10.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Following a New York Times story (subscription required) from a couple months ago, Russia announced this week it would reduce its dependence on Windows and work toward a national Linux-based operating system. As Katherine Noyes points out on NetworkWorld, we’ll have to wait to see how this unfolds given that this isn’t the first time Russia has said this. Noyes’ story includes some good information on what businesses can learn from this.
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Welcome to the 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. We love doing these awards because we get to interact with you, our readers, more than usual. This year, more than 12,000 of you generously took time to participate and share your perspectives on what tools are helping you work and play. We always are fascinated by your preferences and how your usage patterns change over time. This year, we have more categories than ever, so let’s get right to the results. Here, ladies and gentlemen, Linux geeks of all kinds, are the winners of your 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards.
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In response to this high profile case, many Russian schools started to switch to Linux, and in response to that, Russia apparently declared that all schools should switch to Linux-based software by 2008.
However, apparently that didn’t actually happen. Glyn Moody points us to the news that another Russian school teacher has been fired for complaining that his school still used Microsoft software. Even though the 2007 order required schools to switch to Linux, apparently a training system the government is making the school use requires Microsoft Office. So the teacher filed a complaint, pointing out the contradiction in orders… and for his efforts he was fired.
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With penetration of Android will come mobile developers and with them will come a large application suite. Those applications will automatically run on an Android desktop.
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It is for this reason that I think it’s too early to write off Linux on the Desktop.
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Linux is my sandbox. It is where I go to play. It is also where many people go to be productive. Desktop Linux has many millions of users. You probably have not heard much about it because of the way that it is developed and promoted.
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On the desktop, you can run over 300 distributions or varieties of Linux.
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For this Halloween season, I decided to post a few old but entertaining and somewhat educational Linux/Unix horror stories that were compiled by Anatoly Ivasyuk. Actually, Anatoly has created an entire page filled with Unix-related horror stories and I just picked a few interesting entries to share with you all. Don’t worry, I will provide you the link to the complete horror stories page right after my choices. Enjoy!
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It’s Halloween and nothing scares proprietary companies more than the cute little Linux Tux. Our Editor set out to a mission to carve a Linux Penguin on our pumpkin and scare some non-free companies. Here is the step by step creation. The process has not been patented, you are free to copy, modify and distribute it, as long as you maintain the attribution.
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Yes. We actually watched these movies. We suffered through them for you. We tracked them down in video stores and on Netflix, and sorted through piles of rubbish and even the Youtubes. We watched them all, and this is what we have gleaned: technology, guys, is scary. It causes addiction, it connects us with weirdos, and it is responsible, we suppose, for Emmerich-style mass destruction. Yet, Hollywood seems to be most fascinated with that last bit — and when it comes to attempting to scare the bejeezus out of its horror-loving public, current tech trends are unfortunately ripe for the picking.
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I couldn’t make this up if I tried: The Linux Foundation is offering a platinum rewards Visa credit card. There is no annual fee, a low introductory APR — in fact, it’s a normal credit card with Tux on the front.
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Server
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If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means “Milky Way,” at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Rakudo Star is a more usable and stable distribution of Perl 6.
Guest: Patrick Michaud, for Rakudo Perl.
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Topics for this podcast
*Latest release and support for OpenStack, Austin code release
*Development and devops consolidation continue with CollabNet-Codesion
*Funding for a number of open-source-focused players
*Open core, Canonical and the ongoing discussion
*OTRS provides open source helpdesk and service management
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Ballnux
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Samsung today launched its much anticipated Android 2.2 tablet Galaxy Tab in India. Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available in India from November 10, right right after Diwali festivities, but if you are too excited, you can pre-book one now. It is available for pre-order on Samsung website as well as on Flipkart and Future Bazaar.
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The WiFi-only version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has shown up in the FCC’s testing database, complete with the model number GT-P1010. The Froyo slate differs from its GT-P1000 sibling by omitting the 3G chipset and instead relying on WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 for its connectivity; otherwise it has the same 7-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, the 3-megapixel rear camera and front-facing 1.3-megapixel webcam.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three stable kernel updates: 2.6.27.55, 2.6.32.25, and 2.6.35.8. Users of these kernel series “must upgrade”. Also there will be only one more update for the 2.6.35 series, “so you should be using .36 instead.”
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The integration of the TILE architecture in the Linux kernel enables many open source projects to support Tilera natively and start optimizing their code for many-core. It also allows Tilera customers across embedded and cloud markets to run their Linux applications on Tilera’s technology without software change.
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Kernel 2.4 was revolutionary because it was the first kernel release that was truly embraced by enterprise users for use in their operations. Linux had had support for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing – another term for multiple CPUs) since 2.0, but the improvements in 2.4 driven by the newly involved big players (such as IBM) brought improved scalability, stability and new features that finally pushed it over the edge as a serious contender to proprietary UNIX systems of old.
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Graphics Stack
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Chia-I Wu, the open-source developer who previously worked to bring Mesa to Android devices and worked on the new EGL state tracker, is now working for LunarG and has just published a patch-set that enables the Nouveau graphics driver to run the Wayland Display Server.
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Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.
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Applications
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In this day of heavy eye candy and all point ‘n click desktops, the command-line seems to be falling further and further into disuse – at least by regular desktop users. The command-line and its power can perform everyday tasks faster and easier than a bunch of clicking around, yet new users are still intimidated by the prospect. But there really is nothing to fear. To help prove its usefulness, here are my top 15 used commands (from a fairly fresh install).
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This is an open source clone of Evernote designed to run on Linux. It is written in Java so it will also run on Windows & OS-X, but the primary focus has been to try and get a usable environment for Linux. While this is designed to work with Evernote, it is in no way connected with or supported by Evernote. Any problems you encounter will not be corrected by them and, since this is GPL software, you are using this software at your own risk.
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Proprietary
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Many hard-core Linux users will tell those who have yet to adopt it to use Wine or Crossover Office to get their favorite application running on Linux. This, of course, is simply not a solution for the new user just trying to get accustomed to an entirely new operating system. These applications need to be ported over so they can run natively. When/if that should happen, Linux adoption will be rampant.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for GStreamer filters.
– Mapping of standard cursors to native desktop cursors.
– Improved support for installers with services.
– Many MSXML improvements.
– Decoder for TGA-format images.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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Wine 1.3.5 came two weeks ago with better Shader Model 4.0 support for Windows applications/games and the ability to use the CUPS print server directly, among other features, while today Wine 1.3.6 has been released with support for more features.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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For those unfamiliar with the concept, plasma desktop themes deal with anything from the menu panel to dialogs, widgets, etc.
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GNOME Desktop
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In order to promote the GNOME 3.0 launch and spread the idea amongst the GNOME community members, I’m sharing the following message! Please translate it and share it with your friends and help us organize the biggest GNOME Launch ever!
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The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work.
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Pardus have its own package management system: PiSi (For more information about pisi you can checkout development page). Package-manager uses its backend. As you may remember from my previous posts, we are using an infrastructrure for managing operations called Çomar. Package-manager calls Çomar where it can check that if the user have necessary priveleges to use PiSi by using PolicyKit (which calls PolicyKitKde on KDE). You may see that this operation resembles KAuth. One can ask why we are using this method, instead of KAuth. Well, the simple answer is that this infrastructure is nearly 4 years old. 
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Reviews
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It attracts a lot of users because of its ability to give the user a feeling of ownership without an excessive amount of time and effort.
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Tiny Core Linux 3.2 is truly the polar opposite of Ultimate Edition 2.8; it provides the absolute minimum necessary to get you going and from there it’s really up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You’ll need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you want to use it for before it has the possibility of creating real value for you. So it’s definitely helpful if you know in advance what you want to get out of it before you attempt an install.
I suggest that intermediate and advanced Linux users use Tiny Core Linux 3.2. Beginners can certainly give it a whirl in a virtual machine, but the install might prove to be a bit overwhelming to those who are completely new to Linux.
Click to the next page to view the full image gallery (9 screenshots) of Tiny Core Linux 3.2 screenshots.
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New Releases
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Version 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) of the very best Free-Libre Open-Source data recovery software toolkit based on Ubuntu is out.
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Red Hat Family
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To hear that charge made about something as fundamental as the way enterprise software is currently sold, however, is rare. That, however, is just what Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst asserted last week in a speech at Interop in New York.
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Fedora
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Fedora 14 will be released on schedule on Tuesday, Nov. 2nd, which many of us know as “voting day”.
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Debian Family
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As I’ve written more times than most any of you would probably care to read, the six or so months during which I ran Debian Lenny as my main desktop were some of the smoothest months I’ve experienced in my FOSS-running life. That’s because Debian releases are conservatively built and never change. Security updates are pretty much it; the kernel stays the same, with patches backported into the same version and then pushed to users via apt/Aptitude. I’m sure the occasional critical bug-fix comes through as well, but often a broken piece of a stable Debian release stays broken (e.g. the Ted RTF word processor in Etch, thankfully fixed in Lenny).
But if your particular Debian setup (system and applications) is running well, you’re good for at least two and maybe even three years if you don’t want or need newer versions of your applications. I have yet to explore Debian Backports or pinning apps to Testing or Unstable. I might need to do that to get a 2.11/2.12 version of gThumb (I could also just install a .deb package with dpkg or gDebi).
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Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is awesome! Based on Debian Testing it is a rolling distro. That means if you are running LMDE you will always have an up-to-date system running, and as the saying and experiences go, Debian testing base is more stable than the so called final/stable releases of most other distros. But if you are a stability freak like me, you can make your Linux Mint Debian stable by pointing the apt sources.lst to squeeze. This ways you won’t have to install point updates of applications every now and then. You will always have the most stable and workable system for quite a long period, till squeeze becomes obsolete. Here is how I did it.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Widgets on the desktop; some people can be quite snooty about them but there is a reason they are available by default on two of the most popular Operating Systems.
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As if it were a Christmas gift to all ubuntu users, it has been announced at the UDS that a development version of Ubuntu Software Center with ‘Ratings and Reviews’ feature will arrive by Christmas.
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“I’m interested in Ubuntu and the cloud, how do I get involved” is a question I got a few times already. I thought it would be a good idea to answer this as a blog post. I believe one of the very first things you’d want to do, is to make sure you’re on the main communication channels, talking to the community, asking questions, seeing other questions being answered, trying to answer some yourself, sharing opinions and generally “connecting” with the rest of the community. That is a great first step. So I’ll highlight the main communication venues for the Ubuntu cloud community, as well as way to get kick-started.
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Translators, educators, school children and students all have a natural home in Ubuntu too, I believe, and Edubuntu and a bunch of other efforts will continue to try and reach out to them.
There are many many, more, I don’t doubt.
A further benefit of reaching out to groups who tend to be more mixed in gender and background than the Linux community is that it brings that diversity into the Ubuntu community. It will be interesting to watch these efforts develop.
But back to UDS. It’s been a great week.
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Tonight I will concentrate on answering your questions about Unity on Ask Ubuntu. Questions will be answered based on the number of votes they receive and ones that I can answer.
Unity developers will be advising me best on how to answer your questions and we can continue to develop the answers based on feedback. If you’ve already asked then we’ll keep working on our answers to be better.
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Ask many Linux users about the concept of “fragmentation,” and they’ll pooh-pooh the very concept. They’ll argue that the beauty of open source is the rich array of software flavors that open platform components give rise to. Canonical is a business, though, and at a certain point it has to evaluate whether a “rich array” of desktop interface flavors is necessarily in Ubuntu’s best interests. Yes, Unity is new, and will have to go through bug testing and other challenges, but it is also a standardized desktop that Canonical can command control of.
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One thing that I have noticed with Unity so far, is that heavy usage seems to have a greater impact on the performance of Unity than with Gnome or KDE.
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RAM wise Unity is awesome, but the spikes in CPU usage tends to kill the interface, and often you need to wait for ten or more seconds between clicking a launcher and actual response. But there is hope…
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This day is starting early. We are going to a family get together in a few hours (why is the end of the year always to crazy!?) and I want to get something readable for you guys who are following this series before I am Internetless for a few hours.
I have something interesting for you folks – a custom unity launcher…
SUCCESS!!!
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So what if Ubuntu does not have the user interface you want. You don’t have to use it. You can change it. You can do anything you want with it. You can even release your own distribution based on Ubuntu with your changes. Waaaiiit a minute….hasn’t that already happened? Something Minty I believe?
If this Unity is more popular than Gnome then it will succeed. If not, well then back to the Gnome board. If the Ubuntu distributions users like what Canonical will do then Ubuntu will be more popular than ever before. If not then some other distribution will.
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But while the decision may be in keeping with the times, it’s still every bit the ‘risky step’ that Mark Shuttleworth described it as when he made the announcement earlier this week.
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It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don’t see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a “Mobile Internet Device”. Their use cases do not overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.
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Ubuntu’s Jorge Castro has confirmed that Maverick users will be able to test the newly announced Compiz port of Unity via a PPA ‘as soon as possible’.
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To celebrate the 500th member of the Ubuntu DeviantArt group. I’ve put together some stats for Operating System Use based on self stated use on profile pages:
Windows 7/Vista/XP – 410,000 (76.9%)
Mac – 87,700 (16.3%)
Ubuntu – 20,300 (3.7%)
Linux – 16,000 (3%)
Total: 533,300
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You may have heard this before, but the latest release of Ubuntu – Maverick Meerkat – shows that Linux is ready for the prime time. The reason? The unifying nature of the web.
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Learning a new operating system can be difficult, but is also really fun. If you’ve recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 on your computer and want to explore what this operating system is capable of, don’t panic: you’ll enjoy it.
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It has often been said that the vibrant community of users and developers surrounding each distribution is Linux’s “killer app,” and I think in many ways that is true. Ubuntu is no exception. Not only is there free documentation and live support chat for help with the distribution, but there are also Web forums, mailing lists and a Launchpad-based Q&A system, among other resources.
Even before you have any specific questions, it’s a good idea to begin to explore this community so that you know what’s out there when you need it. The resources available far outshine what any proprietary vendor’s 800-number could ever provide.
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After reviewing Ubuntu 10.10 and Kubuntu 10.10, the next logical Ubuntu edition to review I think should be the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, or UNE. As the name implies, UNE is the edition of Ubuntu optimized for small screens, such as you will find on netbooks and tablet computers.
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Released at ten past ten on the 10th October 2010 (all the tens – get it?), Ubuntu 10.10 is the latest version of the popular Linux distro to hit the streets. If you were expecting a slew of new features and functionality, however, disappointment beckons. New features there are, but the expected headliners didn’t quite make it. Indeed, Ubuntu 10.10, or Maverick Meerkat as it’s known, is more about polishing the big changes of the last release, Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), than adding much that’s new.
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See, 42 really is the answer to everything. We’ve got issue #42 out for all of our readers and it’s packed with all the goodness you’ve come to expect from a FCM issue. This month, we’ve got an exciting new feature called Linux Lab. Take a look!
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Phones
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Android
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Sony Ericsson on Friday confirmed that it will begin releasing the Android 2.1 update for its flagship Xperia X10, X10 mini and X10 mini pro smartphones on Sunday. This makes good on a promise made back in May. European X10 owners will start receiving the update during the evening of October 31.
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Sub-notebooks
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We at litl had to skip last year’s GNOME Summit in Boston because we were too busy releasing our first product, the webbook. But we wanted to contribute with something this year. So, we’ll doing something similar than we did in 2008.
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I got to see an ARM Netbook at UDS-Natty. The Netbook is a EFIKA MX Smartbook. It is exciting to see an ARM based computing device running Ubuntu.
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Nifty, low-cost netbooks hit the scene in late 2008 and sold over 36 million units in 2009, according to ABI Research. Even with projected sales of 35-43 million units this year, the future of these diminutive laptop-like computers is being pulled under a dark cloud of doubt as new tablets grab the limelight and spare cash from consumers.
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While most ARM chips are running low-level smart-thingies like controllers, smartphones have really taken off. Total growth is around 30% year over year. News this year:
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Tablets
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Other OEMs watch ASUS. 2010 will finish well and 2011 looks to be even better for GNU/Linux.
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Asustek will also launch two 7-inch models and two 9-inch models in March 2011. One of the 7-inch models will feature support for Wi-Fi and the other 3.5G, while the later one will also feature phone functions. As for the 9-inch models, Asustek will have one model adopt the ARM-based Nvidia Tegra 2 platform with Google’s Android operating system and the other the Wintel platform. The two 9-inch models will have a price gap of about US$100, Shen noted.
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Most IT managers are well aware of the LAMP stack, which includes the Linux operating system, an Apache Web server, a MySQL database and a dynamic programming language such as Perl, PHP or Python. But other open-source system groups are growing rapidly. Some obvious examples are the JBoss Application Server with a JAX-WS Web services stack, the Zope object-oriented Web application server — written in Python — and the Plone open-source content management system that works with Zope.
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Events
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Are you interested in Open Source? At the exhibition, you will find several companies and parties who have specialized in or work with Open Source software and/or applications. Not only in the field of data security, but also storage. The seminar programme also contains sessions specifically dealing with Open Source.
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We also want to especially encourage open source software companies to provide some insights in their open source based business model, offered services and products.
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The ApacheCon conference–dedicated to all of the influential Apache-backed platforms and applications, ranging from Hadoop to Cassandra–is coming up Nov. 1st through 5th in Atlanta, Georgia, and we’ve been doing a series of guest posts in conjunction with it. Members of the Apache Software Foundation have weighed in on the foundation’s approach to open source projects, and now, Sally Khudairi, a VP at the foundation, has written a guest post focused on servers, innovation and the cloud. Here it is.
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As you can see from the list of participants, yours truly will also be attending. Apparently, there will be a live video stream of some of the sessions: not sure whether mine will be one of them. If it is, you can see me spouting my common commons nonsense around 11am CEST, 10am GMT.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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WoMoz internal survey results and conclusions are now available. The blog post says that the main purpose of the survey was to “… detect areas of improvement related to gender issues in Mozilla and FLOSS communities,” but also notes that finding women who are active contributors to Mozilla was a challenge. Only 18 of the 30 women contacted responded to the survey. From these responses, the survey team concluded that many of the women have experience with the Ubuntu project, so reaching out to Ubuntu Women might help attract more contributors. Some of the women who are contributing to Mozilla are doing so as a result of being contacted from somebody already involved with the Mozilla project. Also, “lack of time” seems to hold women back from contributing to Mozilla.
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As noted on Slashdot, which also has an interesting discussion from readers about Rainbow, support for live streaming and WebM are planned as additions.
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Oracle
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# Boggled at Oracle’s amended complaint against Google. Havn’t investigated the verbatim code copying claims in detail – which are of course fair game for copyright enforcement – but what interests me -far- more are the API copyright claims:
# As I wrote before, I believe that Java has rather weak patent protection, not being particularly innovative or novel really – rather a collection of existing techniques packed together into one (useful) package. With a load of design artefacts in the API that can be claimed as in some sense ‘novel’ though of little intrinsic technical merit. I wrote a long screed on the background to this: Why Oracle’s Java Copyrights Might Matter in August. As I also wrote before: I am not a Lawyer, and have no very deep understanding of the Java situation.
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My first question would be, why is the majority of council members stacked with Oracle employees in the first place? It is a community council, not the project steering board, it should represent the mostly volunteer community, which has certainly different interests than the a for profit corporation. Hence, the people with a conflict of interest all along have never stepped down in the first place.
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I would like to discuss a bit the position of the Document Foundationwith respect to copyright assignments. I understand there have been questions here and there about this topic, and it’s perhaps necessary to explain our position.
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The problem is that most of the people who are looking at the “line by line” example don’t actually understand code. SCO did this, through the same legal team (Boies Schiller) with its claims that Linux had direct copied code from UnixWare. That was debunked pretty quickly. The only thing missing here is Larry Ellison running around issuing open letters or ranting about Google to anyone who will listen. Never let it be said that Ellison isn’t classier than Darl McBride.
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Within hours Groklaw has an update that shows the “example” is from OpenJDK and was released under the GPL. Further, the “example” is not a copy but a derived work. This is like SCOG v World in fast motion.
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Oracle Gets Specific — Files Amended Complaint – Updated 3Xs: And More, More, More
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After four years working with the MySQL team, under three different companies, it’s time for me to pursue a new career.
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CMS
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Diaspora is getting better every day. Here are some of the features we’ve added over the last month:
* Public messages are can now be posted to Twitter and Facebook
* Friends can now be in multiple aspects
* Re-sharing of status messages to aspects other than the one originally posted to
* An invite system for inviting your friends not hip to Diaspora yet
* Email notifications on new friend request and acceptance
* Account data is exportable
* A more friendly “getting started” experience
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Education
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What is anything but inevitable is the adoption of any of these open educational resources. As a thought experiment, pick your favorite institution you believe is committed to open education. Have they ever adopted an open education resource produced at another institution for in-class use? If they have an open courseware collection, can you find a single third-party OER in the collection? If even the institutions that claim to be committed to open educational resources aren’t reusing them, who will?
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Healthcare
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Last Friday, I had a heart attack. As I was rushed to the hospital by the superb ambulance crews and through the operating theatre and onwards to the recovery room by the skilled surgeons, one thing stuck in my mind; how badly open source, and software development in general, has let down health care professionals, who I watched handle bundles of notes and forms which contained the crucial patient care information.
[..]
It’s not just a software problem though; we need to come up with new ways of rapidly capturing the health care professionals thoughts and information, ones which are as fast as handwriting, with devices which aren’t going to act as a vector for infection. To create those devices and the software, we, as an open source and IT community, need to create the framework and intelligence pool so that we can approach the severely time constrained doctors, nurses and other professionals, and find out what they need and how we can build it.
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Through the efforts of the FreeMED Software Foundation, many generous donors and help from the Pop-Wuj Spanish Language School, we were able to install an advanced electronic medical record, somewhat customized, for the a clinic in Quezeltenagno, Guatemala.
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Funding
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MacArthur is one of the nation’s largest independent foundations. The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society.
With assets over $5 billion, MacArthur will award approximately $230 million in grants this year. Through the support it provides, the Foundation fosters the development of knowledge, nurtures individual creativity, strengthens institutions, helps improve public policy, and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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For those interested in compilers, particularly GCC, or are interested in some technical slides to look over this weekend, the presentations from the 2010 GNU Compiler Collection Summit are now available online.
Some of the potential papers/slides that may be of interest are on GRAPHITE-OpenCL to generate OpenCL code from parallel loops, optimizing real-world applications with GCC LTO, real-time debugging with GDB trace-points, improving GCC’s auto-vectorization, the Google Go front-end to GCC, enabling more optimizations in GCC Graphite, GNU Tools for ARM, and the issues of supporting GCC on Microsoft Windows.
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We’ve just posted a recipe to follow for converting your videos to the new free WebM format, using VLC.
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Project Releases
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We, the monotone developers, are very proud to release version 0.99 of our distributed version control system.
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Government
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Award winners were announced during the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) 2010, in Portland, Oregon today. Winners include:
Open Source Deployment in Government: honors a U.S. government agency or body that has shown commitment to the use of open sourcee, through policy and/or adoption. The 2010 winner is Whitehouse.gov and the Executive Office for their deployment of Drupal open source content management system in October 2009.
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On Twitter, Eduardo Romero, involved in the city of Zaragoza’s move to an open source desktop, was one of those who quoted the Secretary General: “Free software is in the heart of policy and strategies of Andalusia.”
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Germany’s Competence Centre for Open Source Software’ (Ccoss), part of the country’s Federal Office for Information Technology, helps public authorities implement open source. The Ccoss website was renewed this summer and unveiled at the Linux Tag conference, which took place in Berlin last June.
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Openness/Sharing
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Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age builds upon “Internet & Creation : how to recognize non-market exchanges over the internet while funding creation” published in French in October 2008 by InLibroVeritas. See the French page for details on Internet & Création. Sharing and the Creative Economy has now found a publisher, and we are proceeding with finalizing the manuscript as soon as possible. The book is likely to be out in early 2011.
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Open means different things to different people. To some, open source and open innovation mean free access and a requirement to return enhancements back to a broader community. But businesses ask: where’s the competitive advantage? How can the two paradigms co-exist, for mutual benefit?
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Open Data
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This week I attended a panel session on open data and mobile government. In simple terms, open data is about governments making public data available in a way that lets clever people do useful things with it, such as an iPhone app that tells you when your bus will arrive.
A good panel had been pulled together. Chaired by Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone R&D and Mobile Monday London, it comprised David Mann from the DirectGov innovation team, Phil Archer of Talis, and Kenton Price of Little Fluffy Toys (makers of a Boris Bikes app). Broadly speaking they represented the owners, providers and developers
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Though anecdotal in many ways, Where’s My Villo?’s experiment shows that open- data allowing citizens to monitor the performance of a service of which they are the final users should be required in all public-private partnership contracts. Down the line, this may even play an ex-ante role by discouraging companies who intend to deliver frivolous services from chasing public-private contracts, as well as allowing citizens to demand better service ex-post.
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Programming
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Programming languages are unnecessarily difficult to work with because they rely on the artificial constraint of using only ASCII characters, a noted programmer argues in the November issue of the flagship publication of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
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Standards/Consortia
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Some good demos of new ODF-supporting software, including LetterGen, OFS Collaboration Suite, ODT2EPub and odt2braille.
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The Chinese Internet has been abuzz over a hit-and-run incident involving the young son of a high-level security official in Hebei Province, outside Beijing.
The episode shows how quickly outrage over abuses by privileged Chinese officials can come to a boil, as well as the power of Internet-fueled popular pressure in today’s China.
