installed by default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition.
Speaking at an event dedicated to spinning-off Pegatron Technologies from Asustek, Jonney Shih, chairman of Asus, reiterated the company’s long-term plan to become “another Apple”, but to adopt open-source or popular platforms instead of proprietary software, including ARM and Google Chrome/Android combinations as well as Intel and Windows to suit consumer demand, reports DigiTimes web-site.
The annual free software conference LibrePlanet is the place for the free software community — from old school hackers to brand new users — to come together and further the collective goals of the free software movement. At LibrePlanet 2010 you can help your neighbor get a head-start in free software or explore the very latest philosophical ideas that will shape computing and user freedom for the next generation.
refarm the city are tools of open software and hardware for urban farmers.
is a mix of a good meal (the crop, the friends, the seeds, …) , hardware (the urban farm, the composter, the electronics, the sensors, recycled materials, …), software (built a farm according to: your personal needs, local vegetables, local gastronomy, farm location, …) that will give you the tools to design, control and manage your farm during her life.
Open Source Days is the largest open source conference in the Nordic area. It’s your opportunity to meet, share, and learn from professional open source experts.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The old cliche is true, and it applies to the Web sites of FLOSS projects as surely as it does a first date or a job interview. Unfortunately, all too many FLOSS Web sites make a very, very poor first impression. Not surprising, since many FLOSS developers are much more talented at coding than they are at Web site design. How to fix the problem?
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This is a topic that has grabbed my interest not just because of the marketing FLOSS angle, which is important, but also because I’ve been tweaking my own site design. While it’s fun, site design is not one of my core skills. I can mangle HTML just fine, but actually making things look pretty from a Web design angle… not so much one of my strengths. Better resources for site design would be greatly helpful!
When you buy a computer today, you choose between the consumer-friendly platforms of Windows or Mac. Alternatives such as Linux are completely ignored.
The kernel of the Linux operating system is “open source,” meaning that no company owns or controls it completely. Commercial software packages are built around the Linux kernel (such as Red Hat), but the core platform remains free for anyone to revise, modify, and authenticate.
Many folks are leery of open source software because society is programmed to embrace products from companies like Microsoft and Apple. Linux is universally celebrated for its rock-solid performance and stability, but it requires a little more effort to find layman-like support and help.
DRBD provides an alternative high availability solution for MySQL. By effectively putting a mirrored filesystem beneath the database, the Linux operating system is thus replicating all of your data without the database even knowing about it. In our first two articles on the topic, we discussed some of the strengths and weaknesses of native MySQL statement based replication and then compared and contrasted those with the DRBD based solution. The advantages are in simplification of management, and elimination of some of the anomalous behavior of MySQL replication. The potential tradeoffs though are some performance impact, both in how your filesystem will then respond as it has to wait for acknowledgement of writes on remote destinations as well as a performance hit when you failover as the target MySQL database is starting up fresh, and has to warm its cache before performance will equal that on the former primary.
Not every CMS is as easy to set-up like WordPress or Movable Type for example, and sometimes depending on how easy it is to install, this can reflect how easy it could be to use the system. Many hosting companies will automatically install a few types of CMS’s to your domain (i.e. Joomla, WordPress, Drupal), however there are a few that require you to manually upload them to your directory using an FTP.
One such example is MuleSoft’s new offer of Tomcat application server via the GoGrid cloud. The product, MuleSoft Cloudcat, consists of cloud-based Apache Tomcat on GoGrid with commercial support from MuleSoft.
We’re also seeing examples of new open source software for the cloud. We’ve covered the use of unpaid, community Linux in the cloud, but a new cloud-specific distribution, CloudLinux, may also have some interesting implications, particularly for hosters and other service providers. CloudLinux, compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone CentOS, is commercially backed and supported by a company of the same name.
The OpenSAF Foundation, the not-for-profit organization supporting the OpenSAF open source high availability middleware projects, today announced that Ericsson has deployed the OpenSAF technology in carrier networks. This represents the first public statement by a major equipment manufacturer on commercial adoption, development and deployment of OpenSAF and demonstrates the quality and maturity of the open source project.
During more than two years, the main consultants of OPENTIA have actively participated in the creation of what could be named the greatest work of public interoperability ever made in Spain: the Spanish Interoperability Framework and its belonging technical and administrative development.
A 2007 AGIMO survey revealed that 68 percent of government agencies were either piloting or using open source software.
But further questioning from Greens Senator Scott Ludlam yesterday revealed research had not been undertaken since. AGIMO took on notice a suggestion that the research be revisited.
Centrelink, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and National Archives of Australia were known to use open source products; however, it was up to individual agencies to make procurement decisions, AGIMO said.
Greens spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam had been pushing for the government to adopt open source software to promote openness and reduce costs.
While open source software may reduce licensing costs, the cost of support could be an issue.
I’m a member of two IEEE societies that publish IEEE Transactions. While most of the papers are rather scholarly, I sometimes run across one that I’d like to summarize and provide a link for readers to download the original paper. That happened recently. Knowing that IEEE forbids third parties such as T&MW from posting IEEE copyrighted work (I can live with that), I contacted one of the paper’s authors asking if he would post his paper and I’ll link to it.
The author agreed to post his paper, but he’s not a member of that IEEE society and thus he had no way to download his own work. That in itself is inexcusable, but it gets worse.
Openmoko has announced the release of the Spring 2010 update for its WikiReader. Openmoko Product Manager William Lai said that, “We’ve been listening to requests from customers for better rendering quality, improved scrolling and we fixed these issues as our top priority for the Spring 2010 update”.
The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Hi everyone, my name is Alan and I do have a Facebook account. There, done it. Feels better already.
I don’t use it that much, and frankly I find it a little disturbing the way it mixes up all your friends, family and work contacts so they all talk to each other. But this isn’t a post about my insecurities and paranoid delusions. No, it is a post about Ubuntu and XMPP. Facebook now does XMPP, which is an instant messaging protocol also known as Jabber. It is the same thing Google talk uses and the same thing that the most awesome OLPC XO uses for communication.
Pupils have been banned from celebrating or sending Valentine’s Day cards – to protect them from the emotional trauma of being dumped. The pupils have been warned that if any cards are found or exchanged in school, they will be confiscated.
Teachers at Ashcombe Primary School in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, believe children are not ‘emotionally mature’ enough to understand relationships.
Former President Bill Clinton left a New York hospital on Friday morning after undergoing what his cardiologist called a successful procedure to clear a blocked artery.
Lunchtime is over. Events in the processor market and particularly the HPC market have changed the game. Software applications that once enjoyed performance increases from increased clock speed have not seen any real significant bumps in recent years. Celebrating and ranking processors based on clock speed is therefore of little value. Indeed, the current hardware advances in both multi-core and streaming-core (GP-GPU) do not apply to many single threaded applications. And yet, there always celebration of these new hardware advances.
Advanced Micro Devices will put more focus on tightly integrating graphics processor cores into mainstream servers starting 2012 as it tries to increase system performance, a company executive said.
Recently, Google announced that its operations in China (and beyond) had been subject to sophisticated attacks, some of which were successful; a number of other companies have been attacked as well. The source of these attacks may never be proved, but it is widely assumed that they were carried out by government agencies. There are also allegations that the East Anglia email leak was a government-sponsored operation. While at LCA, your editor talked with a developer who has recently found himself at Google; according to this developer, incidents like these demonstrate that the security game has changed in significant ways, with implications that the community can ignore only at its peril.
There should be a 9-minute film on Newsnight tonight (10:30pm, BBC Two) showing some research by Steven Murdoch, Saar Drimer, Mike Bond and me. We demonstrate a middleperson attack on EMV which lets criminals use stolen chip and PIN cards without knowing the PIN.
Police forces all over the UK will soon be able to draw on unmanned aircraft from a national fleet, according to Home Office plans. Last month it was revealed that modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers, and will be in place in time for the 2012 Olympics.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is something we all use and depend on, yet don’t really pay much attention to; if you have some time to investigate alternatives, you could really enhance your network’s performance and security.
On November 30, 2009, we got another letter from the CBSA saying that they’d need another 60 days to meet the request, because a timely response would “unreasonably interfere with the operations of the government institution” and “consultations are necessary to comply with the request.” We settled in to wait again.
Elliz McKenzie, of East Dulwich, had her card confiscated by a TfL ticket inspector who noticed that her photo card, which entitles 11 to 15-year-olds to free travel to school and is worth up to £360, had been scratched and was therefore “in breach of the Oyster card behaviour code”.
The card had been accidentally damaged by the schoolgirl’s baby cousin.
TfL said the card would be returned if Elliz carried out six hours of volunteer work, which could include cleaning graffiti or picking up litter.
Whilst he couldn’t manage to make our debate on the subject, Lord Adonis blithely guaranteed that images taken of people in airport body scanners would be immediately destroyed after they were taken.
The claim is rather undermined by the experience of Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, who during an appearance on the Jonathan Ross show claimed that he was presented by airport security staff with printed images from his scan, which he promptly autographed.
The number of computers with access to the Schengen Information System has doubled to 500,000 thanks to the extension of the EU.
SIS is a shared information system used by police and border guards across Europe. Although the UK and Ireland declined to sign up fully, they still use the system.
UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband today lost an appeal to conceal details of the “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of UK resident Binyam Mohamed after being stopped in Pakistan, then detained and subjected to extraordinary rendition at the behest of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.
Security industry analysts and lawmakers will get an unprecedented chance next week to evaluate how the government might respond to a hack attack on critical infrastructure targets.
The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a Washington-based non-profit established in 2007 by several lawmakers, will host a simulated nation-wide cyber-attack next Tuesday for a group of former administration and national security officials, who will be playing the roles of Cabinet members.
French lawmakers will vote next Tuesday on a proposal to filter Internet traffic. Part of a new security bill, the measure is intended to catch child pornographers, but critics say it won’t succeed. Once the filtering system is in place, though, it will allow the government to censor other material too.
The National Assembly has already spent two days debating the grandly titled “Bill on direction and planning for the performance of domestic security,” known as Loppsi II in French, with deputies voting to reject all the amendments that sought to limit the Internet filtration provisions.
During the debate over the French security bill (LOPPSI), the government opposed all the amendments seeking to minimize the risks attached to filtering Internet sites. The refusal to make this measure experimental and temporary shows that the executive could not care less about its effectivity to tackle online child pornography or about its disastrous consequences. This measure will allow the French government to take control of the Internet, as the door is now open to the extension of Net filtering.
A band of cyber-attackers have taken down the Australian Parliament House website and hacked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s website in coordinated protests against government plans to filter the Internet.
Is it true that a bill was tabled before congress that sought to give the US president absolute power to take over the internet? Why does the US ban access to sites, and not just any sites but open source application sites to citizens of other countries? Why does Google do same with their code hosting service Google Code? I find it very funny and ironic when the kettle tells the pot how black it looks!
Launched yesterday, Youtube’s safety mode will allow users with Google or Youtube accounts to only view content that’s deemed to be wholesome and abides by Youtube’s Community Guidelines. Of course the problem with this is that you will have to trust that the filtering system is up-to-date with the latest content.
