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10.30.12

Links 31/10/2012: Valve Likes GNU/Linux. EFF Does Not Like Unity in Ubuntu 12.10

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • “Jitsi”… la alternativa libre a “Skype”.

    Como “todos” sabéis, “Skype” fue adquirido por Microsoft, y en su momento les prometí una alternativa libre. Pues bien, esa alternativa se llama “Jitsi”, antes conocido como “SIP Communicator”.

  • Day of Reckoning For Open Source Software May Be Coming
  • Open Source Orion 1.0 Browser based Code Editor Goes Live

    Back in January of 2011, the Eclipse Foundation announced the development of Orion, a browser/cloud based IDE. At the time, Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation told me that Orion is more than just Eclipse in a browser. It’s a view that he re-iterated today with the official launch of Orion 1.0

  • Gild Source helps startups mine for developer talent gold
  • Architecture 3.0 and Open Source
  • Five More Common Myths Around Open Source Adoption [Slideshare]
  • Open source: not always a successful course

    In my early-October discussion of tech simplification at my former primary home, I’d mentioned that I was able to dispense with my powerline networking setup. But when I re-visited the CA residence a couple of weekends ago, I realized I’d forgotten about one particular node; my Power Mac G4 Cube upstairs. Instead of resurrecting a powerline spur, which would have necessitated a re-expansion beyond my solitary eight-port switch at the router, I instead decided to connect the G4 Cube to the LAN via an Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi bridge.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Cloud Apache OpenOffice plans to be discussed next month

      OpenOffice’s graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365′s debut nears. Plans for “Cloud Apache OpenOffice” will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks

    • LibreOffice Quantal features: Unity Integration, PackageKit and Templates

      The PackageKit/Session Installer integration is implemented in UNO, that allow extensions and macro creators to trigger the installation of software from trusted archives in general — quite a nifty feature in itself. As we have this now in place, in the future we can also use it to complete the LibreOffice install by adding missing packages for certain actions that are not available in the default Ubuntu installation (which leaves out some parts of LibreOffice).

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Nearing End Of Stage One Development

      Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek issued a new 4.8.0 status report where he mentions “I’d like to close the stage 1 phase of GCC 4.8 development on Monday, November 5th. If you have still patches for new features you’d like to see in GCC 4.8, please post them for review soon. Patches posted before the freeze, but reviewed shortly after the freeze, may still go in, further changes should be just bugfixes and documentation fixes.”

  • Project Releases

    • Open source NAC system PacketFence 3.6 released

      PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, free and open source network access control (NAC) system.

    • Clementine music player adds podcast support

      The latest major update to Clementine, version 1.1, expands the open source media player’s streaming support and adds long-awaited podcast functionality. Clementine is a cross-platform program that, its developers say, is designed to be both fast and easy-to-use, and was inspired by version 1.4 of Amarok (the current release is Amarok 2.6). It supports playback of local music libraries and streaming of online radio stations, and can be used to transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC and AAC files.

    • Sourcefabric’s Airtime 2.2 gets smart blocks

      Sourcefabric has released a new version of its open source radio automation software that brings with it several new features. Airtime 2.2 includes improvements to the rebroadcasting features of the application as well as new “Smart Blocks” that allow users to automatically assemble randomised playlists according to a set of parameters.

    • Bootstrap 2.2 becomes more flexible with new templates

      The Bootstrap developers have announced the release of version 2.2.0 of their open source web front-end toolkit. This new major update is the project’s first release since leaving Twitter, which made the framework available as open source in August of last year, and brings with it dozens of fixes as well as new templates and a new media component.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • From Open Source to Crowdfunding

      One of the premises of this blog is that the success and methodology of open source are not one-offs, but part of a larger move towards open, collaborative activity. Thus, by observing what open source does well – and not so well – lessons can be learned that can be applied in quite different fields.

    • Open Access/Content

      • The Open Textbook Challenge [Infographic]

        With the cost of college textbooks as high as they are, students are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. The edtech world is finally starting to take notice: companies and edtech leaders are working to create resources for open-source textbooks. Online Colleges has created an infographic on the numbers behind the shift toward open-source textbooks, and some of the statistics will surprise you.