Still, many experts caution that while the Internet has become an outlet for anger against local officials, it is not a significant threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.
What sparked the uproar was not only the hit-and-run itself, but the young man’s lack of remorse and high-handed attitude. “Go ahead and sue me, I’m Li Gang’s son,” he reportedly said, just after the accident.
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A WORLD-FIRST trial of a personal carbon trading scheme that will also target obesity, is to be conducted by Southern Cross University on Norfolk Island.
The three-year project will involve giving everyone on the island a card loaded with carbon units, according to the man leading it, Garry Egger.
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Now, this is a weird one. A team of Irish engineers says it could be possible to minimise the need for mobile base stations by getting phone users to act as base stations themselves.
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An “internet troll” who posted obscene messages on Facebook sites set up in memory of dead people has been jailed.
Colm Coss, of Ardwick, Manchester, posted on a memorial page for Big Brother star Jade Goody and a tribute site to John Paul Massey, a Liverpool boy mauled to death by a dog.
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FEMA exists to help after a disaster. And when disasters strike, over and over again, we see communities working together to help within themselves and to help each other. But FEMA is hoping that people who are willing to help after a disaster are also willing to help before one. Those are the ideas they’re looking for. You might have an emergency kit if you live in a hurricane- or earthquake-prone area. But what else could we proactively do to help each other and ourselves on a larger scale before the need arises?
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He wants an apology.
Tim Profitt — the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist — told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped and that she started the whole thing.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt said. “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you.”..
Profitt also blamed the incident on his back pain.
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The topic of the panel was “Cultural Leadership: Forging a Shared Kernel While Preserving Individual Differences.” In other words, how can leaders inspire today’s workforces across geographical and cultural boundaries and through times of uncertainty.
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China’s Premier Wen Jiabao really has been on a roll in the past 8 months, seemingly mentioning the need for political reform and the importance of universal values like human rights, freedom and democracy on every possible occasion, starting with his prominently featured article about his former mentor Hu Yaobang in March.
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What does that mean? “Web linking is the most fundamental web building block,” says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. “Typed links – links with a clear semantic meaning – existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition… Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features.”
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Science
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Pressure flaking is a retouching technique that was used by prehistoric toolmakers to shape stone tips. They pressed the narrow end of a tool close to the edge of a piece they were working on to create rectangular, parallel marks; these are considered the hallmark of pressure flaking. This technique allowed them to more finely control the final shape and thinness of the tool edge than direct percussion could, and yielded sharp, thin, V-shaped tips with straight edges. The earliest evidence for pressure flaking came from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean industry of Western Europe, and dates from around 20,000 years ago.
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Security
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CentOS has updated seamonkey (C4, C3: remote code execution), C4: firefox (remote code execution), and C5: xulrunner (remote code execution). [...]
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Environment ministers from almost 200 nations agreed late tonight to adopt a new United Nations strategy that aims to stem the worst loss of life on earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.
With a typhoon looming outside and cheering inside the Nagoya conference hall, the Japanese chair of the UN biodiversity talks gavelled into effect the Aichi Targets, set to at least halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land area by 2020 up from less than 10% today.
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Finance
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Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the country’s central bank followed conflict of interest guidelines when it hired an adviser from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Bloc Quebecois lawmaker Daniel Paille and Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party both asked about the hiring of Timothy Hodgson for an 18-month term. Flaherty said in response that the bank makes its own staffing decisions and that Hodgson has “severed” his ties to the private sector.
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Prosecutors asked a federal judge to seal the courtroom for part of the upcoming criminal trial of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programer, an effort to protect the secrecy of the bank’s high-frequency trading platform.
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Most accounts of the ministerial meeting last weekend of the Group of 20 — 19 nations plus the European Union that represent the world’s wealthiest economies —implied that it continued to perform sterling service – heading off currency wars, keeping explicit protectionism under control and deftly managing the process of reforming governance at the International Monetary Fund.
Post-financial crisis, middle-income countries continue to rise in economic importance, and the recent shift in global leadership from the Group of 7 (the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) to the G-20 is commonly supposed to accommodate the growing claims of “emerging markets” on the world stage.
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U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been a genial caretaker for an Obama administration trade agenda mostly aimed at placating labor unions and their Democratic allies by erecting barriers to imports.
With the public more opposed to free trade than ever, and Democrats running hard against it this fall, the White House has shown no interest in the issue. Completed trade deals with other countries haven’t been sent to Congress, leaving U.S. allies hanging. Obama hasn’t even sought congressional authority for new agreements, a foreign policy tool presidents have cherished for 30 years.
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Life has been so dull since the nation’s major banks had their last existential crisis a year or so ago. Right now, it’s like watching a beloved rerun.
We know how the story is most likely to end. The banks will lose billions. It will take a decade or so to drain the swamps — also known as the balance sheets of institutions like the Bank of America and Citigroup — of overvalued and underperforming assets. In the meantime, however, the government will probably jump in and save the banks from themselves once again.
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Here’s the crucial thing to remember about financial reform: the status quo previous to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act financial reform bill was entirely favorable to Wall Street and the largest banks.
[...]
They have already signaled to Wall Street that, starting the morning of November 3rd, 2010, the GOP will be the party that fights sensible Wall Street reform and returns us to the world of 2009, the world most favorable to Wall Street.
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This is the lowest level for weekly claims and the 4-week average since July, however the 4-week moving average has been moving sideways at an elevated level for almost a year – and that suggests a weak job market.
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The foreclosure crisis intensified across a majority of large U.S. metropolitan areas this summer, with Chicago and Seattle – cities outside of the states that have shouldered the worst of the housing downturn – seeing a sharp increase in foreclosure warnings.
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For all the scandalous news about systemically sloppy foreclosure documentation, bankers are trying to reassure the public that no undeserved evictions resulted.
“At the end of the day, the underlying substance was accurate,” JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told reporters on a conference call this week. “There’s almost no chance that we’ve made a mistake”
That misses a key point, which I’ll get to shortly.
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Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show.
Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.
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The minister responsible for internet regulation is planning a new mediation service to encourage ISPs and websites to censor material in response to public complaints.
Ed Vaizey said internet users could use the service to ask for material that is “inaccurate” or infringes their privacy to be removed. It would offer a low cost alternative to court action, he suggested, and be modelled on Nominet’s mediation service for domain disputes.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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This means Usage Based Billing could begin implementation as early as January 2011. This will be a truly rude awakening for the many Canadians who are unaware that this is coming. Imaging getting an Internet bill for double what you are used to paying for monthly access. Just at the time Canadians are digging their way out of the seasonal spending chasm.
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Rémi Denis-Courmont is one of the primary developers of the VLC media player, which is free software and distributed under the GPL. Earlier this week, he wrote to Apple to complain that his work was being distributed through their App Store, under terms that contradict the GPL’s conditions and prohibit users from sharing the program.
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Open standards for file formats ensure portability of the content artifact (often with relevant metadata or context) across authoring or viewing applications. The emergence of the PDF/A standard, for example, as an ISO-managed specification outside the corporate control of a sole vendor happened because of the reluctance of many public sector agencies to accept a proprietary format and risk losing the opportunity to preserve essential content for the long term.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Limewire is probably more popular with the casual downloader who has maybe had use of the Limewire client for a number a years. Its certainly a simple application to use. The problem with Limewire seemed to me that the average user was not tech savvy and so Limewire became a haven for malware and all other sorts of nastiness. Its not a p2p Client I would have ever considered using nor would I have recommended it to anyone else.
For me the loss (in respect of the “service”) is no loss. On 26th October 2010 when Judge Wood served an injunction on Limewire, I saw no loss (from a contributory point of view) but what was worrying were the implications it could have for other p2p services in the future.
Whatever your views on copyright infringement, the technology behind it is not designed to infringe anything. As a user in a BT swarm for example, the sensible position is to give responsibility of any alleged infringement to the users engaging in it not a provider of a tracker or service where users frequent. If we look at this in the real world, it would be like holding a bus driver responsible for a robbery on his vehicle, a landlord responsible for their tenants behavior whilst renting his/her property. The idea that Limewire can be held responsible is to me as inconceivable as any of the above examples I have given.
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I’m getting more questions about my latest book than about any other I’ve written. And this is before the book is even out—before anyone has even read the galleys.
That’s because the questions aren’t about what I wrote, but about how I ended up publishing it: with an independent publisher, for very little money, and through a distribution model that makes it available on only one website. Could I be doing this of sound mind and my own volition? Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house?
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To many people the movie piracy Scene is something mythical or at least hard to comprehend. Who are these people who are the source for the majority of the pirated movies online? In a rare conversation, TorrentFreak had the chance to pick the brain of a former member of one of the world’s largest movie piracy groups, who speaks out about pride, ego, money and the changes that the Scene has gone through in recent years.
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When a Universal Music Group employee sent a routine notice to a San Francisco Bay Area mother back in 2007 ordering her to take down a grainy YouTube video of her son dancing, there’s no way he could have known what he was about to stir up.
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Governmental bodies around the world are adopting Creative Commons licenses and signaling to their constituencies that these works can be shared in simple, interoperable ways. Just this week, the current Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco Silva released his official photostream under CC BY, while also posting a CC BY-licensed announcement to run for re-election on SoundCloud.
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ACTA
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Dear President Obama,
As academics dedicated to promoting robust public debate on the laws and public policies affecting the Internet, intellectual property, global innovation policy and the worldwide trade in knowledge goods and services, we write to express our grave concern that your Administration is negotiating a far-reaching international intellectual property agreement behind a shroud of secrecy, with little opportunity for public input, and with active participation by special interests who stand to gain from restrictive new international rules that may harm the public interest.
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Funny, even though consensus couldn’t be reached, the ACTA countries have each taken the agreement back to their respective governments to try and get it signed. They have all agreed that there will be no further rounds of negotiation.
Apparently though, changes can still be made to the text. Since I am a citizen, not a diplomat, I have to wonder if this means that each country can sign a version of ACTA that they are comfortable with, respective of the wants and needs of the others? If so, it would detract from the point of having one universal treaty.
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In the midst of increasing controversy on the extent to which ACTA would alter current or proposed changes to U.S. law, over 75 law professors sent a sharply worded letter to President Obama asking him to “direct the USTR [US Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to a meaningful participation process that can influence the shape of the agreement going forward.” The letter comes as U.S. government officials having been informing public interest advocates that this is last week of consideration of the text, even while reports are increasing that the text as written conflicts with current and proposed US intellectual property law.
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However, some are noticing that it’s actually even worse than that. While I already disagree with the court’s interpretation of various forms of secondary liability, at least they’ve included some safeguards in terms of what standards need to be met before secondary liability might apply by looking at things like whether or not there are substantial non-infringing uses and whether or not there’s intent or knowledge. Unfortunately, it looks like ACTA partly seeks to wipe these out by changing these more nuanced standards into a simple “aiding and abetting” standard, which could lead to criminal infringement claims. As we’ve already noted, ACTA has already broadened the definition of “commercial scale” in order to increase criminal liability for infringement, but law professor Michael Carrier’s analysis suggests the “aiding and abetting” language also greatly broadens the liability for secondary liability as well
Android Netbook – Acer D250-1613
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Many interesting things come from Sweden whether it is Tunnbrödsrulle to Glögg to IKEA, but how well are these wonderful people able to create compact, home servers? After reviewing the CodeLathe TonidoPlug and PogoPlug, Excito, a company from Limhamn asked if we would be interested in checking out their new Linux-based home server, the B3. With that said, here is the review of the Excito B3 home server, which is actually a rather exciting device with its capabilities ranging from being a Bit Torrent download server to a home router with web serving capabilities.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Bradley and Karen discuss the new license of their show, multi-platform Free Software projects and conferences Bradley attended this month.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Gallium3D’s IR known as TGSI, or Tokenized Gallium Shader Instructions, and attempts by some to replace this intermediate representation. Efforts toward improving TGSI are not particularly new, but it’s been going on for a while and then just earlier this month a new shader and compiler stack was proposed by LunarG. As part of the LunarGLASS proposal, the LLVM IR would be used as a replacement to TGSI.
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Applications
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Music loving Linux users take note: Though Amazon hasn’t updated its Linux downloader for Amazon MP3 in ages, you can still get your MP3 fix off Amazon using clamz.
Amazon MP3 offers a really good selection of DRM-free music, including a fairly hefty selection of free songs and sampler albums. But Linux users have been getting the short end of the stick from Amazon lately, because the retail giant rarely updates the MP3 download client for Linux. That’s not a big deal if you’re just buying a single song, but it’s a prerequisite for downloading Amazon albums.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Ubuntu Developer Summit is in full swing here in Florida. There have been a load of important decisions taken. For example today I dropped KDE from our desktop. I know this may be controvertial with some parts of the community but we can have unity in our new desktop.. Plasma. Of course we’re Kubuntu so we did it upstream.
Martin and the X.org packagers had a face off about X drivers. Kubuntu Mobile has plans to make it more useful next round. We found problems that need fixed like KDE’s system localisation support. We reviewed all the patches Kubuntu and Debian has for Qt and found a load that can be dropped or moved upstream. Canonical decided it loves Qt and Qt asked what Canonical wants (accessibility was mentioned a lot).
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The report from the October 26 FESCO meeting (click below for the whole thing) includes the news that the remove setuid feature has been approved for the Fedora 15 release.
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Each release of Fedora offers new features to improve functionality for different audiences. One of those audiences is software developers, some of whose goals are being able to more effectively enhance performance and squash bugs in the software they write. Fedora 14 is expected to include some exciting innovations that allow developers to better achieve these goals.
One of the tools developers use frequently is the GNU debugger, or GDB. In the past, when a developer started up the debugger, it would load a variety of information about the program to be debugged. This information was stored in indexes which had to be calculated each time GDB was launched. These indexes contain data that help the developer locate which part of their source code is being executed in a program. They similarly come in handy for reporting bugs, since a bug reporting tool like ABRT can use the indexes to report more detailed information to the developer.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you’re currently using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx and everything works, it might be a good idea to leave your install alone. After running it for six months, we can tell you that Lucid is rock-solid. Only time will tell if 10.10 is as good, and we only had a week with it. So, if reliability is ranked highly on your OS wish list, go with the LTS. But if you’re experienced with Linux, or just the type who must have the very latest, there is nothing wrong with choosing Ubuntu 10.10, either. It all comes down to the type of user you are.
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Two days ago we reported on what the graphics stack should look like for Ubuntu 11.04 in terms of its X.Org Server, Mesa / Gallium3D, and the open-source graphics driver versions to be deployed in this next Linux operating system release codenamed the Natty Narwhal. This though wasn’t the only X-related discussion to take place at the Ubuntu 11.04 developer summit in Orlando this week, but there were other related topics discussed such as KMS configuration / quirk handling, the multi-monitor experience on the Ubuntu desktop, and multi-touch support. There were also talks aimed at Linaro / embedded Ubuntu on ARM platforms with regards to embedded GPU drivers and OpenGL ES support.
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Now that Unity will be used by default in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, it’s been getting a lot of attention and there are discussions going on about if and how the Global Menu (AppMenu) will behave on the desktop, a better way of managing multiple desktops and many other subjects. One such discussion drew my attention and I though I’d share it with you.
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Altera announced that it has licensed ARM’s Cortex-A9 core, and will incorporate it into a 28nm chip integrating FPGA (field programmable gate array) technology during 2011. Meanwhile, a soft processor core based on MIPS Technologies MIPS32 architecture will be released earlier in the year, the company added.
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Phones
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The only problem is that when HP realized that its future depended — at least in part — on creating a tablet that could go toe-to-toe with the iPad it probably didn’t take them long to survey the OS landscape and find themselves lacking any good options. This is important. It’s not that HP didn’t think it could come out with a decent tablet — I’m sure they stand behind the Slate 500. It’s that they didn’t think they could come out with an AMAZING mass market tablet with a user experience that would rival the iPad’s.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The developers behind the MeeGo operating system, the Linux-based distribution that married Moblin and Maemo, have just released version 1.1. MeeGo 1.1 is available for Intel Atom and ARMv7 architectures and comes in the netbook, IVI (in-vehicle information/entertainment systems), and handset editions. Besides the core MeeGo OS hitting 1.1, the MeeGo SDK 1.1 has reached beta and will be released before the MeeGo Summit next month in Dublin.
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Today we are announcing the project release of MeeGo 1.1. It provides a solid baseline for device vendors and developers to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom* and ARMv7 architectures.
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Android
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Toys R Us is now going to be equipping children with the technology of the future. The retailer will be selling the Elonex Etouch tablet, which was displayed at IFA in Germany. The tablet will come with a 7 inch or 10 inch screen.
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On the other hand, it is clear that OOo is – from the point of view of the user – not lowering the productivity of employees, and can perform the necessary tasks without impacting the municipality operations.
- Hospital:
The migration was done in two steps; a first one (groupware, content management, openoffice) and a second one (ERP, medical image management).
In the first, the Initial acquisition cost was: proprietary 735K€, OSS 68K€
annual support/maintenance cost (over 5 year): proprietary 169K€, OSS 45K€
Second stage Initial acquisition cost: proprietary 8160K€, OSS 1710K€
annual support/maintenance cost (over 5 year): proprietary 1148K€, OSS 170K€
The hospital does have a much larger saving percentage when compared with other comparable cases because they were quite more mature in terms of OSS adoption; thus, most of the external, paid consulting was not necessary for their larger migration.
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Nokia hoped to revive Symbian’s importance, which once dominated more than 50 percent of the mobile market, by reinvigorating its developer base in light of a rush of Linux-based operating platforms like Android and LiMo. It hoped in vain.
Related Research
* Privacy: How to Avoid the Third Rail of Online Services
* Navigating Google Instant – Tips for Search Marketers
* Four Reasons to Watch for Power Line Communications
* Social and Online Media Need Privacy Plan Now
For years, companies have looked to open source to salvage dying products, and each time these efforts have failed. Often dismally.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We earlier covered the made for India browser, Epic Browser, which is specifically targeted towards Indians keeping their browsing habits in context.
[...]
Epic Browser, a derivative of Firefox offers a few great localized features that makes it an interesting product. We earlier shared some of the useful features of the browser – for example Built-in Antivirus (that scans documents automatically), ToDo (good implementation), snippets, social network integration etc.
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At Mozilla Labs, we’re constantly trying to push the boundaries with respect to what the browser can do. We’ve experimented with audio recording in the browser as part of the Jetpack prototype earlier, and want to revisit the idea. There have been great strides on video playback recently, but there’s still some work to be done before users can create multimedia content for the web, on the web.
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Oracle
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I strongly believe that in the end, it’s how we will shape the very fabric of our community -which today mostly amounts to the OpenOffice.org project volunteers- that will allow us to progress and innovate together. After a month, I am cautiously optimistic, but it seems we’re on the right track to do something extraordinary. Thank you everyone, looking forward to a great Document Foundation!
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But the relevant point is different: the PolicyNodeImpl.java that is presented comes from the OpenJDK distribution, and was as such released under the GPL+ClassPath exception (something that is not mentioned anywhere within the complaint, by the way). Here, the claims are two and different: the first is that Android (actually, Harmony) copied its API that Oracle claims is copyrighted. The second claim is that the actual source code of the PolicyNodeImpl.java file has been copied verbatim.
Let’s start with the first one: the claim that Oracle Java APIs are protected and copyrighted. On this, it seem to me that the interface definition themselves (not the actual source code) as a mere interface does not fall within the copyright provisions, unless the actual names are trademarked, and thus its implementation requires the actual copying of a protected name in a way that is deemed incompatible by its licensee (something similar was done by Autodesk, embedding a copyrighted phrase that if not included in the file prevented the application from opening it directly).
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In its tweaked complaint, Oracle ups the ante against Google, who has called the lawsuit baseless.
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But there’s more. The code indeed looks copied, but is it, really? Carlo Daffara generated a diff of the two files, which paints a slightly different picture. According to a comment over at Groklaw (I know, I know, but he makes a good point), any similarities can easily be explained by “using the same naming convention for variables and the widespread use of automatic code generation in the Java community”.
This is not as clear-cut a matter as it seems, but I’m sure the usual suspects will rail on Google anyway. Surely more to follow.
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CMS
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Vote for your favorite Hall of Fame Content Management System (CMS) here.
From the list below, choose which Open Source Content Management System in the Hall of Fame category you would like to win.
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Project Releases
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Today we’re making available “Aylesbury,” our first named release of libvpx, the VP8 codec SDK. VP8 is the video codec used in WebM. Note that the VP8 specification has not changed, only the SDK.
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Government
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Godwin Caruana, MITA’s CTO, explained in the Times of Malta newspaper last month that open source will be considered wherever it is cost-effective, and without disrupting business processes. “The approach is to ensure that we identify the prospective areas as we go along.”
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Germany’s Competence Centre for Open Source Software’ (Ccoss), part of the country’s Federal Office for Information Technology, helps public authorities implement open source. The Ccoss website was renewed this summer and unveiled at the Linux Tag conference, which took place in Berlin last June.
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Openness/Sharing
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Recently I came across an article by Roy Luebke at Blogging Innovation that asked the rather interesting question, “Is Management by Consensus Killing Innovation?” While I’ve (thankfully!) never had a manager whose decision-making was contingent upon the agreement of a team, I have spoken with many people who confuse the concept of collaboration with consensus.
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Aside from their aesthetic value, what’s interesting about these films is that the content is released under a cc licence.
[..]
Those are reasonable, if not killer, arguments. But his last point is pretty inarguable:
One last thing on the “open svn” point: in theory it could work, if we would open up everything 100% from scratch. That then will give an audience a better picture of progress and growth. We did that for our game project and it was suited quite well for it. For film… most of our audience wants to get surprised more, not know the script, the dialogs, the twists. Film is more ‘art’ than games, in that respect.
That’s fair: there’s no real element of suspense for code, or even games, as he points out. So this suggest for certain projects like these free content films, openness may be something that needs limiting in this way, purely for the end-users’ benefit.
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Latitude and Shareable Magazine recently released the findings of The New Sharing Economy study, which uncovered new opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors, and established companies in the emerging sharing economy.
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A new study in Science magazine* provides additional evidence for group genius. My own research with collaborating groups has repeatedly demonstrated that groups manifest emergent properties, that are not reducible to the individual characteristics of the group members; this new study confirms my own findings, using a novel qualitative approach combined with “smart badges” designed by MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland.
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Open Data
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Last summer, I met Pedro Markun and Daniela Silva at the Mozilla Summit. During the conversation – feeling the drumbeat vibe of the conference – we agreed it would be fun to do an international event. Something that could draw attention to open data.
A few weeks before I’d met Edward Ocampo-Gooding, Mary Beth Baker and Daniel Beauchamp at GovCamp Ottawa. Fresh from the success of getting the City of Ottawa to see the wisdom of open data and hosting a huge open data hackathon at city hall they were thinking “let’s do something international.” Yesterday, I tested the idea on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s listserve and a number of great people from around the world wrote back right away and said… “We’re interested.”
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Early voting in New Mexico was temporarily disrupted when a voter-registration computer system was made inaccessible due to an expired license, officials said.
The secretary of state’s office, responsible for maintaining the license, said the Tuesday night problem was fixed within an hour.
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Denton’s Gawker, Huffington Post, and similar-scale ventures won’t “become dominant players.” But those that husband their resources and play their cards smartly will survive, continuing to grow and to figure out the contours of the new media we are all building. They’ll be active, important players, without “dominating” the way the winners of previous era’s media wars did.
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Science
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Move over, touchpad screens: New research funded in part by the National Institutes of Health shows that it is possible to manipulate complex visual images on a computer screen using only the mind.
The study, published in Nature, found that when research subjects had their brains connected to a computer displaying two merged images, they could force the computer to display one of the images and discard the other. The signals transmitted from each subject’s brain to the computer were derived from just a handful of brain cells.
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You need to hear some horror stories; I’ve left quite a few out from this essay.
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Joe Romm, climate activist extraordinaire, is upset at Scientific American for featuring a dumb online poll on global warming.
Online polls are notoriously amenable to manipulation, and it seems pretty clear that climate skeptics organized in force to skew the results. Like Romm, I have a hard time believing that anything close to 56.1 percent of Scientific American readers believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.”
But even if you grant that the poll was the victim of an organized attack, I’m still amazed by what we can learn from it. In response to the question “Which policy options do you support?” 42 percent of the respondents chose the answer “keeping science out of the political process.”
Say what?
Keep science out of the political process? Science? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around; that the goal was the keep politics out of science. I can understand, albeit disagree with, categorizations of anthropogenic global warming as bad science, but I’m afraid I just can’t come to grips with the notion that we should keep “science” from influencing politics at all. What is the point of civilization in the first place if we don’t use our hard-won understanding of how the universe works to influence our decisions on how to organize ourselves?
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A Policy Forum in today’s issue of Science takes a look at what’s become a significant problem in the sciences: enabling and maintaing unfettered access to large collections of scientific data. Although the report focuses on the biosciences, many of the problems it describes apply to other areas of research as well. The biggest problem, however, is fairly simple: there’s no good mechanism for determining who pays for maintaining large amounts of data, which leaves existing repositories at risk of either duplicating efforts or losing funding entirely, with a resulting loss of data.
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Security
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The applet is dropped inside the user’s home directory and stops running at computer reboot. This means that on Linux, unlike on Windows, the Koobface infections are temporary. Which means if you happen to get that infection, reboot immidiately.
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Jonathan Rayfern jailed for 16 months after selling at least 11 forgeries for £26,000 on eBay
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Things could be going from really bad to even worse around the Gulf of Mexico, for residents and for BP. An investigation by Al Jazeera reveals that the dispersants BP is using to treat the spill are making people sick.