You may recall that almost exactly a year ago there were all sorts of reports of music blogs using Google’s Blogger service finding their blog posts silently disappearing. The issue, it turned out, was the way Google dealt with DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders. The way the DMCA is set up, in order to avoid liability, Google is put in an awkward position of having to take the content down.
Today a federal appeals court rejected a government claim of “lobbyist privacy” to hide the identities of individuals who pressured Congress to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the government’s warrantless electronic surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. As the court observed, “There is a clear public interest in public knowledge of the methods through which well-connected corporate lobbyists wield their influence.”
Commissioner Malmström defensive intervention in the European Parliament. She claims the agreement includes “an absolute prohibition on data mining – searches of the database can only be undertaken where it is possible to show a reason to believe that the subject of the search is engaged in terrorism.”
Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.
The Tor Project is free software that helps you thwart attempts by third parties like you government who are interested in spying on your internet sojourn. It works by “bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.”
Yesterday, Iranian authorities enacted a ban on Gmail, saying they’d introduce a government-sponsored (and presumably government-monitored) email service to replace it. Now, as YouTube’s seeing an influx of protest videos, Google’s taken a moment to mark the Iranian government’s lack of control.
We wonder why every publisher freaks out about digital protection. Cmon, they have their reasoning! Even though there are better methods that could be enacted, i think not wanting to have your hard work yanked from you by a couple dweebs with advance copies is a completely valid arguement. Of course, I am not painting myself as The Holy Jesus of Video Games. I definitely dabble in the illegal file sharing world as well, no doubt about it. All I’m saying is, would you rip off a hardworking development team who put so much blood sweat and tears into their product before they even get a chance to SELL IT!?
The Reason Foundation releases my policy brief today looking at the effect network neutrality regulation will have on wireless applications and services.
Much has been written about the deleterious effect that regulating network management would have on broadband investment and innovation, and when applied to wireless, which is what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposes to do, problems would only get worse.
Imagine a time when you won’t have to leave your bedroom to catch a new film’s premiere. For foreign fans of Bollywood movies, that time is now. Striker, the Bollywood flick that features Siddharth (Rang De Basanti fame) and Aditya Pancholi, will be released simultaneously in theatres as well as on popular video broadcasting site YouTube.
The option to view it online, however, is limited only to international audiences. Incidentally, the rough cut of filmmaker Sudeep Mishra’s film Tera Kya Hoga Johnny was leaked on the same site earlier this month.
DigiProtect has shot itself and its business model in the foot during a recent court hearing. The notorious anti-piracy outfit refused to open its books for scrutiny during a case where it claimed compensation against a file-sharer. The judge consequently ruled that the defendant didn’t have to pay the majority of the claim against him.
After first being blocked in 2008, an Italian court has once again ruled that ISPs in the nation must block access to the infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay, leaving millions of users without access to one of the most popular sites on the planet.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is no model of transparency, and the word is finally getting out. This week, the New York Times dug into the “secret” meetings, coming back with nearly nothing new (itself a pretty good indicator of just how “transparent” the negotiating process has been).
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam has called on Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to take details of international anti-piracy negotiations public.
A 1 Gbps service could let a user download a full 1080p High-Def movie in mere minutes and is more than 1000 times faster than AT&T’s basic DSL offering.
If entertainment conglomerates are waging the current fight they are now, just try to imagine what will the landscape look like 10 years from now if Google’s efforts materialize.
Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s oldest newspaper and most-visited website (now co-edited by the former prime minister and head of the central bank) has just announced an anti “deep linking” policy saying that Icelanders aren’t allowed to link to individual pages on the site, only the front door.
Given their reactions to Google, it does seem like a reasonable question. Or will that only happen when Facebook is making much more money from its other lines of business, and those news execs get jealous?
Hello book publishers. You’re starting to scare me.
I am a writer, but was a record label executive from 1989-2000 and am fascinated by parallels between the two industries. When it comes to the digitization of product and attempts to master/mangle the phenomenon of social media and file-sharing, the publishing business is where the music business was about 10 years ago. And although publishing probably sets its collective IQ (not to mention good manners) as superior to the music business, I can’t find evidence that their reactions to industry sea change are substantially different.
After years of complaints, last year the music labels finally got what they wanted from Apple–the ability to raise prices on their songs. Last April, iTunes introduced a “variable pricing” scheme, which gave the labels the ability to move prices from 99 cents a song to $1.29 (and for some tracks, down to 69 cents).
What he points out is that for culture to matter, it goes beyond the artwork itself, to the people who experience the artwork and then share it with others — thereby connecting with each other and the artwork itself. And while people sit back and claim that remixing is “stealing” or “lazy” or “not art” at all, that’s totally missing the point. Art is not about just the creator. Without the shared experience, it’s a lot less valuable — and what we’ve done with copyright laws is make it that much more difficult to share that experience through our own eyes and our own cultural views. And if you don’t see the shame in that, then you’re missing a lot.
“We chose the name Buzz because of the word’s connotations of activity, conversations, sharing of information,” Google’s Victoria Katsarou tells WebProNews. “‘Buzz’ is not a trademarked term.”
Given all that, I found this story about the photographer, Richard Misrach, whose photograph was chosen by Apple to be the default wallpaper for the iPad, quite interesting. That’s because, while he’s been talking to Apple for a while, the company only came to him days before the launch to ask to use the image, and no agreement had been worked out by the time the product launched with the photo there.
After boasting of streaming more than 2,200 hours of live video during the Summer Olympics in 2008, the network will only stream hockey and curling events live on the Web this year—roughly 400 hours of video. That means if American favorites like skier Lindsey Vonn or snowboarder Shaun White are competing in a crucial race during the day, fans not in front of a TV will not be able to watch those events.
Last week, in discussing its attempt to settle its lawsuit with Google over the Google book scanning project, the Authors Guild posted a rather interesting public letter, entitled To RIAA or Not to RIAA, That was the Question. In defending the settlement, it notes that it could have fought the lawsuit to the end, but that it might have lost. In fact, this is why I supported the idea that Google should have fought on, because it seemed like Google had a strong fair use case — something the Authors Guild admits. Even though the Authors Guild says that it disagrees that the book scanning project was fair use, an awful lot of copyright legal scholars seemed to believe that it was, in fact, fair use.
Kyle sent over yet another musician, named Nathan Harden, pulling out the “woe is me” schtick in an article claiming that this generation “killed rock ‘n’ roll.” It hits on all the usual debunked points and only quotes industry sources on the major label side of the business, assumes that the only way to make money in the music business is by selling albums or songs, and doesn’t even realize what a huge contradiction it makes in the process. It starts out by quoting record sales stats, but ignoring all of the recent studies that show that money hasn’t gone away, it’s just shifted to other channels — and those channels are ones where the actual artists get more money. It’s true that the major record labels are making less — no one denies that. But it’s folly to claim that this means the death of rock ‘n’ roll or music at all. Another recent study showed more music being released today than ever before in history.
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Sorry, Nathan Harden, but you’ve been sold the myth that only record labels make the music industry and that only through selling records does the music industry work. That’s simply not true. Yes, the record labels are having trouble, but rock ‘n’ roll isn’t dying. It’s thriving by adapting to this new market.
The problem is that on a typical record label deal, things don’t really work that way for most musicians, either. It may work for the top of the top — the ones that catch on quickly and become big. But for the majority of bands that sign with a major record label, they fail to really get big enough to matter, and the labels very quickly drop all support and the band becomes yet another unrecouped wonder.
When Jammie Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) became the first alleged P2P file-swapper to take her case all the way to trial and verdict, no one suspected that she would actually have three trials and verdicts, but that’s the case today, as the RIAA rejected a federal judge’s decision to slash Thomas-Rasset’s damage award. Instead, we’re headed to a truncated third trial on the issue of damages.
The University of Georgia has fired Dorin Lucian Dehelean, a security analyst who was responsible for passing on RIAA copyright infringement notices to the student body, alleging that he demanded bribes from students to make the record of their supposed infractions go away.
Following iiNet’s huge win over anti-piracy group AFACT, Aussie ISP Exetel has taken steps to soften its copyright infringement notice procedures and will no longer suspend accounts on mere accusations.
On February 4th, Australian Internet service provider iiNet won its court battle against several Hollywood studios.
So, this morning, I tried something new: with a little video capture with RecordMyDesktop and a little editing from kdenlive, I was able to put together a (very) rough concept of what one user’s search for Linux just might look like.
It was a fun thing to do in just an hour’s time, and I may donate it as a demo video to the Linux Foundation’s new We’re Linux video contest, if they want it. (It’s too long for the contest, and I would recuse myself from participating, anyway.)
Other operating systems are not so happy go lucky as Linux is. They tend to make a lifetime commitment to their installed home and really do not like too much change. So much so that these operating systems are always calling back to their parents and keeping them informed of their living arrangements. They really are a stickler for this and while these operating systems can be commended for their loyalty and commitment, they do tend to become rather a stick in the mud when it comes to change. To keep these operating systems from grumbling too much it is advisable to keep it living in its home, unchanged, for its natural lifetime.
Symbio CEO Jacob Hsu (right) has been working with Taiwanese OEMs for 10 years and says they are finally ready to kick off the traces and become their own brands.
This surprised me. I was at last year’s CompuTex show, in Taiwan, looking for Linux, and it just wasn’t there.
While many of the Taiwanese businesspeople I talked with expressed a desire to go outside the Microsoft orbit, every booth featured Windows gear, usually with Intel chips.
But Android, the mobile operating system Google has built on top of Linux, is turning heads. “Google put together a complete package” for Android, Hsu said, with “software Development Kits (SDKs) and other things people could use.”
About the only time vendors converge on open standards to ensure customer choice is when it suits their desires to dislodge a too-powerful vendor, as the HTML5 crowd is doing to Adobe’s Flash or as IBM et al. have done with Linux to break Microsoft’s Windows grip. In these cases, it’s not really about customer choice so much as about giving vendors more choices.
What makes the poll more interesting than most is not just the raw numbers, but the comments that go along with the voting. Each entry had its own thread in the forums and users were more than happy to hold forth on their opinions in greater detail. Some are more thoughtful than others, but well worth a skim for anyone participating in one of the projects voted on.
The Roku player, that nifty little Linux-based device which streams Netflix, Amazon movies, Revision3 shows, and more, now has an SDK available for programmers to create their own channels:
With the Roku Software Developer’s Kit, you too can build a channel that streams your content to the TV.
One good thing I can say about Dell is that they seem to be granting refunds for Windows, but only on new systems (not refurbished). The key to getting the refund is to politely contact them after you have received your new PC, and state that you have read the Windows license agreement on your screen, and are following the instructions and asking for a Windows refund. The last time I attempted this, Dell shipped me a return label to send back the Windows CDs. About 2 weeks after I shipped the CDs back, I received a check in the mail. I have to admit that was a very surprising experience, in a good way. Today I am still happily running Fedora 10 on that machine.
