10.04.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The canton, in fact, “should fire those and hire more flexible people,” Pogson suggested. “Seriously, why would an employer tolerate insubordination? There are thousands of people ready, willing and able to work with GNU/Linux.
“If GNU/Linux gives the canton the efficiency and performance it needs, why should employees be allowed to say, ‘No’?” he added. “That would not be tolerated in any place where I have worked.”
At Pogson’s current employer, “we brought in GNU/Linux with little fanfare, just swapping it for dead/dying XP machines, and there has been no fuss at all,” he noted. “Why are the canton’s employees different — or is that just hype by the media to sell papers?”
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1) Total cost of ownership – Despite what the marketing material from select proprietary software companies might like you to believe, the software provided by proprietary vendors comes at a cost. There’s something to be said for having the ability to control the cost of your data and the software that runs it.
By using Linux, one can be assured that the future of any projects enabled by this open source solution will be in firm control of those who are running the controls. No faceless company is going to come along and suddenly change the rules as to how you run your projects or how their software can be used. With Linux based options in your arsenal, you’re in control of your data. From beginning to end, you have control over how much or how little your company spends on Linux solutions.
2) Updates are automatic – For many desktop Linux users, it’s something that we often take for granted. When we go to update our desktop operating system, we also have the option to update the software installed on our system as well…automatically. 1
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Prize drawing for a free 10-year subscription — Linux Magazine celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the November 2010 issue, which includes a free archive DVD with a complete library of all previous issues.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Ric Wheeler is the File System Group Manager at Red Hat, and Jeremy Allison caught up with him at LinuxCon in Sao Paulo, Brazil earlier this month. Ric tells Jeremy how he got into file system development as a grad student, then how he progressed into building storage arrays, eventually becoming a Linux advocate. From there, Jeremy and Ric talk about the direction that Linux is headed and the future of desktop computing. At the very end of the video, you can even hear about Ric’s brush with Hollywood!
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Applications
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CloudSN (Cloud Services Notifications) is an application similar to Specto (which is not maintained anymore): it can display notifications when you have new emails (POP3 and IMAP), new Identi.ca messages, Google Reader unread items or it can watch any RSS feed for changes. It used to also work with Twitter but since Twitter introduced OAuth for all apps, CloudSN stopped working with Twitter (hopefully it will be fixed soon).
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One of the best features of Linux is its flexibility, and nowhere is that more obvious than the desktop. Your Linux desktop can have the look and feel of any desktop environment you want. One reason for this flexibility is the ability to add and remove small applications to better the desktop experience, like desktop docks Cairo-Dock and Avant Window Navigator.
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DockBarX is a taskbar with grouping and group manipulation which works as an applet for both the GNOME Panel and Avant Window Navigator. DockBarX 0.39.8 (codename 0.40 release candidate) has just been released, bringing 2 changes:
* The tooltip for pinned programs with no open windows shows name and description now, just as normal Gnome launchers do.
* The width of the window list frame is slightly smaller.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Making your application a full-fledged participant in the federated social web
is not easy, but gradual and incremental improvements can make your users’
activities visible to others.
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Games
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Arcade shooter game Steel Storm Episode 1 version 1.0 is released which was only available as beta until now. The game is quite addictive with fast paced action that wants you to annihilate hordes of enemies . Episode 1 is available as free download for Linux, Mac and Windows users.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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This is a bit atypical for OMG! Ubuntu! but this morning Bryen Yuko Yunashko, also known as suseROCKS, reported that he was robbed for many valuable gadgets during his travels in Europe. As a user Bryan has dedicated much of his life to raising awareness of accessibility in technology, and this theft has robbed him not only of valuable data but of the tools he uses to increase his quality of life given his disability.
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Our kid Graham has had a rough time of it on the internet recently. His article for our sister site TechRadar, “The trouble with Linux: there’s too much choice”, sparked off a few flamewars. Most notably, Caitlyn Martin over on the O’Reilly blog delivered a no-minced-words response: “Are you intimidated by breakfast cereal?”.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Smith’s vision for Fedora is about ensuring that the Fedora community is an inclusive place where multiple views and contributions are welcome. Smith doesn’t necessarily have any new or unique tools for building community, but he does bring a different background to the position than past Fedora Project Leaders.
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Debian Family
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The rolling distribution is certainly a good idea but the rules governing it must be designed to avoid any conflict with the process of releasing a stable distribution. Lastly, the mere existence of rolling would finally fix the marketing problem plaguing testing: the name “rolling” does not suggest that the software is not yet ready for prime time.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubucompilator is a tool to easily create Ubuntu / Debian .deb packages. It’s basically a GUI for all the commands required to make a .deb – to understand exactly what it does, take a look at this video…
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As Windows XP fades into the sunset, Ubuntu community members are trying to reach out to millions of Windows XP users to get them to switch to Linux. The Ubuntu pitch is pretty simple: Stick with your existing Windows XP hardware and switch to Ubuntu, rather than spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on a new PC running Windows 7. The big question: Will Windows XP users embrace the Ubuntu message?
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Ubuntu is brought to users in their own language by a large community of volunteer translators, who tirelessly work on localizing every part of the operating system on every release.
In this series of interviews we’ll get to know who they are, about their language and how they work.
This week we’re introducing you to Gábor Kelemen, the Hungarian translation team coordinator.
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Flavours and Variants
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In this Screencast I show you the twitter client hotot.
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Phones
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This one is still very much a rumor, but PreCentral is reporting that it’s heard from a “very reliable tipster” who says that Palm is prepping a new phone codenamed “Mansion,” which may or may not be the same device that recently turned up in a certification database under the name P102.
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Android
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The current Android Market — actually Markets, since several carriers have customized it to their own ends — have a long way to go to match the customer and seller experience of iOs. Amazon knows ecommerce better than just about anybody, and the kind of collective intelligence filtering they brought to books would be a big leap forward for app discovery. But I’d caution developers eager to get their apps in front of more buyers via an Amazon store to carefully review the terms and conditions to make sure they’re entering a relationship with a retailing behemoth like Amazon with both eyes open.
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Well, it seems that Google Wave isn’t quite dead yet after all. Turns out, they’re open sourcing a bit more of the project and asking for collaboration. (Ok, someone to take over.)
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We would like to thank our Google Summer of Code students for their hard work this summer. Thanks also to Google for generously supporting our students while they hacked on MINIX. We are also grateful to the MINIX community for all your contributions and feedback. We hope you enjoy the new release.
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Events
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So here we are, all in a room, running POSSE. Capetown, it’s warm, it’s sunny, it’s a very nice place to be. Following the schedule as planned.
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Web Browsers
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The Google Chrome development team has released Chrome 7.0.517.24, the first beta of version 7 of the company’s WebKit-based web browser. Formerly only available in the Chrome developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel), the first Chrome 7 beta resolves a number of bugs that lead to crashes in the Dev channel release and introduces several changes and new features.
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Databases
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The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally.
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Business
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I spoke with Augustin ten years ago when I was writing Rebel Code, but until today, I had never met him. So it was good to do so, and to catch up with the many interesting things he has been doing in the world of open source business recently.
Things soon went downhill at VA Linux after those amazing times a decade ago. The dotcom meltdown meant that people stopped buying VA Linux’s boxes almost overnight: revenue went from $60 million a quarter to $15 million in six months. So Augustin set about restructuring the company, turning it from one based around hardware, to one based around the Web. For when it was flush with money, VA Linux had acquired a number of leading sites, including Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat. These formed the core of a business with $40 million annual revenue – rather a come-down from the $240 million the hardware business had been bringing in just a little while before.
One side effect of this slimming down was that Augustin had effectively made himself redundant. He joined some friends who had set up the venture capital firm Azure Capital Partners. The idea was that Augustin would help them invest in exciting new open source companies. During this time he formulated his view – novel then, but hardly earth-shattering in retrospect – that the next wave of open source companies would be at the application level.
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Alfresco has issued version 3.4 of its open source enterprise content management system (CMS). The latest release is aimed at making it easier for users to collaborate and and share their content as quickly and easily as possible. Discussing the release, Alfresco Software CTO John Newton said that, “The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web”.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which provides Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects with fiscal sponsorship, asset stewardship, license enforcement and license compliance services, announced the appointment of Bradley M. Kuhn as its full-time Executive Director.
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The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution.
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Openness/Sharing
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As more and more of the world’s population has gained access to the Internet so a growing number of free and open movements have appeared — including the free and open source software movements, free culture, creative commons, open access and open data.
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Open Data
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During the panel I noted that, if we are interested in improving response times for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests (or, in Canada, Access to Information (ATIP) requests) why doesn’t the Office of the Information Commissioner use a bugzilla type software to track requests?
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The government is to change the law so that all data released under the Freedom of Information Act will be fully accessible to computers.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference in Birmingham that the Freedom of Information Act will be amended so that all data released through FoI must be in a reusable and machine readable format.
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Data science is clearly a blend of the hackers’ arts (primarily in steps “O” and “S” above); statistics and machine learning (primarily steps “E” and “M” above); and the expertise in mathematics and the domain of the data for the analysis to be interpretable (that is, one needs to understand the domain in which the data were generated, but also the mathematical operations performed during the “learning” and “optimization”). It requires creative decisions and open-mindedness in a scientific context.
Our next post addresses how one goes about learning these skills, that is: “what does a data science curriculum look like?”
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Open Access/Content
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Electronic content and digital interactivity are everywhere – except in most public school classrooms. How can schools and teachers take advantage of technology to help students excel? What do teachers really need?
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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It’s open standard. The good news with HTML5’s standards is they are open and free of patents. For example, WebKit, which keeps a library of open-source software, provides a free layout engine that can be used to create browsers or applications. “You won’t have IBM (IBM) knocking at your door, saying, ‘You’re using our patents,’” says Le Hégaret. This also means you’re not dependent on one vendor’s tools, as with Adobe Flash or Microsoft (MSFT) Silverlight.
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Federal officials on Friday suspended one of the nation’s largest government contractors from receiving new work, alleging that the Northern Virginia company inappropriately went through other firms to gain access to contracts set aside for small companies.
The U.S. Small Business Administration’s action imperils hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for GTSI Corp., a top-50 contractor that has relied on the Pentagon and the rest of the federal government for more than 90 percent of its sales in recent years.
At issue is work GTSI did as a subcontractor for small businesses serving as the prime contractors on government contracts.
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Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.
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Divining a possible new market in municipal water management systems, IBM has set up a pilot project in Dubuque, Iowa, to investigate whether cities could both save money and conserve water by monitoring citizens’ usage more closely.
In this project, over 300 home dwellers have been issued smart water meters that wirelessly transit their water usage back to IBM data center, on a periodic basis. The citizens can check into a secure Web site, run by IBM, to see how much water they use, and when the it is being used during the day. The idea is that by studying water usage habits, citizens may be able to tell if they have hidden leaks.
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In an interview with TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy, Thiel, 42, argued that the high-tech gold rush that has skyrocketed valuations for Internet companies represents a sharp disconnect from the economic malaise that has blanketed much of the world, stagnating median wages and living conditions for most people just 30 miles outside of Silicon Valley.
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Science
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A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.
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With the introduction of Shader Model 5.0 hardware and the API support provided by OpenGL 4.0 made GPU based geometry tessellation a first class citizen in the latest graphics applications. While the official support from all the commodity graphics card vendors and the relevant APIs are quite recent news, little to no people know that hardware tessellation has a long history in the world of consumer graphics cards. In this article I would like to present a brief introduction to tessellation and discuss about its evolution that resulted in what we can see in the latest technology demos and game titles.
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From My Personal Blog
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I found it gratifying back in the days around 2006 when people in my scientific field knew me in conferences because of my blogs and wanted to hang out with me because of these. The readership grew steadily as long as I kept writing. PZ Myers sees the same type of trend and Techrights, where I wrote over 11,000 posts, is the same. Perhaps I will resume posting in blog form about science later this month or next month. As always, I will separate my professional life, my personal life, and my hobbies (the 4 blogs I run will provide this separation).
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The programme is broken down into several episodes, each delivered in parts due to time limits in YouTube. Here is the first part of the four episodes.
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Security
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On Wednesday, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III discussed the military’s cybersecurity strategy after meetings at NATO and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. “Like air, sea, land and space, we’re going to have to treat cyberspace as an arena where we need to defend our networks and to be able to operate freely,” he said.
The rhetoric sounds uncannily familiar to what retired CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden told infosec professionals at the annual security conference Black Hat in July. “Cyber is a domain like land, sea, air, and space,” he said.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A Reddit user who posted meanspirited remarks about a Flickr user’s photo was called a jerk by the photographer. To get back, the critic posted a tiny thumbnail of the Flickr image (which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) to Reddit along with a complaint about his treatment.
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The co-founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, on Tuesday slammed whistleblower WikiLeaks over its release of Afghan war documents which he said could “get people killed”.
Wales also expressed irritation over the website’s use of the term “Wiki” in its name, which refers to a site that allows different users to collaborate and make contributions.
“I would distance myself from WikiLeaks, I wish they wouldn’t use the name, they are not a Wiki. A big way they got famous in the first place was by using the word Wiki, which was unfortunate in my view,” he said at a business conference in Kuala Lumpur.
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Technology is such an enabler. Even when it comes, allegedly, to robbing a bank.
For police in Arlington, Texas, believe they have rumbled an inside job of a bank robbery by stumbling on the cell phone of one of the bank’s tellers.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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As part of our work to witness and expose water pollution problems around China, Greenpeace campaigners and photographer Lu Guang visited several areas along the Yangtze River that have been severely affected by industrial water pollution.
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The discoveries are providing new insights into the behavior of our ancestors – but they come at a price. So rapid is the rise in global temperatures, and so great is the rate of disintegration of the world’s glaciers, that archaeologists risk losing precious relics freed from the icy tombs. Wood rots in a few years once freed from ice while rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather, crumble to dust in days unless stored in a freezer. As a result, archaeologists are racing against time to find and save these newly exposed wonders.
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Here aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, we are continuing our three-month science mission in the Gulf of Mexico. We are floating about five miles north of the Deepwater Horizon well site, in water that would have been covered with oil a few months ago, where thousands of gallons of oil were skimmed and burned on the surface while an armada of boats and planes delivered daily bombardment with chemical dispersants that sunk the oil back underwater into the path of any unlucky sea creatures nearby.
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While the water samples taken from way down deep during the trip are off to the lab to get analyzed, the immediate, measurable data obtained by Rainer tells us this; that there’s a clear indication of an oxygen deficiency in the Gulf’s waters, in an area stretching from around the Deepwater Horizon disaster site to 300 miles (500km) to the west. The infamous plume still exists – perhaps not visibly, but the essence of it is still there.
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A criminal with alleged links to gangs across the country and even Afghanistan was nabbed in Purulia with nearly 1 kg of uranium on Sunday. The market value of the radioactive element is said to be about $7 million.
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Our oceans are an absolute marvel – but they are also in a deep, deep crisis. If we don’t act fast, our oceans will continue to deteriorate and vital food sources and essential functions provided to our planet and its people by the oceans could be lost forever. Since healthy oceans underpin our very survival, Greenpeace is today releasing an “Emergency Oceans Rescue Plan” aimed at world leaders, which sets out the best way to save our oceans- something that can and should be done at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which takes place later this month in Japan.
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Finance
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Bank of America is delaying foreclosures in 23 states as it examines whether it rushed the foreclosure process for thousands of homeowners without reading the documents.
The move adds the nation’s largest bank to a growing list of mortgage companies whose employees signed documents in foreclosure cases without verifying the information in them.