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On stage at a private event in Silicon Valley last night, legendary director James Cameron and Google CEO Eric Schmidt held a fascinating two hour conversation that touched on everything from the technology needs of the upcoming Avatar 2 film to the perils that face the environment if action isn’t taken.
Eric Schmidt, acting as moderator, questioned Cameron on a plethora of topics in front of an audience of Silicon Valley movers and shakers for the Churchill Club Premiere Event. The conversation started with a video highlighting Cameron’s decades of accomplishments, including Terminator, Rambo, Alien, Total Recall, Titanic and of course Avatar. It quickly moved into a conversation about how he created the most expensive and most profitable film in human history.
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Finance
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As mentioned before, we have been using AdBard on Identi.ca for almost 8 months. Although we support what AdBard is doing, we haven’t been getting the kind of ad rates that we expected. AdBard is covering about 5-7% of the hosting costs of running identi.ca, with nothing left over to cover any percentage of the salaries of the people who support the site.
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The pay received by chief executives of the companies listed in the FTSE 100 rose 55% this year, a survey has found.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Facebook is rolling out a new breed of Pages called Friendship Pages that pull together the public wall posts, comments, photos (based on tags) and events that two friends have in common.
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In order to detect any infringement of their database right, Binley’s include in their database a number of what they call “seeds”. These are bogus entries, giving the address of Binley’s staff. When any post is received addressed to a seed address, Binley’s can then presumably check the source against their list of clients to check that the marketing comes from someone authorised to use their database.
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Students at the Ohio State University Open Source Club have made some excellent and much-needed upgrades to EFF’s MyTube software.
Real privacy risks are presented by all of the Web’s solutions for embedded video — from user-generated-content sites like YouTube to proprietary sites like MSNBC and Comedy Central. When you visit a site with embedded video, you’re not only sending your information to your destination site, but also to the website which hosts that video. In addition, you’re allowing the video-host to place cookies and other tracking devices onto your computer. This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when — even if you didn’t try to play the video.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against three agencies of the Department of Justice (DOJ) today, demanding records about problems or limitations that hamper electronic surveillance and potentially justify or undermine the Administration’s new calls for expanded surveillance powers.
The issue has been in the headlines for more than a month, kicked off by a New York Times report that the government was seeking to require “back doors” in all communications systems — from email and webmail to Skype, Facebook and even Xboxes — to ease its ability to spy on Americans. The head of the FBI publicly claimed that these “back doors” are needed because advances in technology are eroding agents’ ability to intercept information. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the DOJ Criminal Division to see if that claim is backed up by specific incidents where these agencies encountered obstacles in conducting electronic surveillance.
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Bloody ethnic riots in the far-western region of Xinjiang in July last year sealed the fate of Twitter and its domestic clones. The government, observing their growing popularity, feared that troublemakers in Xinjiang could use them to foment unrest. Since then Twitter has been available in China only to those with the skills to penetrate the Chinese internet’s “great firewall”. But the authorities quickly gave approval to new China-based microblogging services, or weibo, which employ armies of censors. In February even the Communist Party’s own mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, opened one.
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Domestic blasphemy laws, far beyond their clear violation of freedom of expression, are responsible for broad violations of human rights, particularly when applied in weak democracies and authoritarian systems, according to a study released by Freedom House today.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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An interesting decision on damages in cases of copyright infringing file-sharing has been handed down by the Regional Court Hamburg (LG Hamburg, decision of 8 October 2010, case reference 308 O 710/09).
In a press release the Hamburg court informs that it decided that a 16 year old file-sharer was only liable to pay damages of 15 Euros for each title he had illegally shared online. In this case the overall damages amounted to 30 Euros for two songs he had offered illegally on an Internet file sharing site. The claimant, who owned the distribution rights for these songs, had asked for damages of 300 Euros per title, which appears to be a fairly common amount usually awarded for such damages.
[...]
…German courts appear to adopt a rather pragmatic real life approach when assessing the level of damages to be awarded.
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A young man, who as a teenager file-shared two music tracks, has finally discovered his fate. After rightsholders demanded damages of 600 euros ($828) the case dragged through the legal system. After nearly five years a court in Germany has just published its decision. It ruled that the damages demands of the rightsholders were excessive and instead ordered the defendant to pay 30 euros ($41.00) damages.
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Do you need to access the fan webring for Boy Meets World’s Rider Strong, but can’t now that Geocities has been shut down? Fret not! The “Archive Team” is putting all 900 GB of Geocities into a publicly-available torrent.
The Digital Prism Screencast – MintNanny
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Send this to a friend
10.28.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It is a common argument that Linux will never make it mainstream because everybody already knows windows. It has been said that because everybody knows windows that there is nobody to teach them Linux. Ipso facto, nobody will learn Linux because there is nobody around to show them how to use Linux. What a load of bovine back end fertiliser. What people are referring to is that the uptake of Linux is a chicken and egg problem.
[...]
This introductory period only went so far. After that time I bet that you started exploring for yourself and only asked questions when you became stuck. Or you learned enough to do what you needed and stayed at that level. This is exactly the same for any operating system, be it Macs, Linux or windows.
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But a large number of Microsoft’s customers aren’t customers because Microsoft makes good products, but because Microsoft products are default and a lot of people are afraid to delete those apps and OSes and try something different.
If there is someone in your life who uses computers, but is not very computer literate, you can help wean them off of Microsoft’s bloated OSes and change-resistant user apps.
The open source and Linux communities appeal to techies who are opinionated about computer technology, and want to have the best of everything.
But the GUIs with Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu, are no less user friendly than recent Microsoft OS GUIs.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: The London Stock Exchange is super fast, thanks to Linux, while Android celebrates its 100,000th app submission. We discover things and talk about tiling window managers, while our listeners talk about Ubuntu’s Unity.
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Ballnux
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Out of the four major U.S. carriers, AT&T was the most in need of a solid Android smartphone, and it’s finally got one in the Samsung Captivate. Part of the Galaxy S series, the Captivate is by far AT&T’s most powerful and feature-rich Android device, boasting a gorgeous Super AMOLED touch screen, a 1GHz Hummingbird processor, and some great multimedia features. It won’t win any beauty contests, and we wish AT&T would stop restricting app access, but overall, the Captivate delivers and is a great alternative to the iPhone 4. The Samsung Captivate for AT&T will be available starting July 18 for $199.99 with a two-year contract (voice plan and minimum $15 data plan required).
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Christopher Bergström of PathScale has passed along a note detailing some of the recent progress made by the Nouveau team and their developers working on PSCNV, their Nouveau driver fork. This includes 2D beginning to work on the GeForce 400 “Fermi” graphics hardware, open-source 3D for Fermi still being worked on, and a pool of documentation is beginning to form for the NVIDIA hardware by the open-source community. Here’s the details in full.
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Along with the benefits of being easier to develop and maintain a driver within the Gallium3D architecture than a classic Mesa DRI driver and being able to extend its features and capabilities in a somewhat generic manner by state trackers, it’s also commonly said that Gallium3D drivers will be faster than the old Mesa drivers. We have looked at the R300 Gallium3D driver (R300g) performance a few times comparing it to classic Mesa, results showing R300g is still catching up to the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver, and that the rate of changes it was going through this summer was quite impressive.
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Just over a week ago we reported on Pixmain gaining improved gradients and is rendering much faster in the project’s latest development release. Now this free software project that provides pixel manipulation capabilities for the X Server and Cairo, has reached its version 0.20.0 stable milestone.
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Applications
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But two cool Linux apps give you a the ability to record directly to a file whatever’s being shown on your computer’s monitor. RecordMyDesktop and Istanbul both record screen sessions into an Ogg Theora video file.
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I decided to go with Final Fantasy for now because, as Dan knows, they hold a special place in my nostalgic heart. But I think I’ll probably end up going with pushpin. So, are any of these compelling reasons to switch to Empathy? So far I haven’t found one. Right now they’re more or less equivalent. So just use whatever your distro has as the default. Right now the important use cases for Pidgin are if you need off the record or the other encryption plugin, if you don’t want chat logging, or if you also use it on Windows and want a consistent experience. I’m going to use Empathy for a while and see if I end up pining for something from Pidgin or just stick with it.
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I went looking for a replacement and found Remmina – which bills itself as the GTK+ Remote Desktop Client.
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So what have I been up to lately? Well, I have recently got a nice new job with a local ex-ISP turned “cloud services” provider so I’m looking forward to jumping into the new role which, I hope, will be far more interesting as it will unleash my passion for Linux in a commercial environment. I’ve been a bit less active on the Sabayon front because of the job hunting and such but should increase again soon.
One of the things I’ve been working on is the Sabayon website design, the plan is to provide the whole portal and services with a uniform clean look that is more accessible and easy to use. I’ve attached a screenshot of the homepage draft design, feedback as always is encouraged.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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To play the game, you’ll need a client with which you can connect to any of the available servers. Alternatively, you install the game on your own server which you can then add to the metaserver list so others can connect to yours.
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Desktop Environments
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Seeing a lot of user-submitted artwork and animations via Blender, GIMP, and Inkscape enthusiasts (some of which you can see in 10+ Amazing Short Films Made With Free Software) has made me really appreciate images illustrated by hand, which includes wallpapers. Given the season, illustrated wallpapers shouldn’t be too difficult to find, and it might even get you excited for Halloween!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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A few month ago I already blogged about “the end of the (Linux) desktop as we know it.” I will not blatantly repost this entry but draw some conclusions linked to the recent adoption of Unity for the default Ubuntu desktop.
My conclusion was the following : “At a certain level, one can say that the battle is already lost : the current desktop environments can not really fight this war as they don’t own the key technology : the browser. As a consequence, the risk, for them (Gnome, KDE, etc.) is to be a tool that will launch a browser. A (relatively) simple tool that can be easily changed with almost no user impact…”
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[T]here is a list of problems that are severe enough to cause Canonical & Co. to think it’s worth paying developers to work on a fifth desktop interface contender for Linux rather than use any of the available ones, including the Shell — an undertaking that Dave Neary quite presciently calls “really hard” (more on that later).
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At the Ubuntu Devloper Summit on Monday, it was announced that Ubuntu 11.04 will ship with Unity as its default shell. It will still focus on Gnome applications, and depend heavily on the Gnome libraries — but the default interface will be Unity. For those unfamiliar with Unity, it’s the default shell for the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu.
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If you can’t exploit it, you can’t secure it. I don’t know if that quote has been said before, but if you are deeply interested about computer security or ethical hacking, that should be your main mantra. To fully learn how to secure a computer program, you must know how to break it and find vulnerabilities. In relation to this, there is a unique Linux distribution that is primarily created to help teach you about software security, its name is Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL).
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For those not familiar with the project, it is a type of installation published in a book (freely available in PDF form) for someone to be able to read through and build their own Linux distribution straight from source. If you want to learn more about a Linux-based operating system and if you have some time to kill, this is a great start. My earliest of experiments were all successfully built in a virtual guest under VirtualBox. I was able to customize it the way I desired by installing only the packages that mattered to me and ran with it. Immediately after my first build, I went to the Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) project page, to install additional applications not documented in the LFS book. As dorky as this sounds, it was all part of an exciting experience.
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New Releases
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Finnix 100 comes over a year since its previous release, Finnix 93.0, and introduces a new version scheme, with future versions incrementing numerically.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I hadn’t noticed, but there are Mandriva 2010 Spring packages for KDE 4.5.2 available since some days now on KDE FTP. I currently don’t know whom to thank but thank you !! (neoclust maybe ??) Packages for both i586 and x86_64 are available.
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Red Hat Family
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Wall Street analyst Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co. came to red Hat’s headquarters for some on-site research at the Linux software and services firm. To the relief of the Hatters, she was impressed.
In an extensive research note written after the visit, Egbert upped the target price for Red Hat shares $3 to $48 while maintaining her “Buy” rating.
Red Hat shares traded up slightly Wednesday morning at $41.61.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Barceló Viajes, a leading Spanish travel operator, has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to consolidate its datacenters that support the company’s mission-critical business platforms. By virtualizing its systems, Barceló aims to reduce its server farm by half. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Barceló has enhanced the ease of management of its systems and has experienced improved flexibility, scalability and performance.
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LTN’s Pattern Recognition Analyst, Paul A. Ebeling, Jnr, today ID’d the start of a New Bullish Trend (NBT) for Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat closed at US$41.08 on Monday and opened Tuesday at US$40.72.
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Fedora
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There is a running instance to look at, and we could get a similar instance running on a Fedora Infrastructure public test server. We have a ways to go for it to be fully hosted by the Fedora Project, but why not try using it for the next session?
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu has released a new video ad which tells about some of the core markets of Ubuntu — desktop, servers and cloud. The ad also says that Ubuntu will always be free.
The ad is undoubtedly good, but if it is targeted to be shown at business meets, conferences its good. If the ad is targeted at the home users, it is nowhere close to what it should have been. What do I mean? Just think if Apple iPad ad. It was all about what ‘you’ can do with the device and not what all an operating system can do, because you know what? No one cares.
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Another interesting question asked is “Will Unity become themeable?”, however it seems no decision regarding this has been made so far.
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Overall I am rather happy-ish with Unity. There are some issues that I will explore as the days go on.
Overall it feels quicker than regular Gnome, but there are moments when it really seems to wait for something when responding, like when you open the menu.
Tomorrow I will be looking at how much resources it uses compared to Gnome2, and a few other things.
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I’ve had the pleasure of trying out plenty of netbook hardware. Just about every form factor and operating system combination available. These netbooks range from the hardly usable, to the might-as-well-be-a-laptop, and everything in between. It’s that “everything in between” space that appeals to the majority of users on the planet and that’s exactly where the Starling lands – but it does so while leaving quite a solid impression on the user.
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Jolicloud 1.1 will be provided as an upgrade for existing Jolicloud 1.0 users. It will be based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), and supported until April 2013. But, the good news is that future patches from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) will also be added in the new Jolicloud 1.1 release.
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Flavours and Variants
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Released 09/06/2010, The Fluxbox edition of the ultra-popular Mint Linux OS is hailed as a newer Fluxbuntu type of derivative based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. So I’ll take it for a spin and see how it runs.
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On October 10, Canonical released its latest installment of Ubuntu, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”. Like previous iterations, Maverick also includes variations from the standard Ubuntu Gnome interface. Kubuntu is the KDE variation of Ubuntu, and last week, I decided to upgrade from 10.04 and give 10.10 a try.
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Earlier this week I wrote a quick look over on EOL about Super OS 10.10. Super OS…well…it didn’t exactly live up to its name, though it does have its place among the many Ubuntu remasters out there. I ran into another distro though that does a more credible job of living up to its name. Ultimate Edition 2.8 is the latest release of yet another Ubuntu-based distro.
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Want to go on an ebook-reading marathon for two weeks? You don’t need an iPad. All you need is a decent touch screen ebook reader. They can last more than 10 days (not just 10 hours) and, thanks to e-ink technology, so will your eyes.
E-ink displays, which most of these ebook readers use, consume less power, are less susceptible to glare, are less strenuous to the eyes, and most of all, cost much less than even the most basic iPad.
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US bookstore giant Barnes & Noble unveiled a color electronic book reader on Tuesday, getting the jump on rivals Amazon and Sony.
[...]
Barnes & Noble said customers could immediately purchase the Nook Color, which is powered by Google’s Android software and has eight gigabytes of memory, through the bookseller’s website with shipping beginning around November 19.
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Digi-key is shipping a 1080p-ready development board based on Texas Instruments’ Cortex-A9-based, dual-core, 1GHz OMAP4430 system-on-chip (SoC). The $174 “PandaBoard” offers 1GB of DRAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, DVI, and HDMI connections, and targets smartphone and mobile device development using open source Linux distributions such as Android, Angstrom, Chrome, MeeGo, and Ubuntu.
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Sub-notebooks
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There were six people who flew from Boston to SF for the OLPC summit this past weekend, three of them work for OLPC, one for SugarLabs, one for public media non-profit and myself. It was a beehive of a weekend, as everyone felt like a bee taking active part in presenting, learning and collaborating! The opening reception took place on Friday evening at the Market st location of SF State University, kindly arranged by Sameer Verma and SF OLPC community. It was great to hear Carol’s announcement of San Fran Mayor’s decision to proclaim Sat, Oct 23 of 2010 as One Laptop Per Child Day in San Francisco.
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It wasn’t that long ago that open source computing was more a dreamy ideal than a working proposition. But as attested by the strength of the two-day government open source conference that kicks off in Portland today, it’s become a practical, problem-solving movement.
Open source computing may be defined broadly as software that is developed, maintained and used in a collaborative way, across organizational boundaries, rather than software that is developed in-house and presented as a proprietary, commercial product. It’s the difference between the Microsoft Office suite of applications, for example, and OpenOffice, which provides free and broadly supported software applications. Open source can also apply to operating systems, servers, browsers and other software.
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Skip Newberry: I look forward to learning about some of the innovative open source and open data initiatives underway in other cities. In particular, I am interested in exploring opportunities for collaboration.
Mark Greinke: Open Source is a platform that effectively enables collaboration and interactive communities. Attending GOSCON allows us to collectively share our tremendous experiences and talents in solving problems that benefit all our communities. I am extremely excited to learn how our peers are leveraging open source solutions and to share with the community some of the innovative things Portland is doing around Open Source and Open Data.
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Counting your blessings is good for the soul — not to mention for convincing yourself and any investors that your project will succeed. Free culture is highly conservative, because it’s possible to simply reuse ideas (and sometimes actual artifacts) with little to no cost. Here’s seven things I’m really glad I don’t have to worry about in designing the production model for our free culture animated series Lunatics.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 is all over over the news and the funny thing is, Firefox 4 final release has not even happened yet. Firefox 4 beta 6 was released recently and it boasts of key performance improvements and a number of new and useful features like Tab Candy. Let’s do a quick look at the latest Firefox 4 in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.
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According to a just-revised timetable, Firefox 4 will now shift to release candidate status sometime in early 2011. Release candidate, often simply dubbed “RC,” is the final stage of development before a software maker gives the green light for a final version.
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Not long ago I was still defending Firefox as a good browser that never, or only very rarely like every few months, crashed on me. That may in retrospect have had something to do with hosts file and all sorts of nasties blockers, because once I disabled these for a while for a little test it suddenly kept crashing, like in abnormally exiting, at least once a day.
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Oracle
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Oracle has updated its lawsuit against Google to allege that parts of its Android mobile phone software “directly copied” Oracle’s Java code.
Oracle filed a surprise lawsuit against Google in August, claiming portions of Google’s mobile OS platform infringe Java-related copyrights that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems.
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CMS
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The site is based on Drupal. Web design firm BrightLemon London was chosen to build the online community.
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Government
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The European Commission published version 1.0 of Open e-Prior, its open source electronic procurement solution for member states, in late September. The new version allows users to import and view catalogues of services, submit purchase orders and credit notes, and exchange invoices.
The software is made available on the OSOR.eu.
Open E-Prior version is developed by the Directorate-General for Informatics (Digit) of the European Commission. The tool is Digit’s contribution to the Pan European Procurement Online (Peppol) project. Peppol intends to simplify the cross-border electronic exchange of information between public administrations and their suppliers.
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The Texas Supreme Court when writing their opinion in Robinson v. Crown Cork and Seal cited Mr. Spock, effectively making him a legal authority for interpreting the Texas Constitution.
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NPR specifically banned journalists from participating while the Washington Post similarly warned reporters, that they could “observe,” but “cannot in any way put themselves in a position that could be construed as supporting (or opposing) that cause.” Yes, how dare reporters be seen supporting sanity!
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Multnomah County officials have decided to dump Microsoft in favor of Google, expecting to shave as much as $600,000 a year from the county budget.
The government agency said that 3,500 county employees — excluding staff in the sheriff’s and district attorney’s offices — will be using Google Apps for Government for e-mail, calendars and contacts Monday. Previously, they relied on Microsoft Outlook for the same functions.
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Security
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A communications malfunction at a Wyoming Air Force base knocked 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles offline for 45 minutes last weekend as technicians scrambled to diagnose the problem, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
[...]
Officials stressed that there was no possibility the missiles could have launched accidentally, nor was there any indication that foreign governments or terrorists had hacked into the system. If the U.S. had needed to fire the Minuteman III missiles in the affected squadron during the outage Saturday, officials said, backup systems could have been used.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Privacy advocates worried about x-ray scanners making their way around U.S. airports may be surprised to know the technology is also making its way onto America’s streets.
The Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. military and even local law enforcement agencies are buying and deploying mobile X-ray vans that can see into the interior of vehicles around them.
The Z Backscatter Van (ZBV), manufactured by American Science and Engineering (AS&E), can be used to detect contraband such as car bombs, drugs and people in hiding.
But the vans, which can also see through clothing and into some buildings, are raising privacy concerns as well as questions about health risks — and what might happen if the technology gets into the wrong hands.
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The introduction of body scanners at international airports followed the case of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight to Detroit on which he was a passenger. He had flown from Yemen via Lagos and Holland’s Schipol Airport. There are real questions about whether the scanners work. Furthermore, they’re not needed; they invade privacy; and they’re potentially unsafe. In evidence before the Canadian parliamentary group investigating scanners, Rafi Sela, a leading Israeli security expert, derided them as ‘useless.’ His experience is acquired in a country which really knows something about security, and has no plan to introduce scanners. The scanners seem unable to penetrate beneath skin. So hiding material in body cavities or in implants conceals them.
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Mr Broughton said some “completely redundant” security checks should go.
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Enough already with the security theatre
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Reference the article in the Birmingham Mail on Thursday 21 October entitled “Masked Robbers Preyed on Women”.
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A Bristol company that has launched a hotel guest blacklist website has prompted a privacy watchdog to call for a government enquiry.
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He was touting a bonkers new scheme by which drinkers in London who fall foul of the law would be breathalysed or otherwise tested for booze twice a day for prolonged periods of time and, if they failed said tests, could be sent to jail. “It is not just punitive but corrective,” he said. For which, read, nannying and bullying.
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In an paper published in 2009, HP identifies six cloud computing privacy issues when developing for the cloud. They are:
1. Minimise personal information sent to and stored in the cloud
2. Protect personal information in the cloud
3. Maximise user control
4. Allow user choice
5. Specify and limit the purpose of data usage
6. Provide feedback
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The shifting formation is aimed at confusing potential attackers, a concern that reached a fever pitch after 9/11. It could just as easily apply to the corporations jockeying to replace the aging Marine One fleet — a boondoggle that’s wasted billions and fattened politicians’ war chests for years, as a short list of well-connected players maneuver to build a custom rotary aircraft deemed safe enough to fly the president through almost any crisis, even a nuclear blast.
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Bear with me, as I try to connect a few different thoughts that are coming together in my mind in this particular post. My thought process kicked off with this monumentally clueless opinion piece by former state department official Christian Whiton, complaining that President Obama and Congress have failed us by not killing the folks behind Wikileaks. I’m not kidding.
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Finance
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Are you still unsure whether we’re in the midst of a giant bond bubble?
Well, Goldman Sachs sure isn’t. Today, it is selling $1.25 billion in 50-year bonds to retail buyers at a yield of 6.125%.
Do you believe that Goldman would be selling these bonds a week before the Fed meets if it thought interest rates were heading much lower?
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In other words, this is nothing less than prop trading masking as flow. Period. The problem is that as this does nothing to address the issue that the TBTFs are once again taking on massive risk in the form of huge principal inventory accumulation. Furthermore, due to the quirks of VaR reporting, this will actually have an impact of reducing reported VaR, even at a time when Morgan Stanley recently reported its highest blended VaR in history. In other words, the TBTFs, in their avoidance of Donk, have become even greater timebombs than ever imagined. And that banks will crash is certain…
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The “Government intrusion” argument is a powerful propaganda theme that has been around for a long time, and one that big businesses often use to manipulate public opinion. As with so many other corporate-derived propaganda tools, the anti-government theme originated largely with the tobacco industry, which has relied on it for decades to get its way in public policy.
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A few hours before I left my room for the opening plenary of a two-day conference on abortion, a friend sent me the link to Personhood USA’s latest ad. It was playing in the back of my head as I listened to academics debate, politely but forcefully, about selective abortion and fetal personhood, the right of conscientious objection and the issue of fetal pain. And although I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and left with a more nuanced view of several issues, I’m still terrified for the state of discourse on abortion in this country – in large part because of this ad.
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It’s difficult to watch almost any TV without being bombarded with repetitive ads “paid for” by some group that claims to be just like you, or like someone you want to be, like “Americans for Prosperity” and its so-called “Prosperity Network.” But you can help fight back.
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An activist group called SpeechNow.Org is running ads against Senator Russ Feingold. It blames him for the deficit and claims that clean election laws he spearheaded are “attacking free speech.” But who’s really behind SpeechNow’s folksy, cartoon attack ads?
The Money Bags: One funder is multi-millionaire Fred Young, the heir of the Young Radiator fortune in Racine. He sold his Wisconsin company for over $70 million in 1998 to a group that quickly merged with Wabtec Corporation, a multinational with a history of outsourcing jobs to make goods in China and elsewhere.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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We already had mentioned his bizarre idea that kids might change their names upon becoming adults in the future, but Schmidt just keeps on making rather creepy statements about privacy that suggests someone totally out of touch with what people are actually complaining about.