Gnu-Linux is a powerful duo. Major enterprises around the globe are shifting to Gnu-Linux and other Muktware* technologies. Most governments now use Gnu-Linux and Muktware, which is the perfect use of taxpayers’ money. These technologies also ensure that the nation has control over the technology that they are using and not some mega-corporate who controls or owns the code.
Dynamic Innovation
The Gnu-Linux development has been much faster and dynamic than the Slaveware (proprietary) development. A stupid comparison: Look at how much Microsoft’s Windows XP, Office suite and IE, or Apple’s Macs have improved over the years and then compare it with how Gnu-Linux and Muktware have evolved.
The Fedora team invites those interested in attending to help create process and how-to content, solve and mentor problems and educate the wider community about how participation is conducted this year in an effort to improve the capacity for more students and mentors for the Google program, as well as others.
The 2010 conference season is already underway — having launched auspiciously if not officially with last month’s linux.conf.au — and it’s safe to expect that attendees will quickly begin registering, presenters will begin proposing, and before you know it, live-from-the-floor reports will be rolling in. Though the latter will have to wait, as of last week, the registering and proposing is on for LinuxCon 2010.
LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on February 27th – 28th, 2010 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.
That rules out my own training business, so I have enquired about setting up a Linux Users Group (or LUG, as they are fetchingly known). However, this would be a LUG with a difference. The difference is two-fold: it will be a micro LUG, on an individual town basis, and it will incorporate a buddy system, whereby an experienced Linux user would be teamed up with a newbie, who would hold their hand throughout the setting up process. A suitable name may be LUG Buddies.
The Free Technology Academy, a “virtual university” with support from the European Commission, has announced that it has made a set of free-software-related educational materials available under the CC ShareAlike and GNU FDL licenses. Available books include The concepts of free software and open standards (291 pages) and GNU/Linux advanced administration (545 pages). Both books are available in English, Spanish and Catalan.
The Gadmintools set of administration/configuration tools are for any Linux administrator needing a fast, simple means of configuring various systems on Linux machine. Gadmintools requires at least a mid-level knowledge of Linux since some of the tools offered configure fairly complex systems.
I was hosting one of our ComputerWorld Interactive events this morning in Edmonton, where we were discussing IBM’s proposal that Linux is an ideal OS on which to develop a cloud computing strategy.
Some packaged software is beginning to appear to help create private clouds, such as Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), but it’s limited to Linux-based clouds.
US vendor Ksplice has announced the general availability of its Uptrack service which provides various Linux distributions such as CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu with kernel corrections that can be installed while systems are running. This is designed to reduce system down time: Installing a kernel update usually requires a system reboot.
“It allows you to hot patch the Linux kernel with a security update without rebooting the computer. It’s a binary patch capability that is highly automated,” kernel developer and Linux Foundation fellow Ted Ts’o said.
In response to strong encouragement from the Ubuntu community, Canonical released Launchpad’s source code last year under the open source GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).
By default, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Gnome-based user interfaces do not come with a dock, but it is easy to add. Like many things with open source and Linux, you have more than one choice. This is a good thing, because competition drives each to be better. After reading about and playing with several, I settled on Cairo Dock. Here are a few comments on my experience of setting it up on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10.
Music is one thing I couldn’t live without. Especially while working, music keeps me sane. Whether I am writing a lot of documentation or testing software, background music helps me from going ballistic. And because Amarok was installed when I installed the Kubuntu desktop package, I thought of giving it another try.
I tested three popular screencasting applications to see which is best for everyday use. I evaluated the user interface, the quality and variety of output formats, and the ease of installation and obtaining the required dependencies. I tested the programs on a MacBook Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, dual-booting into Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.
Micro Focus, a provider of Enterprise Application Modernization, Testing and Management solutions, today announces Micro Focus Server Express Remote Development Option (RDO), a new development environment option for its development platform that helps slash time and costs for companies building or maintaining Micro Focus COBOL applications for deployment on UNIX and Linux servers.
Developers Cyan World announced at the end of 2008 that the game was back in their hands and would be recreated as open source. The game is now downloadable via the Myst Online website and is entirely free to play.
Today’s tutorial is for those of you who don’t want to wait until late April for the Kubuntu 10.04 (Karmic Koala) release, which will come with a default KDE SC 4.4.0 installation. With this guide, we will teach you, step by step, how to install the brand-new KDE SC 4.4.0 on your existing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) installation.
The latest 4.4 release of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) offers far more than just stability and bug fixes: The developers have added a special new desktop for netbooks, as well as more program options. They have also made major structural changes.
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Binary packages for most of the distributions are to become available in the next few days, which will give users – even those who still use KDE 3 – an opportunity to take a first look at KDE SC 4.4.
The folks behind the popular KDE Linux desktop environment pushed out version 4.4 recently, complete with a new interface designed specifically for netbooks. Basically a desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME provides a user interface and a number of applications for Linux users.
There are many Windows 7 themes available for Linux. These themes will make your Gnome Linux similar to Windows 7. Here, are the best of two Windows 7 themes for Gnome Linux. To install these kind of theme, you can read my previous tutorial.
Something we have been spending some time working on in this cycle has been fixing the mess that is the system tray. This is based upon an awesome specification submitted to Freedesktop by KDE. The spec has been implemented by KDE, we have written an implementation for the GNOME panel and it shipped in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 2.
This work has a range of benefits:
* Better usability: no more confusing mix of left and right click menu options.
* Multiple indicators can be scrubbed: click once and move your mouse between them instead of having to click multiple times.
* Icons are properly spaced.
* Separate panel icons can be specified which helps improve theming.
* Better KDE and GNOME integration.
This is the first in a series of articles looking at some lightweight, but still fully-functional, desktop alternatives to KDE or Gnome. First up: Xfce. Xfce is designed to be lightweight and fully-functional, providing a full desktop environment whilst using minimal system resources; and it’s modular, so you can choose exactly what you want to run.
The current Xfce umbrella package in both Debian stable and Ubuntu 9.10 is xfce4 (version 4.4 in Debian, and 4.6 in Ubuntu). After you’ve installed it, log out of X. If you’re running gdm or a similar app as your login manager, check the bottom left of the screen for a “Sessions” option, and you can choose Xfce for your next session. When starting the session, you’ll then be asked if you want to make this your default window manager.
Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Alpha 2 is based on the 2.6.33 RC6 Linux kernel and features the third release candidate for KDE SC 4.4 (4.3.98), GNOME 2.29.6 and X.org 7.5. KDE related updates include version 2.2.2 of the Amarok music player and KTorrent
I did notice something about it though; privacy concerns. It seemed to be a pain to browse in a “more secure” style (and by “more secure,” I mean that–no browsing is completely secure for a multitude of reasons). After perusing the settings for a while, I noticed the “Incognito” mode for Chromium.
He had enough talent to get enrolled in any graduation course after he passed his higher secondary exams two years ago, but this Idiot’ instead preferred to pursue his passion for computers and enrolled in a year’s programme at IPSR institute in Kerala. And, he got the reward for following his heart after he passed the exams held by US-based Red Hat Company in December 2009. This Gujarati scored 100 per cent marks in the first two tests and over 90 per cent in the third exam. Red Hat is a well known software solution company that created LINUX-based computer operating systems in 1990s.
As the economy improves and open source adoption accelerates, 2010 will be an exciting year. We expect to to focus attention on JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Cloud Computing, JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss and the Java Community and the expanding JBoss ecosystem.
Red Hat has released a beta version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Linux distribution for testing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, aka RHEL, is aimed at enterprise customers. As well as bug fixes released since RHEL 5.4, at this stage of the RHEL life cycle the next incarnation of RHEL5 also includes extensive new functionality and numerous drivers for supporting newer hardware.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 (RHEL) is now available in early beta, providing users of Red Hat’s flagship operating system with bug fixes and an early look at some new features, too.
With RHEL 5.5, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is continuing to build on the RHEL 5 base, which was launched in 2007. Its most recent update was the RHEL 5.4 release, which officially debuted in September and was notable for its new KVM virtualization base. It’s a base that Red Hat is further expanding now with RHEL 5.5, thanks to a new run-time memory allocation feature for KVM virtual guests.
Virtualization has been part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux since the release of version 5.4 back in September. At the time, the new KVM virtualization base was big news. It’s still an important part of the OS. So much so that now Red Hat is further expanding with RHEL 5.5, which it released to beta on Wednesday. The key enhancement is a new run-time memory allocation feature for KVM virtual guests that allows them guests to obtain extra memory as required, and thus not “be stuck with a fixed amount of memory, as Internetnews reports.
Goddard is the codename for the latest version of the bleeding edge Linux distribution, Fedora 13. Eve before the release of Fedora 12 there were new feature plans for Fedora 13. New features continue to be added to the feature plans of Fedora 13 scheduled for a planned release on May 11, 2010. The Fedora 13 feature list includes a number of features that didn’t make it in time for Fedora 12. The feature list includes NFSv4 protocol by default, support for mounting NFS servers over IPv6, and yum language package plug-in. It’s almost time for Fedora 13 feature freeze and we hardly expect any new last minute additions. With most accepted Fedora 13 features highlighted on Fedora Project Wiki we decided to provide a comprehensive preview of the Linux distribution.
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Fedora 13 would offer enhanced support for DisplayPort in X and kernel drivers for NVIDIA hardware. DisplayPort offers a higher link bandwidth than dual-link DVI. Monitors can easily take advantage of this by providing higher resolutions, higher color depths, and higher refresh rates. The DisplayPort will also run at a lower voltage than DVI and LVDS, and uses lesser power. The future laptops will likely switch to embedded DisplayPort for the local panel for this reason. With this feature, Fedora users can take advantage of the the technical superiority of DisplayPort.
I just noticed that there is an updated distribution of the Debian GNU/Linux stable branch, lenny 5.0.4. As noted in the press release, this release is primarily security updates and a few serious problem fixes. If you are running Debian lenny and have been keeping up to date with the official updates, you don’t need to reinstall, the purpose of this distribution is simply to consolidate all the latest updates into a single installable distribution.
This story is all about that experience and my personal opinions about that experience. I do not attempt to make any generalizations about KDE4 in general; in fact, I’ve read many good things about KDE4, written by people who were using other Linux distros instead of Debian. So any problems that I describe and any opinions that I express are limited strictly to the current 64-bit, AMD64 Debian Squeeze (Testing) and the way that it currently installs and configures KDE 4.3.4, ext4 and grub2 (grub-pc).
To cut a long story short, there are lots of free OSs developed under the Linux movement. And I’ve been told “Ubuntu” is among the most user-friendly. The latest version is Ubuntu 9.10 also called Karmic Koala (Don’t ask me why!). I’ve downloaded and used it for about two months. But there are lots of die hard fans of the older version called Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope!). So you can check that out too if you like.
What they do: Canonical (along with Eucalyptus) developed and continues to support Ubuntu, one of the main OSes used for cloud deployments. The two companies continued to work together to further develop the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
Canonical is following the Red Hat model, deriving revenue from their support of an open-source project. They also deliver images of their server product for use on the Amazon EC2 cloud.
Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week is a week of sessions aimed at enabling and inspiring opportunistic developers to write applications that scratch their itches.
The following idea, proposed on Ubuntu Brainstorm, puts forward the sugeestion that users should be allowed to configure the application set before installation. Sort of like the Windows Browser ballot but for, well, pretty much everything.
Now it looks like the Ubuntu team is stripping Brasero and a number of other programs from the list of applications to come preloaded with the next version of Ubuntu Linux.
Eeebuntu is a popular Linux distribution designed to play well with netbooks. It’s optimized for laptops with small screens and Intel Atom processors. And as you can probably guess from the name, it was originally designed as a custom version of Ubuntu Linux for Asus Eee PC netbooks. Today the Eeebuntu team launched the first public beta of Eeebuntu 4.0, which drops the Ubuntu base for Debian Linux.
The major derivatives of Ubuntu are well known, but what about the others? Just because they aren’t as popular doesn’t mean they don’t have something to offer! We introduce five of the least known, yet simply outstanding distributions.
After a previous post where I outlined how to install Adobe AIR in Ubuntu 9.10 I thought I would write another post with instructions for installing in Linux Mint 8 as I also use this distribution on my development machine. The differences are subtle but nevertheless they are slightly different.
The appliance is based on a Linux operating system and includes CeTech’s remote monitoring and reporting applications and Vasco’s identity management platform. All user information is hosted in the services provider’s datacentre facility.
Based on the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, this release includes the complete kernel with all necessary device drivers for the ChipWrights hardware development kit, source code for media player, media browser and IP camera applications integrated with the OpenEmbedded build environment. Linux 2.6.29 kernel highlights include video capture support (V4L2) for various video sources, allowing users to easily port video capture applications to the CW5631 processor, and SDIO Wi-Fi support for portable media players.
While I’ve always been a little scared of spiders, watching student Matt Bunting’s hexapod robot dancing has all but cured me. Maybe it’s the combination of the folk guitar and little leg sways in the below video, but all of a sudden, spiders (at least the robotic kind) look so damn cute.
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It runs on the Ubuntu open-source operating system.
Amazon.com announced open enrollment for its Kindle developer beta program, promising enrollees access to the tools necessary to create “active content” for the online retailer’s Kindle ebook platform. According to the Kindle Development Kit website, the KDK includes a Kindle simulator (both 6-inch and 9.7-inch) that works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux–developers can register up to three Kindle devices through the developer portal, and the owners of those devices will receive invitations to download and test the applications in question.
Wind River today released an updated version of Wind River Hypervisor, its embedded virtualization solution for single and multicore processors. The new Wind River Hypervisor 1.1 release supports the latest Intel(r) processors and enables new inter-virtual machine communication capabilities. Additionally, debugging of virtual boards is now supported by the latest version of Wind River On-Chip Debugging.
There are a few additions to the Chumby One, including an FM tuner, a much-needed volume knob, 2GB of internal storage, a slightly faster ARM-based CPU, and an optional lithium-ion battery (to keep the Chumby running even when the power is out). What went away? The second USB port (the Chumby One features just one powered USB port, suitable for charging devices) and the stereo speakers (the One is mono-only). The integrated accelerometer, touch screen, stereo audio jack, and snooze button remain the same.
Additionally, the kit features a Qseven Heatspreader, a ready-to-run Linux installation on USB Flash Stick and a suitable 12V power supply. Optionally, the evaluation kit is available with a TFT panel including a suitable cable kit.
On 600 MHz Cortex-A8 (OMAP3530 of BeagleBoard with Linux), H.264 BP decoder achieves 45 FPS decoding for 1 mbps D1 streams, and MPEG-4 SP/H.263 encoder achieves 30 FPS encoding for D1 (720×480) streams. This boost in performance of video codecs enables several high resolution and high quality applications on Cortex-A8 based mobile devices like Nokia N900, Google Nexus One, Motorola DROID, HTC HD2, Apple iPhone 3GS and many more. The codecs are available for licensing on Android, Linux, Symbian, Windows Mobile and iPhone OS X.
He’s also been doing some software work on the device now that he has easy access to it. Along the lines of the Ubuntu-on-Kindle hack from September, he’s compiled QT for the Kindle and written a couple of programs such as Sudoku to show that it works.
Brad Dietrich, is the CTO and co-founder of Cloud Engines, Inc. Brad graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachlors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and in Computer Science. He also is a published author and a contributor to several open source projects.
In steps the Pogoplug a device that allows you to connect multiple hard drives to the Internet to allow you to store and share files from. Your own “personal cloud” as the box shouts.
It’s important to remember as well that the plug is, at its core, a Ubuntu box. Any Ubuntu software that you want to install that can be accessed by command line or a web interface (e.g., backup, clustering, load balancing, FTP, etc.) can be installed from an SSH session.
Nokia’s N900 is, in some respects, the most sophisticated mobile handset to date, offering a complete, desktop-derived operating system in the shape of Maemo 5. Yet, while several major operators have picked up the N900, Nokia is a long way from fully exploiting the device and its software platform in terms of the overall user and developer experiences. This must be addressed if Maemo is to be established as Nokia’s high-end platform of choice.
Google’s Nexus One won’t be the only smartphone to run Android 2.1, the latest version of the Android operating system, for too long. Motorola is planning to upgrade the Droid’s firmware this week to include features such as full multi-touch.
Although not a smartphone the Archos 5 Internet Tablet is of interest to smartphone watchers as an example of a device based on the truly open source version of Android: in other words, an Android device without Google.
Monitise has launched a new mobile money management app for Android-powered smartphones.
The Mobile Money app is free from the Android Market and offers a full range of account management, payment and commerce services, including bank account balance enquiries, mini statements, transfers between accounts and bill payments.
Android is the name given to a mobile operating system using a customised version of the Linux kernel. It was first released in late 2008. The platform enables developers to write code in the Java language, controlling the device via Java libraries developed by Google.
The operating system is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, a cosmopolitan collection of firms from a wide range of technology fields. Software companies that participate include Google and eBay, with mobile operators being represented by firms such as T-mobile and Vodafone. Semiconductor companies (including Intel, Nvidia, Texas Instruments) also play a key role in developing the platform. Moreover, handset manufacturers themselves contribute to the development of Android. Notable names include HTC, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, and LG.
According to Simon Wilkinson, CEO of Myriad Group, by bringing together Myriad’s heritage in virtual machines and Linux platforms, the company has been able to significantly improve the performance of Android handsets, leading to a greatly enhanced user experience with richer applications and games and improved responsiveness.
Mobile middleware developer Myriad has unveiled a turbo boosted version of the Dalvik virtual machine, which runs applications on the Android platform, boosting performance and battery life.
Mountain View-based company Google is already known to have a thing about naming various Android releases as sweets, and we have already seen versions of the platform delivered on the market in the form of Cupcake, Donut or Eclair, but there are more to come, it seems. There are at least two new flavors of the operating system that will arrive in the foreseeable future, and now we learn that they will come as Froyo and Gingerbread.
Before diving in to anything else, note that this is a laptop built for running Linux; the one I’m using is running Ubuntu 9.4 (Jaunty), and others that I played with briefly on the show floor were running instead Barry Kauer’s lightweight (around 100MB by default) Puppy Linux. Though Puppy’s quite a nice OS, I stuck with Ubuntu on the EduBook, because that’s what I’m most used to.
Indamixx has been putting out custom netbooks designed for creating and editing music for a year or two now. Basically, Indamixx offers an off-the-shelf netbook like an MSI Wind U100 that’s been tweaked with extra RAM and loaded up with a custom Linux distribution and tons of open source audio production software as well as commercial apps including Renoise. Now the company is offering Indamixx Portable Studio USB Stick Version for netbooks and laptops.
Jolicloud is a Ubuntu variant that aims to make a truly custom-designed interface for netbooks. They’ve just pushed a new feature live in their distro which is pretty incredible: they’ve enabled 1080p HD video playback on netbooks inluding the Intel Atom Pinetrail chipset (the latest flavor of the netbook-centric Atom CPU).
Open source software is increasingly seen as an alternative to proprietary software products, primarily due to its reduced costs, accessibility and high adaptability. The Open Source Cadastre and Registration (OSCAR) project is the first serious initiative applying open source solutions in developing countries.
While you use the software, Mnemosyne can keep detailed statistics about your learning process. If you want, these logs can be uploaded easily and anonymously to a central server for analysis. Researchers can use the data to study the behavior of our memory over a long time period. As an additional benefit, the developers can use the results to improve the scheduling algorithms behind the software.
From one point of view, Samba is open source high drama at its finest: an early adopter of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, and the recipient of an unprecedented release of formerly proprietary Microsoft documentation, thanks to a high-profile anti-trust case.
Command line downloader Curl and its Libcurl library are available in version 7.20.0 with expanded protocol support.
Apart from HTTP, FTP and SCP, the tool can handle IMAP, POP3 and SMTP, including their SSL-secured versions. Also supported is RTSP, the streaming protocol from RealNetworks for multimedia content.
However, not all users will become contributors, and not all contributors will become developers. In fact, the numbers of people progressing along this scale of contribution is very small. Nevertheless, just one contributor is a reduction in the centralised cost of development and thus a step towards sustainability for the project.
When it comes to defining open source, licensing is a critical topic since it’s the license that helps to make an application or effort open. But for Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative, it’s not necessarily the only key success factor for open source projects.
That might sound strange considering that licensing is the bread and butter for the OSI, the body that determines whether a license is open source. But Tiemann , who also serves as the vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, recognizes that licensing isn’t the be all and end all for open source.
There is a famous story of the Stone Soup, where many free ingredients came together to make an amazing finished product. Lest you think it’s just a fable, Red Hat and Ubuntu do exactly that–they’ve combined major open source projects such as Linux, Gnome, Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and MySQL and built major businesses from them.
For starters, ‘Ubuntu is an operating system built by a worldwide team of expert developers. It contains all the applications you need: a web browser, office suite, media apps, instant messaging and much more. Ubuntu is an open-source alternative to Windows and Office,’ as www.ubuntu.com informs.
Beginning with mobile Linux, Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development (www.wileyindia.com) covers topics such as power management, application development, packaging, theming, kernel fine-tuning, testing and so on, all aimed at developers interested in `a practical, hands-on way of learning development on mobile devices.’
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The Mendel Model (named after Gregor Johann Mendel, considered the Father of Modern Genetics) is about `best of breed’ outcomes. Linux-based distributions are careful, selective, scientific, and personalised works of many people individually `breeding’ their own distributions, write Lawrence and Belem.
Enrnst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist whose work `revealed the intricacies of adaptation and multiplication of species,’ is the name behind the third model, because his work `harmonised and connected the work of Darwin and Mendel.’
Mayr’s theories built bridges rather than walls, the authors find. The third model is about the coexistence of diverse Linux distributions.
A Mozilla Developer Preview of improvements in the Gecko layout engine is now available for download. This is a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform, which forms the core of rich Internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have and encourage users to help us by filing bugs.
