08.25.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Television, the little box that sits in the living room is something many people can’t do without. If you have hooked up your TV to your computer then you might want to check out the list of free and open-source television software we published earlier. However, if you want to watch your favorite programs according to your own schedule, you won’t have to rely on the idiot box anymore.
Thanks to the Internet, a lot of native as well as web applications have come up that make sure that you watch your favorite shows at the time and place you want. Here’s a list of ways in which you could get the best television experience on your very own Linux desktop:
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The concept of better is a subjective idea. What is better to me is possibly, even probably, not better to someone else. In my case, and in the case of some of my clients, Linux hardware support is “better”. I do not buy cutting edge hardware and tend to keep systems and peripherals until they stop working and can no longer be repaired at a reasonable cost. When a new release of my favorite Linux distribution comes out I can be 100% certain that my hardware that works with my current release will still work with the new release. That is something I just take for granted. This is not so in the Microsoft camp.
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After waiting like Job for the pre-installed Linux machines we deserved, we’ve arrived at a literal Garden of Eden full of worthy choices. A compelling new offering is the Zorin PC, a new mini-laptop that runs its own Linux distro, Zorin OS.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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ONE MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT, a student at the University of Helsinki posted a query to the newsgroup comp.os.minix asking, “What would you like to see most in minix?” The student’s name was Linus Torvalds, and that Usenet post was the beginning of the Linux operating system (OS). The date was 25 August 1991, exactly 20 years ago today.
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Linus Torvalds didn’t use words half as lyrical as those of the immortal Beatles when he first announced the arrival of Linux 20 years ago (for those who don’t know, the headline for this article is taken from the famous album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released by the band in 1967).
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Graphics Stack
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X.Org Server 1.11 was originally planned for release on the 19th of August, but following a one-week delay, it should be officially released this Friday. This is another significant update to the X.Org Server.
X.Org Server 1.11 was originally planned for release last Friday, but last week was met by the unexpected passing of Keith Packard’s mother. With Keith serving as the release manager and being out of the game last week, the xorg-server release was obviously postponed.
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Last year at XDS 2010 Toulouse there was a discussion about killing old X.Org / Mesa drivers with fire. In particular, dropping all the old drivers that go un-maintained and have little in the way of users and modern functionality. Last year they decided to not really do much about it since these drivers cause little maintenance burden, but the topic has been brought up again and it sounds like these crusty old Linux drivers will finally receive their death sentence.
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Applications
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Shotwell photo manager 0.11.0 has been released bringing in new features and improvements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Today’s Wine consists of two equally important parts: a series of implementations pretending to be parts of Windows, and an ever-growing suite of unit tests. The implementations are straightforward once you know the right thing to do: if the waiter function in Windows’ restaurant.dll asks for a tip, then ours needs to as well. Similarly, the tests prove what the right thing actually is, on both Wine and Windows. They help us answer weird questions, like if the Windows waiter still demands a tip with a negative bill. Somewhere out there, there’s a Windows program that depends on this behavior, and it will be broken in Wine if we make the mistake of assuming Windows acts reasonably.
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Games
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[While commercial products are rarely open source, many different projects have explored the possibilities of opening up the code to the community -- and in this feature, Gamasutra looks at some examples and speaks to the minds behind them.]
The relationship between creator and audience in video games is more complicated than any other creative form. Developers can be artists, teachers, entertainers, scientists, or collaborators — and often they must fill several of those roles simultaneously.
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Ozzy from “Sunday Coders” told LGN that they are porting their game Marball Odyssey to GNU/Linux and need testers to make sure it would work on as many distros as possible.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Happy to tell that Plasma Media Center has been improved a lot and have basic functionalities which is required in a mediacenter i.e Picture, Music and Video.
First of all when user open MediaCenter then welcome screen gets opened in full-screen (required) modes i.e picture, Music and Video. User can enter into any of these mode by clicking on the icons.
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I look forward to software conferences because you can never tell which ideas will excite you most. In 2011 I would expect to be wowed by the latest in tablets or 3D rendering stuff, but actually it turned out that 3D printers and a bad attempt to build a toaster from first principles were what left me with the deepest impression at the Summit. Michael Meeks gave a Lightning Talk on his 3D printer RepRap project. It was really funny, about how he built five iterations of his printer, with each generation printing the next printer. Sadly it seemed his wife’s nylons suffered in the cause of science, but holy crap I’d personally happily donate my socks to further such an awsome project. I don’t know how Michael does it, I am a big fan of his blogs where he describes his thoughts on software such as Libre Office, massive child rearing efforts, attempts to fix his plumbling, lots of stuff on learning Christianity and of course those 3D printers. I couldn’t actually write a blog like that because I personally manage to do bugger all apart from mainly writing software, listening to music and drinking a lot of beer, and if I wrote about my life, by comparison sadly it would be a bit of a dull read. Oh well. I can only think about one thing for years on end it seems, and I wish I was more of a generalist like Michael. But if I wanted to think about one thing, there couldn’t be many better topics than self replicating machines.