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Internationally, the EU, OECD and Canada have all taken steps to address privacy concerns while strengthening their current practices. Canada, in particular, recently launched their Privacy by Design campaign that advocates privacy through the principles of IT, technical development, and best business practices. Additionally, US industry groups are taking the issues into their own hands in order to develop industry standard practice through self regulatory programs. In particular, the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently launched their new program.
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Late European time on Friday (22 October 2010) Google slipped out a blog confirming that, contrary to previous public assurances, its global Wi-Fi privacy breach had resulted in the widespread collection of consumer data which was more than merely fragments of emails. This included the unauthorised interception of entire emails and passwords.
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In a victory for the free speech and privacy rights of Amazon.com customers, a federal judge ruled today that the company would not have to turn over detailed records on nearly 50 million purchases to North Carolina tax collectors.
The state had demanded sensitive information including names and addresses of North Carolina customers–and information about exactly what they had purchased between 2003 and 2010.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The price tag for closing the digital divide between urban and rural Canadians is about $7-billion, says Winnipeg-based telecom provider MTS Allstream Inc.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Now that Marvel has again decided to revitalize its comic icon the Incredible Hulk with a new TV series, the company is bulking up to protect its “Hulk” trademark.
In Marvel’s line of sight is an Ohio-based power tool manufacturer, Airbase Industries, that’s introducing a new line of industrial and home equipment under a “Hulk” brand. The company’s marketing tagline for these tools is “Unleash the Power.”
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Of course, this actually applies to developed countries as well, but we’ll skip over that for now. Still, it’s nice to see at least some folks recognizing that intellectual property creates competing incentives, and that the only way to judge whether or not it’s a net benefit involves looking at both impacts.
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Tens of thousands of South Koreans have had their websites censored or been kicked off the Internet by their ISPs on the strength of a single, unsubstantiated accusation of copyright infringement, in a process that has no right of appeal, no right to face your accuser, and no right to see or contest the evidence against you.
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Copyrights
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I recently posted on how Access Copyright (“AC”) is trying to eliminate all but two of the 101 timely objectors to its proposed tariff hearing that would seek to increase its per student rate by about 1,300% for university and college students. AC is also seeking to charge for linking to and displaying digital content from the internet, which is interesting since no permission is required to do either.
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Although the RIAA and MPAA have stopped suing P2P users for piracy, the porn industry has decided to take on the task of ridding the Web of file swappers. To show how committed they are the purveyors of porn have set a goal to stop P2P porn piracy within 15 months. That’s a pretty tall order considering that the RIAA and MPAA failed.
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A third trial is set to begin in a bitter, closely watched legal battle between Minnesota native Jammie Thomas-Rasset and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
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One of the world’s largest distributors of Filesharing software, LimeWire, has been placed under permanent injunction by the US District Court in the Southern District of New York, to cease distributing and supporting its software. The injunction, requested by multiple parties including Bertlesmann Music Group, Motown, Capitol Records and Sony Entertainment, was filed and approved 26th October and was issued under Title 17 U.S.C §502, covering infringement of copyright.
Giver (more here)
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.27.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Windows is the easy winner, but Linux is as clearly second to Mac’s third. The primary takeaway for most is that Linux traction is strong amongst Eclipse users. The obvious next question is whether this trend holds amongst a wider development community or whether it’s a more localized Eclipse phenomenon. My hypothesis was that it was the latter; that we would instead see different trends amongst, for example, web developer communities. To test this, I decided to take an unscientific look at the raw data that powers RedMonk Analytics, but filtering it by subject to isolate individual community trends.
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The Russian government has decided it is going to develop its own operating system as an alternative to using Microsoft Windows.
Rather than opting for an existing Linux distribution instead, Russia will invest $4.9 million creating its own OS based on Linux for use across all government departments.
A meeting is planned in December where vice-prime minister Sergei Ivanov will discuss the details and plan of action for the development. The key aims are to remove the dependence on Windows and allow for better security, while at the same time not becoming just another Linux distribution.
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The Russian state plans to revamp its computer services with a Windows rival to reduce its dependence on US giant Microsoft and better monitor computer security, a lawmaker said Wednesday.
Moscow will earmark 150 million rubles (3.5 million euros, 4.9 million dollars) to develop a national software system based on the Linux operating system, Russian deputy Ilia Ponomarev told AFP, confirming an earlier report in the Vedomosti daily.
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Kernel Space/Linux Foundation
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, and the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), a nonprofit organization and international open source software development community focused on embedded Linux, today announced they will merge organizations, resulting in the CE Linux Forum becoming a technical workgroup at The Linux Foundation. As part of this merge, The Linux Foundation will expand its technical programs in the embedded computing space.
The use of Linux in embedded products has skyrocketed in recent years, with Linux now being used in consumer electronic devices of all kinds. CELF and The Linux Foundation believe that by combining resources they can more efficiently enable the adoption of Linux in the Consumer Electronics (CE) industry. Given the broad overlap in members between The Linux Foundation and CELF, the similarity in the goals of both organizations, and the large increase of embedded participants coming to Linux in recent years, this aligning of resources will strengthen each organization and ultimately help the organizations’ members achieve their missions: growing the embedded Linux market.
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While announcing its merger with the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) today, the Linux Foundation launched an open source build system project called the Yocto Project. Based on the Poky Linux build system, the CELF- and Intel-driven Yocto Project aims to provide open source tools to help companies make custom, Linux-based embedded systems for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 architectures.
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Embedded systems aren’t just the fastest growing market for Linux; they are one of the fastest growing sectors of computing. And in that segment, Linux growth continues to eclipse all other platforms.
Today, Linux-based systems are powering products and software that are household names: Android, Palm WebOS, Tivo, Sony, and more. But the majority of Linux use in this space is in traditional embedded systems such as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, aerospace and defense, and networking, for example. These products typically consist of “roll your own” Linux comprised of upstream components such as the kernel, X, and glibc that run on top of a specific hardware product. Companies and developers in these markets, in particular, are able to leverage free software and build systems quickly and affordably. And while market-share clearly proves this system is working, at The Linux Foundation we have recognized there are even more places where the industry can collaborate to control costs and speed time to market.
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Because anyone can take Linux and use it as they wish without needing to ask permission (provided they comply with the licence), it ends up being used in lots of places that we rarely hear about. This contrasts with proprietary operating systems, which only get used if they are licensed directly, which means that the licensor always knows exactly what is going on – and can issue yet another boring press release accordingly.
This contrast between much-trumpeted proprietary activity and near-invisible open goings-on is probably most acute in the world of embedded devices. Most people aren’t even aware that there is an operating system being used in many of their more “intelligent” consumer electronics devices, let alone that it is likely to be a variant of Linux.
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David Airlie has just called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in his DRM kernel tree for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel merge window. We have talked about many of these features before that are now entering the mainline Linux kernel code-base as new capabilities of the open-source Linux graphics stack, but here’s the list of what made the cut for Linux 2.6.37 and details on some of the features we have yet to discuss.
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Applications
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Last weekend I hat some nice chats as well at Ubuntu Release Party in Berlin, as well as something like a talk circle. Out of those I like to share some application tipps with you:
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Evernote 4 has been released yesterday and the new version brings a completely redesigned user interface and a re-write of the code to C++.
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TransGaming, the company behind the Cedega program for running Windows games on Linux (as an alternative to using Wine or CodeWeaver’s CrossOver Games) and Cider as the Mac equivalent, has just announced that Adobe is now licensing its SwiftShader Technology for the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.
SwiftShader is TransGaming’s pure software 3D renderer that supports features like vertex/pixel shaders, floating point rendering, and other DirectX 9.0 / OpenGL ES 2.0 level features. Adobe is hooking up with TransGaming so that developers targeting Flash and AIR can utilize 3D APIs (such as Direct3D and OpenGL) and those users that are without any 3D hardware/driver support will fall-back to SwiftShader for the software rendering in future versions of the Flash Player and AIR run-time. This is basically a proprietary CPU-based software renderer that Adobe is licensing from TransGaming.
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Games
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Linux Gaming by Jake Ward is an awesome Youtube Channel that covers lots of native Linux as well as Windows games that runs perfectly under Wine. The channel neatly categorises all the videos in simple playlists for easy access like native Linux games, free games, Windows games, must have games etc.
Every video on the channel is accompanied by a brief description about the game and download links if the game is free or any demo is available. One of the cool features about the channel is if you want to see some Linux game in action, just suggest it on the channel and a video on it will be up.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Canonical will be shipping Unity as the default desktop for Ubuntu 11.04. It’ll still be GNOME technologies underneath, GNOME applications will run on it and it’s still optimized for GNOME, but it won’t be the GNOME shell. Not the traditional GNOME shell that we all know and love nor the new GNOME Shell coming out in GNOME 3.0.
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Inspired (and actually heavily based on…) by the Elementary theme, Orta comes with some slick new elements to give your desktop a more polished look. The most interesting elements are the scrollbar – which even though look a lot like in Elementary, seem more polished -, the Nautilus Elementary breadcrumbs, buttons and the Gedit tabs.
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Parted Magic is a compact and lightweight distribution of Linux to help you manage your disk. It is a live distribution that can run off a CD/DVD or a USB drive. It comes packed with several useful disk and partition management tools such as GParted and Clonezilla. Unlike a number of live distributions of Linux out there, Parted Magic has a pretty specialised approach to things.
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Red Hat Family
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German thin client manufacturer, IGEL Technology, today became the first company in its sector to integrate the open-source software client SPICE into its Linux operating system for its Universal Desktop thin client range. With the SPICE client, IGEL customers who already use Linux at their server level can now provision high-performance virtual desktops with different guest systems. For instance, SPICE can be deployed within the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops solution in order to virtualize Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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Fedora
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Right now I’m testing a recent daily build of Fedora 14 via the Fedora Live USB Creator with persistent storage. Theoretically this should allow me to modify the live Fedora image on the USB and test how the release runs on my hardware with whatever fixes need to be applied in order to make things actually work.
At this point that means the fglrx driver direct from ATI/AMD, which I’m installing right now, and the creation/modification of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf to allow for speaker muting when headphones are plugged in.
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The Fedora Project is gearing up for our twice-annual elections process, for an election period in late November. During this election, we’ll be voting on positions in the following groups:
* Fedora Board
* Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo)
* Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo)
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It doesn’t get any easier than this, so let’s hit it
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The founder of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, has announced at UDS that despite the recent decision of Steve Jobs and Apple to move away from the Java environment, Canonical will continue to consider Java a first grade development platform.
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The Ubuntu website and basically all the official Ubuntu related websites have been upgraded to use the new Ubuntu branding, except for Ubuntuforums.
But that’s about to change. Mike Basinger create a blueprint @ Launchpad regarding this matter which has already been accepted, so it looks like we’ll be getting a new Ubuntuforums design soon (I’m not sure when).
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Video produced designed to be looped telling people in a fun way what Ubuntu is.
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Flavours and Variants
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Yesterday during the Edubuntu plenary at the Ubuntu Developer Summit I announced that you can now try the latest development release from WebLive.
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In this Screencast I show you the default wordprocessing application under Lubuntu 10.10 called Abiword.
Abiword has some special features which allow you to work collaboratively on a document or search the web for translating passages of your text.
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Phones
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Android
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Engadget claims the phone will be most likely be running Android 3.0 but also mentions Gingerbread which we’ve been hearing is actually Android 2.3.
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Are we moving closer to the official announcement of a PlayStation Phone? Engadget is running images of a device it claims to be the mythical hardware, with a few interesting details. The phone allegedly sports a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and the screen is “in the range” of 3.7 to 4.1 inches.
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Images of the PlayStation Phone which emerged today are “most definitely real”, despite the spreading reports of it being fake.
So says Engadget, who asserts that the images and spec information it reports have come from “multiple trusted sources”.
“The PlayStation Phone in the photos we ran last night, and the device reported on back in August is most definitely real,” says the site, reminding us of an incredibly similar mock up it released in August.
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Well, well, well. An eagle-eyed reader tells us PayPal posted a short announcement yesterday on its corporate blog, only to pull it mere seconds later. As you can tell from the URL, PayPal was poised to announce support for “all three major mobile platforms” (also see retweets of the blog post).
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Steve Jobs raised the question last week “Is Android Open?”. What was particularly funny was that he was using the word “open” in a sense that most people don’t use or hear these days. That’s why it was so funny to see Andy Rubin’s response, because they were talking about fundamentally different things. What a lot of people have forgotten is that the word “open” was seriously redefined in 1998 by the people who coined “open source.”
Before open source “open” meant compatibility. “Open computing” was a selling point of the workstation market that said “if you compile your [usually C] code on a DEC workstation, you can send it to your friend who uses a Sun workstation, it will work. Fantastic! Buy our hardware!” Modern Macintosh computers are the descendants, not of Mac OS 9, but of NeXT computers, which were Steve Jobs’ workstation computers.
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To get from commit 1 to commit 1,000,000 took the ASF roughly 14-and-a-half years and the effort of 2506 contributors in the VCS. For KDE it was roughly 10-and-a-half years and the effort of 2154 contributors in the VCS.
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You’ll recall that we started ForgeRock near the start of 2010 to provide continuity for customers of Sun’s enterprise identity middleware products and from that to establish a new ISV creating an identity-oriented application platform, all as open source software. So far we have rehosted OpenSSO in the OpenAM project, and rehosted OpenDS in the OpenDJ project. Demand has been strong and we’ve established a diverse international customer base already, after only 9 months.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has publicized beta releases of the desktop version of Firefox 4 since July, but mobile users can test out the next major update to the mobile browser as well. Firefox 4 for Mobile is officially at beta 1, with builds available for devices running Android and Nokia’s Maemo operating system.
[...]
After all, it is all well and good that Android itself is an open source operating system, but the application marketplace and the OEM pre-installed app list is still dominated by proprietary software. Maemo is soon to be replaced in mass-market devices by MeeGo, and although its netbook builds run the usual stack of Linux applications, the handheld products may not. We might not see Emacs and XChat on our phones any time soon, but it’s reassuring to see a high-quality, extensible open source browser made available. I just wonder if we will ever see it preinstalled.
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Mozilla has pushed back the planned release of Firefox to sometime in “early 2011.” Previously, the open source outfit had said its latest desktop browser would be officially released next month.
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Oracle
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So by closing this important chapter, and with the feeling that I had my mission accomplished within the OpenOffice.org community, I must now to communicate that I am resigning from the roles I took in OpenOffice.org project in the last 9 years, namely in the Community Council as well as the translation lead for Brazilian Portuguese. My duties in the BrOffice community remains unchanged.
Congratulations for the amazing new 3.3 release and farewell.
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IBM has announced the arrival of version 3 of its free Lotus Symphony office suite. The productivity tool suite consists of three applications, Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, and is based on the 3.x branch of OpenOffice.org.
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CMS
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What’s really great here is that the leader of one CMS projects comments directly on the blog post of another CMS leader. That’s what you’d hope from open projects working in the same space, but it’s still good to see. I also think it is rather healthy to hear that the two leaders differ here. As I mentioned at the start of this post, choice is central to free software, and that’s not just a matter of software: it also refers to people’s views. Just as proprietary monocultures bring with them great vulnerability, so open source diversity of this kind is a very real strength.
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Government
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Plans developed by the IT department of the French city of Marseille to replace its three desktops operating systems by a single proprietary operating system, are breaking procurement rules, alleges April, an association on free software and Libertis, a association of IT service companies specialising in this type of software.
In a call for tender, a public administration can request the use of open source, April and Libertis write in their statement published on 19 October. “However, to select one particular brand is strictly prohibited by the Procurement Code.”
In its statement, the two associations protest the end to Marseille’s plans to move to an open source desktop operating system: “The chief technology officer (CTO) has abruptly stopped the switch to Linux and is imposing his personal choices. We denounce his illegal and authoritarian choices that go against the interests of the city and the taxpayers of Marseille.”
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The Portuguese Association for Free Software (Ansol) is urging the government to stop buying proprietary software licences without a public tender, and to switch to free and open source software.
The advocacy group uncovered that five public administrations in 2009 spent more than 120 million Euro in total on proprietary software licences for operating systems and office applications, without properly following procurement rules. “It is illegal, and in these times of crises, such volumes are unjustifiable.”
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As we prepare for GOSCON this year, there are a number of key topics that come to mind. When one thinks about “Government” today, undoubtedly we hear discussions around cuts in government services; the need to raise taxes; stopping or reducing deficit spending and the general trend of doing more with less. This is not just at the Federal level, it is also a focus at the state and local government levels, too. In 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population—3.3 billion people—lived in cities. By 2050, city dwellers are expected to make up 70% of Earth’s total population, or 6.4 billion people. So isn’t it critical for us to start to understand just how technology fits into this ever-growing clamor for improved government services at reduced costs to the taxpayer?
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Openness/Sharing
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Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.
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About a year ago news stories began to surface that wikipedia was losing more contributors that it was gaining. These stories were based on the research of Felipe Ortega who had downloaded and analyzed millions the data of contributors.
This is a question of importance to all of us. Crowdsourcing has been a powerful and disruptive force socially and economically in the short history of the web. Organizations like Wikipedia and Mozilla (at the large end of the scale) and millions of much smaller examples have destroyed old business models, spawned new industries and redefined the idea about how we can work together. Understand how the communities grow and evolve is of paramount importance.
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Programming
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Programmers looking for work in enterprise shops would be foolish not to learn the languages that underlie this paradigm, yet a surprising number of niche languages are fast beginning to thrive in the enterprise. Look beyond the mainstays, and you’ll find several languages that are beginning to provide solutions to increasingly common problems, as well as old-guard niche languages that continue to occupy redoubts. All offer capabilities compelling enough to justify learning a new way to juggle brackets, braces, and other punctuation marks.
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Standards/Consortia
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HTML5 now commands a majority of web-based video support, but its rise is being fueled by mobile devices. Adobe Flash still holds the lead in desktop content.
This news comes from a new survey of HTML5-video penetration conducted by MeFeedia, the self-described “largest independent video site on the web with partnerships so big they make us nervous.” The company’s content partners include Hulu, CBS, and ABC, and they carry content from such sites as YouTube, Vimeo, and others.
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It is becoming a cliché to say that we live in a time of crisis. Whether it’s catastrophic climate change, financial meltdown or collapse of trust in our political representatives, disaster is already upon us and the state seems powerless to construct a meaningful response.
According to Dan Hind’s new book, underlying our inability to tackle these crises is yet another crisis – a crisis of publicity. In his view, the make up of the ‘public’ – “the informed autonomous body capable of initiating policy and driving legislative changes” – now excludes the vast majority of people. Instead, the state bends itself to an elite public dominated by those who control (though not own) the vast capital flows of major corporations and the financial markets which connect them.
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1994: Wired.com, then known as HotWired, invents the web banner ad. Go ahead, blame us.
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Minivans aren’t the most exciting vehicles to drive around. But the Ninja Turtles’ van? Now that’s how you get around in style. So when 23-year-old Brittney Schneck came into possession of a ’94 Dodge Caravan, she decided to upgrade it to something a bit more gnarly.
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Top Mafia boss Gerlandino Messina was playing an Xbox game based on the popular Godfather movies before being arrested last weekend, police said Wednesday.
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ACCORDING TO RESEARCH by Informatica Corp, databases are not doing the job they were intended to do.
Informatica, which sells enterprise integration software, has published its research into how well databases are used and integrated, and warned that many are “falling short of ideals”.
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Almost half of the 350 most valuable listed companies in the UK do not have software escrow agreements in place to give them access to technology if a supplier goes bust, according to an escrow services company.
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Do you have some “Generation Y” teens or pre-teens lazing about your home? Because the terminally ill old social network down by the river, MySpace, would like to show them racy videos all day in his redesigned internet van. Exciting.
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Tuncer Deniz worked at Bungie as a producer from 1996 to 1998 and served as the project lead on Myth 2, but he stayed in contact with top Bungie execs. After recently hearing the story of how Steve Jobs got angry when Bungie went to Microsoft in 2000, Deniz decided to tell us what had happened as he heard it. Turns out that Steve Jobs was angry for a very simple reason: he had wanted to purchase Bungie himself… after first turning the company down.
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Google appears close to buying the trophy 111 Eighth Ave. building, one of the largest buildings in Manhattan, The Post has learned.
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Science
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One of the largest meteorite impacts in the world has been discovered in the Australian outback – an impact so powerful it may have been the trigger for a major extinction event.
The meteorite struck Australia around 300 million years ago and produced a ‘shock zone’ – the area of land deformed by the strike – at least 80 km wide.
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CHIP DESIGNER Xilinx has announced that it can beat Moore’s Law by introducing stacked silicon interconnects.
The announcement debuts devices that allow for higher bandwidth, capacity and reduction in power by having multiple field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in a single package. The firm is saying that by using 3D packaging and through-silicon vias on its 28nm 7 series FPGAs, it can “overcome the boundaries of Moore’s Law and offer electronics manufacturers unparalleled power, bandwidth and density optimization”.
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The water level at the Three Gorges dam, aka the largest hydropower plant in the world, reached its maximum yesterday, spurring electricity output to full capacity for the first time since it began operations in 2008. Dam officials have been holding back water since September in order to let it rise to its peak height of 175m Tuesday morning.
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IBM and other chip makers look beyond CMOS to design a more energy efficient processor
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Security
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Firesheep is a new Firefox plugin that makes it easy for you to hijack other people’s social network connections. Basically, Facebook authenticates clients with cookies. If someone is using a public WiFi connection, the cookies are sniffable. Firesheep uses wincap to capture and display the authentication information for accounts it sees, allowing you to hijack the connection.
[...]
Protect yourself by forcing the authentication to happen over TLS. Or stop logging in to Facebook from public networks.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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In the decade since 9/11, the United States has conquered and occupied two large Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), compelled a huge Muslim army to root out a terrorist sanctuary (Pakistan), deployed thousands of Special Forces troops to numerous Muslim countries (Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc.), imprisoned hundreds of Muslims without recourse, and waged a massive war of ideas involving Muslim clerics to denounce violence and new institutions to bring Western norms to Muslim countries. Yet Americans still seem strangely mystified as to why some Muslims might be angry about this situation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Tete, in Mozambique, sits above one of the world’s largest reserves of high-quality coal. Money is pouring in and the mood is upbeat, writes Richard Lapper, but getting the product to market won’t be easy.
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Finance
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Investors world-wide are braced for rising commodity prices: The cost of sugar is set to surpass the 30-year high recorded earlier this year, while breakfast cereal manufacturers will increase prices to reflect the soaring market value of corn. But for Belgium, the worst is yet to come: The potato market is “firm” and Belgian fries may be set to rise in price.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Obama administration has encountered mounting resistance in Europe to its demands for broad sharing of airline passenger data and other personal information designed to spot would-be terrorists before they strike.
Europe’s objections, based on privacy considerations, worry U.S. counterterrorism officials because computer scrutiny of passenger lists has become an increasingly important tool in the struggle to prevent terrorists from entering the United States or traveling to and from their havens. The would-be Times Square bomber was hauled off a Dubai-bound airliner in May, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said, after his name on the manifest produced a ding in Department of Homeland Security computers.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Digital Restriction Methods (DRM) aren’t just a nuisance that treats all customers as if they had stolen what they actually paid for. They also threaten our future cultural heritage.
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Working with hardware partner HP and software partner Microsoft, the library is showcasing a range of research tools, including a prototype of Sony’s RayModeler 360-degree Autostereoscopic Display that uses gesture control to view static and moving 3D images and video.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademark lawyer Ron Coleman, who runs the excellent Likelihood of Confusion blog, has now written a paper that highlights his concerns about where trademark law has been trending recently, and comparing it to the excesses of copyright law these days.
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Copyrights
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Those cultural policies are part of a major government consultation that comes amid signals that Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore may be open to relaxing those policies as online sellers and electronic books shake up the marketplace. Last spring, the government approved the establishment of a physical distribution facility for Amazon.ca, a move opposed by the Canadian Booksellers Association. The approval came with strings attached – Amazon promised new investments in Canada, increased availability of French language content, and higher visibility of Canadian books – but the precedent was clearly established.
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With the introduction of its three-strikes law, France has positioned itself at the forefront of the ‘war on piracy’. Under the new Hadopi legislation, alleged copyright infringers will be hunted down systematically, but not if it’s up to France’s largest torrent site. In a counter-move the Smartorrent team recently launched a VPN service, and nearly 2500 users of the site have already signed up for an account.
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With anti-piracy outfits and dubious law-firms policing BitTorrent swarms at an increasing rate, many Bittorrent users are looking for ways to hide their identities from the outside world. To accommodate this demand we’ll give an overview of 5 widely used privacy services.
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This new copyright proposal forms part of the European Commission’s general overhaul – officially a relaunch – of the Single European Market. The announcement was made at a press conference in Brussels today, and encompasses 50 proposals to be put in place by 2012.
The Commission’s big new idea is to acknowledge that citizens, as well as business, have a stake in the Single Market. The relaunch was therefore held jointly by Michel Barnier, Commissioner for the Internal Market, and Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Fundamental Rights.
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An interesting story from Financial Times is the result of an interview with Brian Message, a former accountant (i.e. lion-tamer in training) who is one of Radiohead’s three managers. Thom Yorke of Radiohead, according to the article, has predicted the demise of the major labels within months. Good. I don’t think he’s inflating things at all.
[...]
I hope that Brian Message and Thom Yorke are right: what is about to happen to the a-holes running the major labels is not just “DIY record labels.” The music industry is cannibalizing itself and all that will be left will be small businesses that actually care about music. That will be the only way to get music: buy it from the artists themselves.
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Sintel is the Blender Institute’s third “open movie”. Could you describe what “open movie” means to the Blender Institute?