2010 will be a big year for Thunderbird. Last year, we launched Thunderbird 3, which is a huge milestone for us. In this post, I’d like to give people a heads-up as to what the coming year will look like. I’ll focus on three topics: our plans for innovation through add-ons, Thunderbird 3.1, and our first steps towards making Thunderbird self-sustaining.
It’s a good bet that the next generation of defining companies will have corporate cultures built the open source way– around openness and collaboration, while fostering community and culture that extend outside the company walls.
In fact many of the defining companies of the first decade of this century show these characteristics (with one very notable exception we discussed earlier).
OpenGeo is primarily targeting governmental organizations as a means of helping them fulfill the requirements of the Open Government Directive and enable more participation and collaboration with government data.
Macraigor is offering a free port of the popular GNU toolkit (gcc, gas and gdb) for the Atom processor on its website, as well as full support for Eclipse Ganymede.
The Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) is creating a Software-Defined Radio lab that will work with the Navy Research Lab to transfer work done previously on the Joint Tactical Radio System to the GNU Radio’s open-source, free software environment.
Tim Leising, director of the Software-Defined Radio lab at CERDEC, said his group is focusing on developing and testing future software defined radios with the GNU platform to promote collaboration and information-sharing via network connections.
Our fourth annual compilation of the current year’s most notable technology-related 25th anniversaries includes Microsoft’s release of Windows 1.0, registration of the first dot-com domain names, the founding of AOL, the publication of Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto, and the first fatal attack by the Unabomber.
The developers note that they have started working on the next major update to the media player, saying that “VLC 1.1 is on the road”. According to a blog post VLC developer Jean-Philippe André, version 1.1 will allow users users to write their own plug-ins for VLC. Like Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, the extensions will let users add even more functionality to VLC, such as an IMDb add-on to get plot or cast information about a movie.
There are a few interesting things to talk about surrounding free and open textbooks. Quality is one. Usability is another. Why to write one (and/or, why not) is certainly critical. But where can you find these disruptive, open texts?
What this emphasises is that antibiotics form a kind of global commons – a resource whose benefits we all share. But if one party overexploits that commons – in this case, by recklessly handing out antibiotics as the article suggests – then the commons is ruined for *all* of us.
* they don’t have time
* they are selfish
* they don’t care
* they don’t have an incentive to do it
I was perplexed on this and over the last six weeks I spent some time talking to many of these smart people to understand what could be the reason. The results were very interesting. The rest of the article is based on those findings.
It’s pretty clear that the societal drivers of tribal gifting economics and the mechanisms of enforcement didn’t survive the transition to a global social system composed of billions of members. Simply, the connections between any two individuals (outside of immediate familial relationships) are too abstract for these drivers and enforcement mechanisms to be relevant. As a result, market based mechanisms for economic interaction have gained dominance.
As of the end of this month, I have published sixteen novels, a handful of novellas, and almost a hundred pieces of short fiction. It’s been critically well received, garnered me some praise and a handful of awards, and has performed modestly well in terms of what the publishing industry refers to as “the numbers.”
Like every other narrative-prose writer on the planet who does not have the covers pulled up over her head (and believe me, the temptation is enormous) I am trying to figure out how the heck to continue doing what I am good at–what I have spent twenty years learning how to do at a professional level–in the face of developing technology.
I’d go further: if you won’t release them and *share* them, then you’re not really a scientist, because science is inherently about sharing, not hoarding knowledge, whatever kind that may be. The fact that some of it may be in the form of computer code is a reflection of the fact that research is increasingly resting on digital foundations, nothing more.
Whatever value it might have we largely throw away. Few journals make referee’s reports available, virtually none track the changes made in response to referee’s comments enabling a reader to make their own judgement as to whether a paper was improved or made worse. Referees get no public credit for good work, and no public opprobrium for poor or even malicious work. And in most cases a paper rejected from one journal starts completely afresh when submitted to a new journal, the work of the previous referees simply thrown out of the window.
Much of the commentary around the open letter has suggested that the peer review process should be made public. But only for published papers. This goes nowhere near far enough. One of the key points where we lose value is in the transfer from one journal to another. The authors lose out because they’ve lost their priority date (in the worse case giving the malicious referees the chance to get their paper in first). The referees miss out because their work is rendered worthless. Even the journals are losing an opportunity to demonstrate the high standards they apply in terms of quality and rigor – and indeed the high expectations they have of their referees.
The university’s Independent Study offerings have been attractive to students who are unable to make class regularly, either due to geographic distance or because of scheduling conflicts. Its Open CourseWare section offers the general public six classes—three university courses and three high school courses—that anyone on the Web can step through. (May I personally recommend the Financial Planning course? A lot of people could use it these days.) Of course, you won’t get any credit for taking the course for free, and that’s why BYU hopes you’ll pony up the cash and enroll.
When Oracle acquired Sun, the database giant also acquired the Java technology that was Sun’s lifeblood. Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison called Java the most important technology Oracle has ever acquired. With ownership and leadership come responsibility. Java’s future is now in Oracle’s hands. This eWEEK slide show presents 15 ways Oracle can improve Java and boost its position in the Java community.
Buried in all the Google Buzz hype today was a little story on TechCrunch that Google is planning to offer 1 gigabit-per-second, super-duper, high-speed fiber-optic cable in up to 50,000 homes in the US shortly. This is more significant to me than Google taking on Facebook.
Outlining its concerns, the Appeal said that authors’ freedoms in Germany are currently under serious threat, both at an international level (“[I]ntellectual property is being stolen from its producers to an unimagined degree and without criminalisation through the illegal publication of works protected by German copyright law on platforms such as Google Books and YouTube.”), and at a national level. (“The so-called ‘Alliance of German Scientific Organisations’ wants to obligate authors to use a specified mode of publication [i.e. OA]. This is not conducive to the improvement of scientific information”).
Not only was the Appeal based on a misunderstanding of the aims and objectives of OA (OA advocates, for instance, have never suggested that researchers be compelled to publish in OA journals), but it conflated OA with other issues (Google Books, YouTube etc.) that OA advocates argue have little to do with it.
This misunderstanding too is perhaps not surprising — for all these issues do share at least one important thing in common: they all arise from the fact that the Internet fundamentally changes the way in which information can be copied, distributed and consumed.
The President of the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica César Alierta who was attending some PwC meetings in the Basque town of Bilbao said that Spanish Telefonica will charge Google, Yahoo, Bing and other Internet search engines for using their networks.
There are now over 10,000 Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras covering the UK road network. These are capable of recording, recognising and tracking your car by its numberplate. The data from the cameras is collated and stored at a national centre run on behalf of the private, profit-making company ACPO, where it is held for at least two years. In some cases a detailed image of the driver and front-seat passenger is retained along with license plate information.
The cynical view of warnings about a mounting Chinese threat is that they are largely Pentagon budget-building ploys: if the U.S. military is “only” going to fight insurgents and terrorists in the future, it doesn’t really need the next generation of expensive fighter planes or attack submarines. Powerful evidence for this view—apart from familiarity with Pentagon budget debates over the years—is that many of the neoconservative thinkers who since 9/11 have concentrated on threats from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran were before that time writing worriedly about China. The most powerful counterargument is that China’s rise is so consequential and unprecedented in scale that it would be naive not to expect military ramifications. My instincts lie with the skeptical camp: as I’ve often written through the past three years, China has many more problems than most Americans can imagine, and its power is much less impressive up close. But on my return to America, I asked a variety of military, governmental, business, and academic officials about how the situation looks from their perspective. In most ways, their judgment was reassuringly soothing; unfortunately, it left me with a new problem to worry about.
Nicholas George, a senior in Middle-Eastern Studies at Pomona College, was detained, handcuffed, and intensively questioned by the TSA while trying to catch a flight back to school from Philadelphia. The TSA guards found English-Arabic flashcards in his luggage and said that because Osama bin Laden spoke Arabic, “these cards are suspicious.” The FBI was called in, and an agent called him a “fucking idiot” when he asked why he was being held. After being asked if he was a communist or a Muslim, he was released. He was not read his rights at any time.
In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee today, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told representatives that American citizens can be assassinated by the US government when they are oveseas.
Reporting the verdict against a Metropolitan police commander below, we described him as the most senior British police officer ever convicted of corruption offences. Rather, he is the most senior in three decades. In 1977, Wallace Virgo, serious crimes squad commander, and Kenneth Drury, flying squad commander, were among several senior officers found guilty of corruption.
The Indian minister for the environment today imposed a six-month moratorium on the launch of a genetically modified variety of aubergine, known locally as brinjal, saying that further scientific research was needed before permission could be given for its commercial cultivation.
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The decision was welcomed by campaigners. “It is an excellent precedent,” said the Environment Support Group. “No minister before has ever subjected such an important decision to such public and scientific review.”
The census disproves these claims completely. According to the study, agriculture is responsible for 43.7% of the nation’s chemical oxygen demand (the main measure of organic compounds in water), 67% of phosphorus and 57% of nitrogen discharges.
Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.
While the general world opinion of COP15 is that it was a failure, there is the caveat, recognized by many, that a world-wide grassroots movement was galvanized there.
And, in addition, this movement is in a much better position to move on to the next phase of this planetary life-and-death drama, because in Copenhagen we arrived at a crucial clarification: the events of COP15 demonstrated that the governments of the largest and richest nations are all too willing to lose the climate game, as they irresponsibly lead us over the cliff into climate disaster.
The ads are aimed at confusing people by portraying the financial reform bill as a “new $4 trillion bailout for banks” — language that was suggested by discredited GOP pollster and wordsmith Frank Luntz, who recently urged Republicans to stoke opposition to the consumer-friendly legislation by portraying it as filled with bank bailouts, lobbyist loopholes and additional layers of complicated government bureaucracy.
Adamske argues that the bill “makes it harder” for the Fed to provide the money. And he objects to the claim that the $4 trillion is available “if [banks] fail.”
Here’s a fascinating profile on radical Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles, an empiricist who says his research doesn’t support the Chicago School efficient marketplace hypothesis. Instead, Bowles argues that the wealth inequality created by strict market economics creates inefficiencies because society has to devote so much effort to stopping the poor from expropriating the rich. He calls this “guard labor” and says that one in four Americans is employed to in the sector — labor that could otherwise be used to increase the nation’s wealth and progress.
Embattled bank JPMorgan Chase, the recipient of $25 billion in TARP funds, is going ahead with a $138 million plan to buy two new luxury corporate jets and build “the premier corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard” to house them, ABC News has learned.
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
And so here, in plain English, is the implication of Bowles’ basic ideas: The US and New Mexico will keep falling behind until they learn to share the wealth.
Readers may know that one point of contention in the worries about Greece’s deficits is that it had hidden the fact that it violated Maastricht rule that fine eurozone countries whose fiscal deficits exceed 3% of GDP.
It didn’t take long for Goldman Sachs (GS) to be insinuated in the Greek debt crisis. Spiegel Online International reports on the country’s willingness to rely on cross-currency swaps devised by Goldman Sachs. This was done, the paper suggests, to get around Maastricht rules.