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Geoffray found quite a few differences in attitudes towards the free desktop options on Linux compared to the previous year. The situation with Gnome 3 and Unity in Ubuntu has affected the view that people have of KDE. Some traditional free software users have given Unity a bad reception and are considering other options. The response to GNOME 3 seems to be more mixed. Some traditional Gnome users appreciate the new look and feel, while others do not really like it. Some think that the new desktop is not finished, likening it to the KDE 4.0 release. This creates some new interest in KDE, although of course some KDE people are excited to try out alternatives such as GNOME 3 and Unity.
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GNOME Desktop
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I just push a new GNOME 3.0 live image labelled as 1.5.0 (yes, I forgot to push 1.4.0 after I built it, so we are at 1.5.0 now 
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My first acquittance with Salix OS left very good impression on me.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In latest ISO We fixed bug, that prevented loading drivers for USB webcams. Now you can use such programs like Skype without any problems. Try it!
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Gentoo Family
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Almost as though they heard my suggestions, Gentoo now has an installer. It’s not included on an official Live DVD just yet, but it just might next release.
Wiktor W Brodlo has ported the Red Hat Anaconda installer from Sabayon to work with Gentoo. You can either install it in the live Gentoo environment or you can roll it up in a new Gentoo ISO.
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Red Hat Family
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With the advent of RHEL 6 — the newest release of RedHats Enterprise operating system — RedHat have chosen to replace the old SystemV init system with… Upstart!
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Fedora
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From the test installations I carried out, I observed that GPT is the default if Fedora is installed in standalone mode. If, however, there is an existing distribution or another operating system on the drive, and you attempt to dual-boot, it defaults to the MBR partition table.
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Sadly, I don’t have quite as much time to do deep testing of Fedora as I used to. So the above is basically a minimal report from about 3 minutes of usage I was able to fit in a couple nights ago. But I can say I’m looking forward to doing more! Remember that if you’re testing and finding problems, we need bugs! Without them it’s really hard to make a better product. So do your part for free software, and report them.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Beta of the Ubuntu 11.10 operating system is knocking on our doors, as it will be released next Thursday, and we though this will be a good moment to list some of the most important features that will be added in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) release.
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So I decided to take a go at Ubuntu 11.04 in a virtual machine before taking the leap and installing it for real. As I understand it, the new Unity desktop is a pretty major departure from the Gnome 2.x desktop that I’m used to, and I want to see if it’s as bad as it looks in the screenshots.
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Is your computer Ubuntu Friendly? How do you find out? Do you know about the System Testing Application/Client on Ubuntu? Let’s talk, shall we?
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Flavours and Variants
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Well not much was left unmentioned, apart from the vast amount of application and package upgrades. The sleek and stylish Mint 11 Gnome interface is an almost flawless working environment, while remaining quite minimalistic and uncluttered. I encountered no problems at all when running this distribution, thus I highly recommend it for everyone.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung announced four new Android 2.3 Galaxy smartphones, as well as a new naming scheme for the Galaxy product line. The new phones include the Galaxy W (3.7-inch, 1.4GHz), the QWERTY-enabled Galaxy M Pro (2.66-inch, 1GHz), the Galaxy Y (three-inch, 832MHz), and the keyboard-ready Galaxy Y Pro, according to the company.
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Parrot is readying what it claims is the world’s first Android-based car receiver for an October release. The Parrot Asteroid offers a 3.2-inch display, GPS-based location services, Bluetooth, optional 3G access to web services, a 4 x 55 Watt MOSFET amplifier, plus support for music sources including Internet radio and a built-in FM/AM tuner.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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NFC is coming to Android tablets this fall, in two seven-inch, Android 2.3 models announced by Sharp and TazTag respectively. The Sharp RW-T107 is an enterprise-focused tablet that supports the Sony Felica flavor of NFC in Japan, while TazTag’s TazTab combines NFC with a biometric fingerprint scanner, plus ZigBee, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and optional 3G.
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The government has decided to develop an operating system capable of rivaling Google’s Chrome OS in collaboration with Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, a move to gain ground in the emerging cloud computing service industry.
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Events
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Besides XDC Chicago 2011 for Linux graphics developers, coming up in just two weeks in Santa Rosa, California is the Linux Plumbers Conference. Here’s some of the interesting talks expected at this event that’s largely targeted for Linux kernel developers.
Here’s the talks I find to be most interesting based upon the LPC2011 schedule. (My list is in no particular order.)
Coreboot – The Coreboot software project will be talked about and their efforts to replace proprietary BIOS/UEFI/firmware with this fast open-source code that’s designed to initialize the hardware and boot the system in a lightning fast manner. The talk abstract mentions that Coreboot currently supports around 230 kinds of motherboards and can get to booting the kernel in as little as a half second. The Coreboot project has been around for a while known — previously it was called LinuxBIOS — and is supported well by AMD, especially with the promise of supporting Coreboot on all future hardware.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s JavaScript engine man-in-charge David Mandelin believes that there is plenty of room for the Firefox Mobile team to improve the browser’s performances on ARM/Android devices. He highlighted Firefox Mobile’s memory usage as a key problem area and suggests that the mobile browser might have to revert back from a multi-process to a single-process architecture.
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SaaS
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Big data requires big file systems. That’s where the open source GlusterFS file system is aiming to fit in with the upcoming GlusterFS 3.3 release.