Oh… many things. First, I love to work with artists, which goes much easier than working with developers! And making short animation films with teams is an amazing and very rewarding activity. With this large creative community of Blender artists, the financial model enables it even; not many short film makers have this opportunity.
But the practical incentive to do this is because it’s a great development model for Blender. Putting artists together on a major challenge is the ultimate way to drive software like Blender forward. That way we can also ensure it fits ambitious targets weeding out the ‘would be cool features’ for the ‘must need’ ones. And it’s quite easier to design usability with small diverse teams, than have it done online via feedback mechanisms, which easily becomes confusing with the noise of hundreds of different opinions.
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ACTA
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La nota de hoy sin duda es la publicación por parte de Transparencia Internacional (TI) de su lista anual del índice de corrupción por país. The letter of today is undoubtedly the publication by Transparency International (TI) in its annual corruption index by country. Para transparencia internacional, la corrupción puede ser definida como el abuso del poder para beneficio privado. For Transparency International, corruption can be defined as the abuse of power for private gain. El indice es la percepción que se tiene de la corrupción en el sector público y para ser medido se requiere como mínimo de tres fuentes. The index is the perception that there is corruption in the public sector is required to be measured at least three sources.
Prometo hacer un análisis más amplio, pero de entrada me metí a ver cómo le había ido a los países negociadores de ACTA respecto del año pasado, esto fue lo que encontré: I promise to do further analysis, but the input I got to see how he had gone to the ACTA negotiating countries from last year, this is what I found…
The Digital Prism Screencast – MintMenu (more here)
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The month-long voting is over so it is about time to announce the winner of our $100.00 (USD) coolest Linux workspace contest. The people have spoken, and from our five finalists only one has emerged victorious.
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Less is More
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Whoa, waitaminute. A 1.7Ghz machine with a healthy 256Mb will be a handicap to learning Linux? A handicap? Even when armed with lightweight applications?
[...]
But I can also say that I learned a lot more about Linux from a wildly unpredictable 100Mhz machine, and even more from a rancid little K6-2, than I ever did from a dual core Thinkpad. I enjoy having it, but I don’t count it among my educational treasures.
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I’m still a bit wired over the post from a day or two ago, insisting that a 1.7Ghz machine with a healthy amount of RAM and a decent-sized hard drive would be a detriment to anyone learning Linux.
More and more that strikes me as completely counterintuitive, and for plenty of reasons. I already explained that an older machine is a challenge, whereas a newer machine is a luxury.
But honestly, when someone wants to learn Linux, or at least try it out, I don’t recommend they go buy a new computer. I suggest they find a 4- or 5-year-old laptop, and learn the ropes that way.
And aside from three reasons to buy old machines instead of new ones — power demands, noise levels and Linux compatibility — there are other good reasons to use an old computer to learn about penguins.
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Ubuntu, the most user-friendly of the Linux distributions; Ubuntu, the harbinger of the day of the Linux desktop to the world; Ubuntu, the crowned king of all distributions; Ubuntu — the Operating System that has now killed my desktop for the third consecutive upgrade in a row. This is ridiculous. I have been an Ubuntu user and supporter since the seventh grade, when I first started using Linux, but this is just too much. I know I’ve denounced Ubuntu and then reconsidered at least once in the past, but this is different, this is intolerable.
My final unfortunate experience with Ubuntu began last week. I had just run the upgrade to the new release, version 10.10. When turning the computer on in the morning, I had expected to be greeted by my customary desktop with maybe a new theme at the most. However, I was welcomed by a bleak login prompt on tty1 — the command line. The new upgrade had ruined my configuration so that the X server would no longer start the graphical display. Fail. Ubuntu has ruined my desktop three times in the last two years, not coincidentally in the wake of each six-month release. That makes its record of stability in my experience worse than both Gentoo and Arch, each of which are supposed to be horribly difficult to use.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Amaroker without a cause Mark Kretschmann.
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Ballnux
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Overall though, the Galaxy Tab is the best non-Apple tablet to date, and it plays well against Apple’s impressive iPad. As the Android OS and app developers catch up with the new form factor, the gap is certain to narrow further.
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Kernel Space
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With over 13 million lines of code, the Linux kernel is one of the largest open source projects in the world, but what is a kernel and what is it used for?
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Linux averages 5.5 changes per hour, every hour of every day, and is perhaps one of the most active software projects in human history. Jon Masters charts these changes every month in quite possibly the best technical column in human history…
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Flash drives and SD Cards are getting bigger, faster and cheaper. They’re not just for sucking down snaps from your pocket camera any more: they’re backup storage, portable homedirs, netbook expansion … you name it.
Most arrive with a VFAT filesystem, and usually stay that way. But for a lot of applications, this is not ideal. Curious if the filesystem made any difference, we did what Feynman would have done: tested some.
For once, testing gave a pretty clear answer. So what is the fastest filesystem linux folks can use on their flash media?
Ext4.
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Applications
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What impresses me about PiTiVi isn’t so much that it’s a flexible multimedia editor — we have a handful of those already in the Linux community. What I think sets PiTiVi apart is that it makes video editing intuitive. I don’t generally create or edit video files, but I was able to jump right in with this application. I didn’t have any need for a manual or tutorial (though there is a short tutorial on the project’s website). PiTiVi has an interface which allows people to learn by doing without a bunch of scary options or jargon. Almost everything is drag-n-drop with this editor and I feel it lowers the bar for people interested in putting together their own videos.
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The latest version of Miro now remembers the previous selected view under Library and features the addition of new video conversion capabilities, including support for Apple’s iPad. Users can now cancel all queued auto-downloads and clicking the ‘previous’ button now shifts to the start of the current file before moving to the start of the previous file with the next click.
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Openfiler is an appliance, which means that it has a single, specific function. When the system boots the first time, you receive a text-based welcome screen that directs you to use the web interface for Openfiler management.
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Well, by now it’s obvious to the world that I kicked Pidgin 2.7.4 out of the nest last week. Although that release included some nice new features for ICQ users, lots of bug fixes, and some remote crash fixes, it’s not without its share of problems. Those problems are producing a bunch of duplicate tickets for us to deal with, so I thought it might be a good idea to post about them here just in case anyone bothers to read my rambling.
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Unix (and Linux) command line programs are like old friends. You get caught up in the day-to-day hustle of life and you may forget about them temporarily, but sooner or later you remember them and that warm feeling comes over you….
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Ubuntu, as we know is all about party and fun, along with a lot of serious work for people at Stock Exchanges and NASA. Let’s see how much fun we can have with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has some of the coolest ‘apps’ for music playback. By default you get Rhythmbox which is a cool app in itself. However, you can install many other apps depending on your needs. Since these apps are for free of cost you can try all and see which one fits your need.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Some readers aren’t fans of running Windows games under Wine, perhaps because you’ve had bad experiences in the past, or you find it a little fiddly to get a game running. On the other hand, plenty of you install Wine to run Windows games and are interested in getting new games running.
So, I’ve decided to write small articles pointing out games that do work fine under Wine with minimal tweaking, as and when I stumble across them. Think of these little articles as similar to the Linux Action Show’s “X runs Linux” section, but instead “X runs on Ubuntu with Wine”.
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Games
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Relive historic battles, ride with the powerful conquerors of ancient lore, built and control powerful civilisations, turn the tide of history, transport yourself to a bygone era, literally become God. These are the characteristics that captivated the fans of the popular Age of Empire series. However such popular Real Time Strategy games like AOE and Civilisation do have a downside. They were built mostly around the Windows scene and were down right proprietary in their nature, leaving little for Linux and open source enthusiasts. For a long time, games of such quality were thought to be impossible to be developed in an open source environment due to the amount of work involved and the lack of significant returns.
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Whatever your thing you’re bound to find something you like amongst this lot. All the games featured here have received updates within the last year, are cross-compatible on all 3 major platforms (and some even go beyond that) and won’t cost you a penny. Forget work, let’s have some fun!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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From time to time I need to take a screenshot of some application or a part of my desktop. The obvious solution in KDE is KSnapshot, which is perfect if you want a rectangularly-shaped picture.
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One more example is how the Git services for the KDE community keep improving, from Git integration in KDevelop to the rapidly maturing infrastructure the sysamdin team have been tooling up for us for some time now. projects.kde.org continues to get better and better and Tom is doing an awesome job of keeping everyone informed about that process.
V
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GNOME Desktop
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Percentage of gnome-shell code written by Red Hat by lines [:] 91%
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1. Mepis
[...]
2. Kubuntu
[...]
3. PCLinuxOS
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Red Hat Family
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“In all honesty, we’re out of space,” Whitehurst said following a Harvard Alumni Association panel discussion Tuesday night that brought four area CEOs to Cisco’s campus. “We’ve rented all they have around us.”
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Red Hat announced that leading Indian FMCG major, Marico, is powering its SAP-based mission-critical ERP system on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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Fedora
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Earlier this month the Fedora community began proposing names for Fedora 15 with the proposals ranging from names like Malmstrom to Fortaleza and Gutzwiller. The list, however, has now been narrowed down to five potential candidates for the Fedora 15 codename.
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You may have noticed that Fedora 14 makes its release next week. Curious to see what was going to be in the new version, and on a suggestion from pyxie, I grabbed a copy and installed it on my USB flash drive.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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That “feature” is marketing. Let me explain.
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It amazes me how quickly Canonical releases Ubuntu. Every six weeks, like clockwork, a new release is out in the wild. And every new release brings with it a host of improvements, squashes bugs, and introduces new features. But there are some features and improvements I have yet to see. So I thought I would take this opportunity to spell out a few things I’d like to see come along for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).
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Firstly, it’s good to mention that it’s actually “Unity as the default desktop if your graphics card and drivers support it”. We’ve learnt a harsh lesson this cycle about where Unity works well, where it should work but doesn’t and finally where we just can’t expect it to work.
Therefore, it is going to be a primary focus this cycle to enable Unity on as many chipsets as possible. We will be much more lenient about what OpenGL features are required (allowing runtime fallbacks through detection and through quirks files for those chipsets that lie about their capabilities).
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So, I was expecting this to be announced at Mark’s keynote this morning, but it looks like good ol’ Jono Bacon beat me to it Nevertheless, I won’t let him steal my thunder.
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A mere four months since the 0.9.0 release, which was the first release in quite a while, Compiz developers brought out version 0.9.2. Sam Spilsbury, developer of Compiz, announced this release on the Compiz mailing list as well as his personal blog on Sunday, October 24.
This release brought a few new features and lots of stability and performance fixes. Splisbury says it should be ready for general usage.
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This post will be about Unity stuff I am interested (and maybe start working on), I am not a designer but I can give it a bit of a kick off by implementing zeitgeist-powered backends.
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Whilst the big news in Mark Shuttleworth’s opening address at the Ubuntu Developer Summit was regarding Unity he also touched upon the creation of a new Ubuntu icon theme – one that will be in keeping with the Ambiance and Radiance GTK themes.
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It started harmless. I saw a message about a new release being available (10.10 instead of 10.4). I’m used to smooth updates in Linux, so I clicked the upgrade button without further thinking.
All went smooth indeed. About 2 hours later my netbook was ready to reboot. After doing so I was greeted with a new wallpaper behind the login screen. So far so good. I logged in and…
..was surprised. What was that? Not the UI I was used to and which was the main cause to install UNE in the first place.
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I’m not going to say anything about Unity for myself because I haven’t tried it (and it will likely not happen). What I will say is that it isn’t surprising to me that more and more distributions today are switching from an Ubuntu base to a Debian base, because Debian is entirely community-driven and is usually more stable. That’s why my Fresh OS respins are based off of Linux Mint “Debian”, that’s why #! moved to a Debian base, and that’s why Manhattan OS (which was based on Ubuntu not too long ago) moved to a Debian testing base (along with rebranding itself to Jupiter OS). Folks, expect to see a lot more of these types of base shifts happening in the near future, as Ubuntu starts to really chart its own course.
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As Susan wrote earlier, Mark Shuttleworth made the announcement of Unity’s promotion to the big time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Much of the early criticisms of this move are from developers who claim that Canonical is more interested in pushing the Ubuntu brand than working together with the community.
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Having slept on it since writing my initial reactions yesterday I now have a proposal for Canonical & GNOME, which I hope the people concerned will consider.
Yesterday, I said “the best possible outcome I can see is that one of the two projects will become an obvious choice within a year or so”. So my proposal is this: let’s have a bake-off, Unity vs GNOME Shell, under the big tent of the GNOME project.
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Canonical shook the Linux world yesterday when it announced that the next version of Ubuntu — “Natty Narwhal,” or version 11.04 — will no longer use the GNOME interface by default. Instead, Natty will feature Unity, the multitouch and 3D-enabled interface that made its debut earlier this month in the distribution’s netbook edition of Maverick Meerkat, or Ubuntu 10.10.
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Is this the end of Canonical and Ubuntu’s Free Software ideals? Hardly. But the company has come to the realization that in order for Linux to have a chance on the desktop, it has to make some hard choices and compromise. It can’t sit and wait for the GNOME Foundation to twiddle its thumbs and lag behind in desktop innovation from Windows, Mac OS, or even KDE.
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Ubuntu Tweak (now on Version 0.5.7) has evolved quite a bit since the early days, adding more functionality along the way.
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The biggest mistake you can make with Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition is to directly equate it with the new Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition of the same distro.
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Ian: I only recently started working on Launchpad. I work on the “Code” team, reporting to Tim Penhey.
We deliver functionality associated with managing and importing branches, merge proposals, code reviews; Bazaar-Launchpad integration; the XML-RPC and web services API etc.
Personally, I’ve also done some work on improving the menu rendering performance and other infrastructure type things.
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The idea of Ubuntu Developer Summit if you’re not sure what it’s all about just yet is “Getting face time together is really important” it helps us to get to know one another, puts the faces to the names/nicks which will help folks become more productive for the coming cycle.
There track have been re organised to get more cross-pollination:
* Application Developers
* Package Selection and System Defaults
* Performance
* Multimedia
* ununtu the project
* hardware compatibility
* cloud infrastructure
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At the Natty UDS currently underway in Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has provided a new desktop direction with a move to the Unity shell, instead of the GNOME Shell. Moving beyond just the user interface, Shuttleworth has also shared some insight into where he sees Ubuntu headed in the next five years.
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Even Microsoft knows the desktop is dying. It’s not going to disappear, any more than the TV is going to disappear. But the excitement in technology lies elsewhere, and it’s not coming back. (Might as well wait for the Fugees to get back together.)
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 10 is a good release that builds upon great features from both Ubuntu 10.10 and Linux Mint 9. The new features are not an example of aggressive development, but still provide enough enhancements to justify an upgrade/installation. In fact, I would still recommend Linux Mint 10 to those Mint users who can’t be bothered to upgrade, if only to enjoy the latest Ubuntu, Kernel and GNOME updates and features.
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Sub-notebooks
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It’s been a couple of years since I reviewed a laptop from ZaReason, the UltraLap SR. Now I’m reviewing something a bit smaller — the ZaReason Terra HD.
[...]
What I liked: Nice big screen for a Netbook; great looks and construction for something in a Netbook class machine
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Nicholas Negroponte wants to give laptop computers to children in third-world countries so they can communicate with the rest of the world. (05:21)
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5 (More) Free and Open Source CRM Software: We have already featured here several free and open-source CRM software but due to popular demand, we will showcase five more CRM tools. As I’ve already explained before, CRM software is used for effectively managing a company’s interactions with clients and possible customers by organizing, automating, and synchronizing business processes.
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Looking at the evolving scenario, it will become imperative for solutions providers to have an open source play. Many solutions providers we spoke to said that the lack of skill sets and non-availability of applications have been the key reasons for not providing open source solutions.
This partner perception was probably correct a couple of years ago. Today, the availability of open source professionals has considerably improved, and the overall open source ecosystem has matured. Vendors such as Red Hat have built a portfolio of end-to-end offerings, including virtualization.
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Experts estimate that the number of open source apps available doubles every fourteen months. Sourceforge alone has more than 260,000 projects, and with so many open source apps now available from so many different repositories, it can be hard to keep up.
For this list, we’ve highlighted some newer open source tools you might have missed. We also included some gems from obscure categories, like Mandelbulbs, gene sequencing, and knitting, to name just a few. Other open source tools on the list are good projects that are overshadowed by older, better-known projects, and at least one is an old favorite that has a new name.
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The topic of open-source software has been steeped in debate since the development and licensing took root in the 1980s and picked up steam with the proliferation of the Internet in the decade that followed.
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It’s time for the annual New Zealand Open Source Awards, and the 31 finalists show an extraordinary range of innovation and collaboration.
Among the three nominations for best open source project are: SilverStripe, a New Zealand-made content management system that has been downloaded more than 325,000 times globally in less than four years; Kete, a digital library project, and R, a programming language and software environment that has become the lingua franca for statistical computing and graphics.
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Events
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We had a great time in Paris at our Third Open Source Think Tank this year! We had over 120 attendees, primarily from Europe http://thinktankeu.olliancegroup.com/index.php.
The two case studies were very different and illuminated the range of the open source market: Airbus and the Danish Government. The Airbus discussion was particularly fascinating as they described a product development cycle of twenty years with a product life cycle of forty years. Software has become critical to their planes, but given these time periods, proprietary software has significant disadvantages: (1) most proprietary software companies are likely to be acquired or go out of business during such a long period and (2) even if the proprietary software company still exists, the technology will be dated and the company may be reluctant to invest in maintaining it. An open source approach overcomes many of these problems.
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The OSSF at Academia Sinica in Taiwan has kindly organized a full-day GPL compliance workshop on December 2nd in Taipei, Taiwan.
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Oracle
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During an Internat Relay Chat (IRC) meeting of the council on the 14th of October, Louis Suárez-Potts, Community manager of OpenOffice.org for Oracle, called for members of The Document Foundation to resign from the OpenOffice.org Council. Christoph Noack, former OpenOffice.org Product Development Representative, and Florian Effenberger, former OpenOffice.org marketing project lead and German marketing contact, have responded with formal resignation emails.
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OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available on the download website.
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Last week, the OpenOffice.org Community Council requested the resignation of members who supported The Document Foundation, the recent fork of the OpenOffice.org project. This week, the results are revealed: resignations of key people, and a growing tendency to choose sides in the community. And the tragedy is that none of this angst seems necessary.
The request follows the recent creation of The Document Foundation (TDF), to provide an independent governing body for the development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) code, and the announcement of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation’s fork of the OpenOffice.org code.
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CMS
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Within the Drupal project, we don’t have a paid staff to advance the core software. However, many of the developers who contribute to critical parts of the Drupal code base make their living by building complex Drupal websites. Some Drupal developers are paid by customers to contribute their expertise to the Drupal project or are employed by companies ‘sponsoring’ Drupal development. Tens of thousands of developers are working with Drupal today, and many of them contribute back to the project. Albeit different, neither Joomla or Drupal are exclusively a volunteer run project, and that is one of the reasons we’ve grown so big. Ditto for WordPress that gets a lot of help from Automattic.
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Last month Drupal.org had over 2 million unique visitors, many of them coming to the home page to learn about and evaluate Drupal. The home page was designed with these visitors in mind. Our UX research revealed that Drupal.org is primarily a searching site, so the home page features a large search box with optional search filters. The rest of the home page focuses on the needs of Drupal evaluators, including a section showcasing the newest and best Drupal sites.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Technology Academy (FTA) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today their partnership in the FTA’s Associate Partner Network. The Network aims to expand the availability of professional educational courses and materials covering the concepts and applications of Free Software and free standards (http://ftacademy.org/standards).
The FTA consists of an advanced virtual campus with course modules which can be followed entirely on-line. The learning materials are all published under a free license and can be accessed by anyone, but learners enrolled in the FTA will be guided by professional teaching staff from one of the three participating universities. The FTA aims to enable IT professionals, students, teachers and decision makers to undertake accredited professional education modules in free software studies.
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Science
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Think how awesome it was the first time you saw a lightsaber in action. Or how your mind was officially shredded when Neo mastered the Matrix. Technology in movies is cool. When artfully filmed, gadgets, gizmos, robots, and computers can captivate and amaze audiences.
But for every thrilling example of cool-ass tech, Hollywood seems to produce a tired, dated cliche. There’s the obligatory no-cell-phone-service scene in horror flicks. There are robots with ATTITUDE in science fiction. There are impossible user interfaces in action films. The list goes on and on.
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Security
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Britain should stop “kowtowing” to US demands over airport security, the chairman of British Airways, Martin Broughton, said yesterday, adding that American airports did not implement some checks on their own internal flights.
He suggested the practice of forcing passengers on US-bound flights to take off their shoes and to have their laptops checked separately in security lines should be dropped, during a conference of UK airport operators in London.
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Finance
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Shrinking revenue at U.S. banks, led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc., may continue to fall as the industry heads into what could be its slowest period of growth since the Great Depression.
After the six largest U.S. banks posted record revenue in 2009, combined net revenue fell by an average of 8 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier and 16.3 percent over the last two quarters, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue so far this year is down by 4.1 percent, driven by declines in everything from trading at Goldman Sachs to home lending at Bank of America Corp. New laws restricting account and credit-card fees, as well as derivatives and capital rules, are also squeezing lenders.
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When investment-banking giant Goldman Sachs bought 11 Seattle and Eastside office buildings and complexes in 2007 — overnight becoming one of the market’s largest landlords — there wasn’t much talk of risk.
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Judy Stratton said she and her husband Harry have tried since January 2009 to modify the mortgage on their home in Stayton, Ore. after a drop-off in demand for Harry’s floor maintenance services. In August, Stratton said, they received a rejection letter from their bank saying they did not qualify for help per the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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If you own a Nook, you better make sure you regularly update its software, otherwise you might lose all your files that are not B&N books. That’s what happened to Michael, and customer service told him that it can happen if the device hasn’t been updated recently. The updates are too much for it to handle so it has to spontaneously jettison all foreign objects! Or something like that.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Canada’s pharmaceutical industry and the European Union have been quietly lobbying for changes that could give brand-name drugs several years more patent protection here — and potentially add hundreds of millions of dollars to Canadian medication costs annually.
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Copyrights
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The legislation was passed on April 22, 2009 and came into force on July 24, 2009. By the end of July 2010, there has been no suspension against an individual user or a web site by the order of the Minister. However, the Copyright Commission has recommended ISPs to suspend accounts of copyright infringing users in thirty-one cases, and all of the individual users have been disconnected to the corresponding ISPs for less than one month.
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Michael Geist isn’t shy about engaging in a “copyfight.”
The very title of his new book alludes to his last public fight—waged on Twitter, blogs, and in the news media—with Heritage Minister James Moore.
The Digital Prism Screencast – MintUpload
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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So this is just a reminder – I’m trying to make sure that everybody is aware of the fact that in my 2.6.36 announcement, I was talking about trying to do a short merge window. Why? So that I could release -rc1 by the time the kernel summit started, despite the release of 2.6.36 being delayed.
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In February of this year the Clang C/C++ compiler for LLVM hit the milestone of self-hosting itself after Clang’s C support was declared production ready (with the recently released LLVM 2.8, the C++ support is now deemed feature-complete) just last October. In April another achievement was reached for LLVM/Clang and that was building much of FreeBSD’s base operating system. Today another milestone has been hit and that’s building the Linux kernel for Debian to the point that it’s functional and can run the X.Org Server both on bare metal and this can also be done within a QEMU virtualized environment.
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When looking at the Core i7 970 at its stock speeds with turbo boost capabilities, the CPU performed very well and practically winning every benchmark. Granted, the CPUs we used for this comparison were limited to what we had access to, and that meant no six-core AMD tests or any of Intel’s Extreme Edition processors. The only tests where the Core i7 970 “Gulftown” did not come out the winner was with the software that did not have enough work to keep all twelve CPU threads busy and so the Core i7 870 commanded the lead due to its higher turbo frequency. The Core i7 870 quad-core with Hyper Threading can be boosted up to 3.60GHz when needed, but with the Core i7 970 in most cases you can overclock this CPU to at least 3.6GHz if not 4.0GHz. Of course, that is unless the motherboard (or cooling) limits you in doing so as we were faced with in this set of tests.
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Graphics Stack
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So xorg-server-1.9.1 went out fairly smoothly and will probably be the version tied to the Katamari release.
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The Wayland Display Server continues moving forward and is nearing the point of usability by enthusiasts and those interested in easily trying out this display server that leverages the latest and greatest Linux graphics technologies.
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The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here’s a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.
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Applications
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Rosegarden is a tool for making and understanding music, a general-purpose MIDI and audio sequencer, score editor, and music composition and editing environment that is released under the GPL, and runs exclusively under GNU / Linux.
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Compiz 0.9.2 has been released with a lot of bugs fixed but also new features such as:
* a new MultiAnim which allows for mutliple copies of windows in animations
* minimized live window previews (experimental) – a feature many have been waiting for to use in DockBarX (among others)
* natural scale mode which pushes windows apart based on their distance from each other already when overlapping
* re-written group plugin
* simplified shadow storage in the decorations
* support for KDE 4.5′s blur hint
* Allow resizing from the center of the window
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Overall, with the less GPU demanding games, Windows 7 tends to take the lead over Ubuntu 10.10 when running at higher resolutions, but Ubuntu 10.10 did secure some significant leads at lower resolutions. In the toughest multi-platform environments presented by Unigine, the performance was the same across operating systems.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins.