An article in Der Spiegel asserts Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) helped Greece cover up the true depth of its debt situation through creative use of cross currency swaps which allowed Greece to be in much deeper debt than allowed under what is called Maastricht deficit rules, which can fine countries who go beyond the stated parameters they’re allowed to operate under.
While Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was on the talk shows reassuring America that the economy is healing, developments in Europe threatened to cut the legs out from under a U.S. recovery.
The short story is that Greece and a number of other European Union (EU) countries are in debt, deep in debt. EU rules say member countries cannot have budget deficits that exceed three percent of GDP. Greece’s debt is closer to 12 percent.
Sunlight recently developed a seven-point plan for a comprehensive and meaningful disclosure regime in a post-Citizens United political world.
John blogged about the first piece of the platform, Independent Expenditures, and today I’ll be focusing lobbying disclosure, which, even before Citizens United, needed to be updated to address the who, what, when, and why a lobbying contact took place. In the wake of Citizens United, real time, online, substantive disclosure becomes even more critical to demonstrate that corporate expenditures are indeed independent and to shed light on whether there is even the appearance of coercion.
Pavitt’s disclosure at the Govnet 2010 Government IT conference was reported by silicon.com and not denied by HMRC, whose spokesman told me: “Our job is to deliver value for money to the department and our customers, and that does not mean artificially ramping up our spending to be regarded as a player.
“The bigger your budget, the more leverage you have, but HMRC is not driven by this consideration. The scale of our IT needs alone ensures that we have sufficient presence in the IT market to engage meaningfully with any supplier we choose to achieve maximum service delivery in tandem with value for money.”
Lord Hanningfield, the council leader who championed a multi-billion-pound outsourcing deal with IBM for Essex County Council, has resigned today amidst the MPs expenses scandal.
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In December 2009, Essex County Council signed an eight-year agreement with IBM to transform its operations and services, and slash costs. It is expected to eventually cost between £2.3 billion and £5.4 billion, dependent upon the services procured.
The systems that the post-Thatcher consensus created have broken badly. So far in Britain there is little political will to reform them, or many of the other aspects of our society that need fixing or preparation for change ahead – I’ve talked about the economy but it could equally be global warming, energy security, an ageing population, the digital revolution, the rise of rival developing economies. Qualities such as creativity, bluntness, open-mindedness, humility and independence have largely become absent from politicians (of course, there are of course honourable exceptions, but none of them sit on the front benches) and they are essential for the challenges that lie ahead.
Until this moment, I had naively assumed that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) was an official body, funded by the Home Office to co-ordinate policing policy. Well, guess what? It’s a nice little privatised earner, as this Telegraph report suggests.
Concerns have been raised that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is being run as a private company and as such escapes many of the rules that ensure public bodies are accountable.
This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll). And whether that belief is true or not, the damage is the same. The democracy is feigned. A feigned democracy breeds cynicism. Cynicism leads to disengagement. Disengagement leaves the fox guarding the henhouse.
Sarah Palin gave a $100K speech to a convention of teabagging wankers, she faced a few pre-screened, prepared questions, and what did she need? She had to have the answers written on her hand ahead of time!
Palin also received some criticism for referring to President Obama in her Nashville speech as a “charismatic guy with the teleprompter,” while referring to crib notes she had scrawled on her hand during the same speech.
The Alaska governor Sarah Palin, in the Washington Post on 9 December, attacked the emailers as a “highly politicised scientific circle” who “manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures”. She was joined by the Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who has for years used his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to campaign against climate scientists and to dismiss anthropogenic global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. During the Copenhagen climate conference, which he attended on a Senate delegation, he referred to Jones’s “hide the decline” quote and said: “Of course, he means hide the decline in temperatures.”
In a video posted on YouTube on February 3, House Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) explains how the right wing media machine creates and spreads disinformation in an effort to smear the left. “Disinformation” should not be confused with “misinformation,” the unintentional form of wrong information. Disinformation is produced by people who intend to mislead their audience.
One of the subtlest ways of gaming the system is to hack the system before you even play – for example, by building in a bias that means your particular approach is given a natural advantage. That this goes on, is nothing new; that it’s happened at the heart of the European Union is profoundly disturbing. Here’s the summary of what’s now been discovered:
These findings suggest that BAT [British American Tobacco] and its corporate allies have fundamentally altered the way in which EU policy is made by ensuring that all significant EU policy decisions have to be assessed using a business-orientated IA [Impact assessment].
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This is an incredibly important – and impressive – paper, with huge implications for many areas. One that springs to mind is that of environmental protection. Given that the framing of Impact assessments is biased in favour of business and financial issues, it’s not hard to see that other viewpoints – for example of examining the implications for animal and plant life, or of the various commons impacted – will receive pretty short shrift. It’s also an argument for the economics of externalities to be developed more so that they can be brought into the equation when such one-side reviews are being conducted.
Citizens in the Ukraine are starting to see American-style campaign sloganeering and other tactics in the race between their Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and her main rival, Viktor Yanukovich, for the office of President.
Fifteen years ago, CMD’s book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! first exposed the hidden government and industry PR campaign greenwashing toxic sewage sludge as “biosolids,” an invented PR euphemism used to cynically re-brand toxic waste as “fertilizer” given free to farmers.
I’ve written on the forum a little while ago, outlining the selection process I envisage introducing, partly to help me work that out, and partly to give the chance for member feedback. Now I’m in a position to announce that we will be putting the first potential candidates forward for ratification by the party membership, after which they will be declared as prospective parliamentary candidates for PPUK.
The West seems to be annoyed by a series of events: China’s cyber attacks on Western computer networks, disputes with Google, crackdowns on human rights activists, execution of a British citizen, and its unhelpful role ranging from the climate change talks to Iran’s nuclear program. The list goes on. Pundits point to the increasing threats posted by an increasingly self-confident China.
But before going on criticizing China, let’s view the matter from another angle: The West’s response to China’s economic reform and opening. It plays an important part in fuelling China’s self-confidence, one of the key themes discussed in posts by Chinese scholar Zhu Xueqin (朱学勤) on BBC Chinese Web and Lu Di (芦笛) on Bullogger.com.
The Iranian government plans to permanently suspend Google Inc’s email service in the country, the Wall Street Journal reported on its website on Wednesday.
Australia’s drive to protect its own population from the horrors of the internet may be starting to have knock-on effects on the surfing habits of its neighbour, New Zealand – some websites are no longer accessible in NZ via Aussie ISPs.
A Reg reader wrote to tell us: “NZ surfers being routed via Optus routers in Oz have been blocked from NHL.com, and peopleofwalmart.com along with all ‘Gamehouse’ social games on Facebook.
Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas is using the Digital Economy Bill to wade in to the debate over whether aggregators can freely link to online newspaper material.
The UK government politely refused some of the boldest proposed late changes to the Digital Economy Bill, as the House Of Lords finally finished debating the bill on Tuesday night.
The German government declared its intention to not continue with the Internet filtering law which was passed in 2009 to block child pornography online.
Since the former government, made up of a coalition of Germany´s two biggest parties, the social democratic SPD and the conservative CDU, passed the law in June/July 2009, it remained a controversially discussed topic in Germany. Especially civil society groups including the Internet community criticized the then Minister of Family Ursula von der Leyen for using child porn as an excuse to create a structure of online censorship.
From the department of premature congratulations: One of China’s best-known artists and activists just spoke out in support of Google’s “decision” to stop censoring search results inside the world’s most populous nation.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece headlined “Google Gives Us Hope,” Al Weiwei also said two of his Gmail accounts were breached by unknown intruders and messages were automatically “transferred to an unknown address.” He said that even as the internet was promoting greater political participation, Chinese authorities were working hard to stifle this possibility.
Back before the Christmas break, it looked like Ofcom was ready to do its duty and stop the BBC from adding digital rights management technology to its high-definition broadcasts. After all, DRM doesn’t actually prevent copying – even the BBC agrees that the scheme it’s proposed won’t stop a determined copier, and once that copy is on the internet, everyone else will be able to get at it with a couple of clicks.
And DRM imposes social, monetary and public interest costs: a DRM scheme will never be able to embody the flexibility built into the law that instructs judges to carefully weigh up the copyright holder’s exclusive rights against the public’s legitimate use of copyrighted works for personal archiving, format-shifting, commentary, education, and the other traditional uses that have fallen outside of the exclusive purview of copyright corporations to approve.
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I love the Beeb, honestly I do. I am just as worried about charter renewal in 2016 as anyone in White City. But how on Earth can the BBC’s masters believe that adding DRM will win over the affection of the Britons whose support Auntie will need during the next government?
With a majority of the major publishers now going to the agency model, it’s logical that the final two, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, won’t be far behind, especially since they’re a part of Steve’s team. (HarperCollins hasn’t officially switched, but Rupert Murdoch said on their earnings call they’re renegotiating to that, so I’m counting it.) Three out of five, we’re calling it: Amazon’s dream of a flat $9.99 for ebooks has flatlined.
The top civil servant at the Department for Business (BIS, formerly BERR, formerly DTi), David Hendon, has sent a letter [pdf] back in response to a letter [pdf] from Nominet’s chairman Bob Gilbert saying that the EGM proposed changes would “largely remove the concerns” that the government has about Nominet.
The Conference Board of Canada is a respected think-tank — or it was, until it was discovered that it had cooked its research in a report on Canadian copyright that had been funded by copyright industry bodies (they discarded the empirical research that suggested there was no problem and instead plagiarised a lobbying document produced by its sponsors and presented it as “research”).
We’ve already pointed out how director/writer/filmmaker/entertainer Kevin Smith is a great example of a filmmaker embracing the model of connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, even to the point of saying that unauthorized file sharing is just a way to get more fans he can “convert.” Apparently, he may take things to another level, by following a crowdfunding effort similar to what we’ve seen with some musicians and authors.
In a landmark case the music copyright group SABAM has been chasing a local Internet provider in court, trying to force the company to filter P2P traffic, thus far without result. The Brussels Court of Appeal has now referred the case to the European Court Of Justice where it will be thoroughly examined once again.
Should copyright holders be allowed to get the identities of Internet users behind an IP-address for private prosecutions, or should that ability be left solely with the police? That’s the key question behind a pivotal hit movie camcorder case which is set to move amid an unusual amount of secrecy to Norway’s Supreme Court.
It has been about a year since the music labels got what they had been asking for from the major online music stores: tiered music pricing. Problem is, that system may not be working out as well as the labels had hoped—Warner Music Group has reported slowed digital music growth since the pricing changes, and even though the company tried to spin the news as positive, it acknowledged that the timing may not have been the best.
Warner’s digital sales (and by “digital,” it means online sales, not CDs) made up 20 percent of its total revenue in its quarter ending on December 31, 2009—flat sequentially from the previous quarter. Unit growth in “digital track equivalent albums” saw a five percent growth rate during the December quarter, though it’s down from 10 percent in the September quarter and 11 percent earlier in the year. Digital revenues were up eight percent year over year, compared to 20 percent the year prior.
Welcome to the ACTA: END THE SECRECY Facebook group. This group is about getting the word out, getting organized and putting the heat on parliamentarians to stand up for domestic sovereignty.