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FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Wednesday that his agency hopes to release a report by the end of the year that would detail proposals for helping journalism survive but said one idea that is unlikely to be included is a call for taxing electronic devices to subsidize newspapers and other media platforms.
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He added that “government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers and [any proposal] should be platform neutral.”
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The IMF report – “Will It Hurt? Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Consolidation” – implicitly argues that austerity will do more damage than so far admitted.
Normally, tightening of 1pc of GDP in one country leads to a 0.5pc loss of growth after two years. It is another story when half the globe is in trouble and tightening in lockstep. Lost growth would be double if interest rates are already zero, and if everybody cuts spending at once.
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You read that correctly. Some of Germany’s wealthy are demanding that they pay a “Rich man’s tax” They feel that simply contributing to charity is not enough, they feel that they should pay more to support society, because they can. They say they have more money than they need.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is joining the fight against Righthaven, a company that has been widely criticized for suing a string of news sites that use content belonging to its clients, including, notably, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The EFF is now defending Democratic Underground, a political site which Righthaven sued last month for using a five-sentence excerpt of a Review-Journal article without permission. The Las Vegas Sun, which has closely been following Righthaven’s moves, says it’s the first time that Righthaven has been hit with a counterclaim.
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In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, police belonging to a special Pre-crime unit arrest people for crimes they would do in the future. It’s science fiction, and it will probably never happen in our lifetimes.
However, the pre-crime concept is coming very soon to the world of Human Resources (HR) and employee management.
A Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.
While background checks, which mainly look for a criminal record, and even credit checks have become more common, Social Intelligence is the first company that I’m aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character.
Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and “thousands of other sources,” the company develops a report on the “real you” — not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around.
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DOCTORS have been disclosing sensitive medical information – and even mocking patients – on Facebook.
The NSW Medical Board has cautioned one doctor for making “flippant and derogatory” comments, and warned others to “think twice” before disclosing patient details on social networking sites.
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And so, the mayor of Mokena gets a history lesson on the First Amendment from the press that the First Amendment enables. There’s something nice about that, though, you would have hoped the history lesson would have come sooner.
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Internet blocking is advocated as an allegedly effective measure against the proliferation of child abuse images. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have been using this technology for years. But a practical test by the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) in cooperation with European civil rights advocacy groups has shown: Internet blocking does not fight abuse, in practice it only serves to conceal the failures of politics and police. Websites can remain on blocking lists for years even though they have either been deleted or could be deleted easily and quickly.
How is this possible, and what could be done against illegal sites? Answers are given by a new analysis of current blocking lists from Sweden and Denmark by the Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship. The group developed software to select, categorise and geo-locate 167 blocked Internet domains as a representative sample of websites blocked in Denmark at the time of the investigation. “The result is a smack in the face of law enforcement authorities”, says Alvar Freude of the Working Group. “Of the 167 listed sites, only three contained material that could be regarded as child pornography.” Two of these three sites had been blocked in Denmark since 2008, and these are, or least were, blocked in Sweden, Norway and Finland as well. These sites were therefore known for at least two years in several countries, and apparently law enforcement authorities did nothing to try and get this illegal content removed.
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With the Senate trying to rush through COICA, the online censorship bill that ignores history and appears to violate both the principles of the First Amendment and due process, a bunch of concerned citizens have been speaking out against the bill, and asking the Senate not to rush it through without at least holding hearings about the massive problems with the bill.
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While there’s been increasing attention paid to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA), the proposed law that would allow the government to require ISPs and registrars to block access to websites deemed to be “dedicated to infringing activities,” it looks like the White House (which we had thought was against censoring the internet) appears to be working on a backup plan in case COICA doesn’t pass.
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Quebec City’s Winter Carnival has hired lawyers to defend its beloved Bonhomme Carnaval, whose iconic image is gracing newsstands across the country this week after Maclean’s magazine used it to illustrate an explosive cover story about corruption in la belle province.
“For the past 57 years, the Carnival has invested considerable energy and resources into protecting Bonhomme Carnaval’s outstanding reputation,” said the event’s CEO Jean Pelletier in a statement released Monday afternoon. “We are therefore examining the options available to us to enforce our intellectual property rights.”
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The BlackBerry security jinx is unlikely to be resolved soon. The telecom department has rejected the interception solution offered by Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) for its secure corporate email service. What’s more is that it has spurned RIM’s technical solution for decoding all chat communication on the popular BlackBerry Messenger service, which contradicts the home ministry’s recent clean chit to the Canadian smartphone maker’s interception solution for its messaging service.
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Taking a cue from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies are seeking to re-engineer the Internet and other digital communications networks to make them easier to spy on.
In the week since the plan became public, it has been roundly condemned by civil liberties groups and security experts — and rightly so. While the proposal described in Monday’s New York Times probably won’t do much to hinder sophisticated criminals or terrorists, it does threaten to undermine the security of global communications and stifle technological innovation.
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A number of major advertising associations have banded together to announce a self-regulatory program that would allow users to opt out of ad tracking. The program revolves around the awkwardly named “Advertising Option Icon”—an icon that websites could place on their site that would allow users to get more information on why they’re being targeted for ads and let them control their data collection.
The program is based on an industry report from July 2009 titled Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, which focuses on education, transparency, and consumer control when it comes to targeted ads. The participating organizations include the Association of National Advertisers, Direct Marketing Association, the Better Business Bureau, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and Network Advertising Initiative. And, lest you assume this is a small effort, these trade groups represent some 5,000 other companies when it comes to advertising on the Web, so they have some pull.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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“Young people are pretty smart. They’re not going to pay for something they don’t need to,” he said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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One of the key objectives of the Indian Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, is to protect the authors of underlying works in films (such as scriptwriters, lyricists and music composers) from exploitation by effecting extensive structural changes in the Copyright Act, 1957, and, consequently, in India’s film and music industry. The amendments proposed in the 2010 Bill cover a range of subjects including exhaustion, the regulation of copyright contracts and the role of copyright societies.
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Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson continues his excellent reporting on British law firm ACS:Law, a much-derided firm that sends threatening copyright letters on behalf of pornographers. ACS suffered an Anonymous denial of service attack in September, and inadvertently dumped its entire email repository, which is now available for download all over the net. Today, Anderson digs into ACS’s finances — how much it makes, what it expects to make, and how much paper it goes through printing threatening letters to mail to poorly researched accused infringers.
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Tweet
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention will be returning to Portland, Oregon, July 25-29, 2011.
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The owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has for the first time been hit with a counterclaim over its online copyright infringement lawsuit campaign, with attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing the newspaper of entering a “sham” relationship with the Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner Righthaven LLC — and accusing Righthaven of copyright fraud.
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The explanation that it’s because of the BitTorrent release is pure speculation. Another article, from TorrentFreak provides some more details, with notes of rejection from IMDB. They claim that the movie needs to be associated with a production company that has a history of releasing movies, in order to get listed at this early stage. However, Tedeschi notes that this is a real production house that has released movies in the past, all of which have been listed in IMDB. The only thing that he sees that’s different is the planned BitTorrent release.
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The article also highlights a filmmaker, Ellen Seidler, who complains about spending hours a day sending emails to file sharing sites, demanding they take down her film. Just think how much better she could be doing if she spent that same time connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy.
What a waste of space by the LA Times, who shouldn’t be misleading people like this with bogus articles. It’s articles that portray these people as victims, due to their own lack of business initiative, that does real harm to filmmakers. If, instead, the LA Times focused on smart filmmakers who are in the same situation as Carter and Seidler, but instead embraced it and are making real money because of it, they’d be helping. Instead, they’re just making more of a mess.
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In the meantime one has to wonder, if BTplc had expressed concerns in the past, why is it only now they get an adjournment? Could it be that in not only damaging ACS:Law, the recent email leaks have also damaged the system which some wished to seek revenue from? and now Gallant Macmillan has been put on hold, what of Ministry of Sound? their site is still appears to be down. How much damage to their reputation with its potential customers has been done? From some forums, I’m seeing quite alot.
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Torrent Freak is currently reporting a comedy spoof of a certain historical figure finding out about he leak at ACS:Law. You can find that here: http://torrentfreak.com/acslaws-anti-piracy-downfall-sends-hitler-crazy-101004/
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ACTA
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ACTA negotiators claim a deal has been done, but is it really a counterfeit? How is it that a deal is successfully concluded when there are matters still outstanding? It would seem that the European Commission statement of a “successful” conclusion of ACTA is somewhat pre-emptive.
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The Dutch foundation Vrijschrift requested publication of ACTA documents. The request was denied. Vrijschrift filed an objection, below a translation:
1. Many provisions in ACTA are mandatory: “Each Party shall”. Substantially, often they regard legislation, eg “Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at (…)”. There is a binding relationship between ACTA and legislation.
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Participating in ACTA
mouse ears on the world: text says ACTA ATTACKS INTERNET
* Australia
* Canada,
* the European Union
* Japan
* South Korea
* Mexico
* New Zealand
* Switzerland
* United States
American Flag hangs down
ACTA came with heavy duty Non-Disclosure penalties. Which is why most if not all of the elected representatives of the participating governments were kept in the dark about what was even on the table. This includes elected representatives of the American Government. If they were made privvy to the negotiations, they were legally restrained from talking about it. Not very democratic, eh?
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The fact that ACTA did NOT go as planned probably means they will fight harder to achieve their goals in different ways. Canada is likely to get more “special treatment” since we’ve provided a hot bed of opposition. The fact that ACTA has not passed probably means that there will be an even stronger push to get the dreadful Bill C-32 passed.
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The round of negotiations in Tokyo last week on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will be the last in the several-year long process to come to a final agreement, negotiators have said. The latest text – along with highlighted issue areas on which certain countries still have reservations – will be released before the end of the week, negotiators told Intellectual Property Watch.
The most critical outstanding issue is scope, especially on border measures, a Japanese negotiator told Intellectual Property Watch today. There was a “certain convergence” but “further examination was needed in some capitals,” the negotiator said. “In that sense we haven’t gotten agreement” yet.
Juan Pedro Bolivar – “GNU Psycosynth”
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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I powered up SLED 11 SP1, plugged in her USB thumbdrive and opened up her Chinese poetry presentation in OpenOffice v3.2.1. Next, I showed her how to use SCIM for Chinese character input (toggle via Ctrl-Space & HanYu PinYin input). Left her to it for an hour and she successfully completed her assignment, saved it in PPT format and went home. I did warn her that her presentation may not be 100% WYSIWYG when opened on a Windows PC at her club meeting. *fingers crossed*
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While AMD soon will be introducing the Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards, there is still plenty of life left to the Radeon HD 5000 series especially for those interested in open-source support with the Evergreen GPUs finally being supported by the open-source driver stack complete with OpenGL acceleration via a Mesa driver and this support will continue to mature before there is the same level of support for the next-generation Southern Island GPUs in the open-source world. In this article we are reviewing the ATI Radeon HD 5450 “Cedar” graphics card, which is AMD’s lowest-end Evergreen GPU but will set you back less than $50 USD.
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AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.
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Applications
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A task manager is software which enables users to compile a list of tasks to be completed. This list is also known as a to-do list or things-to-do. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘task manager’ should not be confused with monitoring software which provides information about programs and processes running on a computer.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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We hope to have our first Bordeaux for OpenIndiana release within the next month. Your support is welcome and needed to make this happen…
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Almost five years ago, at the traditional KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück, I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on a whiteboard. It felt appropriate to put the server into the center and arrange the different layers of the system around it in circles. The result was a beautiful diagram.
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Trunk already features the new KDE Power Management System, but there are some feature regressions as not everything has been implemented yet, but I can say 80-90% of what’s needed is in. Today we’re going to make the applet play nice with the daemon, and if you want to test all of this goodness, I’d really advise you to wait until tomorrow.
Those are the main things, but many many more small ones have been done/fixed, to improve your desktop usage and not getting in your way. Hopefully I got you interested, so look forward to a vastly improved power management experience in 4.6!
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GNOME Desktop
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So.. I’m actually in Europe to work! Not play. And I’ll give dedicated posts to the two events I’ll be at this month, but quickly, I’m attending the GNOME-A11y hackfest/AEGIS Conference in Sevilla, Spain. This is a solid week of work. And later in October, I’ll be headed up to Germany for the openSUSE conference.
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New Releases
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Just released version 0.6.101 of stresslinux which is based on openSUSE 11.3. Some extra package are updated as well, these include bandwidth, busybox, memtester, stressapptest and x86info.
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This release of GParted fixes a regression introduced with the previous version. The problem introduced was that when partitions were created using MiB alignment, the resulting partition was 1 MiB larger in size than requested.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Concluding: I’m not saying here – give up on Mandriva and join openSUSE. What I do want to offer is some help – we’re all Free Software communities, we care. Let’s work together a bit more!
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Debian Family
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I attended the Debian Policy BoF. It inspired me to start reviewing Debian Policy and led to my submission of a bug report to improve the description of the archive areas in Debian.
[...]
I helped with the herculean task of getting Sage, a FOSS mathematics system, back into Debian. After discussing the issue during the Debian Science track at DebConf10, I met Lucas Nussbaum in the hacklab and he (with help from Luca Falavigna) managed to get the old buggy version of Sage removed from unstable (apparently, this version was causing support issues for the upstream Sage community, so this was a positive step forward).
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Debian’s “testing” distribution is where Debian developers prepare the next stable distribution. While this is still its main purpose, many users have adopted this version of Debian because it offers them a good trade-off between stability and freshness. But there are downsides to using the testing distribution, so the “Constantly Usable Testing” (CUT) project aims to reduce or eliminate those downsides.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Phones
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Android
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This is a big thing because now 32 countries out of 44 where Android has footprint can buy paid apps. This should take away one of the biggest drawbacks that Android marketplace was facing.
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Even as Android users, most of us have become familiar with the harsh requirements of the Apple App Store. Rejected App Store applications routinely find a place in the Android Market, and Tawkon Radiation Detector is no exception.
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Google has expanded Android Market paid application support for developers to 29 countries, and boosted to 32 the number of countries where consumers can buy apps for their phones. The search giant has also replaced its Nexus One web store with Google Phone Gallery, a site where users may compare three Android handsets at a time.
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Google has released the latest figures for devices accessing the Android Market and we’re getting closer to a Froyo majority.
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Tablets
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Dell’s recently tipped seven-inch Android tablet will ship in a few weeks, going head to head with the new RIM PlayBook and a rumored seven-inch version of the Apple iPad, says an industry report. Meanwhile, Dell is also readying a 10-inch Android tablet for release next year, says the story.
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* Yellow: Production Orientation
* Pink: Marketing Orientation
* Green: FOSS Community Orientation
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OpenOffice meets the needs of easily 95% of home users (and a good deal of those that use office software at work) and most of those people using an, often times illegal, version of Photoshop would be able to accomplish the exact same tasks using the legally free GIMP. Beyond this beginning Linux distros such as Linux Mint or Pinguy OS easily fulfill all the desktop computing needs of your average user.
With all of this in mind, why don’t you see Linux, OpenOffice, or GIMP on the shelf at your local computer store? Simple:
There is no money in it for the retailer.
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Today is international translation day! As part of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc), I have been writing a book on the localisation of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
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Events
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In only a few years, Free Software has evolved from being a niche phenomenon into an increasingly mature mainstream movement. Despite the commonplace understanding as Free Software as one of the driving forces of tomorrow’s information technologies, the surrounding political and economic environment has often not yet kept up. As the founder and first president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as well as CEO of a Free Software enterprise, the speaker has unique insight into political and economic aspects that keep favouring proprietary technologies until the current day despite the assurances to the contrary by some. From his personal experience, Georg Greve will give some real life examples of how Free Software companies work and interact with partners and customers, and how a truly level playing field would be constructed.