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GNOME Desktop
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This move could anger at least some open source enthusiasts, but it probably shouldn’t. Ubuntu is clearly trying to further differentiate itself in a Linux world filled with UIs and user experiences that are extremely similar. It is a risky bet, but Shuttleworth says that developers need not worry because fragmentation can be avoided by using FreeDesktop.org to ensure that desktop integration mechanisms are standardized and interoperable. Whether that will be enough to alleviate all possible issues or silence the critics of this decision remains to be seen.
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I was vocal enough in the past so I guess there is no need to reiterate again how much I dislike GNOME Shell… I see now Canonical is practically forking GNOME and replacing the Shell with Unity for the next Ubuntu release. In both the case of the Shell and Unity I can’t understand why people behind those projects persists in trying to make a Desktop OS act and feel like a mobile phone OS, like being targeted exclusive at clueless users.
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It is the super secret service that does all the work behind Gwibber. It is not without improvements this cycle, most notably Geolocation support, the ability to display maps about where your friends are, inside it and the the ability to store you and your friends’ profile data offline.
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There is going to be some questions about this decision in relation to GNOME. I want to make something crystal clear: Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME, but we continue to support the latest GNOME Shell development work in the Ubuntu archives.
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Compiz 0.9.2 was revealed recently with a number of major improvements, new features and even new plugins. But the future of Compiz became uncertain since both Gnome with its GNOME Shell and KDE with its new KWin has decided to go forward with the new integrated desktop approach. But hold on, Compiz might just become an ever more active and important project with Canonical deciding to integrate Compiz with Ubuntu Unity.
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As Debian is to Ubuntu so GNOME is to Unity. What do I mean by that? Well, once upon a time there was an operating system called Debian. It was, and is, a powerful version of Linux. Outside of the Linux community though almost no one had ever heard of it. Then Ubuntu came along, built its own easy-to-use distribution on top of Debian, and now it’s arguably the most popular Linux in the world.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Asturias
Blarney
Lovelock
Pushcart
Sturgis
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I was doing an installation of Debian Squeeze to a USB drive, and unfortunately the Debian installer was eager to drop its own GRUB on the Master Boot Record — not on the drive to which I was installing Debian but to the first hard drive on the system, which contains Fedora 13 and Windows 7.
So I had a dead GRUB on the Master Boot Record of my drive.
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So we just got done signing off on the gold images for Fedora 14. I’m amazingly proud of the whole little release management group – development (especially Anaconda team, who were awesome), release engineering, and QA teams: we had an unbelievably smooth ride through the Final validation testing stage. Unprecedented in the annals of Fedora history, we span one publicly-announced Test Compose (TC) build (there were five unannounced ones, but they were just to test small fixes which we needed an image compose to verify) and exactly one Release Candidate (RC) build, which was the build signed off as Gold today. We have never needed just one candidate build to get a release right before.
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Fedora 14 has gone gold. According to Adam Williamson, Red Hat Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, the Fedora 14 Final Release Go/No-Go Meeting resulted in the unanimous decision that RC1 should be declared Gold. Attendees were pleased that the quality tests had gone so smoothly and this is the first time a first release candidate would ship as final. An email with the good news will go out to mailing lists on Thursday.
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Debian Family
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Squeeze includes not only Shotwell but the GIMP and Inkscape. It also includes OpenOffice and what’s known as GNOME Office, the latter including Abiword and Gnumeric.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’m writing this blog post in a chair in the ‘Grand Caribe Convention Center’, at the end of the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in preparation of the 11.04 Natty Narwhal release. It’s been a very interesting first day to say the least.
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Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has reached EOL (End Of Life). It is no longer supported by Ubuntu with security updates and patches. You have known this day was coming for 1.5 years, as all non-LTS Ubuntu releases are supported for only 18 months.
I have no plans to delete the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty AMIs for EC2 published under the Alestic name in the foreseeable future, but I request, recommend, and urge you to please stop using them and upgrade to an officially supported, active, kernel-consistent release of Ubuntu on EC2 like 10.04 LTS Lucid or 10.10 Maverick.
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This is it! Porting the Unity view to Compiz, comibing the Desktop and UNE editions, and defaulting to UNE for users who can run it. This is is a huge opportunity for the Ubuntu community to make something that can deliver free desktops to millions and millions of people who don’t have software freedome today. And also, having a lot of fun with our friends doing something really big along the way.
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The Ubuntu Font Family, which was only available for Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 (in the official repositories) has just been uploaded to the official Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 9.10 Karmic Koala and 8.04 Hardy Heron repositories.
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Mint
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The Digital Prism Screencast covers both Drupal and Linux Mint.
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MintUpload is one of the Mint Tools, it’s a simple drag & drop FTP / SFTP / SCP client. It allows multiple services, folders or sites to be set up for different purposes. It’s a notification area widget and desktop widget.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Well, this was inevitable. After Samsung and Sony Ericsson abandoning Symbian for their line of smartphones, and after Symbian Foundation executive director Lee Williams leaving the company for “personal reasons”, there’s now a report that the Symbian Foundation is winding down its operations, in preparation for closing up shop entirely.
The news comes from a “source close to Symbian”, and basically states that Lee Williams’ successor as executive director, chief financial officer Tim Holbrow, has been appointed to wind down the Symbian Foundation’s operations. This seems in line with Holbrow’s background in finance, whereas Williams worked within Nokia on S60.
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Recently a project called “Qt Modularization” was initiated. This is a project that aims to modularize Qt at every level. As you may know already, Qt is currently modularized on the DLL level; each module has its own DLL. However, the project as a whole is still monolithic; all the code is being hosted in a single repository, and you cannot build a leaf module without building the modules on which it depends at the same time. This project aims to change that, so that the modules are hosted in different repositories, with a separate maintainer for each, and the modules may have different release schedules.
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Qt Quick provides a declarative framework for building highly dynamic, custom user interfaces from a rich set of QML elements. Qt Quick helps programmers and designers collaborate to build the fluid user interfaces that are becoming common in portable consumer devices, such as mobile phones, media players, set-top boxes and netbooks. Qt Quick consists of the QtDeclarative C++ module, QML, and the integration of both of these into the Qt Creator IDE. Using the QtDeclarative C++ module, you can load and interact with QML files from your Qt application.
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‘It also aligns the Qt application and UI framework with the planned version for the MeeGo 1.1 platfrom (Qt 4.7). Qt Mobility 1.0.2 APIs for mobile development are also included’. Essentially, even without MeeGo1.1 handsets, you can built now apps for it using the N900 running PR1.3, and Qt4.7.
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Since setting up Zimbra, the email migration has gone quite well. The Outlook-connector works as expected and the more adventurous users are enjoying the fully-featured Zimbra web interface (which is much better than Outlook and Gmail, it could only be better if it made you lunch).
[...]
For agenda and contact synchronization I finally settled on Funambol, which has native mobile clients for Blackberry, iPhones, Nokia and WM and provides a J2ME client for other mobile platforms. Another plus over BES is that Funambol is both open source and very easy to deploy (it does require a server- and a client-side install though).
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The children had been designing images to go on bags that could be sold for charity to aid flood victims in Pakistan. They came to work with Jelena to actualise their ideas. They were introduced to a piece of open-source software called Inkscape (download here) and were shown how to produce high quality designs and manged to achieve some incredible results in a total of only four hours.
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Of course, Grace Hopper is a conference for women in all sorts of computing, which includes lots of proprietary software and the ratio of women in proprietary software is significantly higher than it is in free software. At 20%+ vs 2% (respectively) one would expect the strategies and tactics to be a little different. Yet, despite the differences in the two communities, I don’t think advancement is out of reach for us.
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AISL, the Italian Association of Free Software companies, recently debuted at the SMAU exhibit, the Italian leading ICT to discuss items related to digital technologies for business.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.
Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.
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Databases
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LWN.net has a nice article on their front page on Drizzle’s and MariaDB’s recent beta and RC releases. it is behind a paywall for a few more days, but using the link below you can already read it.
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Oracle
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Whether the proposal was backed by Oracle or not, some long-term contributors are resigning already. On Friday, October 22, Charles H. Schulz announced his resignation in a blog post. He said it saddened him to have to resign, but was also a relief due to the tension at OpenOffice.org lately. He said the proposal and subsequent behaviors and discussions were unprofessional and showed a complete lack of understanding of Free and Open Source Software. He and others have stated that both projects will now lose out due to a competitive atmosphere instead of the desired cooperation. Schultz said the LibreOffice will now become an official fork since Oracle et al. “refuse to play ball” with The Document Foundation. Schultz will continue to contribute to The Document Foundation.
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Hi Louis, all,
This mail to inform you that I’m resigning from being Louis deputy at
the CC. Please remove my role from the site. I unsubscribe from the list
just after this mail.
Kind regards
Sophie [Gautier]
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Hi Louis, all,
With respect for my friends in the community I hereby resign from myposition as deputy for Charles in the community council.
I’m sorry that this is a necessary step.
Good luck in the future. I hope we can meet one day – still as friends and free software enthusiasts.
Cheers,
Leif Lodahl
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The Java Community Process truly was a great hope for peace. A neutral place where everyone from developers to vendors could work together to produce specifications, reference implementations and tests to drive the success of Java.
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For one thing, as much as people may have complained about Sun’s guarded control of the Java Community Process (JCP), concern is growing that Oracle’s commitment to Java may benefit it more than it benefits the wider Java community. Oracle, perhaps recognizing that it had a PR battle to win, has repeatedly emphasized Java’s central importance to it, leading the Java community to mostly give Oracle the benefit of the doubt.
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Business
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For example, when I teach a class about OpenNMS, I often ask the students if they are subscribed to the main OpenNMS discussion list. Usually, less than one in ten raise their hands. In fact, more than half of our commercial customers contact us for the first time without ever having installed the software. And that’s because our customers don’t come to us looking for open source software. They come to us because they want to find the best solution to their problems—and, in many cases, that solution includes open source software.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Technology Academy (FTA) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today their partnership in the FTA’s Associate Partner Network. The Network aims to expand the availability of professional educational courses and materials covering the concepts and applications of free software and free standards.
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Openness/Sharing
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I believe history – especially recent history — teaches us something very different. While information technology markets certainly go through cycles, they tend to oscillate between open and closed more fluidly than Wu suggests – and that dynamic is accelerating today. Moreover, during periods which Wu regards as more “closed,” things aren’t always as closed as he suggests. Or, more importantly, the “closed” models typically spawn more innovation than Wu and others bother acknowledging. It’s during what some regard as a market’s darkest hour when some of the most exciting forms of disruptive technologies and innovation are developing. Finally, to the extent some markets are completely locked-down for a time, it’s more often than not due to public policies that facilitate that lockdown or the “closing” of systems.
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Standards/Consortia
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This website has W3C-compliant, CSS3 and HTML5 -based website templates with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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“Unions set to fight plans for £6bn cuts” was the front page news of the Financial Times yesterday, May 24th, in the aftermath of the well-trailed and assiduously leaked initial skirmish in what we are told is to be a long and multi-billion War of Austerity pitilessly fought out in the next couple of years.
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Boingboingdave sez, “Outside the Conway-Rand Paul debate in KY, Paul supporters held down a woman from MoveOn while another stomped on her neck and head. The woman was attempting to present Paul with a mock Employee of the Month award from Republicorp representing the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech.”
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Asserting that Jammu and Kashmir’s accession with Union of India is full and final, the BJP State President Shamsher Singh Manhas today said that no body can dare to challenge it and any one who does should be put behind the bars.
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The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia, the website’s founder, Julian Assange, told a leading Moscow newspaper Tuesday.
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Fifteen past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have issued a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao, asking that the newest winner, Liu Xiaobo, be released from his 11-year prison sentence, and that his wife, Liu Xia, be freed from de-facto house arrest.
Chinese police seized a woman from her house in the middle of the night after she tweeted her intention to demonstrate with a banner congratulating jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo on winning the Nobel peace prize, a friend said today.
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If you’re headed to PayPal’s big developer conference in San Francisco today, you may spot an unusual landmark sitting in front of the Moscone Center: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. The frigid booty comes compliments of the WePay team, and they’re trolling PayPal’s conference in an effort to tell everyone in attendance that “PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay, of course.
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The 159 dummy accounts all have obviously-fake names (such as the ‘dd1′ pictured) and curiously seem to only have contributed to submissions from Digg’s publishing partners. The suspicious activity began after an algorithm revision that took place on October 15.
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On Monday, following a report in AllThingsD that publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards was bailing for a start-up, Pixazza, CEO Matt Williams e-mailed staffers to announce that “the burn rate is too high” at the company and that it would be laying off 25 of its 67 staffers, a total of 37 percent. At its peak–at the time of Adelson’s departure–the number of employees was slightly over 100.
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Science
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A newly discovered class of materials known as “topological insulators” could help physicists to obtain new ways of defining the three basic physical constants – the speed of light (c); the charge of the proton (e); and Planck’s constant (h). That’s the claim of a team of physicists in the US, which has proposed a new experiment to measure the fine-structure constant (α), which is a function of h, c and e, by scattering light from such a material. Topological insulators are unusual in that electrical current flows well on their surface, but not through their bulk.
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Health/Nutrition
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Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years, with scientists predicting further widespread droughts and floods.
Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year’s harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price.
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Security
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SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If you login to a social media site, it is likely that you will be getting a session cookie to keep you logged in (usually turned on by the “Remember Me” button). This cookie will identify you as already having logged into the system, and therefore its possession will allow you to connect to the social media site without having to identify yourself again. So, now imagine you are in a coffee shop with open wifi and you have your laptop with you, and you are also logged in with a session cookie to Facebook or Twitter. Guess what? Any person in the possession of Firesheep will be able to intercept that session cookie, and therefore will be able to connect to your Facebook account. Not only that, Firesheep will capture all of the unencrypted cookies flying around in the open wifi environment.
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There’s been a great deal of coverage in the last day or so of Firesheep, a plugin for Firefox that lets you take over the Facebook and Twitter accounts of others on your local network. If you use Firesheep, you can pick one of the people on, say, the same open wireless at your nearby cafe, and then easily view, delete, and add comments using their name on these sites.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Leading the attack on whistleblower web site WikiLeaks, Fox News editorialist and former Bush-era US State Department official Christian Whiton said on Monday that the US should classify the proprietors of WikiLeaks as “enemy combatants,” opening up the possibility of “non-judicial actions” against them.
“So far, the Obama administration appears to have been asleep at the wheel in responding to this,” he wrote for FoxNews.com on Monday. “The same is true of the Democratic-controlled Congress, which has no fewer than ten committees of jurisdiction that could be doing something about this—but which are not.”
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The U.S. Defense Department is quietly taking on an expanding role in defending U.S. critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.
In a break with previous policy, the military now is prepared to provide cyber expertise to other government agencies and to certain private companies to counter attacks on their computer networks, the Pentagon’s cyber policy chief, Robert Butler, said Oct. 20.
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Finance
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As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The coalition government has torn up figures that pegged the cost of plans by the intelligence services to store records of every online communication at £2bn.
A Home Office spokesman told The Register that the previous government’s estimate of the cost of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) has been abandoned.
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This week, EFF is taking part in the 32nd Annual Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, where we urged the Privacy Authorities to call for the repeal of the European Union’s 2006 Data Retention Directive, which requires Internet service providers operating in Europe to retain telecom and Internet traffic data about all of their customers’ communications for a period of at least six months and up to two years, for possible use by law enforcement.v
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A federal judge ruled late Monday that government requests for detailed information about Amazon.com customers violate Internet users’ rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy. The ruling came in a lawsuit originally brought by Amazon to stop the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) from collecting personally identifiable information about customers that could be linked to their specific purchases on Amazon. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation and ACLU of Washington intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of several Amazon.com customers whose information was at stake.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I’m coming back from JISC and again sitting on the floor among the Bromptons. Alice and Bob are in their regular seats. They must get out earlier than me or rush along platform Zero faster than the average punter. (The 1645 is not a good train to arrive just-in-time for unless you like bicycles). Anyway I catch part of their conversation.
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A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that global P2P traffic is expanding, with BitTorrent as the key player. In North America, more than half of all upstream traffic (53.3%) on an average day can be attributed to P2P. The report further signals some really interesting regional differences in P2P use, such as the dominance of Ares in Latin America.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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“The color PURPLE is a trademark of 3M.”
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Earlier this year we covered how Facebook was suing a site called Teachbook.com, claiming that any social network that ended in “book” was infringing on its trademarks.
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A civil society group this week warned government officials gathered here against patents on “climate-ready” crops and what they characterised as an attempt to obtain an exclusive monopoly over plant gene sequences. The group asked states at the United Nations biodiversity conference to recognise that such patents are a threat to biodiversity and to the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources.
Yesterday, the ETC Group held a side event and presented a paper [pdf] alleging that the six largest global agrochemical and seed corporations are filing wide-scope patents with the aim of obtaining a monopoly on plant gene sequences that “could lead to control of most of the world’s plant biomass” for food, feed, fibre, fuel or plastics.
Biomass is defined by the group as “material derived from living or recently-living biological organisms.” Biomass includes all plants and trees, microbes, but also by-products like organic waste from livestock, food processing and garbage, they said. “Climate-ready” crops are engineered to address climate change challenges.
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In a landmark 2010 declaratory judgment decision, a Southern District of New York court invalidated claims from seven Myriad patents associated with the BRCA1/2 breast and ovarian cancer genes. The patents include both composition claims covering isolated DNA molecules and method claims covering the processes of detecting and screening for BRCA mutations. The lower court held that these claims all fail the patentable subject matter eligibility test of 35 U.S.C. §101. A typical invalidated claim includes Claim 1 of Patent No. 5,747,282 which reads “1. An isolated DNA coding for a BRCA1 polypeptide, said polypeptide having the amino acid sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:2.” (The amino acid sequence No. 2 was provided as a part of the patent filing).
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Indigenous Peoples previously protested the position of Canada opposing the language in the 21 October preambular text “noting the significance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 21 October 2010). The CBD secretariat is housed in Quebec, Canada.
“The protocol must meet standards consistent with the internationally accepted rights of Indigenous Peoples,” said Harry. “If it does not, the ABS protocol will facilitate the misappropriation of genetic resources from indigenous lands and territories, and alienate the traditional knowledge implicated in benefit sharing schemes,” she said, adding that this would lead to a further impoverishment of the “world’s most vulnerable peoples.”
Today, a group of Canadian indigenous peoples published a press release about Canada’s alleged undermining of the biodiversity negotiations. They said that in an interview with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, John Duncan, Canadian minister of Indian affairs and northern development, “claimed the ABS issue was a diversion. “What is being discussed in Japan is about intellectual property, so to think that has anything really significant to do with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is inappropriate,” he was reported saying.
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Copyrights
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Nobody knows how many file sharers are getting warnings from France’s new P2P infringement authority, but Billboard.biz says that French labels are sending 25,000 complaints a day to Hadopi, the agency enforcing that country’s “three strikes” law.
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IP Dragon is concerned that the owners of internet cafés and the operators of planes, trains, ships and buses are not charged for showing foreign films. This is not only discriminatory to foreign film makers, and in violation of international treaties, but it will hurt the fledgling Chinese film industry. There is not really fair competition if you have to pay or Chinese films and foreign pirated films you can use for free. The National Copyright Administration of China has already announced that this will not change in the near future. Maybe Hollywood, Bollywood and the European filmindustry can change their opinion.
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Many people, including myself, have said it’s inevitable: digital music is going to be given away legally for free, while musicians and songwriters try to make livings in other ways. But just how inevitable is it?
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With this salon, CC Denmark would like to invite the public in to discuss the benefits of using open licensing models in business. Presenting each of their work, renowned speakers from three international projects will elaborate on using CC licenses and sharing ideologies in their respective fields.
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Well, here’s a fun one. Apparently, there’s a local news site known as The North Country Gazette (don’t click that just yet…) covering parts of upstate New York via a blog format. Rather than putting in place an actual technical paywall, the site has apparently decided to go with a paywall-by-threat model.
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ERIKA: Like I said earlier, it’s made me re-think how you interact with the trolling, toxic readers that everyone inevitably picks up when their work starts to attract an audience.
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The Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has ceased all its operations after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA. Limewire was ordered to disable all functionalities in the current application to prevent users from sharing copyrighted material. The verdict is expected to have an unprecedented impact on the P2P file-sharing landscape.
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ACTA
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När det gäller det redan så hårt kritiserade ACTA-avtalet , så är kristdemokraterna (EPP) och de konservativa (ECR) i Europaparlamentet mycket angelägna om att det även skall omfatta så kallade geografiska indikatorer (GI). In the case of the already much-criticized ACTA treaty , so is the Christian Democrats (EPP) and the Conservatives (ECR) in the European Parliament is very keen that it should also include so-called geographic indicators (GI).
Det innebär i korthet att de vill att geografiska produktmärken (Champagne, Parmaskinka mm) skall få samma skydd som vanliga varumärken mot förfalskning. That basically means that they want to geographic marks (Champagne, Parma ham, etc.) shall receive the same protection as regular brands against counterfeiting.
EFF Celebrates 20th Anniversary With New Animation by Nina Paley
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Linux based systems are now standard technology in many exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange.
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The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has reportedly “doubled” their networking speed with a new Linux-based system, clocking trading times at 126 microseconds as compared to previous times of several hundred microseconds.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This time on the show: Fab reviews Minecraft (a big reason why the release of this show took so long), Mozilla gets a new boss, is Canonical seeking open core?, Steve Jobs gets smacked down hard over Android, Microsoft send out Viagra spam and we talk about a lot of Linux news as usual.
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Ballnux
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While we’ve got a pretty good idea as to what kind of pricing we might see with the Galaxy Tab, the one piece of information we didn’t have was exactly when we would need to break open the piggy bank. Well have no fear, TmoNews is here!
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A “micro” Linux server in the Elastic Compute Cloud will be free for a year as an inducement for prospects to try their first cloud experience.
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Applications
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Now, let’s explore the 7 online backup solutions at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching as a new program called SimpleAudioPlayer saw its initial release and then a few minor updates. I put off on compiling it since at the time of its initial release I was
using GNOME Ubuntu, and since SimpleAudioPlayer is a KDE application, it would have required installing a lot of KDE libraries. But since I’m now using KDE, I decided to take the plunge. I downloaded and compiled the newest version yesterday (version 1.0.3), and have been trying it out ever since.
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Arcontech, the real-time market data technology specialist has today announced the Linux version of its CityVision market data distribution and vendor contribution platform.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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On a sunny September weekend in Cambridge, England, ten KDE and Telepathy developers met in the Collabora office to plan the future of Instant Messaging in KDE software. Once everyone had arrived, our host George Goldberg gave us an overview of the current state of the codebase, which parts are usable, which parts still need writing, and which parts were written years ago and need revision. This turned into a project management session to determine the order for getting things done, and a discussion about a release schedule that will make the project visible without tying it prematurely into compatibility guarantees that slow down development.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Most of the hype about touchscreen devices these days centers around the iPad and other highly proprietary hardware. But Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has made major bets in recent months that touch-enabled computers will become ubiquitous in the open-source world as well. It made that belief clear last week when it showcased the Unity interface running on a tablet computer. Read on for a look.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, I burned the ISO file for Super OS. We’ve used Super OS in the past and found it to our liking for one simple reason. It makes available some of the codecs and “restricted” goodies that the regular Ubuntu install does not.
Let’s say W32 Codecs, Nvidia and ATI prop drivers, libdvdcss and the Oracle/Sun version of Java 6.
Yeah, I know, I know…iced tea this and iced tea that…..openjdk-6-jdk and openjdk-6-jre…I appreciate the effort. Many times they just don’t work.
They have serious limitations in many banking and secure websites…it just doesn’t get the job done for many online applications…at least for the time being.
So we needed a base distro to build to and we began to work with Super OS.
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The idea behind it is that it can help with rehabilitation, but when it runs on Linux 2.6 and can be modded both at software and hardware levels, I know what I’d be using it for. Kicking down pinatas and sprinting off with my spoils, yes.
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MontaVista Software recently released MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0, the next generation of its carrier grade quality Linux development platform. CGE 6.0 delivers the technologies required for next-generation multi-core architectures with the new MontaVista Bare Metal Engine for high performance, new multi-core resource management capabilities to maximise multi-core designs, and new high availability features incorporating the latest open source technologies. At the same time, CGE helps Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) and Telecom companies lower their total cost of ownership with extended power management capabilities and support for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, according to the company.
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Last week, chip maker and operating system wannabe Intel revved up its Wind River Linux with a version 4 update, putting a piping hot and steamy fresh Linux kernel at the heart of its cross-platform, embedded Linux platform. This week, the related Wind River Hypervisor is tweaked with a 1.2 release.
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The Matrix-504 is Artila’s 2nd-generation ARM9- based box computer with pre-built Linux kernel and file system. It comes with 100% Linux 2.6.29 compatible computing platform, ATMEL AT91SAM9G20 400MHz CPU, 64MB SDRAM and 128MB NAND Flash, System backup Data Flash: 2MB, One 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, Four 921.6Kbps high speed TTY (serial ) ports, Two USB 2.0 host ports- 12Mbps, Fail-over mechanism against system crash, Provides four high-speed TTY ports: Port 1 supports RS-232/422/485 and Port 2 to Port 4 support RS-232/485. The RS-485 interface features hardware direction control to ease communication programming, GNU C/C++ tool chain for Linux/Windows, Extremely compact design, 78 x 108 x 24mm, Ultra-low power consumption, less than 3 Watts. Matrix-504 ARM9-based Linux Computer with 128MB on-board Flash, including one CD-ROM which contains GNU tool chain and user guide.