The Gluster project is out this week with the second beta release of GlusterFS 3.3, the final release is expected before the end of the year. The new release provides an integration point for Apache Hadoop enabling Hadoop users to use Gluster for storage. According to Gluster, their filesystem is also comptable with Hadoop’s own HDFS (Hadoop File System), though Gluster provides some additional benefits including scalability and performance improvements.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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I had a short look at the new Extension repository, that I created for LibreOffice, and I saw the number of projects is growing. There are currently fourteen projects on the site and I expect more of them in the next weeks, because we had not going into the wider public with this new sub-project.
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Having been asked by the Steering Committee and Membership Committee to act as the Elections Officer for The Document Foundation, it is my pleasure to announce that we will now conduct the election of a Board of Directors. This election is following the Bylaws [1] of our Foundation. The term is one year commencing from the date the Foundation is legally established.
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CMS
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Project Releases
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NetworkManager 0.8 was released at the beginning of the year and then NetworkManager 0.9 was planned for release in March, but its release didn’t finally take place until yesterday. NetworkManager 0.9 is a huge release that breaks both the API and ABI compared to the previous NetworkManager release.
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Programming
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In 2005, after just two weeks, Linus Torvalds completed the first version of Git, an open-source version control system. Unlike typical centralized systems, Git is based on a distributed model. It is extremely flexible and guarantees data integrity while being powerful, fast and efficient. With widespread and growing rates of adoption, and the increasing popularity of services like GitHub, many consider Git to be the best version control tool ever created.
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Cablegate
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Hours after announcing it would be releasing tens of thousands of cables from various countries including Libya, China, Israel and Afghanistan, WikiLeaks announced that it was sustaining denial of service (DOS) attacks and had “regressed” to its backup servers.
Not surprisingly, WikiLeaks suggested on Twitter that the attacks were from a state-sponsored entity. The organization asked, “Are state directed Denial of Service attacks, legally, a war crime against civilian infrastructure?” And, “Should we, legally, declare war on state aggressors that commit infrastructure war crimes against us?”
These messages came early in the morning on August 24. Releases had already been posted. Followers were helping WikiLeaks “crowd source” the cables by tweeting out their findings with the hashtag #wlfind.
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Almost two weeks before the desperate young fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire on a street in Tunis and a full month before the uprising that ensued, touching off the “Arab Spring” that is still unfolding, the rationale for revolution appeared on the Internet, where it was devoured by millions of Tunisians. It was a WikiLeaks document pertaining to the unexampled greed and massive corruption of Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and all his money-hungry family.
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08.24.11
Posted in Google, Patents at 4:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Time is running out for the USPTO
Summary: More mainstream coverage of the problem with the patent system and another report suggesting that Microsoft’s mole, Elop, might be going after patents that Google is after
In light of some of the recent developments (e.g. the success of Linux being hinged on the failure of patents), it is clear that patent wars are a present reality. “A rational observer would now predict that a further outbreak of patent wars, and portfolio-bolstering acquisitions, now are likely,” says one report. “Some observers also are starting to say that the software patent process is broken, costing jobs and threatening innovation as well, and there also is some growing talk that reforms are necessary. Patent system is broken, read the book and complaints that the patent system is broken,while criticism is growing.” These are the words of one of the latest articles on the subject.
Another new article makes a similar point. The author writes about the possibility that many more software patents will become toothless soon. “Court rules ‘do it with a computer’ doesn’t make an idea patentable” says the headline, highlighting last week’s milestone that we covered several times. The article adds: “This week seems to be bigger than most for software patent news. Earlier in the week we had Google’s announcement they are buying Motorola Mobility to acquire defensive patents. Now we have what could be a landmark ruling against the validity of a software patent on the basis that it describes a mental process. ”
Some of the subscribers-only sites which target patent lawyers typically have an opposite interpretation, where basically nothing can stop software patents and those patents are just so wonderful. Watch this claim that software patents are “under attack”. Poor them…
In other relevant news, Google is still trying to get more patents on the face of it. It is claimed that InterDigital’s patents heap is up for sale and Microsoft’s mole that we suspect will use patents against Android is among those bidding for the heap. This further shows that the USPTO is a nightmare which promotes nothing that it promises. As this one site puts it this week:
The Economist blog ‘Democracy in America’ covers the lamentable state of IP. The problem is particularly bad with software patents because they are both so unnecessary to encourage innovation and also because there are potentially so many software patents – software is such an easy medium in which to embody productive ideas. The recent purchase of Motorola Mobile by Google apparently to get itself a stash of patents is truly alarming, because, having spent $12 odd billion on getting the patents and with only a few parties able to marshall sufficient defensive patents to protect themselves against Dark Lord’s like Nathan Myhrvold, Google is then obliged to its shareholders to maximise the value of those patents and to maximise its profit from any mobile phones it makes. And, because of the IP nightmare only a handful of firms will be able to make such products – though only by warding off marauders with threats of counter claims for breaching their own patents.
Here is the update about Google seeking to have patents that are being used offensively reexamined:
Since our last update on the reexaminations of the Oracle (Sun) patents being asserted against Google, two additional first actions on the merits have issued, one [PDF] on patent 6,125,447 and one [PDF] on patent 6,910,205. In each case the examiner has rejected all of the claims for which Google has requested reexamination.