    • Open Hardware

      • Off to the Future with a new Soccer Robot

        Computer scientists from the University of Bonn have developed a new robot whose source code and design plan is publicly accessible. It is intended to facilitate the entry into research on humanoids, in particular, the TeenSize Class of the RoboCup. The scientists recently introduced the new robot at the IROS Conference (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Portugal.

  • Programming

    • GCC 4.8 Compiler On AMD’s Eight-Core Piledriver

      This month from CPUs based upon AMD’s new Piledriver micro-architecture I have delivered results of compiler tuning on AMD’s Open64 compiler as well as GCC bdver2 tuning. That initial testing from an AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core processor didn’t show any big boost out of the “bdver2″ target with the new BMI/TBM/F16C/FMA3 instruction set extensions. Testing in this article from the AMD FX-8350 are GCC compiler benchmarks of the 4.6.3, 4.7.2, and 4.8.0 development snapshots to look for performance improvements on this new high-end AMD processor when using the very latest GCC compiler code.

Leftovers

  • Nothing Is Foreign to the Liar Willard Romney Anymore

    It was early in the proceedings here on Monday night when I was struck with a horrible vision. It may have been right about that moment in the final presidential debate when Willard Romney — who, for most of the past two years, has been the most bellicose Mormon since they disbanded the Nauvoo Legion — looked deeply into the camera’s eye and, inches from actual sincerity, said, “We can’t kill our way out of this mess.” Or, perhaps, it was when, in a discussion of his newfound dedication to comprehensive solutions to complex problems, he announced his devotion to “a peaceful planet,” or when he cited a group of Arab scholars in support of loosening the grip of theocratic tyranny in the Middle East.

  • Tim Cook calls Surface tablet confusing

    Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took a dig at Microsoft’s soon-to-be released Surface tablet during Apple’s earnings call on Thursday, referring to it as a “fairly compromised, confusing product”.

    “I haven’t personally played with a Surface yet,” Tim Cook said in response to a question about the Surface and the competitive landscape in the tablet market overall.

    “What we’re reading about it is that it’s a fairly compromised, confusing product.”

  • Microsoft’s Pivot — A Plan to Dominate “Devices and Services”
  • Surface is ‘a quirky cat,’ teardown shows

    iFixit determines Microsoft’s tablet is pretty tough to repair, coming in only slightly easier than the iPad.

  • Poll shows tepid interest in Windows 8

    52 percent of respondents had not heard of Windows 8 and that 61 percent had “little or no interest”

  • Mobile Devices Beating PCs As Default Gateway To The Internet
  • Windows 8: Does Microsoft’s Split-Personality OS Make Sense?

    In studies conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, a software consultancy, experienced Windows users had trouble finding applications on the Desktop interface.

  • Bizarre Trend: Journalism Professors Using Klout Scores As Part Of Students’ Grades

    We’ve raised questions in the past about the relevance of “Klout” scores. If you don’t know, Klout is one of a few companies that try to measure “influence” online by looking at your social media activity. The whole process seems kind of silly, but for whatever reason, once you put a number on things, people take it seriously, no matter how bogus the number might be. Lots of companies now use Klout scores to determine who they should give special perks to, leading to plenty of people just trying to game their scores. However, should Klout scores count towards your grade as a student? Adam Singer sent over examples of two separate journalism professors who think so.

  • Why We Have So Many Dumb Rules: A Case Study

    New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten a lot of abuse for his campaign to ban the sale of sugary drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. There are lots of reasons for this, but among the economically literate his proposal is widely viewed as gratuitously inefficient. Simply taxing sugary sodas would be a lot more sensible, so why not do that instead?

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Supreme Court and the death of progress

      In tonight’s ‘Conversations with Great Minds,’ Thom talks with Frederick Kaufman, author and Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine. Tonight’s ‘Big Picture Rumble’ panel discusses Romney campaign Co-Chair John Sununu’s racist comments on Colin Powell, how simply living near foreclosed homes has cost families trillions and whether Hurricane Sandy will prevent the oligarchs from stealing the election.

    • Amid Cutbacks, Greek Doctors Offer Message to Poor: You Are Not Alone

      As the head of Greece’s largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Ex-CIA Officer, Torture Whistleblower to Be Sentenced for Leak
    • Video: Police Brutalize Defenseless Man at Aliya

      Over the next couple of minutes the man is also pepper-sprayed and beaten with a truncheon by the female officer, all while posing no threat to the officers’ well-being whatsoever.