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Web Browsers
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That’s a sizable chunk, when you realise that total global average daily users of Firefox at the same time was about 114 million. In short, roughly 1.5 percent of total Firefox users globally are Australian. And the number is growing. As at August 2009, there were 1.6 million average Australian daily users of Firefox. That figure was much smaller — 1.2 million — in August 2008. In other words, although IE is still the dominant force, Firefox is a strong challenger, with Chrome and then Safari coming up behind.
IBM CIO Godbee compares his company’s adoption of Firefox to the way that the similarly open source Linux operating system gained traction on servers around the world over the past several decades since it was first released.
“Over a period of time it has been organic,” he says. “And suddenly there is it is, on a wide scale.”
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Databases
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MariaDB 5.2 is almost here. The gamma release (think “RC”) was released on 28 Sep and the stable release will follow just as soon as the developers are happy with it.
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Project Releases
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FireBreath is licensed under a dual license structure; this means you can choose which of two licenses to use it under. FireBreath can be used under the New BSD license or the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Green IT is concerned with approaches to information technology that reduce the environmental impact from the manufacture, use and disposal of computers and peripherals. Occasionally I am asked whether Open Document Format (ODF) has any relationship to “Green IT”. This is an interesting question, and the fact that the question is asked at all suggests that Green IT goals are increasing playing a central role in decision making.
When an organization migrates from Microsoft Office and their binary file formats (DOC/XSL/PPT) and moves to ODF, they will immediately notice that ODF documents are much smaller than the corresponding Microsoft format documents. This is a benefit of the ZIP compression applied to the contents of ODF documents. It also reflects that fact that Microsoft-format documents, especially ones that have been edited and saved many times, tend to accumulate unused blocks in the file, blocks which are not used, but still bloat the file’s storage.
[...]
So in summary, yes, a move to ODF will cause your documents to be far smaller than they were before, and that has advantages in terms of storage and bandwidth consumption. But let’s be honest, when it comes to disk storage and bandwidth documents are not your biggest problem. Graphics and video are far larger.
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Compounding the problem is decreasing quality and quantity of original material and increasing torrents of swill from content farms, recycling the same shallow junk over and over merely to provide a framework to hang yet more ads on, and then SEO-gaming for all they’re worth. Thanks, I so love it when the first page of a Google search is link farms and content farm crapola.
Consider supporting sites you enjoy, if they accept reader subscriptions or donations. For example, Groklaw and LWN.net serve up some of the best, most in-depth articles anywhere. Groklaw runs no ads, and LWN.net relies on subscriptions to help them keeps the ads to a minimum. As always, it comes down to the Golden Rule– the one with the gold makes the rules. Me, I don’t even want to live in a world controlled by marketers. Though I fear we are already mostly there.
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Science
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They want to establish “at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its operation”. Um, our simplistic arithmetic shows this would be 438 Fab Labs, based on 307,006,550 residents (from July 2009) divided by 700,000. Many cities would have several Fab Labs, if this scheme works. Oh, and the population is likely to grow a tad by ten year’s time.
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For certain kinds of bacteria, we have reached the end of the line. No new antibiotics have been developed for decades, and some superbugs are now resistant to all those we have. There is no one solution to the problem of antibiotic resistance, but we desperately need new antibiotics.
Far from helping, though, drug regulatory agencies are discouraging the development of new antibiotics, say those who met in London last week to discuss solutions to the problem of antibiotic resistance, at a conference organised by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. New Scientist finds out what is going on.
Why are regulators coming under fire?
They are making it ever harder and more costly to get new antibiotics approved. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came in for the most criticism.
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Health/Nutrition
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Could Del Monte, Heinz, Unilever and Walmart become the deciders on stainability? In “What’s New for Dinner,” Frederick Kaufman writes about the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, an attempt by large companies to measure the environmental impact of the seed-to-shelf life cycle of any produce-based product.
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Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve–bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Ed Miliband, giving his first speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September 2010, said of civil liberties, “too often we seemed casual about them”.
“I won’t let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty,” he said. “I want our party to reclaim that tradition.”
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As a report published yesterday by the Civitas think tank makes clear, this is a dangerous approach. The idea behind the Vetting and Barring Scheme is flawed and remodelling it will make no difference. The scheme was introduced to make children safer after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002 exposed the flaws in vetting their killer Ian Huntley. Yet it is more likely to put our children in greater jeopardy, while at the same time poisoning their relationship with adults.
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Police will soon have the means to grab someone’s genetic sample and run it through the national DNA database while waiting in the street, if early trials by military industrial giant Lockheed Martin are successful.
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A Norwich two-year-old was asked to take down the hood of his anorak when entering a city convenience store – for security reasons.
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Yesterday Norfolk County Council confirmed that the camera has never been used and as a result no tickets have been issued.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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10:10’s climate change murder video has caused much offence, but one thing nobody is questioning is their inability to control the material, or the debate.
The instant negative reaction from most of the climate change campaign community after its release yesterday morning, prompted the video to be quickly pulled from 10:10’s own website, but it was even more quickly reposted by people wishing to continue to comment.
Wisely, in their apology statement yesterday evening 10:10 said they are not going to try to control how people use the video now it is in the wild, for instance via copyright take-downs.
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Finance
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Beijing offered to buy Greek debt on Saturday (2 October) and pledged to support a stable euro and not reduce its holdings of European government bonds in an effort to deflect criticism of its foreign exchange policy ahead of an EU-China summit this week.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. Also, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
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Today, lawyers Gallant Macmillan will attend the High Court in London in an attempt to persuade a senior judge to order the handover of hundreds more identities of people accused of file-sharing. To mark this occasion, Operation Payback decided to hit the London law firm but after they tried to nullify the planned DDoS attack, Anonymous hit their client instead. Many hours later, Ministry of Sound is still out of business online.
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The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library’s National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation’s audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.
“It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago,” the survey notes. “What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies.”
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ACTA
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The spokesperson for the Trade European Commissioner has announced Saturday October 2nd, that all parties have reached an agreement on ACTA. This is one more example of how the secrecy of this negotiation permits all manoeuvres to deceive citizens and Members of Parliaments. La Quadrature du Net calls all European citizens to alert their MEPs and National MPs about the need to monitor closely the rest of this negotiation and prepare to reject its by-product.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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We have highlighted the problems with the Ofcom filesharing code, most importantly that the code does not comply with the Digital Economy Act.
Neal Walfield – “GNU Hurd”
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 10:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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One picture is worth a thousand words…
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For these beginner Linux users, Linux represents an all-mighty fortress that stands impenetrable. Consequently, they engage in all sorts of risky on line behavior. While it is a fact that Linux is more secure than Windows is, the hubris of these tragic heroes gradually leads them to their destruction…or to the bitter realization that a great many of the attacks a computer can suffer are fostered by a careless user.
Fanboys always wage wars based on prejudice. Regardless of the OS you like, an open mind will help you fly over the clouds of ignorance and, eventually, you can make a conscious choice about whether or not your OS satisfies your needs or if a migration is the solution to your computer woes or the beginning of them.
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Without further delay, here are some impressive Linux desktop customization screenshots…
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Applications
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Starting a new application series will show you many alternative applications for Microsoft windows in Linux platform. For example today I will try to find many possible applications to be alternative for Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator work In Linux Platform.
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I have a few applications that I have tinkered with, but didn’t make a big enough impression to warrant a full post. Just in the interest of safekeeping the notes I made about them, I’m going to leave a list here, for the future.
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There are more than thousands of Linux Operating Systems and checking out all of em is simply impossible .
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Better late than never, so I am entering into this fever called Twitter. And as a Linux Guru wannabe I like to use the command line for a lot of task, including tweeting.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ubuntu Gamer reader Boni Boy Blue recommended an open-source MMORPG. Planeshift is a fully immersive 3D world which is based on the Crystal Space 3D engine with no limitations on class, weapons and armour so there is no need for micro purchases that seem to plague a lot of free MMORPGs. The game is also multi-platform so you can play with your friends who run Windows or Mac.
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Turned out the entire system was running Linux.
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Frictional Games may be a small Swedish indie studio, but the outfit has a flair for atmosphere and production values which make its horror titles stand out as much as any heavyweight developer. We were impressed with the earlier Penumbra series of games, and found them genuinely chilling, although Amnesia: The Dark Descent takes everything up a notch again. Or down a notch, perhaps, given the descending theme. Amnesia is a first-person horror survival game with adventure style and physics puzzles, alongside stealth elements.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kopete ex-maintainer and all around Basket case, Matt Rogers.
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I guess Sabayon 5.4 hasn’t really changed much from version 5.3, which had many of the same bugs that I experienced today. I simultaneously love it for its vast collection of applications included out-of-the-box and hate it for its stability issues, which still haven’t been resolved despite using the extremely stable KDE 4.5. I guess this is going to get a solid “meh” from me. (That said, don’t be surprised to see me testing the next version of Sabayon when it comes out.)
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From time to time we hear the question, what actually is KDE e.V., what’s its role in the KDE community? Let me try to answer this question here.
In short, KDE e.V. is the organization, which represents, supports, and provides governance to the KDE community. It gives the community a legal body so it can participate in activities which require a legal representation, somebody handling money, or a way to legitimize individuals to speak and act for the community.
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GNOME Desktop
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For some strange reasons, I am not able to enable clutterview in my Ubuntu Maverick. When I press F4, it just shows a black screen. Hence the ammonkey’s screenshot above. Another important feature worth mentioning is the integration for zeitgeist search engine. Take a look at the awesome video by ammonkey himself demonstrating zeitgeist search engine.
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Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.
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And then of course there is Debian. I think about half the servers we have deployed are Debian based and indeed I like it very much. Desktop however is another story, many of our test runs have miserably failed due to unsupported graphic cards, malfunctioning wireless support and so on.
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $41.75 with the current price action closing at just $41.00 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.
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Fedora
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The Board agreed to move forward with the last statement, and will be voting on whether or not to finalize the statement at this coming Monday’s Board meeting.
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Debian Family
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Megatotoro was kind enough to remove Gloria and install Mepis for me, after which, as in the Sioux hanblecchia, I was left alone on the hilltop…or, more accurately, inside the Mepis pyramids. This is the beginning of my challenge: For the next week, I will only use Mepis on my netbook to feel the differences. Remember, since I am not a computer guru, all I have is my limited empiric access to this fascinating world.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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* Ubuntu One was greatly improved with lots of bug fixes with focus on stability and better nautilus integration. Users can now create account with out a need to visit a browser. The web interface was improved and feels more intuitive.
* An Android application was released for Ubuntu One and a new feature introduced where Ubuntu One will stream music to phones.
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Toshiba’s AC100 is certainly an interesting notebook on the face of it: Tegra 2 processor, full QWERTY and plenty of battery life, but the Android OS does mean it’s definitely a companion device and not your sole ultraportable. That could all change, however, now a hack for loading Ubuntu onto the AC100 has been developed; Carrypad pulled together the instructions and files from tosh-ac100.wetpaint.org, ac100.gudinna.com and the official Toshiba forums and managed to get his AC100 up and running with Ubuntu 10.10.
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Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat, will be released in just a couple of weeks. That got me reflecting on the fact that I have been a happy user of Ubuntu for what must be over 5 years now. That’s a long time!
The GNU/Linux variants are the only OSes I’ve used where I really have the flexibility to define my own workflow (example). So they are a pleasure to use (ok, most of the time). I use a computer for many, many hours a day nearly every day. And the time spent customizing software and learning it is a drop in the bucket when it’s amortized over the months and years I’m going to spend using it. Sure, Windows and Mac OS are a bit more learnable and easier to get started with— but they are much less usable. And for me, and most other people who sit at a computer for a living, that is precisely the wrong optimization to make.
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Flavours and Variants
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The only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I’ve done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS.
wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name).
The other reason I wanted to test this is because I wanted to try to make a “light” version of my Fresh OS respin. Yeah, I know this is based on Ubuntu while the regular version is based on Debian, but I’ve heard murmurs in the wattOS forums of the next wattOS version being based on Debian anyway. Anyway, this means that I will also be testing the installation procedure as well as a few other things post-installation.
[...]
Overall, I think wattOS is a great distribution that is highly customizable and is a great way to revive an old computer with modern software. I do still feel slightly cheated by the absence of the power management tools. I highly recommend anyone to try it out. (See? I did include the download link this time!)
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Overall it works great – just as well as Crunchbang, but with update to date software. The only thing I didn’t like was that there was no update gui – I needed to run apt-get to find out stuff is ready for update – this also annoyed me with CrunchBang. Come on guys, every major distro (including Ubuntu, upon which it’s based) has some way of letting the user know there are updates to be installed. The user shouldn’t have to go manually checking every few days.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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In a head-on comparison, Firefox 4 wins over its Microsoft arch-enemy. But that does not mean Internet Explorer 9 is bad. Far from it. Furthermore, the fact the browser scene has another new player, a good one with big teeth and a decent punch, should make you really excited. As the end user, you will benefit from even more attention and better and cheaper products. This is what fierce competition is all about. You.
Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are going to be great browsers once released. If you’re a Firefox user, no need to abandon your favorite product. It’s still the good ole stuff that made the difference and broke the monopoly. If you’re an Internet Explorer user, now you truly have a good browser, which you can use and be proud of.
And that would be all.
I hope you enjoyed the article. If not, feel free to point out where I might be wrong.
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Firefox is my default web browser, which can be mainly attributed to its amazing add-on support and customizability. But other browsers have emerged (Chrome) or improved to a point, that Firefox feels old fashioned in certain categories. Especially speed and performance wise. If you ever experienced how fast Chrome or Opera are opening the most complex websites, and then compared that to Firefox, you know that something is amiss there.
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CMS
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The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its flagship web site, economist.com. The homepage is Drupal powered, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more. The Economist evaluated several open source CMS and proprietary solutions aimed at media publishers. In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces. The Economist will be adding lots of social tools to its site over time, and doing so on its existing platform was too slow/inefficient.
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Business
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Recent surveys have found that small and medium-size businesses are increasingly willing to consider open source tools. Not surprisingly, small businesses and large enterprises are predisposed to different categories of open source software. Survey data suggest that ERP is one category where small businesses are more likely to adopt open source than their large enterprise peers.
Several open source ERP vendors are vying for a share of the action. Small-business owners and/or their IT department heads should consider whether an open source ERP package could meet their business needs as their companies grow.
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Project Releases
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I have spent the last few weeks working on setting up nightly tarball builds of GIMP, GEGL and babl. Today I am glad to announce that this is up and running.
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Introduction
BIND 9.7.2-P2 is a maintenance release for BIND 9.7.
This document summarizes changes from BIND 9.7.1 to BIND 9.7.2-P2. Please see the CHANGES file in the source code release for a complete list of all changes.
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Government
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The National Archives is today launching a new Open Government Licence, which makes it faster and easier than ever before to re-use public sector information.
The UK Open Government Licence is a key element of the Government’s commitment to greater transparency. It provides a single set of terms and conditions for anyone wishing to use or license government information and removes some of the existing barriers to re-use.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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At the moment, due to limitations in the GCC compiler only 128k of flash are immediately useable but we’re very close to unlocking the whole memory space.