With respect to the ’447 patent, the examiner cites to two principal items of prior art as each anticipating all of the claims of the ’447 patent. In other words, the examiner has found two separate patents that establish that none of the claims of the ’447 patent were novel.
With respect to the ’205 patent the examiner found a single item of non-patent literature that anticipates all of the challenged claims of the patent. That is, the non-patent literature establishes that none of those five challenged claims were novel.
Here is an update on Apple’s failed attack on Android:
Apple Loses Court Battle In Europe, Samsung Free To Sell Galaxy Tabs
Justice will prevail. The European Courts have once again reinstated the faith in justice. Apple today lost its monopolistic battle against Samsung and Android.
Jan Wilderboer, a FOSS evangelist, writes on his blog, “Apple has LOST all claims wrt the European patent 2098948. The court thinks that the European patent 1964022 is worthless and will be thrown out in reexamination anyway. The only thing that remains is the european patent 2059868. And the claims of that patent can be circumvented in trivial ways.”
The Guardian still offers some coverage on this subject this week, mostly critical of software patents (for a change). One Twitter user, Kevin B Unhammer, writes/quotes: “there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers» (Never do business with firms working for patent trolls)”
Katherine Noyes, writing for PCWorld (IDG) continues her criticism of software patents and so does TechDirt, which writes about something we saw last week:
We recently wrote about a surprising Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling that might open the door to invalidating a lot of software patents. We received an an interesting comment on the post a few days later from John Pettitt:
So I was thinking – great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it – then I realized the idiot in question was me 
Not sure how I feel about this.
John – inventor of the patent in question.
Pettitt is now running an interesting operation called Free Range Content, which helps companies syndicate content easily. However, a while back, he was the named inventor on patent 6,029,154, describing a “Method and system for detecting fraud in a credit card transaction over the internet.” We reached out to Pettitt to ask him a few questions about his views on the patent system and he kindly agreed.
Priceless.
What’s notable in all those reports is that there is strong consensus on the need to abolish software patents. If anything, Google validated his inclination after it had complained about anti-competitive aspects of patents, especially ones pertaining to software (although not explicitly so). █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The BBC continues to deceive the public with Android-hostile stories that are actually a reversal of the important truth
EARLIER this year we demonstrated and stated that the BBC only ever covers Android when there is bad news. Even then, the BBC prefers to distort the truth, for example by characterising malware (that the user has to actually install and cannot spread) as a “virus”. BBC reports do a disservice to the public not just in the UK as the site is accessible to all countries. They are being paid by the public to do the job of accurate reporting; instead they pay wages to former Microsoft managers and take additional money from BIll Gates to do PR for him, disguised as 'news'. They only ever mention Android when there is something venomous to push under the "BBC" brand name. For shame really.
Here is the latest example of the BBC’s distortion of the truth. Who benefits from this? As Muktware puts it:
Wrong. The court has given Samsung seven weeks time to fix the issues related to one of the patents. The court has rejected all other patents. The patent in question is related to the way photos are shown on these phones. Additionally, the patent is related only to Android 2.3 and doesn’t affect Android 3.0. The issues is minor and can be easily circumvented. Seven weeks time is more than enough for Samsung to fix the software related issue.
‘NOTE: Samsung is *allowed* to sell the phones. The ban will be imposed *only* after seven weeks that too if Samsung fails to circumvent the minor patent.
What BBC did not highlight was that the court has rejected all of Apple’s claims related to the iPad. BBC also did not highlight that Samsung is free to sell its Galaxy Tab in Europe.
Meanwhile, over at another anti-FUD Web site, advice about patent defence is being given. “This likely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea,” states Professor Webbink, “but there is an interesting academic paper by Professor Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University School of Law entitled “Predicting Patent Litigation.” You can download a free copy of the paper here [PDF] on the Social Science Research Network.
“The paper is interesting because Prof. Chien identifies a number of objective markers that identify a patent as being more likely of being asserted in litigation than the general population of patents. The really useful aspect of her analysis is that many of these markers can be discerned prior to the patent actually being asserted.”
It is nice to see academia getting involved in such research because academics — unlike patent lawyers — do not speak for their patents-dependent wallet. They just work with the data they have and almost every time they just find that software patents are bad for the economy, competition, etc. There is a recent study on this.
The BBC was supposed to be different. Since it is funded by the public, it is supposed to be agenda-agnostic, but it is not. If it hires senior staff from Microsoft UK, it is only a matter of time before it become some anti-Linux propaganda machine at worst and one that totally ignores GNU/Linux at best (in reality it’s a mixture of both). █
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Posted in Microsoft, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 2:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Collaboration Summit/ELC Joint Reception. Markus Rex is on the right.