      After a good two minutes of sadistic thrashing, the officers are joined by a squadron of their peers, and successfully put him in handcuffs and under arrest.

      A source confirmed with CrownHeights.info that the man had full permission to be there, and had been living there for a month without any trouble. It is unknown who called the police or why.

    • Capitol Hill’s Rabid, Ravaging Republicans

      Has there ever been a more crazed, cruel, anti-people, corporate-indentured, militaristic and monetized Republican Party in its 154-year history? An about-to-be-released list of some of the actual brutish votes by the House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor, will soon be available to you from the House Democratic Caucus.

    • Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists

      Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

  • Leaks

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Meet the Network Hiding the Koch Money: “Donors Trust” and “Donors Capital Fund”

      Earlier this year internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a major hub of climate change denial and right-wing extremism, were publicly leaked. The documents exposed the Heartland Institute’s funders and strategies for attacking climate science, and led to a mass exodus of Heartland’s corporate funders.

    • Einhorn Family Foundation Behind Voter Suppression Billboards

      One Wisconsin Now and theGrio have uncovered that the Milwaukee-based Einhorn Family Foundation is the “private family foundation” that funded controversial billboards in Milwaukee which warned: “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY! 3 1/2 years and a $10,000 fine.” The billboards were denounced as voter suppression by Mike Wilder, director of the African-American Round Table, and other community groups. The billboards were put up in largely African-American and Latino communities in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Columbus by media behemoth Clear Channel, but the client remained anonymous.

    • Groups Use Fake Letters, Felony Threats to Suppress Vote

      When Phyllis Cleveland first saw the billboard on East 35th Street warning of prison time and a $10,000 fine for voter fraud, the city councilwoman concluded it had one purpose: to intimidate the constituents of her predominantly low-income ward in Cleveland, Ohio.

    • Telling Truths about Israel, Palestine

  • Censorship

    • Judge Rejects Request To Seal Filings In Case Over Miami Heat Owner’s Unflattering Photo

      Earlier this year, we wrote about how a minority owner of the Miami Heat, Ranaan Katz, was so upset about an “unflattering photo” that a blogger/critic had posted of him, that he apparently bought the copyright on the photo and sued the blogger, claiming copyright infringement.

    • The Year In SLAPPs: From The Oatmeal To Pink Slime

      2012 has been yet another year filled with meritless lawsuits filed solely to chill First Amendment free speech rights — so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP). As websites relying on user-generated content continue to increase in popularity, we also see a rise in SLAPPs targeting online speech, from the everyday blogger to the one-time online reviewer. Some of the most talked about SLAPPs this year include:

    • Greek journalists warn over press freedom

      Tension rises between Greek government and media after TV presenters are suspended over criticism of public order minister

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • America’s Schools: Breeding grounds for compliant citizens

      For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • ORG says IP Committee has missed the point

      Reacting to the All Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group’s report, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:

      “We welcome the group’s desire for evidence based policy but think this sits ill with its’ call to move the Intellectual Property Office to the Department of Culture Media and Sport, which has had a dire record of inventing policy initiatives without a shred of evidence.

    • Three former Environment Ministers speak out on NK603 and Roundup
    • Of Course Monsanto Says It’s Safe

      If you’ve been paying attention to the news about food lately, you’ve probably read about the now infamous “Seralini study,” in which University of Caen (France) molecular biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini demonstrated major health issues associated with eating Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) corn and the herbicide used in conjunction with it, RoundUp.

    • The Proposed U.S. – EU FTA: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

      Over the past year or so, there has been a slow and steady effort to generate support for a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. The Obama administration is now behind this, and there is no reason to think a President Romney would change gears. Thus, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election, this trade initiative is likely to go forward.

    • Trademarks

      • The Proposed U.S. – EU FTA: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

        A couple years ago, we wrote about Hebrew University suing GM for using an image of Albert Einstein in an ad without first getting permission (i.e., paying up). Einstein left his assets to Hebrew University (of which he was a founder and a big supporter), and Hebrew University has taken that to an extreme, more or less arguing near complete ownership over Einstein’s likeness, and has been ridiculously aggressive in trying to enforce those rights — to the point of tricking print shops into printing Einstein images, only to threaten them with lawsuits. All this despite the concept of publicity rights barely even existing in Einstein’s time, and no indication that he cared one way or the other about such things.