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Programming
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I’ve finished writing and editing Modern Perl: The Book, and it’s gone into production, which means that Onyx Neon is preparing a print-ready PDF to give to the printers. The book should be available in print by the end of October, if not sooner.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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To recap, what I am offering is to think of CC as an enterprise operating on three separate spheres, each with its distinct, although definitely not independent, value contribution. The first is the contribution to transactions between actors in the creative fields, the second is the institutional contribution and the third is the contribution in the normative field.
The idea is that this can serve as the baseline for analysis, a fundamental categorization which lends itself to further sub-categorization, by field, by activity, by actor and by CC tool, but that doesn’t lose track of the way all of these tie into the one primary goal.
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Technically the video is impressive, it shows the software advancements and the grown experience of the team, it had good music and voices and it slightly longer. Still… I think it will be a smaller success compared with its predecessor, Big Buck Bunny.
Simon Josefsson – “Autobuild”
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I was trying to figure out a topic to write about. I usually focus on Tutorials and tips, as not being a native English speaker, my grammar is not good enough to write opinion posts.
This time I decided to write about the future of Linux, and I was focusing of topics like:
* Need of marketing
* Teaching children how to use computers with Linux instead of others.
* Focus on new devices, like smart phones, tablets, etc.
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Desktop
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My wife is a special case of another kind. Once the initial learning for Linux was over, she would have been happy as a pig in mud. I spent a day with her getting Gnome configured to look and act as much like Windows XP as possible. And everything was pretty much working OK. But Danielle is an Excel guru. She stopped using Google Docs’ spreadsheet function because it was too basic for her needs. So, for her, using OpenOffice.org’s Calc is like trying to fly a stealth bomber in which all the buttons were moved to random locations in the cockpit. As far as I can tell, everything she wants to do is possible, but it’s somewhere else or done in a really weird way. I don’t regularly do 1/4 of what she does with spreadsheets, so I have no idea where these things are. Unlike problems with Nautilus or Rhythmbox where I use the programs daily and, therefore, know what to do, I have no idea how to do the things she wants to do. And the inline help has left her….unsatisfied.
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So, TFA and some of the comments are pure ignorance. The presumption is that OpenOffice.org has failed as desktop software because M$’s Office still remains active. What nonsense! That is “winner-takes-all” and not relevant to the question of success or failure. Being driven from the market is only one way to fail and monopolizing the market is only one way to succeed.
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Server
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Intel was caught napping on 64bitness. They may be napping on the ideal cloudy server. If Intel lets ARM march in, ARM and GNU/Linux could take a big chunk out of Wintel in the server/workstation space. What’s wrong with a ton of passively cooled CPUs on a motherboard? Is Intel worried for the CPU cooler makers? Is Intel worried that ARM may be better at this role than Atom?
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Dell and Canonical have jointly certified a range of PowerEdge servers for Ubuntu Server Edition. The majority of systems have been certified for the current version 10.04 LTS, which Canonical plans to maintain until April 2015. Some older models, have been certified with older versions down to Ubuntu 8.04.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Under the release management of Apple’s Jeremy Huddleston, the first release candidate for the first point release in the X.Org Server 1.9 series is now available. X.Org Server 1.9.1 will be the first update to X.Org Server 1.9, which was released in August, and should make it out around the same time as the X.Org 7.6 katamari release later in October.
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Applications
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Linux only (maybe): The free, open-source image editor, GIMP, uses multiple windows for its tools and dialogs, but they’re getting combined into a single window in a future release. Impatient types can combine everything right now, though, with a Python script.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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If you’re not familiar with the ‘Tetris’ then welcome to earth – I will take you to our leader. Everyone else has likely succumbed at least once to the addictive puzzler and as such it needs no formal introduction.
Hexglass is a Tetris-styled puzzle game with a slight difference. Instead of using square blocks to create a ‘Tetris’ you are instead given hexagonal shapes of varying forms. You must arrange, rotate and align these into horizontal rows of hexagonal bricks, completing a row makes it disappear and scores you some points – just like traditional Tetris.
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Desktop Environments
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At long last, the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) have reached a beta status for their version 1.0 release. Among the libraries hitting this beta status are Eina, Eet, Evas, Ecore, Embryo, Edje, E_Dbus, Efreet, and Eeze. New snapshots are also available for Enlightenment and Elementary.
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GNOME Desktop
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Richard Hughes updated his pack of freely distributable generic ICC profiles that are used by GNOME Color Manager.
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September has beaten our previous record month 
. In total approximately $635 has been received from in affiliate fees from Amazon compared to the previous record of $500 a nice 27% increase
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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What I’m looking for is a distro that supports the latest version of KDE, uses pulseaudio, networkmanager and usually sports the latest kernel. Bonus if they refuse to package Mono. Fedora used to be the ideal distro for me but after F14 this will change because of the new policy. Fedora will eventually turn into Fedbuntu.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Two new T Shirts for the Maverick Meerkat release of Ubuntu that comes out in just over a week have appeared in the Canonical Store.
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It is my great honor to be able to announce a new Ubuntu Classroom event that will be taking place: LoCo Days! To quote the wiki, “Most Classroom sessions done in the Ubuntu community are done in English. However, we have a large LoCo community as well.
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Under the hood Maverick Meerkat uses the 2.6.35-22.33 Linux kernel, which is Ubuntu’s take on the 2.6.35.4 stable kernel. What’s noteworthy about this kernel is that it’s a bit more stable than previous ones and it includes support for Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors. Sandy Bridge is Intel’s next generation of PC and server chips. That doesn’t matter now except for developers, but if you want to get the most from your next high-end PC purchase in 2011, you’ll want this support.
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Flavours and Variants
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The plasma-widget-message-indicator is not new to Kubuntu, but it got some nice improvements in this cycle. It got a visual overhaul to fit the new visual theme of KDE 4.5 (and in my opinion looks generally more pleasing to the eye), but the new killer feature is one you can’t see at all.
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Phones
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Android
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Consumers don’t pay attention to patent infringement cases. Unless the court opts to halt sales of Motorola’s Android smartphones, which is also unlikely, the market for Android devices will keep skyrocketing.
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The bottom line is that Android is an open ecosystem–much more open than the one surrounding Apple’s iPhone. As long as Android is open, everything from porn to GPS tracking will be more likely to show up on the platform than it is on Apple’s. Increasingly, though, it’s precisely the openness of Android that is making it an attractive platform, and one predicted by many researchers to become much more dominant in coming years.
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If you think back to what you were doing digitally 10 years ago, and then think about what you’re doing today, odds are that you work with video, graphics and audio much more than you ever did before. Within the world of open source, there are not only outstanding free applications that can improve your experience in these areas, but there are many free guides and tutorials to get you going with them. In this post, you’ll find a huge number of resources for pumping up your multimedia muscles. Spend some time with these, and you’ll collect some rich dividends.
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It is possible that we’ll see standardization of componentry around specific projects like Hadoop – although even that seems unlikely with the rampant proliferation of query, import and other ecosystem projects – but I do not expect to see a standard stack of software used to tackle generic Big Data problems, because there really aren’t many generic Big Data problems. Inconvenient as that might be from a vocabulary perspective.
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# Guadalinux on hundreds of thousands of computers in schools and offices in Andalusia, Spain. A million downloads so far.
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Apache Shindig 2.0 is available to download and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence. An overview of the project explains Shindig’s history and how it implements the OpenSocial specification.
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Events
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In a recent post (Hackers Play “Social Engineering Capture The Flag” At Defcon), I pointed to a game in which contestants used the telephone to convince company employees to voluntarily cough up information they probably shouldn’t have.
Of 135 “targets” of the social engineering “game,” 130 blurted out too much information. All five holdouts were women who gave up zero data to the social engineers.
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Web Browsers
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Mountain View updated Chrome to 7.0.517.24 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. But the latest release is light on new features, which has left some Chrome fans a bit nonplussed.
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Databases
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group recently released PostgreSQL 9.0, with major new features and more than 200 addons and improvements for the popular database.
If you look at the release notes you’ll find a ton of new features and enhancements to existing features. For example, this release brings better error messages for unique constraints, improvements in PL languages for stored procedures, and a lot more. Wading through the PostgreSQL 9.0 release notes is a DBA’s delight, but what are the top features in this release? I pinged PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus and got some input on the most important features for PostgreSQL 9.
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Oracle
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Gosling sums the whole dispute up as “all about money,” and provides many more details in the transcript.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source cloud players are pursuing promising hybrid strategies, and as that continues, their flexibility may make them the big winners.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While GCC 4.5 has been around since this past April, if you are still living with GCC 4.4 for whatever reason (like being hit with a massive performance regression), you may be pleased to know that on this Sunday afternoon there is the GCC 4.4.5 release that’s now available. GCC 4.4.5 was delayed a bit, but it’s here and offers up bug-fixes but no major new features.
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Project Releases
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ForgeRock has announced OpenDJ, a Java based open source directory server as part of its I3 platform. OpenDJ, a standard compliant LDAP directory server built for scalability and stability, is a based on OpenDS, a project initially developed by Sun Microsystems, and ForgeRock has announced that a key OpenDS developer, Ludovic Poitou, has joined its ranks. ForgeRock CEO Lasse Andresen said “It’s a real delight to work with him again”. Enterprise subscriptions to OpenDJ are available now from ForgeRock.
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Government
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This state of play report on recent PSI initiatives in Greece discusses the national transposition of the INSPIRE Directive by the Greek Parliament: the National Infrastructure for Geospatial Information (3882/2010). This is a vitally important piece of legislation both in the context of open data and the regulation of Public Sector Information. It adopts a life cycle approach and increases the threshold of protection of the re-use of public sector information. This was the result of lengthy process and a concentrated effort to create a functional and sustainable system for the sharing of Geospatial Information in the context of the Greek legal system. The success of Law 3882/2010 is something yet to be tested in its implementation. However, the author concludes that it is significant as a model for increasing administrative capacity in dealing with open data. This report demonstrates the value of the EU focus on INSPIRE and PSI legislation.
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Openness/Sharing
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Jean-Claude Bradley is the master when it comes to organising collaborations around diverse sets of online tools. The UsefulChem and Open Notebook Science Challenge projects both revolved around the use of wikis, blogs, GoogleDocs, video, ChemSpider and whatever tools are appropriate for the job at hand. This is something that has grown up over time but is at least partially formally organised. At some level the tools that get used are the ones Jean-Claude decides will be used and it is in part his uncompromising attitude to how the project works (if you want to be involved you interact on the project’s terms) that makes this work effectively.
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Open Access/Content
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This naming of a threat seemed interesting when read in connection with Steven Bell’s recent ACRLog post, “Underground Resource Sharing,” in which he related the outrage over Netflixgate to a blog post by a scholar who was horrified to discover that once he finished his degree, the library cut him off from JSTOR. (Apparently he thought an alumni association deal would keep the connection open to everything; anyone who has had to negotiate a license agreement to spend over ten thousand dollars to share two seats across the total population of three institutions, each kicking in over 10K for the privilege is now rolling around on the floor laughing so hard it hurts. Or … well, it hurts, anyway.) How was he supposed to get any work done? He reported feeling a “fresh surge of hatred” for his alma mater. (Excuse me, but does this mean everything you publish in future will be open access? Whose fault is it that research findings have to be paid for and fenced off? You’ll find a hint if you look in the mirror.) Comments on his post pointed out that, duh, you just get a friend to send articles to you, or you join a Facebook or FriendFeed group dedicated to swapping articles or just get somebody’s login. Too bad we spent so much on EEBO – apparently everyone has a bootleg login.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Who gets to decide what you do on the internet: you or your internet service provider? Until recently, the answer was simple: you decide which services and websites you want visit. This is changing rapidly, however. Most internet providers want to restrict your internet traffic. Unless the European Commission prohibits them from doing so. Bits of Freedom together with EDRi on 30 September 2010 urged the European Commission to prohibit this. If you have 5 minutes, you can do the same.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Supported by a conglomerate of file-sharing sites and applications, the VODO project offers a novel distribution platform for indie filmmakers. The model has already proven itself as all major releases have been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users. However, to really tap into the core of peer-to-peer distribution, the focus will now shift to peer-to-peer promotion.
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Berkeley, CA-September 28, 2010…A group of leading experts on copyright law and policy released a report today that explores ideas for meaningful reforms to the U.S. copyright system. Crafted over three years by a group of legal academics, private practitioners, and corporate attorneys, the report examines several ways to improve and update the law in an era of rapid technological change.
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Law firm Gallant & Macmillan, which was threatened with a DDos attack by 4chan yesterday, appears to have disappeared from the internet. It is unclear whether the host disconnected the domain in advance of the attack or whether Gallant & Macmillan is now the latest company to be forced offline through traffic overload.
Anonymous group 4chan began waging war on copyright bodies and solicitors involved in accusing internet users of copyright infringement as part of what it described as a ‘operation payback’.
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It’s being reported by some tech writers that Gallant Macmillan might have been taken down with a new ddos by users from 4chan (It also suggests the possibility that the site was taken down intentionally by its owners.)
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After disgruntled letter recipients mailed off a barrage of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority against ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, he told his advisor that not only did he “feel defeated” but that in his long-term interests it might be better if he “shut up shop”. Doing so, he explained, would bankrupt him.
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In just under 15 minutes, the film narrates a traditional fantasy story with all the pathos expected from the genre – a young female warrior called Sintel finds an injured baby dragon and nurses it back to health. When the baby dragon, barely able to fly, is kidnapped by a powerful older dragon, Sintel takes up the pursuit.
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ACTA
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According to the latest leaks, on 25 August 2010, the wording of the section on the Internet entitled “Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment” has been softened but it still gives governments a lot of scope to introduce repressive provisions including filtering and a “graduated response” leading to the disconnection of illegal downloaders.
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QuestionCopyright.org: Street Interviews About Copyright, Chicago, June 2006 (2006)
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The detectives, no doubt eager to solve their case, save money & get it all done a little bit faster, are running a GNOME-based operating system on Windows branded HP computers.
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Server
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As I recently discovered WordPress.com has a pretty neat sharing service support. It essentially adds a bunch of social network links to the bottom of your pages. Which makes a lot of sense, because every content provider (e.g. a blogger) would like their content to be spread to the world and what better way to archive this than by giving the user the means to easily share something they like or find interesting.
One problem though. Since I am a free software advocate and suppose that you, my readers, are too, I prefer Identi.ca (which is using a free software microblogging software) over Twitter. Yet WordPress.com does not have a share button for Identi.ca…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week on the show: AMD vice president embarrasses herself, native ZFS on Linux, the Seabird concept phone, the new Ubuntu application review process, the usual Microsoft fun and Dan roots his Desire and reviews CyanogenMod 6.
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Plone 4 is the latest version of the state-of-the-art open source CMS.
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Kernel Space
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I really dig the Kindle 3. The small improvements add up to a significant improvement in usability. As my friend Chris put it, “as soon as I turned it on I realized I did the right thing.”
For the curious, I got ahold of the Kindle 3′s source code and generated a patch against 2.6.26 (I did the same for the Kindle 1′s kernel).
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Two weeks ago, I was in Toulouse, France, at a multitouch workshop organised by Stèphane Chatty. After the workshop, in the same week was XDS. The workshop had a nice mix of people, Benjamin Tissoires whom I credit with kicking off much of the multitouch work with his evdev hacks, Pengfei, a PhD student of Stèphane, and Chase Douglas from Canonical, involved with their multitouch efforts. Ping Cheng from Wacom, Gowri Ries and Pascal Auriel from Stantum represented the hardware side. And Zeno Albisser and Denis Dzyubenko from Nokia for the toolkit side (Qt). We talked multitouch for two days and I think we got a lot done – not in code but in concepts and general design questions. The current state is essentially that both hardware and software guys are waiting on us, the X server, to integrate multitouch.