Summary: The problem with SUSE promotion which transcends its own turf and how it might be worth dealing with this
According to some new posts, the Microsoft-sponsored SUSE is not just making events of its own but also has its representatives visit others. Basically, the SUSE bias is dangerous because its end goal is to promote SLE* (whether intentional or not), which is taxed by Microsoft and promotes the use of proprietary software from Microsoft, as we last showed this afternoon. Over the years (since 2006) we have covered many examples where SUSE took actions which directly harmed GNU/Linux but promoted SUSE, often at the expense of other distributions and not UNIX, Windows, or Mac OS. Who does that really help? And who is actually making money from SUSE? That would be Microsoft. The only suggestible thing that can counter this trend is the discouragement of SUSE promotion in any of the FOSS and Linux events. SUSE promotion is partly funded by Microsoft (there was recently another cash infusion). It is Microsoft that gains from all that. Avoid SUSE sponsorships (Microsoft money) and do not give it much room or positive exposure. That is all we can advise one does when setting up a conference. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I recently bought a JOEL Wattforbrugsmåler.
My laptop, a Dell D620, has both Windows and Linux (Dualboot).
I was curious to see whether there was any difference in power consumption during idle, so I decided to put my new device to use!
I removed the battery from the laptop and plugged the charger into my power measuring device before I made sure Windows 7 was running up-to-date drivers, while Linux ran the default drivers.
I then disabled all non-default services and removed any third-party programs from the startup. I booted into each os, let it run for some time (to make sure it was indeed idle) before turning on the clock.
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A long time ago when I was using Windows I realized that many applications were trying to constrain me from doing certain tasks. I was unable to play a certain format or had to install applications that I did not want on my system. I started to think critically as to why I am using Windows and if there is some kind of alternative that I could use instead. Prior to this, I used Mac OS but I knew that both operating systems are proprietary and want to limit the end user. I got tired of being manipulated to use a particular application and having bloatware already pre-installed on my computer. After searching the Internet for alternatives to Mac OS and Windows I found this really cool operating system that is called GNU/Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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When users complain about GNOME 3, inevitably they compare its release to KDE 4.0′s. One KDE developer has told me that he dislikes the comparison, but, in the absence of other parallels, it continues to be made.
However, one part of the analogy that hasn’t been explored is KDE’s recovery from its user revolt, and whether GNOME is in any position to emulate that as well.
KDE’s recovery has not received much notice. It hasn’t been covered by the free software media. Often, too, it is overshadowed by those still loyal to the KDE 3 series, who continue to express their dissatisfaction at every opportunity.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL would carry crude oil from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. Calling it “a bad deal for America,” Sen. Bernie Sanders urged the Obama administration to reject the proposal. “Why in the world would we ever consider approving a new Big Oil pipeline to carry dirty fuel and keep America addicted to oil, when we could save money, create jobs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by moving to stronger fuel economy standards?” Sanders asked. He made the case against the pipeline in a video for Tar Sands Action, an organization headed by Vermont environmentalist Bill McKibben. “The State Department will decide whether to approve or reject the pipeline by the end of the year,” The New York Times said in an editorial published on Monday. “It should acknowledge the environmental risk of the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production and block the Keystone XL.”
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Poseidon Linux is designed for the international scientific community, bundling a big batch of science-oriented software into a single live DVD, plus a batch of desktop productivity and multimedia applications. Poseidon 4.0 was just released with significant changes, so let’s take it for a test drive.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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The article adds that Whitehurst would not specifically state whether Red Hat will or will not actually acquire anyone, as is to be expected, but the comments are the clearest indication yet that Red Hat sees value in a potential NoSQL acquisition.
This is something that we have seen for some time, pointing out in May 2010 that “We have consistently noted that the database remains a missing layer in Red Hat’s software stack… and would see advantages in adding an open source NoSQL database to its portfolio to target MySQL users.”
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is perhaps best known as the leading enterprise Linux vendor. While Linux is the core of Red Hat’s business, their JBoss middleware business is also a critical component of Red Hat’s overall platform play. As Red Hat gears up for its next era of growth, the most often asked question is: Where does Red Hat needs to go next? One potential area of expansion for Red Hat could be the database market.
“If you think about what makes up a platform, what you’re seeing is that more and more components of functionality are getting sucked in,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told InternetNews.com. “We basically have our data services layer. which tries to do some degree of data federation. Will there be more stuff around that? Certainly there will be.”
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Fedora
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The feature freeze is already in place, so that the alpha should contain all major changes in a testable form. These include the switch to the GRUB2 boot loader, which, though officially still under development, has long been used by other distributions.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is a desktop-centric distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and Linux Mint LXDE is the edition that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The latest release, Linux Mint 11 LXDE, was released August 16, 2011. This article presents a review, the first for an LXDE-based Linux Mint edition on this website.
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Phones
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Android
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Why isn’t Chrome a part of Android? It’s a question as old as time itself. Or at least a few years old. But given that the same company, Google, makes both products, it never made much sense. Now they’re finally taking steps to resolve this. A bit. Maybe.
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Sony Ericsson announced a music-oriented Android 2.3 smartphone with a dedicated Walkman music button and “deep” Facebook integration. Due to ship in the fourth quarter, the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman offers a 1GHz processor, a 3.2-inch inch display with 480 x 320 pixels, a five-megapixel camera, a front-facing VGA webcam, plus Sony Qriocity music and video content services.