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A quick look at the WD’s GPL code reveals that the WD TV Live Plus runs a Linux 2.6.22.19 kernel as the underlying embedded operating system.
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Phones
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Despite some issues, webOS 2.0 is probably neck and neck with iOS4 when it comes to polish and ease of use, and that’s a pretty huge thing for Palm.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Love to play some of those WebOS games on your Nokia N900 without having to reboot into a different operating system? With both Palm and Nokia showcasing similar methods of developing native Linux apps (SDL 1.2) and the hardware between Palm Pre and the N900 being similar enough, Maemo users have found a way to put those cool WebOS games on your Nokia N900. It will not need you rebooting your OS and you can run all those games currently on offer by WebOS on your N900 handset!
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Android
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Looking more like a few Android 101 tips, the short clips cover topics like capturing and sharing video clips, setting up personal email, and using contacts.
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Jolicloud
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Tablets
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DigiTimes is reporting on Android tablets yet again. According to their sources, Google recently notified their partners that Android 3.0 will be completed and tablet samples will start arriving in December.
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Revolution Analytics, a developer of software for computational statistics, has raised $8.6 million in an add-on to its second round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Palo Alto, the firm creates software to support users of the open-source R programming language.
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SaaS
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Maestro 3 features an innovative application layer that orchestrates the broadest set of open source tools including Apache Maven, Apache Archiva, Hudson, Apache Continuum, Sonar, Selenium, Xen, Eucalyptus, Icinga and Puppet—in a single application interface.
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Oracle
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So, we’ve got two forks of Oracle-owned projects — OpenIndiana and LibreOffice, both intended to rejuvenate projects that had been left to stagnate in Redwood Shores. We also know that Oracle plans to stick with OpenOffice.org itself, rather than donating the brand to the Document Foundation.
We’ve seen Oracle sue Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) over Java, of course. And more recently, we’ve also seen the emergence of a fork of MySQL called SkySQL.
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The JCP elections are vital to the future of Java. Yet I believe there is evidence of Oracle manipulation.
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Healthcare
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The Veterans Affairs Department will adopt an open source model to modernize its legacy electronic health records system, the department’s chief information officer said at a Senate hearing Oct. 6.
The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) runs on an archaic program language called MUMPS, which experts said must be modernized to properly serve the 8 million veterans who receive care at VA health facilities.
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Business
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We continue to see evidence that open source software is helping vendors expand and grow globally. The latest announcement from
French BPM vendor BonitaSoft, which is establishing U.S. offices in Boston and San Francisco, is a prime example. We covered BonitaSoft’s expansion and approach in July, which leverages more than 300,000 downloads of the software and presence in more than 20 countries.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In this edition we discuss the misleading term “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” (FRAND), we explain what we are doing about centralised computer systems and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and update you on our current campaign to end non-free software commercials by public institutions.
FSFE celebrated Software Freedom Day with a variety of local events and activities. We organised talks and booths in Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne, Offenburg (Germany), Zurich (Switzerland), and The Hague (Netherlands). With our activities we reached new audiences, and explained to them why Free Software will become as important as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.
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Project Releases
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GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites.
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Frustrated by the snail’s pace of the SEC investigation into insider trading allegations, Cuban offered to pay government attorneys to work faster.
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Land is precious in Manila, and people are prepared to endure incredible circumstances to claim their own piece. Baking’s family is one of hundreds that have set up home in the cemetery, jostling for space with the dead. “It’s much better living here than in a shanty town,” he assures me as we clamber over densely-packed powder pink and blue tombs on the way to his home. “It’s much more peaceful and quiet.”
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A drug addict has become the first man in Britain to take part in a controversial project that saw him get cash to be sterilised.
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Twelve historic sites around the world are “on the verge of vanishing” because of mismanagement and neglect, according to a new report.
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Steal someone else’s game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.
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A federal judge in New Jersey has cleared the way for a landmark criminal case targeting CAPTCHA circumvention to proceed to trial.
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Did Ubercab just crash and burn? Taxi and limo industry insiders in California today informed TechCrunch that the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority & the Public Utilities Commission of California have ordered the startup to cease and desist.
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Health/Nutrition
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Cancer is a modern, man-made disease caused by environmental factors such as pollution and diet, a study by University of Manchester scientists has strongly suggested.
The study of remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece and earlier periods – carried out at Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and published in Nature Reviews Cancer – includes the first histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Rev Jesse Jackson has said that Britain’s moral authority is being damaged by the government’s failure to stop the police discriminating against ethnic minorities.
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With the impact of the soon-to-be-announced mega austerity cuts still to come, it could be that millions will soon find it hard to make ends meet.
But help is it hand. There’ll be no shortage of people forced to turn to shoplifting or petty crime to survive – and now there’s a website that will pay you to sit at home and spy on everyone in the hope of catching them.
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An investigation is under way after a police officer was filmed hitting an anti-fascist demonstrator in the face during a far-right rally.
Alan Clough, 63, from Radcliffe, Bury, was protesting against the English Defence League (EDL) rally in Bolton in March when he was struck, fell to the ground and was subsequently arrested.
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Shortly after 10am on 14 May 2005, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down “Route Irish” – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.
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So it was last month when a friendly couple dumped their paper on the train seat opposite me. And bingo, it was as bad as ever. “Defense Officials Predict Slow Afghan Progress.” And the sourcing for this hardly unexpected headline? “Senior US military officials”, “military officials”, “a senior US military official”, “Obama administration officials”, “defence officials”, “the senior military official”, “military leaders”, “the official”, “military officials”, “the officials”, “many in the military”, “military officials” (again), “officials” (again), “military officials” (yet again) and “officials” (yet again).
Why do our scribes write this horseshit? My old mate Alexander Cockburn calls it “selling the Brooklyn Bridge” and claims that Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of The New York Times, is always ready to buy it.
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Kelly’s death has never been the subject of a proper inquest, Powers argues. The original inquest was replaced by the Hutton inquiry – a highly unusual and, to many observers, unjustified break with standard legal procedure for single deaths. Last month, lawyers acting for Kelly campaigners delivered an application for a fresh inquest to attorney general Dominic Grieve. Grieve is considering it, a process which may take several more months.
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Norwich City Council used controversial spying powers to investigate and fine a pub for flouting the smoking ban.
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With allotments in mind, news has reached Big Brother Watch of the ludicrous situation of a Lincolnshire council demanding to know the sexual orientation, race and religion of those applying for one of the eighteen vacant plots in the City of Lincoln.
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The good news, according to Professor Audrey Cronin at the US National War College, is that terrorist campaigns always end. The only questions are when and how. The answers hinge on government policy. After the 2005 London bombings, Tony Blair proclaimed: “Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.” Ministers proposed waves of authoritarian measures, including incursions on free speech, control orders, ID cards and extensions to detention without charge that one former chief constable labelled a “propaganda coup for Al-Qaeda”. If Al-Qaeda was looking for a repressive reaction, they got it. But, was it effective?
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AMY GOODMAN: So they’re doing it again on this 400,000-document leak?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: They’re doing it again, and it’s much to their credit, and I appreciate it. I’ve waited forty years for a release on this scale. I think there should have been something on the scale of the Pentagon Papers every year. How often do we need this kind of thing? We haven’t seen it. So I’m very glad that someone is taking the risk and the initiative to inform us better now.
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Government plans to intercept Internet communications and store details of “traffic data” are reportedly back on the cards.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Six weeks from now, in Cancun, Mexico, the world’s nations will gather under the auspices of the United Nations (the UNFCCC) to again discuss how to alleviate climate change. They’ll try to pick up the broken pieces from last December in Copenhagen, where we witnessed tortured dances by government leaders trying to avoid the realities of our time, and the profound conundrums we face as a society. They accomplished nothing, and may reprise that performance in Cancun.
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China has unveiled its most ambitious conservation plan in a generation, ahead of the opening today of a crucial UN biodiversity conference.
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Leaders of the few remaining countries where tigers are still found in the wild are preparing for a make-or-break summit in Russia, which they believe offers the last chance to save the critically endangered animal.
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The nuclear industry could end up passing on to taxpayers the costs of disposing of waste from new reactors under government plans, according to official documents seen by the Guardian.
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To meet goals of reduced emissions, we may need to look no further than our own populace, according to a study published in PNAS. By analyzing a few different data sets and projections for population and emissions growth, a group of researchers found that a concerted effort to slow population growth could contribute as much as 29 percent of the emissions reductions needed to avert dangerous levels of climate change. They also found that a more urban population causes a significant increase in emissions, while an older one lowers emissions.
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Finance
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France’s main airport has only a few days’ worth of jet fuel left, it was announced today, as the strikes against government pension plans continued to disrupt infrastructure.
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More importantly, the French have decided to take to the streets in the millions – including large-scale strikes and work stoppages – to defend hard-won retirement gains. (It must be emphasised, since the media sometimes forgets to make the distinction, that only a tiny percentage of France’s demonstrators have engaged in any kind of property damage and even fewer in violence, with all but these few protesting peacefully.) French populist rage is being directed in a positive direction – unlike in the United States where it is most prominently being mobilised to elect political candidates who will do their best to increase the suffering of working- and middle-class citizens.
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Saying Greeks had already made “unprecedented sacrifices”, the prime minister, George Papandreou, insisted today there would be no more hard-hitting austerity measures, despite the country bracing itself for an expected upward revision of a budget deficit that at 13.6% has already hit record highs.
“Whatever happens, there will be no additional burden placed on wage earners and pensioners. There will be no additional increase in tax rates beyond the ones we have already committed to making,” Papandreou said.
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[Editor’s note: In November 2009, MoJo reporter Andy Kroll received a tip about a little-known yet powerful firm, the Law Offices of David J. Stern, which handled staggering numbers of foreclosures in southeastern Florida—the throbbing heart of nation’s housing crisis. Among the allegations, the tipster had it from insiders that Stern employees were routinely falsifying legal paperwork in an effort to push borrowers out of their homes as quickly—and profitably—as possible.
Kroll spent eight months investigating Stern’s firm and its ilk—a breed of deep-pocketed and controversial operations dubbed “foreclosure mills.” After sifting through thousands of pages of court documents, interviewing scores of legal experts and former Stern employees, and attending dozens of foreclosure hearings in drab Florida courtrooms, he emerged with a portrait of a law firm—indeed, an entire industry—that was willing to cut corners, deceive judges, and even (allegedly) commit fraud—all at the expense of America’s homeowners.
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Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. created products that were “tragically deficient,” in the view of the chairman of the panel charged by Congress with identifying the causes of the financial crisis.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is good at telling fairy tales. Geithner first became known to the general public in September of 2008. Back then, he was head of the New York Federal Reserve Board. He was part of the triumvirate, along with Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke and then Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, who told congress that it had to pass the Tarp or the economy would collapse.
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Even after an extension of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, many of those about to go off the program are in a quandary. Scott Pelley talks to some of them in Silicon Valley.
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From the highs of 2007, total California employment is down about 6.5%. And, 2008 total oil product consumption compared to 2007 is down about 5.5%. There is no question that 2009 energy data from EIA Washington will show another notable fall, in California energy use. Meanwhile, as we can see from the labor market data, there is no economic recovery occurring in America’s largest state.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This year alone the Chamber has pledged to spend $75 million on ads attacking candidates who don’t meekly bow down to the biggest and wealthiest corporate interests.
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Many Americans think of the Chamber of Commerce as a local organization that supplies maps or information about local businesses, or thing of it as a sort of civics league, like the Elks Lodge. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. is completely different. It often has no ties to local Chambers of Commerce. It spends more money on lobbying than any other entity in Washington, D.C., outspending even the political parties on elections nationwide. The Chamber has a $200 million budget, and as a 501(c)(6) trade association, it doesn’t have to pay any taxes or disclose its donors.
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The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes spent his life battling the assault on democracy by tyrants. It is disheartening to be reminded that he lost. But he understood that the hardest struggle for humankind is often stating and understanding the obvious. Aristophanes, who had the temerity to portray the ruling Greek tyrant, Cleon, as a dog, is the perfect playwright to turn to in trying to grasp the danger posed to us by movements from the tea party to militias to the Christian right, as well as the bankrupt and corrupt power elite that no longer concerns itself with the needs of its citizens. He saw the same corruption 2,400 years ago. He feared correctly that it would extinguish Athenian democracy. And he struggled in vain to rouse Athenians from their slumber.
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ThinkProgress has discovered that the oil billionaire brothers, David H. and Charles G. Koch, who played a key role in creating and funding the Tea Party movement, hold a quiet annual, invitation-only gathering where they coordinate their political agenda with other titans of industry — including the big health insurers, oil executives, Wall Street investors, real estate tycoons, conservative journalists and TV opinion show stars like Glenn Beck.
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In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch revealed to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that if you don’t like Google Street View cars photographing your house, you can “just move.”
“Street View. We drive exactly once,” Schmidt said during an appearance on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” late last week. “So, you can just move, right?”
Schmidt’s words were broadcast across the net on Friday, but they’ve been edited from the video now available on the CNN website. Before it was edited out, the moment was reported by The Wall Street Journal.
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Today the First Amendment Project is filing a lawsuit on my behalf against U.S. Customs and Border Protection (one of the divisions of the Department of Homeland Security) for violating the Privacy Act and the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to disclose their records of my travels, what they did with my requests for my records, and how they index, search for, and retrieve these travel surveillance records.
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His fans see him as Italy’s Jeremy Paxman, an aggressive but penetrating TV anchorman. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who owns most of the country’s private channels and wields indirect control over the state network, RAI, sees him as a dangerous leftie. Meet Michele Santoro, the temporarily banned hero of Italian current affairs broadcasting.
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Many Egyptians, in what is still a police state, regard Facebook as a safe haven where they can campaign and express their opinions freely. But that could soon change following a crackdown by the authorities against various types of media.
In Egypt, many opposition movements have either started or grown significantly on Facebook, most notably the April 6 youth movement and the national campaign to support Nobel peace prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei as a presidential candidate.
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Chinese police have refused to register an outspoken human rights lawyer who has not been seen since April as a missing person, his elder brother said today.
The disappearance of Gao Zhisheng has caused international concern, particularly because he had previously made detailed claims of torture at the hands of security officials during detentions.
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Pity the Chinese. The inhabitants of the world’s next superpower cannot search the internet or assemble or travel or speak or read or write or even reproduce without restriction. Yet in the lands where freedom is abundant, China, rather than earning well-deserved rebukes, continues to be championed as the ineluctable future. This disgraceful journey began with a liberal assumption: the west, it was claimed, is more likely to influence China by partnering with it, by giving it a prominent position inside, rather than pushing it outside, global institutions.
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Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines have all moved or are moving towards monitoring internet use, blocking international sites regarded as critical and ruthlessly silencing web dissidents.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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And, by the way, we can get a good insight into where the internet might head by understanding what these kids use. School work or watching videos (84% and 83% respectively). Playing games (74%) and communicating via instant messaging (61%) are the next most popular activities online. One out of three youngsters now connect via their mobile phones or other portable devices.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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On September 21, the Vatican observer at the UN, Mons. Silvano Maria Tomasi, addressed the 48th general assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva (English translation). He let the group know that the Vatican supports intellectual property rights (IPR) because such protection “recognizes the dignity of man and his work” and because it contributes to “the growth of the individual personality and to the common good.”
But Tomasi then went on to make a point we’ve harped on repeatedly here at Ars: supporting IP rights in general does not always mean supporting tougher patent and copyright rules; “better” does not always mean “stronger.”
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What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking. Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”
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Copyrights
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The new copyright bill, C-32, places consumers and users at risk of infringement for a wide variety of things, such as circumventing digital locks to transfer a CD track to an MP3 Player, or to transfer e-book content from an old device to a new one. Alongside C-32, Canada has been involved in talks to establish an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Both C-32 and ACTA represent a departure from Canadian copyright…
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Hotel management students in Canada are receiving a lesson in U.S. copyright law courtesy of Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC.
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The logical and ethical next step is to alter this policy, and as such I call for the CBC to do such; allowing for appropriately licensed Creative Commons music to exist alongside commercially licensed music, effectively giving back the rights of Artists and Show Producers to share content, and giving alternatives to Canadian Artists to decide for themselves how their content is to be used. A key issue here is artists’ right to give permission under copyright law for use of their works. They have various reasons for doing this, and why should CBC punish them? By blocking this, the CBC has effectively eliminated this potential on the larger scale. This is not the Canadian way of doing things – we share and we like sharing. Allowing policies like this to exist in our Public Services is a step backwards and creates justifications and rationalizations for similar policies in the future. As a Canadian, this upsets me – seeing my countries’ artists with alternative views set onto a back burner because they have been unfairly grouped in with others. This is not right at all.
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Ah, the word choices of the MPAA. The organization that once claimed the VCR was the “Boston Strangler” of the movie industry is now out there trying to get three strikes and censorship laws passed to protect their business model, and referring to these backwards looking protectionist policies as “forward looking.” That’s what MPAA boss Bob Pisano called the idea, found in the COICA proposal to censor web sites the MPAA doesn’t like. Of course, if this had been in effect when the VCR first came out, there would be no VCR.
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PometheeFeu pointed us to the news that Mark Twain’s autobiography, to be officially published for the first time 100 years after his death is already looking like it’s going to be a best seller. The book comes out on November 15th, but it’s already near the top of the bestseller lists on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble thanks to pre-orders. If you weren’t aware, Twain (real name Samuel Clemens), wrote this autobiography towards the end of his life, but demanded that it not be published until 100 years after his death (some of it, he demanded be withheld for 500 years). Allegedly, he did this so that he could say what he wanted without worrying about the people he spoke ill of ever finding out. Also, it’s not your typical autobiography. Apparently, it was more or less stream of consciousness, concerning whatever he felt like talking about. He would get up in the morning, talk about whatever he felt like, and people working for him would take it all down in dictation.
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We’ve pointed out many times how copyright is, by its nature, a law for censorship. Now, you can argue that it’s necessary or useful censorship (though, I doubt I would agree), but it cannot be denied that the basic purpose of copyright law is to stifle a form of speech. That’s why I’m always amazed at the disconnect of politicians, who support anti-censorship efforts online at the same time that they promote plans to censor-via-copyright law. Of course, most haven’t actually thought about it, or they insist that copyright is not censorship at all, and they can’t fathom how the two are connected.
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The Underground story in brief is this: their comic was pirated and bootlegged on 4Chan. They didn’t sue or whine: the authors went online at 4Chan to discuss their comic. What happened? More good publicity than you can imagine – go look at their website for what happened to their sales.
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ACTA
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is not in line with present EU laws, according to a Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) analysis. Previously, the European Commission has often stated that ACTA would remain fully in line with existing EU legislation.
Health groups have pointed out that ACTA will hamper access to essential medicine in developing countries. FFII’s analysis focusses on the impact ACTA will have on European SMEs in the ICT field, and on diffusion of green technology, needed to fight climate change. The FFII concludes that patents have to be excluded from ACTA’s civil enforcement section.
The Digital Prism Screencast – MintBackup
Credit: TinyOgg
Contents
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Server
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Linux based systems are now standard technology in many exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange.
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The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has reportedly “doubled” their networking speed with a new Linux-based system, clocking trading times at 126 microseconds as compared to previous times of several hundred microseconds.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This time on the show: Fab reviews Minecraft (a big reason why the release of this show took so long), Mozilla gets a new boss, is Canonical seeking open core?, Steve Jobs gets smacked down hard over Android, Microsoft send out Viagra spam and we talk about a lot of Linux news as usual.
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Ballnux
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While we’ve got a pretty good idea as to what kind of pricing we might see with the Galaxy Tab, the one piece of information we didn’t have was exactly when we would need to break open the piggy bank. Well have no fear, TmoNews is here!
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A “micro” Linux server in the Elastic Compute Cloud will be free for a year as an inducement for prospects to try their first cloud experience.
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Applications
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Now, let’s explore the 7 online backup solutions at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching as a new program called SimpleAudioPlayer saw its initial release and then a few minor updates. I put off on compiling it since at the time of its initial release I was
using GNOME Ubuntu, and since SimpleAudioPlayer is a KDE application, it would have required installing a lot of KDE libraries. But since I’m now using KDE, I decided to take the plunge. I downloaded and compiled the newest version yesterday (version 1.0.3), and have been trying it out ever since.
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Arcontech, the real-time market data technology specialist has today announced the Linux version of its CityVision market data distribution and vendor contribution platform.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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On a sunny September weekend in Cambridge, England, ten KDE and Telepathy developers met in the Collabora office to plan the future of Instant Messaging in KDE software. Once everyone had arrived, our host George Goldberg gave us an overview of the current state of the codebase, which parts are usable, which parts still need writing, and which parts were written years ago and need revision. This turned into a project management session to determine the order for getting things done, and a discussion about a release schedule that will make the project visible without tying it prematurely into compatibility guarantees that slow down development.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Most of the hype about touchscreen devices these days centers around the iPad and other highly proprietary hardware. But Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has made major bets in recent months that touch-enabled computers will become ubiquitous in the open-source world as well. It made that belief clear last week when it showcased the Unity interface running on a tablet computer. Read on for a look.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, I burned the ISO file for Super OS. We’ve used Super OS in the past and found it to our liking for one simple reason. It makes available some of the codecs and “restricted” goodies that the regular Ubuntu install does not.
Let’s say W32 Codecs, Nvidia and ATI prop drivers, libdvdcss and the Oracle/Sun version of Java 6.
Yeah, I know, I know…iced tea this and iced tea that…..openjdk-6-jdk and openjdk-6-jre…I appreciate the effort. Many times they just don’t work.
They have serious limitations in many banking and secure websites…it just doesn’t get the job done for many online applications…at least for the time being.
So we needed a base distro to build to and we began to work with Super OS.
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The idea behind it is that it can help with rehabilitation, but when it runs on Linux 2.6 and can be modded both at software and hardware levels, I know what I’d be using it for. Kicking down pinatas and sprinting off with my spoils, yes.
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MontaVista Software recently released MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0, the next generation of its carrier grade quality Linux development platform. CGE 6.0 delivers the technologies required for next-generation multi-core architectures with the new MontaVista Bare Metal Engine for high performance, new multi-core resource management capabilities to maximise multi-core designs, and new high availability features incorporating the latest open source technologies. At the same time, CGE helps Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) and Telecom companies lower their total cost of ownership with extended power management capabilities and support for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, according to the company.
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Last week, chip maker and operating system wannabe Intel revved up its Wind River Linux with a version 4 update, putting a piping hot and steamy fresh Linux kernel at the heart of its cross-platform, embedded Linux platform. This week, the related Wind River Hypervisor is tweaked with a 1.2 release.
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The Matrix-504 is Artila’s 2nd-generation ARM9- based box computer with pre-built Linux kernel and file system. It comes with 100% Linux 2.6.29 compatible computing platform, ATMEL AT91SAM9G20 400MHz CPU, 64MB SDRAM and 128MB NAND Flash, System backup Data Flash: 2MB, One 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, Four 921.6Kbps high speed TTY (serial ) ports, Two USB 2.0 host ports- 12Mbps, Fail-over mechanism against system crash, Provides four high-speed TTY ports: Port 1 supports RS-232/422/485 and Port 2 to Port 4 support RS-232/485. The RS-485 interface features hardware direction control to ease communication programming, GNU C/C++ tool chain for Linux/Windows, Extremely compact design, 78 x 108 x 24mm, Ultra-low power consumption, less than 3 Watts. Matrix-504 ARM9-based Linux Computer with 128MB on-board Flash, including one CD-ROM which contains GNU tool chain and user guide.
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A quick look at the WD’s GPL code reveals that the WD TV Live Plus runs a Linux 2.6.22.19 kernel as the underlying embedded operating system.
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Phones
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Despite some issues, webOS 2.0 is probably neck and neck with iOS4 when it comes to polish and ease of use, and that’s a pretty huge thing for Palm.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Love to play some of those WebOS games on your Nokia N900 without having to reboot into a different operating system? With both Palm and Nokia showcasing similar methods of developing native Linux apps (SDL 1.2) and the hardware between Palm Pre and the N900 being similar enough, Maemo users have found a way to put those cool WebOS games on your Nokia N900. It will not need you rebooting your OS and you can run all those games currently on offer by WebOS on your N900 handset!
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Android
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Looking more like a few Android 101 tips, the short clips cover topics like capturing and sharing video clips, setting up personal email, and using contacts.
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Jolicloud
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Tablets
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DigiTimes is reporting on Android tablets yet again. According to their sources, Google recently notified their partners that Android 3.0 will be completed and tablet samples will start arriving in December.
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Revolution Analytics, a developer of software for computational statistics, has raised $8.6 million in an add-on to its second round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Palo Alto, the firm creates software to support users of the open-source R programming language.
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SaaS
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Maestro 3 features an innovative application layer that orchestrates the broadest set of open source tools including Apache Maven, Apache Archiva, Hudson, Apache Continuum, Sonar, Selenium, Xen, Eucalyptus, Icinga and Puppet—in a single application interface.
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Oracle
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So, we’ve got two forks of Oracle-owned projects — OpenIndiana and LibreOffice, both intended to rejuvenate projects that had been left to stagnate in Redwood Shores. We also know that Oracle plans to stick with OpenOffice.org itself, rather than donating the brand to the Document Foundation.
We’ve seen Oracle sue Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) over Java, of course. And more recently, we’ve also seen the emergence of a fork of MySQL called SkySQL.
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The JCP elections are vital to the future of Java. Yet I believe there is evidence of Oracle manipulation.
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Healthcare
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The Veterans Affairs Department will adopt an open source model to modernize its legacy electronic health records system, the department’s chief information officer said at a Senate hearing Oct. 6.