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Applications
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In the course of my day job I tend to get drawn into interesting niche projects because of my Linux expertise. Recall that the Mothership (that corporate entity located somewhere on the East coat which pays me fairly well to work for them) is *shudder* a Windows shop, primarily.
However, Open Source Software is making not-too-subtle encroachments into even this bastion of All Windows All The Time. I got a call one day a couple of weeks ago from a semi-stressed project leader who at the suggestion of the client was being encouraged to use an application built entirely out of open source components. We have it running on a virtual Linux server. It’s called REDCap, and was developed by Vanderbilt University. Basically, it is a web-based interface to an underlying mysql engine. It is a highly specialized database tool developed specifically to support data collection for clinical studies.
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Most people including myself are hooked on using wget to do whatever quickies that we need to do on our servers. I use it in my scripts, crontab entries and even site mirroring and web crawling.
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Proprietary
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AutoCad which is frequently touted as a killer app unavailable on GNU/Linux has some new developments:
* some cloud services which may with GNU/Linux to view drawings via a browser
[...]
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Instructionals/Technical
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Everyone loves the convenience of Skype and other voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, but the official tools still tend to focus on making simple one-to-one phone calls. One of the most common limitations mentioned is how difficult it is to record the digital audio stream on your computer. Podcasters, teams holding conference calls, and reporters doing interviews (among others) all need to record calls for later use. There are a few stand-alone tools built to work with specific applications, but with just a little additional time you can set up a system capable of recording audio from any application — Skype, various Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) clients, group chat tools, and many more.
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Wine
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New to Wine 1.3.4 is support for right-to-left mirrored windows, Winelib now supporting the ARM architecture, a new taskkill.exe built-in application, the Inetcpl control panel being fleshed out, AcceptEx has been implemented, and there’s improved security checks for SSL connections. There’s also the usual translation updates and bug-fixes. The Wine library now supporting the ARM architecture is good for those interested in wanting to run Windows applications on your ARM-based netbooks or other mobile-focused devices.
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Games
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If you like MahJongg and solitaire card style games then you would be happy to learn that two games were recently released, one is free as a beer, other cost $10.
Those games are made by the indie company named Lost Luggage Studios.
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Would you buy an open source gaming console? How about some purpose made open source gaming software that you could install on your computer? Do you think there is a market for this?
[...]
The latter two are already familiar concepts, with games already available for download on many platforms (Steam, App Store, Android Market, Ubuntu Software Center etc) and as you should all know, games have been available for purchase from a store since… well… since ever.
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Welcome to the tenth mega compilation of Linux games. The magic number! … one more … This time, I truly do not have any grand opening. The only thing I’d like to mention is that the games included in the Humble Indie Bundle, as mentioned in my Linux news article, will be reviewed separately, in the eleventh compilation.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.
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Red Hat Family
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Those of us who write for the insular world of the open-source-software enthusiast don’t often think about how the rest of the planet looks at Linux and other free software.
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Red Hat says the award recognised OSS as the most successful Advanced Business Partner in the region this year and acknowledges its work migrating datacentres at major corporates locally to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform.
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Fedora
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What am I talking about? HTML5 and javascript. Javascript has gotten significantly faster in just the last two years. In some cases over 100 times faster then just 2 years ago. Who drove that? Google and Chrome. Why did they do it? They realize HTML5 is disruptive technology. What we think of advanced “web technologies” today, are still based on html 4.01. Not changed in over 10 years. Ajax was a nice addition 7 or so years back but the foundations, the primitives are 10 years old.
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Yes, finally there’s an updated updates policy for Fedora.
I think it’s worth reading because, as the announcement says, it can be improved, clarified and adjusted; but it’s a very good starting point.
I was writing a more or less deep review of the document, but my internet connection failed, Chromium crashed (!), and here I am writing this post again, so instead of explaining something that you can read yourself in the policy page, I’m going to focus in the most interesting part: the releases.
The updates on the branched release are divided into pre beta, beta to pre release, pre release and release. Although the updates policy helps to have a more solid release, the updates after the release are a very important part of the user experience (for example, it’s an excellent way to polish the rough edges of the release).
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Debian Family
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There are a number of different operating systems today based on the latest Linux kernel, and because Linux itself happens to be open source, anyone can monopolize on the concept and create their own Linux distribution, Ubuntu being one of the distros that rose from the dust of the once great Debian. Debian was an excellent distribution in it’s day, but it fell out of favor for a number of reasons…
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MEPIS is a Linux distribution (a.k.a “distro”) that is designed to give new users a no frills experiece when trying it for the first time. It is based on Debian and gives users the option of either running it as a LiveCD or installing it permanently on your hard drive. When run in the LiveCD mode, the OS gives users the ability to test drive the OS from either their USB stick or a DVD and explore all the available features without making any permanent changes to the filesystem of the host machine. This would mean that you could try this distro on your MAC or Windows PC and then install it later if you so choose.
[...]
Eventually, it comes down to you, the user. With MEPIS 11 in the pipeline and Linux distributions available dime a dozen for you to test, MEPIS or any other popular distro would be ideal for you if you want to break free (literally `0) from the shackles you are wearing while using proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows. The community fourms are always there to help if you do have any questions and the least you could do is try the LiveCD for yourself and see if it suits your needs.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Amongst the many improvements the Ubuntu ARM team have made happen this cycle are support for the community-driven, high-performance, embedded Dual-core ARM Cortex A9 mobile development OMAP4 Panda board and the forthcoming Beagle board XM which boasts 512mb of low-power RAM and a nippy 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor.
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Spreadubuntu is a repository for marketing material by and for the community, with the goal of increasing the market share of Ubuntu.
It will see a theme update soon, to match the new visual identity of Ubuntu. I have been kindly asked to help with the logo.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.
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Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release candidate is here and it’s packed with a slew of new features. The amount of changes happening with Ubuntu lately is quite overwhelming. Here’s a quick look through the improvements in the new Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s flagship device, the Nexus One, is always the first phone to receive the latest software updates. It was the first to obtain the initial over-the-air update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) and this update provided the basis for much development and discussion across the site.
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I’m a big fan of instant messaging apps. They’re fun and easy—plus, like Google Voice, they’re sometimes a money-saving alternative to texting via your mobile number. Living on the west coast, they’re one way I keep in touch with my east coast family, especially my busy brother and my mom, who loves her iPad’s expandable, easy-on-the-eyes fonts. Plus, I sometimes ping Ars’ staff on their IM accounts to work out stories (hey Nate, Eric!).
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Tablets
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StarNet Communications of Sunnyvale, California, a leading developer of X11 connectivity solutions, announced iLIVEx, a fast, secure and fault-tolerant X11 client that turns the Apple iPad into an X terminal for powerful Linux and Unix mainframe and supercomputers.
iLIVEx is available from the App Store for $14.99. It allows iPad users to connect to Unix and Linux desktops and applications hosted on remote Unix and Linux servers. iLIVEx features an ultra-thin data transfer protocol allowing for LAN-like performance, even over 3G connections. iLIVEx connections also run over securely encrypted SSH tunnels. Built-in session persistency allows users to reconnect to their remote desktops should the iPad get disconnected, turned off or the user temporarily switches to another iPad app.
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We have previously reported on Lightspark working on a new graphics engine for this open-source project to implement the Adobe Flash/SWF specification. This new graphics engine leverages OpenGL and Cairo, but now the lead developer is considering a different approach.
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I really like the recent trend of communities forking free software projects when they become unhappy with the direction that the parent company or organization is taking. The first example of this in my memory was when the creator of MySQL, Michael Widenius, created a fork called MariaDB due to his unhappiness with the purchase of Sun Microsytems by Oracle. Widenius feared that Oracle would damage or destroy MySQL, the free software database that his blood, sweat, and tears created and that Sun faithfully supported. Recent events have shown that his fears were valid. More recently, former members of the OpenOffice.org Foundation created a fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice due to similar fears. Today, it was announced that some members of the Madriva community have created a Mandriva fork called Mageia because they no longer trust the direction in which Mandriva is being taken.
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MySQL alone has had at least four forks (Percona, Our Delta, MariaDB, and Drizzle).
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Core developers of large projects are almost always paid developers. This is true for Eclipse, JBoss, Red Hat, most Google projects and, notably, OpenSolaris, among many others. These developers are either employees of companies that have a commercial interest in the finished product, or that derive revenue from ongoing support of the product. These developers, then, don’t have any reason to join a fork. In fact, they have strong reasons not to.
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Events
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One thing I have learned at the Open World Forum is that Europe’s approach to open source is highly political, but not in the way you think.
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Sometimes late, but always on time, Future of Web Apps added me as a speaker this week to the Carsonified-powered Future of Web Apps London event. After some swapping my schedule around since I’ve been speaking about the Federated Social Web at Joi Ito and Digital Garage’s New Context Conference in Tokyo, I’l be speaking mid-day in London about connecting the social web.
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The last decade has seen many open source activities run for the benefit of a single company, but the roots of software freedom can be found in the synchronisation of part of the interests of many equal participants. The next phase of open source should embrace “open-by-rule” and have the liberties of every participant respected equally. We have already seen OpenStack and The Document Foundation arise; I believe there will be more.
The benefits that businesses derive from open source – especially flexibility, vendor independence and the cost savings that result from both through accelerated and simplified procurement – arise from Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Jeffrey Hammond presented research showing lower barriers to adoption of open source software in enterprises as their understanding of and comfort with open source improve.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is paying special attention to Indonesia these days because Firefox has become the leading browser in the country with up to 70 percent market share. Exactly why, we’re unfortunately as baffled as Mozilla is.
On Sept 27, the Mozilla Foundation’s chairperson, Mitchell Baker, and its director of Asia business development, Gen Kanai, and id-mozilla, the Indonesian Mozilla community, held a public talk at Blitz Megaplex at Pacific Place in Jakarta about Mozilla’s market-leading position in Indonesia.
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I’m not sure if my hat is going off to Firefox for being a good watchdog, or to the Swiss Consumer Protection office, ironically, for slipping up on this one. I wanted to see their new web page on how to find out where your wooden furniture (and other objects) comes from.
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This new version includes all changes made upstream in Firefox 3.6.10.
Now the privacy extension gives an alert everytime a bookmark containing javascript code is stored.
Now, by default, HTML5 local storage is disabled. If you desire it, then it must be manually enabled.
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Mitchell was interviewed by Bernard Leong and Daniel Cerventus, two of the hosts of This Week in Asia podcast.
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When you are designing and creating a browser that’s used by 400,000,000 users of the Web, it goes without saying that a lot of responsibility lies in your hands. A crippling bug or fundamentally flawed user interface not only turns people away from your browser, but from the entire Internet. When a geriatric user with Window Me and IE6 announces that they can’t make a website work, it’s not their fault. It’s not the Web’s fault either: it’s the browser! Fortunately, a rather gifted designer is at the helm of Firefox.
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Databases
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With the release of Build 1802, Drizzle, the community driven fork of MySQL, is now officially “beta” software. The new version includes an enhanced version of drizzledump which can now be used to migrate databases from MySQL to Drizzle without any intermediate files. When connected to a Drizzle server it will perform a normal dump, but it it detects a MySQL server it converts all structures and data into a Drizzle compatible format which can be sent directly to a Drizzle server.
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MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.
The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don’t expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.
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Oracle
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BY VIRTUE of its purchase of Sun Microsystems last January, Oracle has acquired not just a venerable computer hardware maker but some of the open source community’s best-known applications and building blocks, ranging from database MySQL to the Java platform to operating system Solaris.
Even the free and popular Microsoft Office challenger Open Office now belongs to Oracle.
Oracle isn’t a newcomer to open source – software that is community-produced by developers, often made available at zero or nominal cost, with the software code freely available to anyone to examine or modify. It has long supported many open-source applications and has been a champion of open-source operating system Linux for years.
[...]
To kick things off, James Gosling, the eminent Sun engineer who created Java – a computing platform that was designed to enable developers to write a program once then run it in any computing environment – quit Oracle soon after he became an employee by virtue of its purchase of Sun.
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CMS
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Since many of you have your own open-source projects to promote and support, but may not be as well-versed in web development, I will create an open-source project site for the Billix distribution to demonstrate site building. When you’d like to expand beyond your SourceForge page, you can turn to Drupal.
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Croogo is a free, open source, content management system for PHP. It is built on top of the popular MVC framework CakePHP and is targeted towards developers, designers and administrators. It was first released on October 2009 by Fahad Ibnay Heylaal, and continued to see 6 more releases in less than a year. The project is currently at version 1.3.2 beta, and is being actively developed.
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Education
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I had an interesting class with my grade 9 students today. Usually it is very hard to keep their attention long. Today, I played a video of Richard M Stallman speaking in a college lecture theatre about Free Software. They gave him rapt attention. They got it. I followed up with a bit of history of GNU, Linux and the SCOG v World saga.
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Government
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Yesterday, the United Kingdom made an announcement that radically reformed how it will manage what will become the government’s most important asset in the 21st century: knowledge & information.
On the National Archives website, the UK Government made public its new license for managing software, documents and data created by the government. The document is both far reaching and forward looking. Indeed, I believe this policy may be the boldest and most progressive step taken by a government since the United States decided that documents created by the US government would directly enter the public domain and not be copyrighted.
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Openness/Sharing
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As Wikimedia and the community embark on campaigns and programs to increase video contribution and usage on the site, we are starting to see video usage on Wikimedia sites grow and we hope for it to grow a great deal more. One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.
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Data
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Thanks for your reply – it inspired me to go back and do a little more poking around, in the hopes of giving you more resources to get started. How to do everything is ultimately up to you – consider these notes as options you can choose whether or not to take, possible pointers for places to look if you’re unsure where to begin.
On the technical side, I’d suggest looking at the OpenGeo stack, in particular the OpenLayers javascript library, for implementation. It’s an open source mapping library and they have very supportive core developers and a growing community. Some documentation:
http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers-intro/
http://docs.openlayers.org/
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/
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Open Hardware
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Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad’s appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.
We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).
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Standards/Consortia
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In its continuing attempts to make the Web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65 percent of the bytes on the Web.
Google announced late Thursday afternoon that it’s releasing a developer preview of a new image format, which it’s dubbed WebP. An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for Web pictures and images, WebP should “significantly” reduce the byte size of images, Google promises.
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To clarify, the Street View imagery for Antarctica includes panoramas of an area called Half Moon Island – such as this view of penguins and this one of the landscape. The blue dots you see throughout the continent when dragging the pegman are user-contributed photos.
We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities. We were excited to share a virtual reflection of the real world to enable armchair exploration. Since then, we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to many more places, allowing you to check out a restaurant before dining there, to explore a neighborhood before moving there and to find landmarks along the route of your driving directions.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago has been discovered in Peru.
Scientists say the find shows that key features of the plumage were present quite early on in penguin evolution.
The team told Science magazine that the animal’s feathers were brown and grey, distinct from the black “tuxedo” look of modern penguins.
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Finance
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Top 10 Ideas for Goldman Sachs New Ad Campaign
10. Under Buffett’s protection since 2008
9. Putting the zero in zero-sum game.
8. Government Bailout: $29 billion
SEC Settlement: $550 million
Doing God’s work? Priceless.