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Google announced a preview release of the Google TV add-on for the Android SDK, supported on Linux with KVM emulation. The add-on lets Android app developers start preparing their software for porting to Google TV, in anticipation of the Android 3.x “Honeycomb” IPTV platform that’s expected to ship later this year.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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However, the recently released Toshiba Thrive Tablet PC line is slowly beginning to make inroads into the business tablet application niche. With a “strictly business” approach to most of its features, and a huge focus on business apps, more businesses are turning to the Thrive as opposed to the iPad 2 or any other tablet for their business plans. The Thrive offers five separate home screens, one of which is loaded with Google contacts, LogMeIn remote access, the Google calendar, QuickOffice for business file access and Toshiba’s PrinterShare and FileManager apps. This is a perfect business suite of apps all in one place.
The native file management Toshiba provides in the Toshiba Thrive tablet is also another business advantage. And though Toshiba’s App Place (apps store) does provide entertainment and gaming apps, it is definitely heavily slanted towards business-oriented apps and software, from enterprise-oriented apps developers such as Central Desktop.
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Apple’s success with the iPad 1 and 2 doesn’t guarantee success for the third. But this shouldn’t deter long term investors. Apple’s greatest capability is its unstoppable innovation force – the release of new product lines that overshadow the previous.
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Remember when the Asus Eee Pad Transformer was the hottest thing since Laserdisc? Remember when it was hailed as an iPad killer with its fancy IPS screen, low price and sweet name. Autobots, unite! Well, Walmart is currently selling it for $350, which puts it at the low-end of the Honeycomb tab price scale. Jokes aside, it’s actually a great deal for an Android tablet.
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One positive aspect of the Internet’s innovative capacity for rapid change has been the dawn of open access publishing that has came to prominence over the last decade. Leading the way is the non-profit organisation Creative Commons, which has just launched a new book showcasing how copyright, content sharing and collaboration can lead innovation in the digital age.
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Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University has replaced the software that provides its information services to mobile devices, moving to open source Kuali software created by a consortium of universities.
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Well now it appears that the home turf of the worlds second largest smartphone maker Samsung has plans to develop a new open source smartphone operating system just for South Korea, a new OS that will challenge rival platforms iOS and Android in the country.
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On the client desktop, running the open source Firefox Web browser is a significant win for security. Firefox alone isn’t sufficient, but it comes with a giant ecosystem of plug-ins which add to security. Adblock-plus is a plug-in which stops advertisements dead in their tracks. Scriptblock disables JavaScript and lets users enable it on a site-by-site basis. Some of the known flash plug-ins have been a source of security bugs; they are generally bad residents on your PC because they simply hog resources and make systems slow. Using flashblock will let you run flash site-by-site, and restrict them elsewhere.
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With the growth of social networking, blogging and the Web in general, personal privacy is becoming harder and harder to find.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that privacy is no longer “a social norm.” And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once famously opined, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
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Events
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– The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software, is fast approaching. The event, which will take place in Denver from Sept. 12-16, has gathered a great deal of momentum, with more than 600 attendees from 31 countries and 43 states signed up so far. It’s not too late to take advantage of this unique learning opportunity that presents a world-class program at great value to attendees, and in a beautiful setting.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has announced the introduction of WebAPI, a project intended to “to provide a basic HTML5 phone experience within 3 to 6 months”. The goal is to provide a set of APIs consistent across browsers, operating systems and devices, that enable common methods of access to phone functionality. The list of functions given in the announcement includes the dialer, address book, SMS, clock, camera, calculator and maps.
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SaaS
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Databases
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It’s no secret that EnterpriseDB, the company that sells and supports commercial versions of the open source PostgreSQL database, is going after MySQL. The company, which says revenues are growing at a 2X annual pace, senses that Oracle is ostracizing its MySQL customers and partners–something that IBM i customers can relate to. But while PostgreSQL makes inroads in the X64 and Itanium markets, it’s not clear if the database will find a similar reception in Power Systems.
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Oracle is advancing its virtualization strategy with the release of Oracle VM 3. The new virtualization technology is designed to expand on Oracle’s previous efforts with a clear focus on server virtualization.
“We care about running big server VMs,” Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle said during a launch event for Oracle VM 3.0. “We want to enable customers to virtualize everything.”
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Business
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Project Releases
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Programming
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Lenovo isn’t kicking HP while it’s down, but the company is taking this opportunity to let everyone know it’s doing just awesome, thanks very much. Lenovo released a statement regarding its status amid the uncertainty in the PC and tablet world. Here’s a brief highlight on the PC manufacturer’s status …
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Cablegate
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In the interview, he spoke at length about information’s role in democracy, and how government censorship is sometimes an opportunity. “Censorship is a signal that an organization or a government is fearful about reform effects of information release,” he said.
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Posted in Asia, Bill Gates, Patents at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: India is ahead of Bill Gates’ game as his plot to profit by seeding the patents market through Africa and India (poor continent and nation) gets criticised even in the Economic Times
THE Gates Foundation — just like software patents — has become somewhat of a naked emperor. Despite spending a million dollars (or more) per day on mere PR which includes paying journalists, the more enlightened people manage to get their voices heard and occasionally those voices also enter the corporate/mainstream press, which must really piss off Bill Gates. The last thing he needs is for people to understand what he is really up to. It is hard to silence and suppress millions of blogs, although it is easy to bribe selected publications in the areas where he invests his money (we gave examples of those). Those who contradict such bribed sources can then be labelled out of line. It’s the manufacturing of fake consensus.