    • Copyrights

      • Have EU orphans found a caring home?

        As promptly reported yesterday by the IPKat, the Orphan Works Directive has just been published in Official Journal of the European Union, thus becoming Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works. This Kat agrees with Jeremy that there’s plenty of material for preliminary references to the Court of Justice of the European Union, as the various provisions in the Directive look, to say the least, open to various interpretations.

      • Memo To Congress: Stop Trying To Fix Silicon Valley

        But the more urgent motivator for lawmakers was the bruising battle early this year over SOPA—a bill aimed at reducing online copyright infringement that would have dramatically increased civil and criminal penalties associated with even minor violations of the law.

        What looked like a slam dunk for the entertainment industry, which authored the bill, instead sparked a revolt among Internet users that culminated in a day of website blackouts. Millions of average citizens called and wrote to Congress to complain, bitterly, about lawmakers’ casual and admittedly inexpert tinkering with the one growing sector we have left.

      • Exploring The Earnings Of A Humble Bundle Author
      • Yet Another Musician Discovers That Free, Implemented Well, Can Increase Fans & Make You More Money
      • Your Right to Own, Under Threat

10.29.12

Links 29/10/2012: Steam For Linux Beta Needs Testers, GNOME 3.7.1

Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Another Look at the $180M HP Contract

    Mostly, we use the operating system called Linux, and we use it on those HP machines. One reason we use it is because it’s free — literally, downloadable for free, no strings, no catch. All the software we use on it, ranging from close equivalents to Windows Office to browsers to desktop publishing and technical software, and a good deal more, is also free. It ranges the Internet even better than Windows, no surprise since the bulk of Web server computers worldwide are run on Linux or on closely allied software. And not only that, it’s “open source,” which means you can (if you choose) go into the guts of the program, and change anything you want. Can’t do that with proprietary programs.

    This software is coded so efficiently that everything I use on my Linux machines can nearly fit onto a single CD; you’d need shelves of CDs to contain Windows or Windows Office. It can run more efficiently on smaller and older computers than Windows can, and run longer on them as they age. A nonprofit in Portland (called Free Geek) for years has been reconditioning old and small-capacity computers, outfitting them with Linux, and sending them to local nonprofits and to underdeveloped countries around the globe; those machines are great for education, and they cost a pittance. Open source runs faster, with fewer errors, and is nearly impervious to viruses, worms and the like. (No need for expensive anti-virus software.) The main area where Windows and Mac’s OS X clearly surpass it is in the realm of computer games. One of the main world headquarters for open source development is the Pacific Northwest; the original developer of Linux, a Finn named Linus Torvalds, lives outside Portland.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Hurricane Sandy: Climate Change Activists Offer Stark Reminder Before Storm Hits

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • onwards to Four

        Not being the sort who rest much, we’re already at work on Plasma Active Four. We met up on irc to firm up our plans. You can read the minutes here, thanks to Thomas who took the time to summarize the multi-hour session.

        We are moving to a devel workflow in which we aim to have an “always-releasable” master branch. All development will happen in branches, something we essentially do already, but we will now also have an integration branch so we can bring the various branches together for testing before merging them when ready, branch by branch, into master. We have been working towards for some time, adjusting our habits one step at a time. This will only cover the plasma-mobile, share-like-connect and plasma-active-maliit repositories for now, but my hope is that as Frameworks 5 arrives we’ll be able to broaden this to the bigger shared repositories such as kde-workspace.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd September 2012
      • KDE Commit-Digest for 9th September 2012

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3.7.1 Is Now Ready for Testing

        Matthias Clasen has announced a few hours ago, October 26th, the first development release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.

        After a two day delay, GNOME 3.7.1 is now available for testing, bringing lots of updated applications, new features, and numerous bug fixes.

        “GNOME 3.7 development is getting underway, with the 3.7.1 snapshot that is marking the beginning of this development cycle. Features are still being proposed and discussed. This release allows some early glimpses of whats to come.”