7. Helping you forget about Bernie Madoff one CDO at a time
6. Goldman Sachs: America’s Counterparty
5. Let us do for you what we did for Greece.
4. Like we give a fuck what you think about us . . .
3. Goldman Sachs: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s JPMorgan.
2. The Rothschilds were Pussies
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The raids carried out by the FBI against antiwar activists last week are an ominous warning to the entire working class. The police-state tactics show the extent to which basic democratic rights—including the right to free speech and political association—have been undermined in the US.
The Obama administration ordered the invasion of the homes of several individuals—primarily members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)—and the seizure of documents, computers, cell phones, cameras and other personal and political material. Those targeted have been summoned to appear before a grand jury on October 12 and may face criminal prosecution for “material support” for terrorism.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, warned Tuesday of the “blight” of new laws being introduced across the globe allowing people to be cut off from the Internet.
“There’s been a rash of laws trying to give governments and Internet service providers (ISPs) the right and the duty to disconnect people,” he told a conference on web science at the Royal Society in London.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Inspired by the Wikimedia Foundation, I wanted to give a brief update on the past month’s technology work at Creative Commons.
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Four years ago, the MPAA worked with the local Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America to create a special “activity patch” for Boy Scouts to repeat propaganda about how evil file sharing is. For some reason, that story got renewed attention earlier this year, when a few sources came across the 2006 story without checking the date on it. While there’s really nothing new on that story, it does appear that the Boy Scouts are making some absolutely ridiculous suggestions to parents about how to talk to your kids about copyright issues.
That link is to an article in the latest issue of Scouting Magazine, supposedly about the “ethics” of file sharing, and how parents should talk to their children about it. And, yet, it’s entirely one-sided, quoting the RIAA’s claims about “losses,” but oddly leaving out the stacks upon stacks upon stacks upon stacks of research showing that musicians are making more money these days, via alternative business models. You would think that would be a relevant part of the discussion… but it’s totally absent. Someone, apparently, failed their “research the facts” merit badge.
But where the article goes totally off the rails is in telling parents that their children are too stupid to understand the nuances of copyright law, and because of that, they should take an extreme position: one so extreme that they shouldn’t even listen to legally burned CDs…
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Undeterred by the online destruction of ACS:Law, UK lawyers Gallant Macmillan will head off to the High Court on Monday to demand the identities of hundreds more people they claim have been detected sharing files online. While the ISP that holds the identities says it will resist the demand and ask for the hearing to be adjourned, the judge and jury of Operation Payback will pass down their verdict tomorrow, sentencing Gallant Macmillan to a DDoS attack.
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ACTA
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As the 11th round of negotiations for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) gets under way in Tokyo, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its opposition to the way these talks are being held behind closed doors without democratic consultation and to the potentially repressive positions being taken by the countries involved. The negotiators aim to conclude the accord or at least finalize its main points, but the latest draft is unacceptable and must be changed if not abandoned altogether.
According to the latest leaks, on 25 August 2010, the wording of the section on the Internet entitled “Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment” has been softened but it still gives governments a lot of scope to introduce repressive provisions including filtering and a “graduated response” leading to the disconnection of illegal downloaders.
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The Tokyo round of ACTA negotiations concluded earlier today with countries saying that they “resolved nearly all substantive issues and produced a consolidated and largely finalized text.” Earlier reports from Reuters indicated that the latest round of ACTA negotiations in Tokyo, Japan has failed to produce an agreement. That report indicated that there is still disagreement over scope, including geographical indications and patents. A later report indicated that there was a basic agreement.
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The 11th and final round of the negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was concluded successfully in Tokyo, Japan on October 2. The Government of Japan hosted the negotiations.
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Negotiators for an international anti-counterfeit accord failed to reach agreement after more than a week of talks on Saturday, but European Union officials said a final deal was just weeks away.
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ABC reports that Agreement Reached in Tokyo Anti-Counterfeiting Talks
I tried to comment on the article, but even after jumping through hoops, it wouldn’t let me. If it has to pass a moderator my comment is certainly dead in the water. Which is a good reason to have a blog, so I can comment on articles full of misinformation like this one.
Why shouldn’t Kraft be prevented from calling their product “Parmesan” or have to pay royalties to Parma, Cognac, Roquefort or Champagne for infringing on these legally trademarked names? Isn’t that the point? REAL Parmesan cheese comes from Parma. Kraft’s Parmesan Cheese is COUNTERFEIT. That’s what ACTA is all about… stopping piracy, right?
Isn’t that why they want these laws? So THEY get paid every time. But paying someone else is a problem. They don’t want to have to pay others, I guess they like the RIAA/CRIA music business model where everything possible is done to avoid actually paying the artists.
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Canada
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While the rest of the world is walking down the street to the beat of a breathtaking 21st century soundtrack—from free music streaming on their cellphone, thanks to online music services like Pandora—we Canadians are stuck shuffling along in 20th century AM/FM land.
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The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers has written to the Canadian government to criticize Bill C-32. In addition to criticizing virtually every new exception – including many that are far more restrictive than those found in the U.S. – it argues for a system that could lead to permanent termination of Internet access.
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Konsole Demo
On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRBoi1At_0
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10.01.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Technically Linux, which underlies Android, among others, is walled off from Unix from an IP point of view, but the philosophical and architectural lineage goes back to 1969′s Unix. It was an amazingly well thought-out operating system which has stood the test of time mostly due to its modular architecture. It was not always clear that Unix would make it this far, and in many ways it was written off.
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Desktop
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When the word “Linux” is thrown around campus, students may not recognize it as a computer operating system. But the UCLA Linux Users Group wants to educate students about it at its quarterly LUG Installfest on Saturday.
The event, which will be held in Boelter 4760 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., hopes to teach students about Linux, an open-source operating system that is freely available online. The event will also offer free installations for attendees.
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Server
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A new web-based system to cater to online transactions of bills, challans and accounts is being developed on a Linux based platform in Arunachal Pradesh.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Concurrent, a leading provider of real-time Linux operating systems, integrated software and computer solutions for mission-critical applications, today announced that Concurrent’s RedHawk Linux software and NightStar application development tools are now available on GE Intelligent Platforms’ GRA111 graphics processing unit (GPU). Concurrent’s software delivers enhanced performance for the rugged military and aerospace markets served by GE Intelligent Platforms GPUs.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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PKWARE, a provider of data-centric security and compression software, has introduced PKZIP and SecureZIP products for Linux on the System z operating platform.
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STHENO/LX is supported on 5 different Linux distributions: CentOS, Fedora, RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I also found that the Network Manager recognized and configured my Huawei 3G (HSPA) Mobile Broadband USB Dongle with no trouble at all. With a grand total of four clicks, and no text input, I was connected to the Swisscom Mobile Network. It doesn’t get any easier than that!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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froglogic GmbH today announced support for automated testing of Qt GUI applications based on the new Qt 4.7 release.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 2.32 was released a few days ago. As most of the developers focused on the upcoming 3.0 it’s not exactly the most exciting release ever but I’m glad to say that Empathy is one of the modules with the most user-visible changes.
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New Releases
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Fabio Erculiani proudly announced a few minutes ago the immediate availability of the Sabayon Linux 5.4 operating system. The latest release is designed for Linux enthusiasts who want the latest packages and the best performance, but don’t want to spend days getting things working properly.
Sabayon Linux 5.4 comes, as usual, with KDE and GNOME editions, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. It includes cutting-edge software, the latest Linux kernel, the newest GNOME and KDE desktop environments, and lots of surprises!
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $41.75 with the current price action closing at just $41.00 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.
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Using C6EZRun, ARM and Linux developers can easily port their current ARM applications to run on the DSP without changing their ARM code or learning DSP architectures.
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Using C6EZRun, ARM and Linux developers can easily port their current ARM applications to run on the DSP without changing their ARM code or learning DSP architectures.
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Newton said that the XSM is a Linux operating system based switching system. The use of Linux for switching equipment is common across a number of networking vendors, including Cisco where Linux is used extensively in the small business portfolio.
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Qnap did not listed the embedded operating system of either system, but considering that the software is said to be based on Qnap’s Linux-based Turbo NAS server stack, a tuxy foundation appears more than likely for the NMP-1000P.
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ARM-9 processor running Techsol’s proven Medallion Linux OS for performance and reliability
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Few things in life freak me out quite so earnestly as the phrase “swarm of flying robots”. But that’s exactly what the folks out at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) have pulled off now.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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MeeGo is a light weight Linux environment designed to run on netbooks, smartphones, in-car computers, and other devices. The source code for the smartphone version of the OS was released a few months ago, but you still can’t actually walk into a store and buy a phone running MeeGo yet. A small group of hackers, on the other hand, are working on getting the OS to run on existing handsets including the Google Nexus One.
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Sub-notebooks
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An 8GB SSD will hold a Chinese version of Linux, where the T9000 has been specially positioned to cater for the educational market.
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Tablets
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If you love your Apple iPad but wish you could run your favorite ‘nix applications on it, StarNet Communications has an app for that. If you’ve been dying to see Flash apps on the iPad, the company’s got a fix for that, too — and none of it involves a hack that would anger ole’ Steve. StarNet on Thursday released iLIVEx. It turns the iPad into an X terminal that runs Linux and Unix apps hosted on remote servers.
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After launching a double-screened Linux-based e-reader at D8 this year, California-based Kno has now come out with a single-screen tablet textbook.
Kno, Inc. has launched a single-screen version of its Linux based e-reader which extends similar functionality of the dual-screen version announced at the D8 2010 Conference in June 2010.
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Arm plans to add multithreading capabilities to future architectures as it tries to boost the performance of its processors, a company representative said on Tuesday.
The company is looking to include multithreading capabilities depending on application requirements in different segments, said Kumaran Siva, segment marketing manager at Arm, at the Linley Tech Processor conference in San Jose, California.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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KEI has received a letter dated September 28, 2010, from Lic. Alfredo Rendón Algara – Director General Adjunto de Propiedad Industrial of Mexico (IMPI). The letter from the Mexican government is in response to KEI’s earlier letter to C. Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, Presidente Constitucional de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, regarding the position of the Mexican government in the ACTA negotiations. (See also the reply from the President, here). In general, the letter is defensive, and fails to engage in most of the substantive concerns of our earlier letter.
The following are notes from the letter of Lic. Alfredo Rendón Algara:
The letters claims that “the deteriorated international trade”, “the intimate connection” between piracy and terrorism, specially on music, the losses produced by “Chinese and pirate” goods, and “the obsolescence of previous international instrument on intellectual property” are the main reasons that move the Mexican government to become part of the negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Bruno Haible – “Contributing Reusable Code to Gnulib”
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Nintendo Wii developer Marcan has been sharing updates via Twitter on his progress with a PS3 Linux bootloader, one that is currently working on PlayStation 3 Firmware 3.41 (including on the PS3 Slim) and now named AsbestOS.
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Desktop
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I think the success of the Mac is mostly a matter of marketing. Whatever your own personal beliefs, though, there’s no denying that there are certain things Linux clearly does better than Mac OS X. If you’re trying to decide on a platform for your business, these factors are worth keeping in mind.
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I apologize for the long delay of presenting the finalists of our $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest. But, as they say, it’s better late than never. So today, I’m going to present to you the 5 finalists, and we will let our readers and site visitors ultimately decide on who really deserves to win the most coveted price.
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Server
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What does facebook sysadmins have to support?
* Monthly 700 million minutes of time spent on fb
* 6billion pieces of content updated
* 3 billion photos
* 1 million connect implementations
* 1/2 billion active users
Infrastructure Growth
* fb reached a limit on leasing datacenter space
* fb is building their own http://www.facebook.com/prinevilledatacenter
* currently serving out of california and Virginia
Initially a LAMP stack. LB -> Web Servers -> Services/Memcached/Databases
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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As we have talked about in numerous articles now and delivered various benchmarks for different graphics processors from those using a classic Mesa DRI driver to the newer NVIDIA/ATI hardware with Gallium3D support, Mesa 7.9 brings a lot to the table. There are many new features to be found in Mesa 7.9 for all drivers, but in this article, we are specifically looking to see how the OpenGL performance of the classic R600 driver has changed compared to Mesa 7.7 and Mesa 7.8.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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28 September – After reporting a bug for ARES, I received an email from Graebert, that says “BTW:
We have released a final version of ARES Commander on Linux yesterday evening.”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Last week, I came across a tutorial about tweaking a specific parameter in the Linux virtual memory subsystem. So I figured that I would share all of the optimizations that I usually go through in a new installation of Linux.
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Many years ago I helped design a new “update” facility for Digital’s Ultrix operating system. This procedure allowed customers to simply install the system without having to:
o boot the system from tape to single user mode
o edit the configuration file for the kernel
o type in all sorts of arcane technical data about disk controllers,, serial line controllers, etc.
o rebuild the kernel
o install the kernel in place
o reboot the system
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Games
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PC, Linux and Mac hit making huge sums for Swedish indie developer Markus Persson
Currently the topic of furious enthusing on the part of the dev sector’s fashionistas, an indie game called Minecraft is causing a bit of a stir online. So much so, in fact, that right now it’s netting its creator in the region of $350,000 every single day.
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Some time ago, I promised you a tutorial about installing and running World Of Warcraft on the Linux operating system. Well, here goes.
A few caveats before we get our collective geek on: first of all, this is going to be a long post. Certainly, it’ll be longer than we normally give you here at the Melting Pot. It’ll also have a lot of images within it. Again, this isn’t something we’ve done a lot of, so please comment if it’s all messed up for you and I’ll try to fix (particularly people reading via RSS). Finally, this article is only going to cover installation. I’ll do a follow-up article about tweaks and customisation, and probably another article of problem-solving and collective trouble-shooting.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Since I begin to use KDE, my big desire It was to contribut with code, but I would have to study different things (indeed that was what I wanted the most: a challenge), and I admit that I thought many times that I would never be able to do it. So I decided to make talks about “KDE for Beginners” (beginners like I was), It was a quickly way to promote and contribut to FOSS, more quickly than to develop.
I made one talk before Akademy, in the Seminar of Free Software Tchelinux at Caxias do Sul, and after, I made two talks, one at International Free Software Forum and the other happened in the 4th Seminar of Free Software Tchelinux at Pelotas. In these talks I met more KDE users, and who knows coming soon contributors as well.
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Debian
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Debian comes with over 20,000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine) – all of it free.
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Reviews
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Overall, I think ArchBang has regressed a bit from its testing version, from not loading properly under 192 MB of RAM where the previous version could to not being able to handle Mozilla Firefox at all. It has a lot of potential, but I’m intentionally damning it with faint praise, as it definitely could use more polish and more testing. While #! has never failed me in this regard, #!’s website and documentation always includes the warning, “CrunchBang Linux is not recommended for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. CrunchBang Linux could possibly make your computer go CRUNCH! BANG!” While I think it’s funny that #! phrases its disclaimer in this way and is upfront about any possible stability problem, I find it odd that #! has this warning at all given its stability; I think ArchBang needs a similar warning, though what does “ARCH! BANG!” mean?
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In Mandriva the development release was named Cooker. The development release of Mageia will be, like Cooker, a rolling distro. The idea here is that any new packages go into the development release first, where they’re tested and any bugs found in them are fixed; then when the development cycle nears its end the repositories are frozen in preparation for pushing a new stable release (after that the development distro starts again). Of course it’s not recommended to run development releases on day-to-day production machines as, by its very nature, it’s unstable and prone to break. Things tend to break quite a good number of times in development releases however they get fixed pretty fast too, so if you like living on the cutting edge don’t hesitate to join forces with those brave souls who’ll be testing Cauldron; the more the testers the better the stable release that’ll follow as more bugs will get squashed this way.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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How do you get contributors? You recruit from your pool of users! How do you get users, to widen your potential contributor pool and to spread your free software / free culture message? You reach out to them, providing them a compelling reason to care. Okay, great, that’s easy right? We just get out there and send our message out – it’s a great cause – folks will want to help, right?