The Economic Times (India) has published the article “Dark side of giving: The rise of philanthro-capitalism”. It states the following facts:
For instance, the Gates Foundation’s sheer clout is taking it, intentionally or unintentionally, to places where policy, business and philanthropy intersect. There are its business and investment links with large companies that are driven by the profit motive. There is its growing stranglehold in the policy-making space across emerging markets, especially in education, healthcare and agriculture.
The $23.1-million investment by the Gates Foundation in Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of GM seeds, is a small example of a trend.
Civil society organisations see it as vindication of what they had always suspected: the unstated agenda of pushing GM crops into Africa. In recent times, though, following strident protests, Bill Gates appears to have tempered his views on agriculture; he talks about picking the best from organics and tech-driven agriculture.
The Gates Foundation’s insistence that its investments and grants ought to be seen separately has also attracted considerable flak. The question is asked: how can it be a ‘passive investor’ in companies such as Monsanto when its avowed goal is doing good with philanthropic monies? “Doubts about his (Bill Gates) larger motives, despite some good outcomes of his charity, are beginning to cloud my thinking,” concedes Mira Shiva, a public health activist. Two emails sent by ET to the Gates Foundation, on December 29 and March 22, went unanswered.
In his blog postings and writings, Eric Holt-Gimenez, director of the US-based Food First: Institute for Food and Development Policy, labels it ‘Monsanto in Gates’ clothing’.
For more about Gates’ relationship with Monsanto, just search this site for “Monsanto”. We have dozens of posts on this topic.
Dissident Voice too is raising concerns about that. From around the same time (as the article above):
Monsanto and other biotech corporations have been pushing to find new market footholds in collaboration with USAID, the US State Department and the Gates Foundation Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). According to Netline: “The collusion of the Gates Foundation with Monsanto Corporation is no accident, as high level officials leading AGRA are former Monsanto executives. The recent purchase by AGRA of $500,000 worth in Monsanto stocks was vivid proof of that close relationship. Despite many words by Gates officials since the inception of the AGRA agenda denying that GMO seeds would be used as part of AGRA, their close relationship with Monsanto has now been revealed to be a key element in their agronomic ‘new green revolution’ strategy.”
[...]
On 7 January 2007 Los Angeles Times published an investigation report on the activities of Gates Foundation in Niger Delta in Africa. Its staff Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon wrote: “The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that it is paying for inoculations to protect health, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Total France—the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe. A sampling of the Gates Foundation’s largest investments between $100 million and $1 billion: Abbott Laboratories, Archer Daniels Midland, British Petroleum, Canadian national Railway, Exxon Mobil, Freddie Mac, French Government, Japanese Government, Merck, Schering Plough, Tyco International, Waste Management… Indeed, local leaders blame oil developments for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.”
The report in the LA Times points out, “Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting. Investigators for Dr. Nonyenim Solomon Enyidah, heath commissioner for Rivers State… cite an oil spill clogging rivers as a cause of cholera, another scourge the foundation is battling. The bright, sooty gas flares—which contain toxic byproducts such as benzene, mercury and chromium—lower immunity, Enyidah said, and make children more susceptible to polio and measles—the diseases that the Gates Foundation has helped to inoculate against.”
The Gates Foundation endowment had major holdings in:
* Companies ranked among the worst US and Canadian polluters, including ConocoPhilips, Dow Chemicals Co., and Tyco International;
* Many of the other major polluters, including companies that own oil refinery that cause sickness in children while the foundation tries to save their parents from AIDS;
* Pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat;
* This is “the dirty secret” of many large philanthropists, said Paul Hawken, an expert on socially beneficial investing who directs the Natural Capital Institute, an investment research group. “Foundations donate to groups trying to heal the future,” Hawken said in an interview, “but with their investments, they steal from the future.”
This report on Gates Foundation reminds me of Janus, a two-face Roman god. Janus was characterised by the blending of maleficent and beneficent. His one face represents war and the other peace.
Around the same time a blogger from India ranted:
THE BILL and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major donor in the health sector in India, has links with food and drug corporations including Coca- Cola, McDonald’s, Merck and Monsanto. These links constitute a conflict of interest to the foundation’s philanthropic work, reveals a new study published on Wednesday.
Several large grants that the foundation makes in developing countries, including India, are linked to companies in which the foundation has invested.
Its grants in the health sector may benefit leading pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline through partnerships to test or promote their drugs, points out the study by Sanjay Basu of the University of California and others in the journal PLoS Medicine . On his recent visit to India, Gates lobbied with the health ministry for the introduction of Merck’s rotavirus vaccine. The foundation is already funding acceptance studies related to another Merck product in India – the HPV vaccine. Tribal girls in Andhra Pradesh have died in the controversial trials.
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The bias in the foundation’s investment in junk food companies is reflected in its grant pattern in the health sector.
It has given just three percent of its grants for noncommunicable diseases which experts feel are being fuelled by the consumption of junk food, among other factors, coming from Coca Cola and McDonald’s.
In fact, the foundation has given direct grants to Coca Cola subsidiaries that “ encourage communities in developing countries to become business affiliates of Coca- Cola”.