Members of the European Parliament are calling on the European Commission to stop keeping it in the dark, and tell citizens what being negotiated in the ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement). In particular, they want to know about the measures in ACTA which threaten the Internet.
The EU has made an official statement [.pdf] on ACTA. As you might expect, it is as wriggly a wriggly thing as a wriggly thing can. Here it is, with a few annotations:
The Commission can inform the Honourable Member that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will be in line with the body of EU legislation, which fully respects fundamental rights and freedoms and civil liberties, such as the protection of personal data. This includes the Intellectual Property Rights’ relevant aspects of the Telecoms package.
As for being in line with “EU legislation”, this *already* allows ACTA-like provisions, so that’s cold comfort.
When concern over ACTA secrecy started picking up a few months ago, one of the industry lobbyist talking points that floated out was “don’t worry about ACTA, because it’s not a ‘treaty’ but an ‘executive agreement’ and thus, it can’t impact US law.” An IP lawyer in our comments keeps making this point over and over again, and arguing that anyone who argues otherwise doesn’t understand the Constitution. Of course, that’s silly.
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And… the next time your friendly industry lobbyist insists that ACTA is “not a treaty” so you have nothing to worry about, go ahead and explain why that’s incorrect.
The so-called SWIFT Agreement, where SWIFT refers to the “Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication”, has close parallels with ACTA, about which I have written several times – not least the way it has gradually emerged from the shadows to be met by growing outrage from people who were kept in the dark about it.
Translation: Writing a law that says 3 strikes will be implemented without specifying how, why, where, when, by whom, under what authority and what kind of due process and pre-cutoff appeal mechanism will be provided is unacceptable. The comittee also criticises the government over the notion that clause 17 would give a government minister the power to change copyright law when they felt like it without recourse to parliament.
In the end it ended up being an issue on AT&T’s end (after all I was still online it was just redirecting any pages I tried to view to AT&T’s website). A couple days later and some paper work later needless to say my internet was back online – Linux and otherwise.
It just irks me greatly that companies always try to blame a third party when their own equipment is not functioning properly.
In such a Windows-centric world, pitching Linux to clients who are not tech savvy is not as hard as you might think — you just have to know the product and know where (and how) the product fits into the client’s infrastructure. Here are some examples.
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Let clients try Linux
If a client wants to play around with Linux to see if it will fit their needs, a really good approach is to give the client a Live CD of a distribution and tell them to boot it up. The Live instance will not change their current OS, and they could get easily get an idea if Linux will work. You can take this one step further by rolling your own Live CD (with a tool such as SUSE Studio) and adding your branding to the desktop, as well as to applications you think the client will want and/or need.
Another plus: Linux job openings on the Dice.com job website rose by 5.5% during the last half of 2009 (June was the bottom of last year’s IT job market) in contrast to Windows listings which dropped by 4% during the same period. The salary findings were tallied by Dice.com based on the responses of 16,908 registered job seekers and site visitors from Aug. 24 to Nov. 12, 2009.
Taras Glek works for Mozilla, but he is not a browser hacker; instead, he works on GCC and other tools aimed at making the browser development process better. It is, he says, a good job. While carrying out his duties, Taras has been able to put a new GCC feature to work in ways which may prove to be useful well beyond Mozilla.
On the 20th of February which is a Saturday, The HeliOS Project will be hosting their first official Organization Day. We will be gathering volunteers to meet at our facility in Lakeway and try to bring some order to the chaos I have created.
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Plans are going ahead for the delivery of up to 30 computers for Our Texas Grandchildren. This is a foundation established by Carole Keeton Strayhorn to care for and nurture the most neglected in our Texas foster care system. We are proud to provide these machines and training to these kids.
Linux has become the strategic ‘Unix’ rival to Voleware and while it does not have the years of development behind it, it is approaching and will soon equal Unix in performance, reliability and scalability.
He will also work with Tony Weeresinghe, CEO of MillenniumIT on a project to switch on the Linux-based MillenniumIT trading platform by 2010. It replaces the outgoing TradElect platform, based on Microsoft .Net architecture.
Meanwhile, David Lester, the LSE’s director of information services, will manage the merger of Turquoise and Baikal.
3D drivers are a traditional source of complaints in open source systems. David Chisnall looks at the history and current state of the art to see what changes are in store for 2010.
NVIDIA’s Optimus is similar to the hybrid-switching technologies that have been available on notebooks up to this point for switching between ATI/AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs on notebooks depending upon the graphics workload, but with Optimus the experience is supposed to be seamless.
These days–in contrast to ten years ago–the world has plenty more Web browsers than it needs. And yet I can’t find one I’m happy with. My continuing search for a browser I get along with led me recently to try Opera, a seasoned but still largely obscure player on the browser scene. Here’s what I thought of it.
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So what’s the verdict on Opera? Overall, it’s fine, but I’m not convinced it’s anything special. However, it’s also currently installed and has yet to cause the loss of three hours’ worth of work, so I just might stick with it–at least till something better comes along.
Music Player with the aims to be intuitive, easy to use and fast even for huge music collections. Developed for Linux with wxWidgets for GTK under Gnome.
In the Linux world with Ubuntu dominating the market to discuss about the comparison of Desktop Managers available for Linux is of good importance . By default Ubuntu comes with gnome desktop environment and Kubuntu comes with kde as the desktop manager . Considering the case of someone who is interested in trying out something different xfce might be fun .
One of the biggest items to impact KDE 4.4 was Nokia’s release of Qt 4.6 in December 2009. The Qt open source GUI framework is the core user interface framework used by KDE. Qt 4.6 brought KDE 4.4 a number of significant advancements, including noticeable performance improvements and a new animation framework, Seigo noted.
Linux offers users numerous separate apps to manage files and handle system-related computing chores, but Krusader packages these functions in its own tool sets. Krusader is designed for the KDE desktop, but this file manager does not need the KDE window manager to run on your computer.
What’s the single most important thing you think free software projects could do to improve their fundraising efforts?
Start reading emails from organizations like MoveOn.org and BarackObama.com and start emulating them and their tactics. You don’t have to agree with them politically to see how they’re doing what they’re doing.
A lot of people are going to call me crazy, but look: I’d argue that GNOME has as much if not more installations than the number of people that are subscribed to MoveOn.org’s email list. And unlike MoveOn.org, a lot of these users are interacting with your software every day, not just when an email pops up in their inbox or when something happens in Washington.
Oracle laying off GNOME contributors is certainly bad news for the project. It’s particularly bad news because Willie Walker, one of my favourite GNOME contributors, is now out of a job.
I just want to put this in perspective, though. In 2007, IBM made deep cuts in its support of GNOME accessibility, affecting contributors such as Peter Parente, Eitan Isaacson and Aaron Leventhal, who are no longer paid to work on GNOME accessibility work. The IBM cuts were perhaps deeper than those that Oracle are announcing right now (but I suspect that we’re not finished hearing bad news from Oracle). So we’ve been through this (and worse) before.
I have both Ubuntu 9.10 and Mandriva One 2010 installed on my computer. I have been using Ubuntu for many years since version Gutsy Gibbon until Ubuntu 9.10 but I just use Mandriva for a month. Basically I was love Ubuntu than any other linux distro. But after I install Mandriva 2010, I planned to leave Ubuntu as my default OS on my laptop. I know, for some people this is strange, but I have a realistic reason why Mandriva is better than Ubuntu at any aspects.
At FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, software that was declared dead was resurrected (Hurd), known combatants sat down at the same table (openSUSE, Fedora and Debian) and almost forgotten entities raised their hands again (openSUSE for PowerPC).
I’ve just put the slides of my talk on Debian and Ubuntu online.
Don’t hesitate to post comments to ask for clarifications where needed (it might be difficult to understand some parts of the slides without being in the room).
I’m about 100% sure that the next person to be interviewed needs no introduction – everybody will have heard of Jono at some point, whether it be from his role within the community, his activity on identi.ca & twitter, or maybe even from Lernid…Either way, I hope you enjoy this as much as I have!
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8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?
I want to see free software, delivered via Ubuntu, become the most ubiquitous platform in the world for users and developers, available to all, respecting local languages and culture, and inspiring innovation and sharing.
In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.
Two prizes up for grabs. One prize pack will be given to the story that the community votes is their favourite. One prize pack will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. I have been given the pleasure of drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on March 8th. Thanks to the Ubuntu Women project for asking for to do this.
What really strikes me as a real storm in the tea-cup is the pseudo announcement that Ubuntu will drop Openoffice.org from its upcoming Lucid Lynx release, in its netbook edition. The news came from this website and got quickly picked out by the largest french newspaper, stirring quite an uproar among the French community.
So for those who are wondering what these wallpaper clocks are all about, wallpaper clocks are wallpapers that show live date and time. And there are a number of good source for wallpaper clocks. But we will get to that later. First the basics. Read on.
The Linux Mint team announced the final release of Linux Mint 8 “Helena” KDE Community Edition. Based on Kubuntu 9.10, Linux 2.6.31, KDE 4.3.4 and Xorg 7.4, Linux Mint 8 KDE CE boasts improved OEM installation, as well as “ignore updates” and multiple software selection features.
Lantronix announced a design contest based on its recently introduced XPort Pro, touted as the “world’s smallest Linux networking server.” Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design, plus a separate $3,000 prize for the Best Student Linux Design, says the company.
Moxa announced a rackmount automation computer, with four PCI expansion slots and four gigabit Ethernet ports. The DA-710 has a 2GHz Intel Celeron M processor, a CompactFlash slot, SATA and IDE interfaces, two serial ports, plus four USB 2.0 ports, and runs Debian Linux 5.0, says Moxa.
Access subsidiary IP Infusion announced a new version of its Linux-based, Next Generation Network (NGN) carrier-grade middleware. ZebOS Network Platform 7.8 adds support for Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS), Data Center Bridging, and MPLS resiliency for wireless backhaul and Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) implementations, says the company.
Android comprised only 5.2 percent of the market in December 2009, but that was more than double than its 2.5 percent share in September, comScore says. This would make the Linux-based Android OS the fastest growing mobile OS during the period, and the only other platform in the top five aside from Apple to grow at all.
Customers who want a Nexus One but don’t want to buy from Google can now pay an additional hundred and fifty quid to have one shipped through Play.com.
Buzz about Google’s Super Bowl ad started spreading when CEO Eric Schmidt implied in a Twitter post that there would be one during the third quarter. There had been rumors–which turned out to be untrue–that Google’s ad would feature the Nexus One smartphone. As it turns out, the “Parisian Love” ad has been on YouTube since November 19 as part of Google’s “Search Stories” ad campaign–which had been online-only until the Super Bowl. It had chalked up over a million views on YouTube.
Motorola is adding another device into its Android arsenal. The Motorola Devour, officially announced on Wednesday, will be available on Verizon Wireless starting in March.
Fluffy Spider Technologies (FST) announced an Android-ready version of its FancyPants 3.0 lightweight embedded graphics framework for consumer electronics. FancyPants 3.0 will initially support Android 1.5 and 1.6 SDKs on MIPS and ARM platforms, providing “autonomous UI” capabilities for ongoing customization, says the company.