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People regularly ask me about how they can work for Red Hat, specifically, how they can work on Fedora for Red Hat. Usually, my answer is “Contribute, do good work, get noticed, and you’re likely to be hired”, but at the moment, two positions have opened up.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Wow.
That’s what I can say about Maverick so far.
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The Ubuntu One service originally launched last year with cloud file storage capabilities and support for synchronizing the user’s e-mail address book and notes. Canonical later added the Ubuntu One music store, which integrates into GNOME’s Rhythmbox audio player. When the user purchases music from the store, the files are deployed directly into their Ubuntu One cloud storage space and are automatically propagated to all of the computers that the user has connected to Ubuntu One. The new music streaming feature complements the music store by giving the user mobile access to their music. It’s worth noting that the streaming feature works with any MP3 that the user uploads to their Ubuntu One storage account, not just the songs that they have purchased from the Ubuntu One music store.
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OpenOffice’s future was doomed from the day when Oracle acquired SUN Microsystems. The eventuality became even more obvious when they pulled the plug on OpenSolaris. Thankfully, OpenOffice is an open source software and leading contributors of the original project has forked OpenOffice and the new project will be called LibreOffice.
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A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the Release Candidate (RC) version of the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.
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Flavours and Variants
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Julian Lavergne has released the Lubuntu Maverick Beta 2 iso is now available for testing. This is the last testing iso before the final release of Lubuntu 10.10. As the iso is still not build with Ubuntu architecture, this release and the final one will be named “Beta”.
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GnackTrack is a Live (and installable) Linux distibution designed for Penetration Testing and is based on Ubuntu. Although this sounds like BackTrack, it’s most certainly not; it’s very similar but based on the much loved GNOME!
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Android was specifically cited as an operating system platform for the latter, but the 1074K CPS is said to run any MIPS32-compatible software, which would include Linux and Windows CE. At CES in January of this year, MIPS showed off a number of Android-based set-top box designs from its partners using MIPS-based Sigma Designs processors.
The 1074K CPS core is supported by tools from CodeSourcery, CriticalBlue and others, including MIPS Technologies’ own development tools and probes, and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) versions of Linux, MIPS adds.
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Phones
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Android
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One of the constant complaints about the Android diaspora is its fragmentation — the increasingly diverse multiplicity of OS versions and devices that are so relevant yet so confusing to the average consumer’s mobile decision-making process.
[...]
Finally, you can select multiple devices to do side-by-side comparisons.
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The Verdict: RIM Right on Target, But Still Some Work To Do
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The September survey found that 58.6 percent of the more than 2,300 mobile app developers queried believe Android has a better long-term outlook compared to 34.9 percent for Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iOS platform.
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This is a community project. Its goal is to advertise Free / Libre / Open Source Software and Projects among the community and on non-commercial web sites. Nobody is making money out of this. Publishing banners and text advertisments is free for FLOSS projects. Likewise there is only a good feeling to be earned by hosting our ads. No money involved nowhere.
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I would greatly appreciate the Nagios Community’s assistance in helping me to resolve this issue by pressuring NETWAYS and Julian Hein to do the right thing and return what is not rightfully theirs.
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Nagios Enterprises posted a blogpost at their community site, accusing me, Julian Hein the owner and managing director of NETWAYS to have taken away their Nagios trademark and that they want it back. While some of the facts in the blogpost are true, some assumptions are not, some are taken out of their context and some may be just a result of misunderstandings.
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Events
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During this afternoon’s final keynotes at the Open World Forum, five panelists met to discuss a few of the challenges of geographical and physical barriers open communities face.
The panel was moderated by Cedric Thomas, CEO, OW2 Consortium, who was joined by:
* Bertrand Delacretaz, Director, Apache Software Foundation
* Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation
* Simon Phipps, Director, Open Source Initiative, Chief Strategy Officer, ForgeRock
* Louis Suarez-Potts, Open Office Community Manager, Oracle
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Web Browsers
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We featured a post on ‘Three Must have Firefox Add-ons for Ubuntu Users’ some time back. I wanted to do a similar post for Chrome/Chromium but could not find many extensions specifically made for Ubuntu users. So I decided to share these two extensions available as of now.
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Mozilla
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Eich noted however that the upcoming Firefox 4 release will compete well in the speed category against Chrome. But speed and a minimal user interface alone are not what will continue to make Firefox a great browser. He added that at one point Google approached him to try and get the Chrome engine into Firefox, but that didn’t work out due to both technical and philosophical reasons.
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SaaS
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A few days before our upcoming Paris Open Source Think Tank, I was pleased to, once again, sit down with Larry Augustin, CEO or SugarCRM to talk about Open Source and Cloud, two of his favorite topics.
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Databases
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Until now have already ported other famous Web applications like WordPress, MediaWiki, and phpBB. Today Joomla is one of them! We did our best to make a smart porting. We haven’t altered a single functionality of the Joomla package, but created the CUBRID intermediary classes which parse the original MySQL queries to CUBRID compatible queries. At this moment the developers focused on bringing the CUBRID support. The final stable release will allow users to deploy the same Joomla distribution with both CUBRID and MySQL Database systems with no difference except for the performance. As we mentioned in the previous blog, the final stable version is expected to have higher performance on CUBRID than on MySQL due to the Web optimizations of the CUBRID Database. Let’s cross our fingers for this.
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Oracle
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I loved OpenOffice! For 6 years, OpenOffice was my bedrock and one of the key tools that allowed me to free myself from the chains of proprietary software. For that, I will forever be grateful. I am certain that the affection that I had for OpenOffice and its development team will be reborn as I discover LibreOffice. It would be pretty cool if the entire OpenOffice Team signed and sent a resignation letter to Oracle stating that they would be moving to the Document Foundation. Can you imagine the deafening silence when Oracle tried to recruit people to work on OpenOffice? One thing that Oracle did not realize is how badly they shot themselves in the foot when they decided to sue Google. Google has some very powerful friends in the form of Redhat, Canonical, and Novell. It is not surprising that all of these friends now support LibreOffice. I too will be supporting LibreOffice as I wave my old friend OpenOffice goodbye. It was great knowing you. LibreOffice, here I come!
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CMS
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Semi-Open Source
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BlackBerry Widgets, a web-based development platform RIM had released in October, has been renamed WebWorks, and will be an open-source project. Using the BlackBerry Web App Packager, developers will be able to create full-fledged programs using familiar web languages, like HTML5, CSS, XML and the like.
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BSD
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Now that I know how to patch my OpenBSD-release installation and keep it updated as OpenBSD-stable, I pulled out the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 now running 4.7-stable, applied the latest patch, then rebuilt the kernel and rebooted.
As I wrote in the earlier entry, once you have the sources and know how to apply patches and rebuild the kernel and system, keeping a patched OpenBSD box is pretty easy.
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Project Releases
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We are pleased to announce the release of Opsview Community 3.9.0 edition.
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Licensing
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At some point, one could even argue that the most successful open source company (RedHat) is very closed to this model : they offer a great product for free (the RedHat Linux Distribution) and monetize services of only a small percent of their users.
Fauxpensource has several definitions and even if this is not yet a widely used term. Some synonims are open-core or neo-proprietary. Neo-proprietary is the term I will use in this post as there is no common sounds or part with Open Source.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Yesterday Hal Plotkin announced the release of Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials. The guide explains how the flexibility and diversity of Open Educational Resources (OER) can improve teaching and learning in higher education, all while retaining quality and enabling resource sharing and collaboration. Free to Learn features case studies and highlights several interviews with leaders of the OER community. The document suggests that community colleges are uniquely positioned to both take advantage of OER opportunities and to become pioneers in teaching through the creative and cost-effective use of OER.
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Programming
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The README file goes back to the dawn of computing. We’re pretty sure Grace Hopper had one in a filing cabinet, right next to a folder marked “Bug”. It is a time-honored tradition: developers pour their heart and soul into a README file and users promptly ignore them. We probably can’t do anything about that here at SourceForge, but we can try.
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Standards/Consortia
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These all have value to their users though if though don’t support ODF, the Open Document Format, in a first class way, I don’t care too much about them. On a regular basis I use Symphony and to a much lesser extent OpenOffice.org and Keynote.
I don’t view presentations on the web as a matter of course, though I do look at SlideShare occasionally. I probably get a dozen presentations a day for work. Unless I’m going to edit them, I want them in PDF format. Otherwise I expect ODF.
The software for creating and deploying presentations have changed very little in the sense that we create blank slides, use templates and predefined layouts, add text and images, and fiddle with fonts and colors. Depending on the application you choose, this is more or less easy.
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Science
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The ultimate memory chips of the future will encode bits on individual atoms, a capability recently demonstrated for iron atoms by IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., which unveiled a new pulsed technique for scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs).
Pulsed-STMs yield nanosecond time-resolution, a requirement for designing the atomic-scale memory chips, solar panels and quantum computers of the future.
“My hope is that we can spawn a great following doing nanosecond time resolution and atomic-scale spatial resolution with their STMs,” said Andreas Heinrich, a physicist in the IBM’s Almaden Lab.
STMs, invented at IBM in the 1980s, have become the workhorse of the semiconductor materials industry. Their resolution extends all the way to the atomic scale, allowing individual atoms to be imaged. Unfortunately, STMs are slow at making such delicate measurements. Now IBM has perfected a new pulsed-STM technique that puts its ability to measure time on par with the nanoscale accuracy as its distance measurements.
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Finance
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The story of bank fraud, committed by the banks themselves is an ongoing story that has been on the side lines since the very beginning of the “meltdown” in 2007. Banks lied then to protect themselves, they continued to cheat and lie to protect themselves, they lied (along with our highest elected officials) to get our money so that they could steal from us even more.
This is a story of a financial system gone bad. It is a story of a government taken over by a financial system gone bad and it is a story of a once free people in a nation whose Constitution has gone bad. Everything we once had and stood for has been destroyed by our banks.
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The lender, JPMorgan Chase, said on Wednesday that it was halting 56,000 foreclosures because some of its employees might have improperly prepared the necessary documents. All of the suspensions are in the 23 states where foreclosures must be approved by a court, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida and Illinois.
The bank, which lends through its Chase Mortgage unit, has begun to “systematically re-examine” its filings to verify that they meet legal standards, a spokesman, Tom Kelly, said.
Last week, GMAC Mortgage said it was suspending an undisclosed number of foreclosures to give it time to take a closer look at its own procedures. GMAC simultaneously began withdrawing affidavits in pending court cases, throwing their future into doubt.
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I have been writing on the topic of fraud by the banks since the beginning of the so called “mortgage meltdown” began in 2007. There was fraud during the bubble committed by the banks, not the loan originators as they claimed. Yes there was fraud at the originator level but without the coaching and approval of the banks the street level fraud would have been held to a minimum as it had been for years.
Now the next wave of fraud being committed by the banks – illegal foreclosure – are being totally ignored by our courts and most of all by our government. This fraud has been public common knowledge for several years now but NO ONE LISTENS.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Like Gladwell, I too grew up with stories of the civil rights movement. A lot was accomplished. Great odds were overcome. And of course it makes for high drama. Which is great on a movie screen but for the people living it, not so much. In fact, I’m guessing that most activists would prefer not to give up their lives or their freedom or their livelihoods to meet their goals. Think how much more Mr. King might have accomplished had he lived.
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The European Commission is taking the UK to court for failing to comply with EU rules on internet privacy.
The case in the EU’s Court of Justice – called an “infringement procedure” – could lead to a fine for the UK if the judges support the Commission’s view.
The EU began investigating the UK last year, suspecting that UK law provided insufficient safeguards against illegal interception of internet traffic.
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A London law firm has pledged to continue to target file sharers, despite controversy surrounding the acquisition and care of users’ data.
Gallant Macmillan is to go to the High Court on 4 October to seek the personal details of hundreds of PlusNet users.
Internet service providers have pledged to take a tougher stand before handing over data, after the leak of thousands of users’ personal details by ACS:Law.
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ACS:Law have managed to highlight the perils of companies operating as private surveillance agencies. By collecting extremely sensitive information – and letting it into the wild through their own incompetence – many people will be suffering serious personal trauma.
Possibilities of this, or smaller scale abuse, are exactly why Peter Hustinx warned that private surveillance was unlikely to be a proportionate means of dealing with copyright infringement, compatible with privacy rights.
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Open Rights Group spoke to BT today, and has requested a meeting with Sky to discuss how they handle future applications for people’s data when they are thought to be infringing copyright.
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The result was that the EU Commission threatened to take the Uk to court. Such action is extremely rare, but today, they announced that they will do exactly that.
At the time, ORG made a technical analysis of Phorm alongside the Foundation for Information Policy Research and wrote to Commissioner Reding and her Commission’s officers in the wake of the Phorm complaint.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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As you know, the European Commission has launched a public consultation on Net Neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Another wave of bit torrent piracy suits were filed Wednesday.
The latest action targets 1,100 John Does in three suits waged by CP Productions Inc., First Time Videos and Future Blue Inc.
All three suits were filed by attorney John L. Steele at U.S. District Court in Chicago and seek to identify each user through their Internet service providers. Each asks for injunctive relief and damages.
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Security firm PandaLabs recently spoke with hacker group Anonymous about its global cyber-war with the pro-copyright industry. Called “Operation Payback,” the DDoS assault was triggered by a similar attack on file sharing sites by an Indian firm. Now Anonymous is in offensive mode and looking to sign on more members by sending out flyers and recruiting people through Facebook, Digg, Reddit and other sites.
Their mission? To fight back against the anti-piracy lobby. “There been a massive lobbyist-provoked surge in unfair infringements of personal freedom online, lately,” one member said. “In the USA, a new bill has been proposed that could allow the USA to force top level registrars such as ICANN and Nominet to shut down websites, all with NO fair trial. Guilty until proven guilty! Our tactics are inspired by the very people who provoked us, AiPlex Software. A few weeks back they admitted to attacking file sharing sites with DDoS attacks.”
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Victoria Espinel, who serves as the nation’s first intellectual property enforcement coordinator within the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration is working with a variety of stakeholders, including Internet service providers, search engines and payment processors, in what it is billing as a “voluntary cooperation initiative.”
Jaromil – “dyne:bolic and dyne.org”
Credit: TinyOgg
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09.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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GNU/Linux is the clear choice for me. Here is an article written by one who shares my views. He describes use of GNU/Linux in schools in British Columbia, Canada. Wherever cost-effective performance is wanted GNU/Linux should be the first choice. I cannot imagine a more appropriate situation than schools. Students and staff need reliable IT and students need IT that is transparent and affordable to them so they can tinker as needed. Students learn by doing. They do not learn by doing what M$ wants them to do.
A teachable moment with GNU/Linux happened in my classroom yesterday. My students have seen the inner workings of a PC, installed GNU/Linux and used GNU/Linux since school began.
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Server
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MIT’s Frans Kaashoek has provided some clues and said that current operating systems, especially Linux can scale to take advantage of multiple cores with minor modifications to the underlying OS code. He and his team simulated a 48-core chip through an 8 x 6 core setup and monitored the performance change when cores were activated one by one. “At some point, the addition of extra cores began slowing the system down rather than speeding it up.” The explanation is that multiple cores often do redundant work and process the same data, which needs to be kept in the chip’s memory for that time. As long as the memory is used, it is not available for other tasks and a performance bottleneck is the result: When the number of cores increases, tasks that depend on the same data get split up into smaller and smaller chunks.