The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) runs on an archaic program language called MUMPS, which experts said must be modernized to properly serve the 8 million veterans who receive care at VA health facilities.
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Business
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We continue to see evidence that open source software is helping vendors expand and grow globally. The latest announcement from
French BPM vendor BonitaSoft, which is establishing U.S. offices in Boston and San Francisco, is a prime example. We covered BonitaSoft’s expansion and approach in July, which leverages more than 300,000 downloads of the software and presence in more than 20 countries.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In this edition we discuss the misleading term “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” (FRAND), we explain what we are doing about centralised computer systems and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and update you on our current campaign to end non-free software commercials by public institutions.
FSFE celebrated Software Freedom Day with a variety of local events and activities. We organised talks and booths in Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne, Offenburg (Germany), Zurich (Switzerland), and The Hague (Netherlands). With our activities we reached new audiences, and explained to them why Free Software will become as important as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.
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Project Releases
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GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites.
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Frustrated by the snail’s pace of the SEC investigation into insider trading allegations, Cuban offered to pay government attorneys to work faster.
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Land is precious in Manila, and people are prepared to endure incredible circumstances to claim their own piece. Baking’s family is one of hundreds that have set up home in the cemetery, jostling for space with the dead. “It’s much better living here than in a shanty town,” he assures me as we clamber over densely-packed powder pink and blue tombs on the way to his home. “It’s much more peaceful and quiet.”
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A drug addict has become the first man in Britain to take part in a controversial project that saw him get cash to be sterilised.
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Twelve historic sites around the world are “on the verge of vanishing” because of mismanagement and neglect, according to a new report.
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Steal someone else’s game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.
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A federal judge in New Jersey has cleared the way for a landmark criminal case targeting CAPTCHA circumvention to proceed to trial.
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Did Ubercab just crash and burn? Taxi and limo industry insiders in California today informed TechCrunch that the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority & the Public Utilities Commission of California have ordered the startup to cease and desist.
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Health/Nutrition
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Cancer is a modern, man-made disease caused by environmental factors such as pollution and diet, a study by University of Manchester scientists has strongly suggested.
The study of remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece and earlier periods – carried out at Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and published in Nature Reviews Cancer – includes the first histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Rev Jesse Jackson has said that Britain’s moral authority is being damaged by the government’s failure to stop the police discriminating against ethnic minorities.
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With the impact of the soon-to-be-announced mega austerity cuts still to come, it could be that millions will soon find it hard to make ends meet.
But help is it hand. There’ll be no shortage of people forced to turn to shoplifting or petty crime to survive – and now there’s a website that will pay you to sit at home and spy on everyone in the hope of catching them.
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An investigation is under way after a police officer was filmed hitting an anti-fascist demonstrator in the face during a far-right rally.
Alan Clough, 63, from Radcliffe, Bury, was protesting against the English Defence League (EDL) rally in Bolton in March when he was struck, fell to the ground and was subsequently arrested.
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Shortly after 10am on 14 May 2005, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down “Route Irish” – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.
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So it was last month when a friendly couple dumped their paper on the train seat opposite me. And bingo, it was as bad as ever. “Defense Officials Predict Slow Afghan Progress.” And the sourcing for this hardly unexpected headline? “Senior US military officials”, “military officials”, “a senior US military official”, “Obama administration officials”, “defence officials”, “the senior military official”, “military leaders”, “the official”, “military officials”, “the officials”, “many in the military”, “military officials” (again), “officials” (again), “military officials” (yet again) and “officials” (yet again).
Why do our scribes write this horseshit? My old mate Alexander Cockburn calls it “selling the Brooklyn Bridge” and claims that Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of The New York Times, is always ready to buy it.
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Kelly’s death has never been the subject of a proper inquest, Powers argues. The original inquest was replaced by the Hutton inquiry – a highly unusual and, to many observers, unjustified break with standard legal procedure for single deaths. Last month, lawyers acting for Kelly campaigners delivered an application for a fresh inquest to attorney general Dominic Grieve. Grieve is considering it, a process which may take several more months.
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Norwich City Council used controversial spying powers to investigate and fine a pub for flouting the smoking ban.
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With allotments in mind, news has reached Big Brother Watch of the ludicrous situation of a Lincolnshire council demanding to know the sexual orientation, race and religion of those applying for one of the eighteen vacant plots in the City of Lincoln.
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The good news, according to Professor Audrey Cronin at the US National War College, is that terrorist campaigns always end. The only questions are when and how. The answers hinge on government policy. After the 2005 London bombings, Tony Blair proclaimed: “Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.” Ministers proposed waves of authoritarian measures, including incursions on free speech, control orders, ID cards and extensions to detention without charge that one former chief constable labelled a “propaganda coup for Al-Qaeda”. If Al-Qaeda was looking for a repressive reaction, they got it. But, was it effective?
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AMY GOODMAN: So they’re doing it again on this 400,000-document leak?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: They’re doing it again, and it’s much to their credit, and I appreciate it. I’ve waited forty years for a release on this scale. I think there should have been something on the scale of the Pentagon Papers every year. How often do we need this kind of thing? We haven’t seen it. So I’m very glad that someone is taking the risk and the initiative to inform us better now.
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Government plans to intercept Internet communications and store details of “traffic data” are reportedly back on the cards.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Six weeks from now, in Cancun, Mexico, the world’s nations will gather under the auspices of the United Nations (the UNFCCC) to again discuss how to alleviate climate change. They’ll try to pick up the broken pieces from last December in Copenhagen, where we witnessed tortured dances by government leaders trying to avoid the realities of our time, and the profound conundrums we face as a society. They accomplished nothing, and may reprise that performance in Cancun.
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China has unveiled its most ambitious conservation plan in a generation, ahead of the opening today of a crucial UN biodiversity conference.
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Leaders of the few remaining countries where tigers are still found in the wild are preparing for a make-or-break summit in Russia, which they believe offers the last chance to save the critically endangered animal.
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The nuclear industry could end up passing on to taxpayers the costs of disposing of waste from new reactors under government plans, according to official documents seen by the Guardian.
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To meet goals of reduced emissions, we may need to look no further than our own populace, according to a study published in PNAS. By analyzing a few different data sets and projections for population and emissions growth, a group of researchers found that a concerted effort to slow population growth could contribute as much as 29 percent of the emissions reductions needed to avert dangerous levels of climate change. They also found that a more urban population causes a significant increase in emissions, while an older one lowers emissions.
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Finance
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France’s main airport has only a few days’ worth of jet fuel left, it was announced today, as the strikes against government pension plans continued to disrupt infrastructure.
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More importantly, the French have decided to take to the streets in the millions – including large-scale strikes and work stoppages – to defend hard-won retirement gains. (It must be emphasised, since the media sometimes forgets to make the distinction, that only a tiny percentage of France’s demonstrators have engaged in any kind of property damage and even fewer in violence, with all but these few protesting peacefully.) French populist rage is being directed in a positive direction – unlike in the United States where it is most prominently being mobilised to elect political candidates who will do their best to increase the suffering of working- and middle-class citizens.
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Saying Greeks had already made “unprecedented sacrifices”, the prime minister, George Papandreou, insisted today there would be no more hard-hitting austerity measures, despite the country bracing itself for an expected upward revision of a budget deficit that at 13.6% has already hit record highs.
“Whatever happens, there will be no additional burden placed on wage earners and pensioners. There will be no additional increase in tax rates beyond the ones we have already committed to making,” Papandreou said.
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[Editor’s note: In November 2009, MoJo reporter Andy Kroll received a tip about a little-known yet powerful firm, the Law Offices of David J. Stern, which handled staggering numbers of foreclosures in southeastern Florida—the throbbing heart of nation’s housing crisis. Among the allegations, the tipster had it from insiders that Stern employees were routinely falsifying legal paperwork in an effort to push borrowers out of their homes as quickly—and profitably—as possible.
Kroll spent eight months investigating Stern’s firm and its ilk—a breed of deep-pocketed and controversial operations dubbed “foreclosure mills.” After sifting through thousands of pages of court documents, interviewing scores of legal experts and former Stern employees, and attending dozens of foreclosure hearings in drab Florida courtrooms, he emerged with a portrait of a law firm—indeed, an entire industry—that was willing to cut corners, deceive judges, and even (allegedly) commit fraud—all at the expense of America’s homeowners.
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Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. created products that were “tragically deficient,” in the view of the chairman of the panel charged by Congress with identifying the causes of the financial crisis.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is good at telling fairy tales. Geithner first became known to the general public in September of 2008. Back then, he was head of the New York Federal Reserve Board. He was part of the triumvirate, along with Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke and then Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, who told congress that it had to pass the Tarp or the economy would collapse.
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Even after an extension of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, many of those about to go off the program are in a quandary. Scott Pelley talks to some of them in Silicon Valley.
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From the highs of 2007, total California employment is down about 6.5%. And, 2008 total oil product consumption compared to 2007 is down about 5.5%. There is no question that 2009 energy data from EIA Washington will show another notable fall, in California energy use. Meanwhile, as we can see from the labor market data, there is no economic recovery occurring in America’s largest state.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This year alone the Chamber has pledged to spend $75 million on ads attacking candidates who don’t meekly bow down to the biggest and wealthiest corporate interests.
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Many Americans think of the Chamber of Commerce as a local organization that supplies maps or information about local businesses, or thing of it as a sort of civics league, like the Elks Lodge. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. is completely different. It often has no ties to local Chambers of Commerce. It spends more money on lobbying than any other entity in Washington, D.C., outspending even the political parties on elections nationwide. The Chamber has a $200 million budget, and as a 501(c)(6) trade association, it doesn’t have to pay any taxes or disclose its donors.
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The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes spent his life battling the assault on democracy by tyrants. It is disheartening to be reminded that he lost. But he understood that the hardest struggle for humankind is often stating and understanding the obvious. Aristophanes, who had the temerity to portray the ruling Greek tyrant, Cleon, as a dog, is the perfect playwright to turn to in trying to grasp the danger posed to us by movements from the tea party to militias to the Christian right, as well as the bankrupt and corrupt power elite that no longer concerns itself with the needs of its citizens. He saw the same corruption 2,400 years ago. He feared correctly that it would extinguish Athenian democracy. And he struggled in vain to rouse Athenians from their slumber.
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ThinkProgress has discovered that the oil billionaire brothers, David H. and Charles G. Koch, who played a key role in creating and funding the Tea Party movement, hold a quiet annual, invitation-only gathering where they coordinate their political agenda with other titans of industry — including the big health insurers, oil executives, Wall Street investors, real estate tycoons, conservative journalists and TV opinion show stars like Glenn Beck.
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In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch revealed to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that if you don’t like Google Street View cars photographing your house, you can “just move.”
“Street View. We drive exactly once,” Schmidt said during an appearance on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” late last week. “So, you can just move, right?”
Schmidt’s words were broadcast across the net on Friday, but they’ve been edited from the video now available on the CNN website. Before it was edited out, the moment was reported by The Wall Street Journal.
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Today the First Amendment Project is filing a lawsuit on my behalf against U.S. Customs and Border Protection (one of the divisions of the Department of Homeland Security) for violating the Privacy Act and the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to disclose their records of my travels, what they did with my requests for my records, and how they index, search for, and retrieve these travel surveillance records.
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His fans see him as Italy’s Jeremy Paxman, an aggressive but penetrating TV anchorman. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who owns most of the country’s private channels and wields indirect control over the state network, RAI, sees him as a dangerous leftie. Meet Michele Santoro, the temporarily banned hero of Italian current affairs broadcasting.
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Many Egyptians, in what is still a police state, regard Facebook as a safe haven where they can campaign and express their opinions freely. But that could soon change following a crackdown by the authorities against various types of media.
In Egypt, many opposition movements have either started or grown significantly on Facebook, most notably the April 6 youth movement and the national campaign to support Nobel peace prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei as a presidential candidate.
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Chinese police have refused to register an outspoken human rights lawyer who has not been seen since April as a missing person, his elder brother said today.
The disappearance of Gao Zhisheng has caused international concern, particularly because he had previously made detailed claims of torture at the hands of security officials during detentions.
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Pity the Chinese. The inhabitants of the world’s next superpower cannot search the internet or assemble or travel or speak or read or write or even reproduce without restriction. Yet in the lands where freedom is abundant, China, rather than earning well-deserved rebukes, continues to be championed as the ineluctable future. This disgraceful journey began with a liberal assumption: the west, it was claimed, is more likely to influence China by partnering with it, by giving it a prominent position inside, rather than pushing it outside, global institutions.
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Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines have all moved or are moving towards monitoring internet use, blocking international sites regarded as critical and ruthlessly silencing web dissidents.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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And, by the way, we can get a good insight into where the internet might head by understanding what these kids use. School work or watching videos (84% and 83% respectively). Playing games (74%) and communicating via instant messaging (61%) are the next most popular activities online. One out of three youngsters now connect via their mobile phones or other portable devices.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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On September 21, the Vatican observer at the UN, Mons. Silvano Maria Tomasi, addressed the 48th general assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva (English translation). He let the group know that the Vatican supports intellectual property rights (IPR) because such protection “recognizes the dignity of man and his work” and because it contributes to “the growth of the individual personality and to the common good.”
But Tomasi then went on to make a point we’ve harped on repeatedly here at Ars: supporting IP rights in general does not always mean supporting tougher patent and copyright rules; “better” does not always mean “stronger.”
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What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking. Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”
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Copyrights
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The new copyright bill, C-32, places consumers and users at risk of infringement for a wide variety of things, such as circumventing digital locks to transfer a CD track to an MP3 Player, or to transfer e-book content from an old device to a new one. Alongside C-32, Canada has been involved in talks to establish an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Both C-32 and ACTA represent a departure from Canadian copyright…
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Hotel management students in Canada are receiving a lesson in U.S. copyright law courtesy of Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC.
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The logical and ethical next step is to alter this policy, and as such I call for the CBC to do such; allowing for appropriately licensed Creative Commons music to exist alongside commercially licensed music, effectively giving back the rights of Artists and Show Producers to share content, and giving alternatives to Canadian Artists to decide for themselves how their content is to be used. A key issue here is artists’ right to give permission under copyright law for use of their works. They have various reasons for doing this, and why should CBC punish them? By blocking this, the CBC has effectively eliminated this potential on the larger scale. This is not the Canadian way of doing things – we share and we like sharing. Allowing policies like this to exist in our Public Services is a step backwards and creates justifications and rationalizations for similar policies in the future. As a Canadian, this upsets me – seeing my countries’ artists with alternative views set onto a back burner because they have been unfairly grouped in with others. This is not right at all.
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Ah, the word choices of the MPAA. The organization that once claimed the VCR was the “Boston Strangler” of the movie industry is now out there trying to get three strikes and censorship laws passed to protect their business model, and referring to these backwards looking protectionist policies as “forward looking.” That’s what MPAA boss Bob Pisano called the idea, found in the COICA proposal to censor web sites the MPAA doesn’t like. Of course, if this had been in effect when the VCR first came out, there would be no VCR.
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PometheeFeu pointed us to the news that Mark Twain’s autobiography, to be officially published for the first time 100 years after his death is already looking like it’s going to be a best seller. The book comes out on November 15th, but it’s already near the top of the bestseller lists on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble thanks to pre-orders. If you weren’t aware, Twain (real name Samuel Clemens), wrote this autobiography towards the end of his life, but demanded that it not be published until 100 years after his death (some of it, he demanded be withheld for 500 years). Allegedly, he did this so that he could say what he wanted without worrying about the people he spoke ill of ever finding out. Also, it’s not your typical autobiography. Apparently, it was more or less stream of consciousness, concerning whatever he felt like talking about. He would get up in the morning, talk about whatever he felt like, and people working for him would take it all down in dictation.
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We’ve pointed out many times how copyright is, by its nature, a law for censorship. Now, you can argue that it’s necessary or useful censorship (though, I doubt I would agree), but it cannot be denied that the basic purpose of copyright law is to stifle a form of speech. That’s why I’m always amazed at the disconnect of politicians, who support anti-censorship efforts online at the same time that they promote plans to censor-via-copyright law. Of course, most haven’t actually thought about it, or they insist that copyright is not censorship at all, and they can’t fathom how the two are connected.
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The Underground story in brief is this: their comic was pirated and bootlegged on 4Chan. They didn’t sue or whine: the authors went online at 4Chan to discuss their comic. What happened? More good publicity than you can imagine – go look at their website for what happened to their sales.
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ACTA
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is not in line with present EU laws, according to a Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) analysis. Previously, the European Commission has often stated that ACTA would remain fully in line with existing EU legislation.
Health groups have pointed out that ACTA will hamper access to essential medicine in developing countries. FFII’s analysis focusses on the impact ACTA will have on European SMEs in the ICT field, and on diffusion of green technology, needed to fight climate change. The FFII concludes that patents have to be excluded from ACTA’s civil enforcement section.
The Digital Prism Screencast – MintBackup
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Let’s look at Mac OS X Lion’s first “innovation” they introduced: multitouch gestures. This is curious because while Mac trackpads and “magical” mice support multitouch, not much work had been done with multitouch at the OS level. With Lion, Apple’s introducing system-wide gestures that command both applications and the OS. But wait, where have we seen this before? That’s right, Ubuntu.
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Kernel Space
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Clang can now compile a functional Linux Kernel (version 2.6.36, SMP).
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Graphics Stack
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Mario Kleiner has published patches over the weekend that introduce precise vblank time-stamping support within the Linux kernel’s DRM core and has implemented this support already within the Radeon and Intel kernel drivers too. The precise vblank timestamps and counting is needed by the DRI2 sync and swap extensions and in particular to conform with the OML_sync_control extension.
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It was just over the weekend that we reported XvMC and VDPAU may come to the ATI R600 Gallium3D driver that would allow those with Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (what’s supported by R600g) to enjoy accelerated video playback using GPU shaders beyond just the limited X-Video extension. This work was being done by Christian König and today he has one hell of a surprise: it’s to the point that today you can try out the code and it should work for XvMC! Yes, that’s the case, I just read the email twice and am now scurrying to test out the appropriate ATI DDX and Gallium3D driver.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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The announcement of Ubuntu dropping the GNOME shell in favor of their own Unity interface that came during Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote to kick off their Ubuntu 11.04 development summit has not been welcomed by many Linux users.
Of the three pages of comments (and it continues to grow) within our forums, there isn’t anyone that’s actually happy to see Unity coming to the Ubuntu Desktop rather than the GNOME 3.0 Shell. Many users have already tried the current Unity desktop used by Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and there’s just lots of complaints.
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First things first: what Canonical is doing here is not new, by any means. Novell developed the slab on their own, based on their user testing and to their own design, before proposing it for inclusion in GNOME once it was released in Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop. Nokia have developed custom user interfaces on top of the standard Linux desktop shell for the past 5 years, built with GNOME technologies, and have actively participated in the development of core components through the GNOME project – they are now developing a custom interface based on Qt, for smartphones, using the same standard desktop stack. OpenMoko did the same thing with the Freerunner. Intel built a custom shell for netbooks in the Moblin project, which is now the netbook interface for MeeGo. OLPC built a custom designed user interface for educational computing devices. GNOME allows and enables this kind of work, because of the great platform and infrastructure we have provided over the years to all Linux software developers.
In such illustrious company, forgive me if I think that Canonical’s management has seriously underestimated the difficulty of the task in front of them.
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Unity is Ubuntu’s new netbook interface. While based on GNOME, it is own take on what an interface should look and act like. Shuttleworth explained that Canonical was doing this because “users want Unity as their primary desktop.”
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Earlier this month the Fedora community began proposing names for Fedora 15 with the proposals ranging from names like Malmstrom to Fortaleza and Gutzwiller. The list, however, has now been narrowed down to five potential candidates for the Fedora 15 codename.
The potential names for Fedora 15 include Asturias, Lovelock, Pushcart, Sturgis, and perhaps the most normal name is Blarney. Personally I’d pick Blarney or Pushcart.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth delivers the keynote speech kicking off the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida. Note: This is an ‘unofficial’ rip of the video stream from the event which cut part way through.
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And so it begins. For anyone unfamiliar with the Ubuntu Developer Summit, it’s a biannual get together for the great minds of the wider Ubuntu community to figure out what’s going to happen in the next release. It’s pretty unique; almost all of the sessions are entirely open and broadcast online for remote participation.
My day began, like everyone else’s, with the keynote by Mark Shuttleworth.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Simply grab the vanilla version for PR 1.3 for your region and get flashing using this guide. If you are on a Mac, this is the guide to follow. The new firmware brings bug fixes, stability improvements and support for Nokia’s Ovi Suite.
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Android
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Apple fan-boys might be eating crow when they heard that Android has passed a major milestone. The Android Marketplace now has more than 100,000 apps for download.
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Events
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I’m pleased to be able to say that the schedule for this year’s PGDay Europe conference in Stuttgart, Germany on the 6th – 8th December 2010 is now available.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Wi-Fi Alliance on Monday announced that its direct peer-to-peer networking version of WiFi, called WiFi Direct, is now available on several new WiFi devices. The Alliance is also announcing that it has begun the process of certifying devices for WiFi Direct compatibility.
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Open Data
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You’ve heard it before: Digital technologies blew up the music industry’s moneymaking model, and the textbook business is next.
For years observers have predicted a coming wave of e-textbooks. But so far it just hasn’t happened. One explanation for the delay is that while music fans were eager to try a new, more portable form of entertainment, students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change.
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Standards/Consortia
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In promotion of what I consider to be the best HTML5 book currently available on the market, Remy Sharp and Bruce Lawson agreed to donate a chapter of Introducing HTML5 to our readers, which details the ins and outs of working with HTML5 video and audio.
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Steve Jurvetson shot this photo of a Interface Message Processor (IMP) made by BBN, which was as used as a router by APRANET to create one of the first nodes Internet in 1969. It is part of an upcoming exhibition at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.
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More than 200 cameras targeted at Muslim suburbs of Birmingham as part of a secret counter-terrorism initiative are to be dismantled, it emerged today.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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After 12 summers, the sun has finally set on the Exmoor Emperor, the magnificent red stag whose epic proportions were his making – and also, it seems, his downfall.
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Hundreds of prehistoric insects and other creatures have been discovered in a large haul of amber excavated from a coalmine in western India. An international team of fossil hunters recovered 150kg of the dirty brown resin from Cambay Shale in Gujarat province, making it one of the largest amber collections on record. The tiny animals became entombed in the fossilised tree resin some 52m years ago, before the Indian subcontinent crunched into Asia to produce the Himalayan mountain range.
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A third of all animals and plants on earth face extinction — endangered blue whales, coral reefs, and a vast array of other species. The wave of human-driven extinction has reached a rate not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Three senior NHS staff in London claim they have been suspended for whistle-blowing after raising concerns about the hospitals they work in, but have been given other reasons for keeping them off work.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Bunnie Huang is no stranger to absolutely ridiculous legal claims concerning trying to hack an Xbox. After doing so, he had trouble publishing a book on the subject, over fears that telling people how to modify a piece of electronics they had legally purchased might somehow violate copyright law (anyone else see a problem with that?). Now, techflaws.org points us to the news that Huang is scheduled to testify on behalf of a guy facing jailtime for modifying Xboxes. But US officials are trying to bar his testimony, claiming it’s “not legally relevant.” Technically, they’re probably right. But, from a common sense standpoint, Huang is trying to make a bunch of important points.
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Like many tech sites, we recently wrote about the fact that the various TV networks were discriminating based on the browser, blocking access to Google TV’s browser, because they don’t want people to watch the shows they’re already giving away for free online on their TV (even though it’s easy enough to just hook up a computer to a TV and watch via your preferred browser of choice). Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed us to the fact that Mark Cuban decided to respond to Newteevee’s article on the subject, in which the author of the original article reasonably pointed out that this was a braindead strategy by the networks, who were shooting themselves in the foot.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The latest part of the case is that both sides have filed for summary judgment, with Lenz arguing that the takedown violated the law, since Universal did not believe in good faith that the video was infringing (as required by the law). Universal’s motion, on the other hand, makes the argument that the 29-second video is not an obvious case of fair use. It still argues that there’s no requirement to check for fair use first, but says that even if it’s supposed to, this video was not obviously fair use.
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Back in 2007, Stephanie Lenz posted a video to YouTube of her children dancing and running around in her kitchen. Stephanie wanted to share the moment with her family and friends. But they weren’t the only ones watching: a few months later, Universal Music Corp. had the video removed from YouTube, claiming that the video infringed its copyright.
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As authorities, rightsholders and ISPs in Denmark negotiate behind an agreed press blackout over the possible introduction of a 3 strikes-style file-sharing regime, the government is set to commit tax payers’ money to the overall plan. The Ministry of Culture says it will help fund a public anti-piracy campaign and will match any financial contributions made by the entertainment industries and ISPs.
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The film and music businesses couldn’t stop file-sharing, but the porn industry has a plan to drive piracy into the shadows in 15 months or less. Can DogFart, Lords of Porn, and Naughty Bank succeed where others have failed?
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ACTA
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Article 1.2 in the proposed ACTA agreement states:
“Each Party shall be free to determine the appropriate method of implementing the provisions of this Agreement within its own legal system and practice.”
At recent meetings in Washington the US Trade representative has told other US agencies, NGOs and US legislators that ACTA is not binding and that its Article 1. 2 allows for a general flexibility for any element that might contradict ACTA in US law.
Iraq War Logs Every Death Mapped – From Wikileaks and Guardian MIRROR
Credit: TinyOgg
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