SELECTIVE PHILANTHROPY?
On his India visit, Gates lobbied for the introduction of Merck’s rotavirus vaccine.
Tribal girls in Andhra Pradesh have died in trials of Merck’s HPV vaccine, funded by his foundation
It has given just 3% grants for non- communicable diseases fuelled by consumption of junk food, including Coca Cola and McDonald’s ( left).
Only days ago we wrote about the special role of GlaxoSmithKline in the foundation, having had its head come from GlaxoSmithKline.
The bottom line is, more and more people are starting to get it. It’s like disdain for Novell and for software patents, which was well overdue. The illusions won’t last for long. People are not dumb enough. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 8:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Reality with a malicious twist
Summary: Complaints and warnings about manipulation of stories about the Gates Foundation, courtesy of the Gates Foundation
THE PR/investment operation known as “Gates Foundation” has been up to no good, or almost no good.
As we noted some days ago, the New York Times had been accused even by its own people of asking Gates what to write. Now, watch another fluff/puff piece from the New York Times and another from the Huff & Puff, which features Gates himself. Huffington/AOL gives him a platform for self-promotion, as usual [1, 2, 3]. “This is hilarious,” remarks a moderate critic, “Bill Gates says he is going to research an issue and write a report. Is he an economist? Does he have expertise in development economics? When did Bill Gates last write a report?
“Bill Gates reads reports. He doesn’t write them. Who is really going to write it?”
As we have shown here before, Bill and his wife do not write their own material; they have speech writers who get no credit (the same speech writers who worked for politicians like the Clintons). The same critic reveals that Gates is funding the Kaiser site, which in turn showers the Gates Foundation with kisses. It’s all quite cyclic, is it not? It’s like a rich people’s party where they grant each other medals. Anyway, this whole reputation laundering gig is being disrupted by one who used to be exploited by the Gates Foundation, probably for PR purposes alone. In his more or less independent blog he reveals that Bill’s main reputation laundering person is now working for Madonna and he notes:
Actually, Neilson really got his start in philanthropy messaging working as the first media relations guy for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Before that, he handled media issues for the Seattle School District.
He left Seattle to go try his hand promoting a number of blue-ribbon philanthropy endeavors but ended up creating this new business Global Philanthropy Group, which appears to be largely focused on helping celebrities do philanthropy.
Like Bono's scam? Read the article closely to understand what Madonna is trying to do. It’s not charity, it’s agenda-pushing and she is spreading a bizarre religion under the veil of “charity” of course. There are several more stories like that, including celebrities who promote Scientology under the guise of “philanthropy”, sometimes exploiting disasters like an earthquake in Haiti as a convenient pretext.
In the next post we’ll be covering some of Gates’ own agenda, which is profit. His critic has some new self-hosted papers (PDF format), including this “peer-reviewed journal article about conflicts of interest and the Gates Foundation” and another which s/he explains as follows:
John Donelly funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation writing on “some independent journalism on global health” is like the blind leading the partially sighted.
The report asks a few good questions. Manufacturing consent is how the new news system works.
The critic likes to emphasise and show that those who criticise Gates get personally attacked (retribution), which is why s/he does not reveal his/her identity. I was recently defended by him/her because I too am regularly being defamed for merely pointing out the reality behind the Gates Foundation. █
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software at 7:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the UK and from Romania seems to suggest that there is unfair marginalisation of software the public can access and in Romania this may also be illegal
A few days ago in The Register, a criticism of the British government for ignoring Free/libre software was published. We included that in the daily links. But much better coverage comes from Mark Ballard, who alleges that the “Cabinet Office builds open source strategy on proprietary software”. Quoting his interpretation of the situation: “The Cabinet Office has chosen a proprietary software system to implement the keystone of its policy to create a level playing field for open source.
“They discovered the same problems that inspired Cabinet Office open source policy hindered their bidding for its own work.”
–Mark Ballard“Under pressure to fulfil the government’s election promise to eradicate systemic bias against open source software, the Cabinet Office rushed through a procurement for an asset register last month. But it raised hackles among open source suppliers it invited to bid. They discovered the same problems that inspired Cabinet Office open source policy hindered their bidding for its own work.”
When it comes to the public sector, we recently compared to the situation in the UK to that of Romania. A European Union-funded research site, OSOR, has caught up with the absurdities in Romania which seem like they may be illegally anti-competitive. To quote:
Experts on procurement involving open source software doubt the validity of a tender published by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) in July, in which it bans solutions based on open source licences. The ministry’s justification of the ban “seems to be odd and not convincing and that makes me wonder if it would stand in court”, comments for instance Mathieu Paapst, an open source and software procurement specialist at the Dutch university of Groningen.
“The ministry’s ban may reflect a lack of understanding of open source”, tentatively supposes Patrice-Emmanual Schmitz, a Brussel-based specialist on the European Union’s open source licence, the EUPL, working at IT firm Unisys (and one of the consultants involved in the OSOR). “It is a very surprising prohibition.”
This is probably not the end of it. Techrights got the attention (links) of many Romanians after it had posted a couple of articles about this issue. These issues must be pointed out in order for change to happen. █
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