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Research suggests that the free operating system Linux will keep up with the addition of more ‘cores,’ or processing units, to computer chips.
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Applications
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Users of the visually impressive Twitter application ‘Hotot’ may wish to add the projects’ daily-build PPA to automatically gain the latest features and fixes as the app strides towards a stable release.
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Time is running out for an innovative new video editor inspired by collaborative distribution tools like bzr and git to gather enough ‘crowd-sourced’ funding to make it into reality.
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CLI Companion is a tool aimed at making the terminal easier to use: it’s a GUI that displays a list of commands and an embedded terminal under it. The application comes with a list of commonly used commands by default, each having a short description and if you want to find out more about a certain command, simply right click it and select “Help”. This will display the “man” (manual) for the selected command.
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When it comes to video editing platforms, Windows and Mac own the field. They run the software from Adobe, Apple, and Avid that’s preferred by professionals, and most –including all Windows machines – come with free, basic editing software for everybody else.
In my third piece on how media and storage applications for Linux – and particularly Ubuntu – compare, I’ll be looking at how Linux stacks up against Windows and OS X in what seems a closed race.
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Sometimes we don’t change our habits even when we have the opportunty to make our lives easier. At least it’s true of me in terms of scanning after upgrading to Ubuntu Lynx (10.04). I don’t know why, but even though I saw that extra possibilitiy in the menu when I needed to scan, I continued using SANE — good, but a bit complicated.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The only problem is we have yet to see a Linux client make a premiere yet for any title using the Unreal Engine 3. We will not see that until Valve’s Steam Client makes a premiere on Linux in the coming months. At that point, it’s a matter of whether a Linux version of Primal Carnage for Linux is actually released. Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux has still not been released, or will it likely ever be.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Stormy Peters has been a champion of the GNOME platform since 2000, and in 2008 became the executive director of the non-profit Foundation that oversees GNOME development. She chatted with us about the future of GNOME, the history of the project and how computers can change the world even in places without power or internet access…
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The ideal candidates for this are PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint “Debian”; both are rolling-release distributions but test their packages extensively to ensure the stability and high quality of the packages. Both include Mozilla Firefox, but only Linux Mint “Debian” offers OpenOffice.org. Both include graphical package managers and most proprietary codecs (out-of-the-box). Finally, both have excellent support for mice, webcams, and printers. As PCLinuxOS doesn’t have OpenOffice.org, I’m going to continue with just Linux Mint “Debian”.
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Are you a Linux guru? Do you want to be a Linux guru? You’ll dazzle them at your Linux guru job interview by mentioning that you always install grub to a floppy, so your computer is unbootable without it. It’s like a primitive boot lock!
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Reviews
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Salix OS is a distro based on Slackware. Slackware, as you probably already know, has not had a reputation as being the easiest distro to use. Salix OS makes Slackware accessible to more users by making it easier to install, configure and manage. You can get Salix OS with the Xfce or LXDE desktop environments. For this review, I decided to use the LXDE version of Salix OS.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc., a leading provider of Linux software, is looking at Austin among other cities as it considers possibly moving its headquarters from Raleigh, N.C., according to news reports and Raleigh’s mayor.
Mayor Charles Meeker said Wednesday that Red Hat reportedly is looking at cities including Austin, Atlanta and Boston as it evaluates its need for additional space. It now occupies more than 188,000 square feet at its headquarters at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus, the Raleigh News & Observer reported Tuesday.
“They’re a prominent company headquartered here, and naturally we’d like to see them stay,” Meeker said.
Red Hat reported revenue of $748 million last year. It has 3,400 employees worldwide, including more than 600 in Raleigh. The company also has 65 offices around the world, including one in Austin on MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1).
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Software company Red Hat Inc. is eyeing Austin for a possible headquarters move, potentially bringing hundreds of white-collar jobs.
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He clearly understood that Red Hat doesn’t sell software license, they sell the support and services around the software. Whitehurst explained that the Open Source business model is about providing the mission critical support and reliability that big companies need.
At one point, Cramer asked why Red Hat isn’t selling him Linux for his desktop. Whitehurst’s response was classic – desktop users are used to the Blue Screen of Death and don’t need mission critical support.
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But my experience running People & Brand at Red Hat has shown me there are endless opportunities to better connect HR and brand efforts within organizations. If making an organizational change is out of the question, I’d definitely recommend getting the HR and brand groups together to look for additional opportunities to collaborate.
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Fedora
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Awhile ago Dave Malcolm transferred to the Fedora team inside Red Hat to sort out the issues looming with the Python stack within our distribution. Red Hat and Fedora has always been huge admirers of the Python programming language, using it to build a large part of our tools and infrastructure. When the opportunity arrived to build an operating system that children could tinker with and customise, we decided to base the application and desktop layer on top of Python – a tradition SugarLabs continued when they took over the development of Sugar.
Because we value the huge benefits Python has brought to Fedora and Linux, it isn’t enough for us to simply build on top of a great system. We feel the infrastructure and Python upstream communities themselves are worthy of investing in and have taken an active role in helping to port and maintain a number of Python 3 modules.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s newly designed font, the work of typographers Dalton Maag, will indeed be used as the default desktop font in Ubuntu 10.10.
Whilst the new font will only be used in the interface of the desktop, with it being held back as the default for documents and the Terminal, it will certainly make a wonderful first impression on Ubuntu users – both new and old.
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OMG! reader Tobias Knight faced such a situation with a fingerprint reader made by Validity Inc. With the open-source driver on-hold, and wanting to make use of the device, he asked Validity Inc. whether they had any plans to provide support for Ubuntu users of their devices.
They replied with some good news: -
“We plan to release Ubuntu support package by the end of the year. It will include proprietary sensor daemon with sample for fprint. We do not have plans for Fedora, but the same package might work (no guarantee).”
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Have you already heard about the new shiny TI OMAP4 CPU ? If you haven’t yet and are interested in ARM stuff you surely will very soon. Ubuntu will additionally to the already known OMAP3 images release images for the OMAP4 architecture with the 10.10 Maverick release.
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“Don’t Call It A ‘Party’ If It’s Not!” yells the catchy slogan from the Ubuntu Vancouver LoCo team in their promotional call-to-arms for celebrating Ubuntu 10.10’s release next month.
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Perhaps the most important evolution is the updated Ubuntu Software Center. The application store now has more than just free software, and installation of third party applications is just as easy as Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market. The changes from 10.04 are subtle but it’s easy to see that the Ubuntu Software Center could become a major selling point and a money-spinner for Canonical.
There are the usual accoutrements of updates to the kernel and applications software such as browsers, productivity applications, social networking clients and media players. Ubuntu One, the cloud based storage system that is in public beta, has been intertwined more deeply within the operating system, allowing users to backup folders with a simple right click.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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A top speed of 75km/h, 3D, a good object to use and an objective, its called Tuxrace! It is compatible with your Nokia N900. Use a penguin to catch each fish with many different levels. The sliding penguins name is Tux. That is the origin of the name of the game.
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Android
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They used TaintDroid to test 30 popular free Android applications selected at random from the Android market and found that half were sending private information to advertising servers, including the user’s location and phone number. In some cases, they found that applications were relaying GPS coordinates to remote advertising network servers as frequently as every 30 seconds, even when not displaying advertisements. These findings raise concern about the extent to which mobile platforms can insulate users from unwanted invasions of privacy.
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The limited edition DROID R2-D2 will be available online at www.verizonwireless.com and in select Verizon Wireless Communication stores beginning Sept. 30.
With a graphic design to look like the iconic Astromech Droid from the Star Wars Saga, the DROID R2-D2 by Motorola will be packaged in a custom box resembling carbonite and come with a Star Wars media dock and wired stereo headset. Exclusive content comes pre-loaded on the special edition smartphone, including:
* R2-D2 notification sounds and ringtones
* Four live wallpapers
* R2-D2 Clock Widget
* “The Best of R2-D2″ video with the original Cantina music
* Exclusive Binoculars App
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Events
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StopBadware is offering an exciting opportunity for anyone in the Bay Area interested in Internet security: Join StopBadware and The Commonwealth Club the evening of Monday, October 4 in Menlo Park, CA, for a discussion on how to keep the Net safe. Three Internet pioneers—all StopBadware Board members—will lead a conversation entitled Keeping the Net Healthy: How Can We Develop an Immune System for the Internet? with opening and closing remarks by StopBadware’s Executive Director, Maxim Weinstein.
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Databases
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Oracle
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Despite reassurances from Oracle, advocates of yet another ex-Sun Microsystems technology are voicing concern about the future of their software. In this latest case, the technology is Lustre, a file system widely used across the supercomputing community.
“Lustre is in a bit of a flux at the moment. The community feels a little bit that Oracle is turning its back to them, and there is discussion going on over whether or not Oracle is forking the code,” said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud, a San Francisco-based, venture capital-funded company recently started to service the potential market of HPC (high-performance computing), Linux-based Lustre users.
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In a year, “my guess is they’ll roll out a new Sun Solaris setup with a nice sticker that says, ‘Optimized for Oracle Database,’ and while they’ll pay lip service to Linux, they will wind down and then kill off their Linux offering,” predicted Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “And while Linux guys will scream it will make tons of money because it gives a corporation ONE vendor to deal with.”
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It has not been easy for Oracle, for as many employees of Sun were supposed to remain, it now is beginning to look as though they are all getting fed up and leaving, perhaps because they were sold a bill of goods, and now they find no merchandise.
Over at TechEye, the news of two more major players are found to be leaving Oracle as quickly as they can disentangle themselves.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What would you think about a sign on the highway stating “You need a Volkswagen to drive on this road. Contact your Volkswagen dealer for a gratis test drive – Your Government”? When it comes to PDF reading software, many governments do this every day. With the pdfreaders.org campaign we will turn the spotlight on public institutions who behave in this way, exposing how frequently such non-Free advertisements appear.
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Government
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Launched today by the National Archives, a new UK Open Government Licence (UK OGL) is said to remove many of the existing barriers to re-use of government held information. The new licence is claimed to be simple. flexible and compatible with other recognised licensing models such as the Creative Commons licence.
The UK OGL will be applicable across the entire public sector throughout England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Replacing the existing Click-Use Licence it will enable the free re-use of a broad range of public sector information, including Crown Copyright, databases and source code. Users will not be required to register or formally apply for permission to re-use data.
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A large number of The Pirate Bay users have received an email, allegedly from the site’s operators, inviting them to join the private BitTorrent tracker Demunoid. The Pirate Bay team has distanced itself from the senders, but it remains a mystery how the spammers gained access to the site’s user database.
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Here’s an update on the Access Copyright (“AC”) proposed tariff that would, if approved, result in a cost if about $60 million a year to the Canadian post-secondary educational sector. There is no such mechanism in place in the USA, where much of the money collected will inevitably end up.
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Openness/Sharing
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Collaboration is about collective engagement for the common good and is the fastest route to open source project success. If an open source project is a neighborhood, then collaboration is the barn raising. Distinguishing this from “participation,” collaboration is about helping others in the community because doing so advances the project and its usefulness for everyone.
My favorite example of collaboration is knowledge sharing through forums, blogs, and idea exchanges (in some circles, called ideagoras). On JasperForge, Jaspersoft’s open source community web site, there are more than 160,000 registered members who have collectively offered nearly 80,000 forum entries across all the listed top-level projects. The variety of questions and issues being addressed by and for community members within the forums is staggering. And, the vibrancy that emerges through this exchange of skill is core to large-scale community success.
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One of the most important programs at Teaching Open Source is the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE). POSSE is a weeklong bootcamp that gets professors and POSSE instructors productively lost. The idea is to help educators understand how to include being productively lost in their curriculum.
Being lost is a special state in open source projects. Although we discuss the open source way of doing things and most of us seem to practice similar techniques, the actual navigation within a project is always unique. Getting a first patch accepted for even a small bug involves the issue/bug tracker, coding practices, patch submission processes, and at least a few rounds of human interaction with people in different roles and different timezones. The same is true for any contribution, from documentation to translation.
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Standards/Consortia
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As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.
Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.
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You’ve seen the film, Coalition of the Willing and perhaps read the opensource.com interview. On October 10, 2010, Coalition of the Willing launches the second phase of the Coalition project: the Coalition Movement Camp 10/10/10 Work Party — a flash mob development party for the climate movement. This is your opportunity to log on, converge, and swarm!
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Science
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A flake of exotic carbon a few atoms thick has claimed a record: the speck has been spun faster than any other object, at a clip of 60 million rotations per minute.
Graphite is made of stacks of carbon sheets. Separate these, and the result is graphene, which shows a suite of novel properties, including incredible strength.
Bruce Kane at the University of Maryland in College Park sprayed charged graphene flakes a micrometre wide into a vacuum chamber. Once there, oscillating electric fields trapped the flakes in mid-air.
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Security
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Finance
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While it is true that many TARP bailout programs have ended, Center for Media and Democracy research shows that money is still due to taxpayers under the TARP. More importantly, the research shows that the U.S. Treasury Department’s ten TARP programs represent less than seven percent of the $4.7 trillion disbursed by the U.S. government in an effort to aid the financial services industry. Far more money has been disbursed by the Federal Reserve to prop up the financial system than by the U.S. Treasury, and those loans are still outstanding.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Lawrence Lessig argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will lead to further corruption of Congress by making legislators more dependent on special interests rather than on voters. Allison R. Hayward, John Bonifaz, and Gabriel Lenz join the discussion. Moderated by Stephen Ansolabehere, Professor of Political Science at Harvard University.
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No sooner does the world agree to one request from US law enforcers for the right to snoop on its citizens than they are back with yet more demands. This week, however, the US may finally have pushed too far: the EU is not happy – and it is pushing back.
First up is the news that, little over a month since signing up to the Swift agreement that both enables and restricts the US’ right to collect information about bank transfers in and out of the United States, the Obama administration has unilaterally decided to tear up the agreement and claim the right to monitor any and every financial transaction, whether it can show good cause or not.
Click here to find out more!
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Translation: The Senate Judiciary Committee won’t be considering the dangerously flawed “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) bill until after the midterm elections, at least.
This is a real victory! The entertainment industry and their allies in Congress had hoped this bill would be quickly approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee with no debate before the Senators went home for the October recess.
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The government wants to force companies to redesign their communications systems and information networks to facilitate surveillance, and to provide law enforcement with back doors that enable them to bypass any security measures.
The proposal may seem extreme, but — unfortunately — it’s not unique. Just a few months ago, the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India threatened to ban BlackBerry devices unless the company made eavesdropping easier. China has already built a massive internet surveillance system to better control its citizens.
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What a great place the UK is for Web users. We have reports of law firms making “requests” for information about accounts alleged to be downloading pornography with personal details linked to that pornography leaked on the Web. Phorm with its Webwise allegedly snooping in on your browsing usage for directed advertising and the DEB looming on the horizon…..what a lovely picture of “Digital Britain”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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DG Information Society and Media has launched a public consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality. European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, announced in April 2010 her intention to launch this consultation in order to take forward Europe’s net neutrality debate. The consultation is part of the Commission’s follow-up to its commitment – one of the prerequisites for the successful conclusion of the 2009 EU telecoms reform package – to scrutinise closely the open and neutral nature of the internet and to report on the state of play to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In other words, there’s simply no good reason. Of course, the monopoly rents afforded to the branded drug maker through patents probably helps. Combine that with the amount of money dumped into highly questionable and dangerous advertising, and you get a bit closer to the answer…
Laurent Guerby – “The GCC Compile Farm”
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