ARM Holdings, the UK company that makes a core CPU design that licensees can modify into their own designs for handheld devices, plans to launch three more Cortex processor cores during 2010 as it pursues new markets.
ARM Holdings announced that more than 1.3 billion chips based on its designs were sold during the fourth quarter of 2009. Reporting better-than-expected financial results, the company added that it’s signing up licensees for three new designs, code-named “Eagle,” “Heron,” and “Merlin.”
Symbian, the giant maker of that well known operating system for cell phones is an inspiration. By announcing that it was going to release ‘billions of pounds worth of Intellectual Property’ as Open Source software it made the BBC news.
Hoorah! Symbian will join the likes of Android OS and Linux, thereby making OSS the dominant software of the phone market. Good luck to them I say…hmm, but hang on I’ve heard this story somewhere before.
Terracotta and Eucalyptus Systems, both open source startups, have announced a new joint partnership. According to the companies, which specialise in scalability for Java applications and the private cloud platform, the partnership will “provide enterprises with an open source solution that maximizes data scalability and application performance in a private cloud environment”. With the new agreement, the companies will reportedly combine their sales and marketing efforts and improve integration between their products. Woody Rollins, CEO and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems said that, “Together we are making private clouds a viable option for managing critical applications and processes at even the highest workloads”.
On Tuesday. Lucid’s chief executive Eric Gries claimed 80 per cent of the FAST’s customer base ran on Linux or Unix, and Microsoft’s decision will simply mean those who’d been previously unsure, concerned about the future under Microsoft, or interested in using an open-source architecture like Lucene or Solr will now move elsewhere.
“This news is the final nail in the coffin,” Gries said of FAST. “I’m puzzled by the thinking at Microsoft. But for us it definitely helps. Customers who were on the fence thinking about staying with FAST and Linux and moving to Solr – their decision is very clear.”
Lucid counts those who’ve moved to Lucid or Solr in the last year as Fortune 500s that don’t want be tied to a single company’s roadmap or paying expensive licensing fees. Microsoft’s plan with FAST is to integrate the search capabilities into Office and SharePoint 2010. Since January 2009, Lucid has picked up Ford, Nike, Sears, and Macy’s.
I didn’t blame SourceForge for this (although plenty of people did). When you get a legal order from an entity that has the right to issue and enforce legal orders, if you are law abiding in your nation of residence, you comply with the order. SourceForge had nothing to gain by “bucking the system” and could ultimately do more harm than good to the open source community by telling the U.S. Government to “go pound sand”.
And, yes, lots of work. For example several new systems installed for our automated test and certification solution, approximately 60 customers and countless prospects have had their questions answered, and significant recruiting work on our immediate priorities including inside sales, sales engineering, software develand support.
I’m only a fairly recent convert to Firefox for the simple reason I didn’t need too many bells and whistles in a browser before now. It’s no surprise then that I used Google’s Chrome for a while after leaving my IE days firmly behind me, but having had to use Firefox because my online banking didn’t support Chrome at the time, I got hooked and have never looked back.
Two Firefox add-ons available for months on Mozilla’s website infected users with malware that stole passwords and opened a backdoor on Windows machines, the open-source browser maker has confirmed.
Since one of my main areas of interest is the conflicting intersection of Free Software and Open Source, Mr. Hill’s thoughts are often very illuminating for me – even when I don’t agree with him I never feel like he makes his argument poorly.
In his FSF appeal, I’m glad to say Mr. Hill delivers and makes a point I am in strong agreement with:
Free software is not really about software in this fundamental sense; it’s about bringing freedom to users through software.
Just like open source is necessary but not sufficient for Free Software, Free Software in turn is necessary but not sufficient for “users to take control of their technology”.
OpenDNSSEC works in all Unix-like operating systems and is suitable both for those who will only sign a single large zone (such as top-level domains) and those who have many small zones (e.g. web hotels, ISPs).
Industry observers say YouTube appeared to be supporting IPv6 in production mode, as opposed to running a test of the next-generation Internet protocol.
In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip’s microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year’s ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you’re likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves.
NASA explains that Pluto’s overall hue is “believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto’s surface, leaving behind a dark and red carbon-rich residue”.
After the release of ccc-gistemp 0.3.0, I contacted Dr Reto Ruedy of NASA GISS to ask him to try out the release and have a look through it.
Dr Ruedy responded, thanking us for our effort, and saying “I hope to switch to your version of that program”. After some further discussion, he clarified this:
When GISS has the resources:
INTERNET HACKERS connected with the group Anonymous, which is better known for its attacks against Scientology, have launched a campaign against Australian government websites.
The group is protesting against the Australian government’s determination to censor its citizens’ Internet connections.
Top flight outsourcing firm Tata Consulting Services appeared to have lost control of its website to hackers today, with the domain apparently being touted for sale.
The Washington Post reported that the site had fallen prey to a DNS hijack over the weekend.
FORMER US ARMY computer insecurity specialist Christopher Tarnovsky showed the Black Hat Technical Security Conference exactly why the US cannot handle a cyber war.
The news that the NSA and Google are working on a deal for the military agency to help protect the information giant’s data networks comes at a time when the NSA is angling to get a major piece of cybersecurity action.
Isn’t it a bit embarrassing for an “expert on counter-terrorism” to be quoted as saying this?
Bill Tupman, an expert on counter-terrorism from Exeter University, told BBC News: “The problem is trying to predict the mind of the al-Qaeda planner; there are so many things they might do.
“And it is also necessary to reassure the public that we are trying to outguess the al-Qaeda planner and we are in the process of protecting them from any threat.”
America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. It’s almost impossible to identify the cause, and it’s doubtful there’s a cure. The entire forensic team from House would need a full season to unravel the mystery of what it is about the American brain that renders us more terrified of terrorists today than we were five years ago and less trusting of government policies to protect us.
Staff Sgt Rob Piercy said: “This is an instance where the Taser saved this man’s life. He was very strong and athletic, and it was difficult to arrest him.”
The man was taken to hospital where tests revealed he “may have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol”. He was later released on “a promise to appear in court” and could face charges of “mischief and assault”.
Although Blair emphasized that it requires “special permission” before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that “permission” is obtained: the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch.
New Ministry of Defence figures show the RAF has fired 84 missiles from Reaper drones since they were first deployed there in June 2008, with more than 20 being fired over the past two months.
Police have questioned a scientist at the University of East Anglia in connection with the leak of emails from the University’s Climatic Research Unit.
In his first State of the Union Address last week, President Obama stated his support for Nuclear energy and that America needed to be “…building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” He seemingly followed up on this pledge on January 29th by proposing tripling existing loan guarantees for new reactors be increased to more than $54 billion.
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it’s not pretty. So why isn’t anyone in America doing anything about it?
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To understand how radiation from cell phones and wireless transmitters affects the human brain, and to get some sense of why the concerns raised in so many studies outside the U.S. are not being seriously raised here, it’s necessary to go back fifty years, long before the advent of the cell phone, to the research of a young neuroscientist named Allan Frey.
When a cigarette burns, nicotine is released in the form of a vapor that collects and condenses on indoor surfaces such as walls, carpeting, drapes and furniture, where it can linger for months, said the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Further details have emerged regarding the US Department of Justice case against UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems. The feds – without argument from BAE – say that the company engaged in a “conspiracy” to violate several US laws in recent years.
An Indian national pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy and aggravated identity-theft charges related to an international fraud scheme to hack into online brokerage accounts in the U.S. and use them to manipulate stock prices, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Anand explained that a number of factors contribute to the success of the zero rupee notes in fighting corruption in India. First, bribery is a crime in India punishable with jail time. Corrupt officials seldom encounter resistance by ordinary people that they become scared when people have the courage to show their zero rupee notes, effectively making a strong statement condemning bribery. In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly, Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight.
A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are demanding a solution. What they don’t realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything.
Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.
It all seemed easy to Angela McLeod when a doorstep lender first turned up at her home in Cranhill, Glasgow. She only needed £300 and here it was, with no credit checks and no questions asked. She just had to agree to an interest rate of 55%.
The company is working with regulators and bank processing companies to resolve the problem as soon as possible, it said. But “personal payments to and from India will be suspended for at least a few months until we fully resolve the questions from the Indian regulators.”
The United States has warned that it may stop working with EU institutions on terrorist data exchange if the European Parliament next week blocks a bilateral deal on the issue.
“If the European parliament overturns the agreement, I am unsure whether Washington agencies would again decide to address this issue at EU level,” US ambassador to the EU William Kennard wrote in a letter sent to European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, according to news agency AFP.
Iran said on Sunday its Internet connections will remain slow this week due to technical problems, ahead of anticipated protests by opposition supporters.
Connections have been slow since last week and some email accounts have been unavailable for several hours each day.
China’s aggressive crackdown on internet smut and dissent continues – yesterday a man was sentenced to 13 years prison for renting a US server for distributing pornographic material
The NSS was a founder member of the One Law for All Campaign which seeks to impede the march of sharia law in Britain. Naturally we think that in a democracy everyone must be equal under the law, with no exceptions. Sharia law is full of exceptions and it is clear that women are not equal under that system.
But now we discover that a different — more favourable — system of justice is being applied to religious people by Cherie Blair (professional name Cherie Booth) in her capacity as a judge. Last week in the Inner London Crown Court, Ms Blair/Booth spared a violent yob from prison because he is a “religious man”.
Wikileaks is usually described as a “whistleblower” site, but it’s really more of a safe haven for secrets that need to be exposed — kind of like a Swiss bank, only in reverse, so it’s kind of fitting that a Swiss bank is one of its most famous targets. But instead of shielding people who are trying to hide their assets, it exposes them. Thanks to the nature of the Net, confidential sources can make those secrets public without putting their own necks on the chopping block.
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So it’s your choice. You can spend $10 on a couple of lattes and a kruller, or you can spend it on keeping information flowing just a little more freely around the world. I know which one I’d pick.
In a followup to his State of the Union address, the president said:
I’m a big believer in net neutrality. I campaigned on this. I continue to be a strong supporter of it. My FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has indicated that he shares the view that we’ve got to keep the Internet open, that we don’t want to create a bunch of gateways that prevent somebody who doesn’t have a lot of money but has a good idea from being able to start their next YouTube or their next Google on the Internet.
Under the Special 301 process the U.S.T.R. seeks input from U.S. copyright, trademark, and patent owners about whether policies and practices in foreign countries deny them adequate IP protection. The process has generally been used by IP holders to complain not only about lax enforcement in other countries, but also about limitations and exceptions in their laws that are beneficial to libraries, to education, to innovation, and to the public interest generally. The ability to comment in the Special 301 process is not limited to IP owners only. Any member of the public is free to file comments. If you believe in the importance of balanced copyright policies, file comments with the USTR and make your voice heard.
Alexander Alvaro (ALDE) has asked 9 questions about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency, or the access by the INTA committee to the drafts documents. He is also asking about changes to substantive patent law (read software patents here).
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