      • Gnome & Wayland

        Wayland is the next big thing in Linux Desktop since ..the beginning? It is meant to work aside with the problematic X (with the tremendous amount of functionality) and eventually (in many years!) is going to replace it.

  • Distributions

    • From Junk to a Security Station; How Mepis Gave New Life to a Discarded Computer

      Last week, a project that had been brewing for quite a while became a reality.

      We wanted to set up a basic security camera for the office where I work but, as the University is short of budget, all we were given was a webcam. With that contribution, the whole idea was pretty much a long-term goal (or a dream, to be more honest, given the circumstances).

    • DEFT 7.2 Screenshots

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Looks To An SDK, Improved App Development

            Canonical and the Ubuntu development community hope to improve application development for developers targeting Ubuntu 13.04.

            Another one of the popular topics for the UDS Copenhagen summit next week for Ubuntu 13.04 is the “app development” track. There’s several different items to be discussed about Ubuntu app development from an Ubuntu SDK to improving the online documentation and support for those developers targeting Ubuntu support.

          • OpenERP and Ubuntu Unity Desktop Integration

            Ubuntu has been in the news quite a lot recently with the release of version 12.10 including the Amazon shopping lens and next week some game shop thing called Steam is going to be announced. It isn’t all toys and shopping though, some of the new features make a heap of sense for serious business applications too. One really interesting area for me is the webapp integration, this is an extension for Firefox and Chromium that allows stuff running in the web browser to integrate with the Unity desktop in a variety of ways, making the distinction between a web application and a desktop application a bit more blurry – which is a good thing. There is built in integration for an assortment of popular consumer websites like youtube, twitter, facebook etc. but it isn’t limited to these single domain software as a service sites. Any web site or web application can test for the presence of the extension then export it’s menu items, do notifications and other actions.

          • Time for an Upgrade
          • Ubuntu 11.04 Ends Support

            Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal released almost one and a half years ago will end support today. This comes according to the policy of drastic six months of OS upgrades and a support for one and half years for each. Long term support Ubuntu releases have a greater support period, extending upto five years for Ubuntu 12.04. These long term support releases are more suitable for business and enterprise environments can can be used in servers and workstations as the main OS.

          • Ubuntu 13.04 May Come Packed With An SDK
          • Join Us At the Ubuntu Developer Summit This Week!

            This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place in Copenhagen from Monday – Thursday. This is the event where we plan the features and goals for the next release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Xubuntu 12.10 Review

              Xubuntu is the lighter weight brother of the ever popular Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. At the forefront, XFCE is the desktop environment of choice and it removes all the bells and whistles that we currently see in the star of the show, Ubuntu. It’s not just focused on older systems but those who want a great looking desktop and don’t need the extras.

              XFCE 4.10 is the forefront of this distribution and it uses less CPU and memory compared to its bigger siblings Ubuntu and KUbuntu as XFCE is focused on using less resources. What also makes XFCE also popular is the fact we don’t see drastic changes from one version to another which we see from Gnome or KDE.

            • Linux Mint Katya Reaches End Of Life

              The Linux Mint Team has announced the end of life of Linux Mint 11 “Katya”. This means users using this OS will not be able to get any security updates and the system will be open to venerabilities. Users still using Linux Mint 11 are highly advised to upgrade their system to Linux Mint Maya.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Can European IT teams seriously consider open source?

    European businesses have long used IT to automate processes and drive down the cost of doing business. This pressure has increased in the current economic climate, and new issues such as bring-your-own-device and the ever increasing amount of data continue to appear.

    One of the solutions to the cost of software is to use open source solutions, but many businesses are fearful of the implications and potential hidden costs in the skills needed to manage open source technology. So what are the real challenges and can businesses across Europe really take advantage of open source?

  • Tiki Wiki 9.2 can now check system requirements

    The current 6.x and 9.x long term support (LTS) branches of the open source Tiki wiki, CMS and groupware solution have been updated to versions 6.8 and 9.2 respectively. Whereas Tiki 9.2 has more than 500 code changes, focuses on fixing various bugs and also includes several improvements, the 6.8 release only includes a patch to close an undisclosed security hole.

  • DARPA’s Robotics Challenge Marches On

    Now DARPA is opening the door to anyone, accepting admissions through February 2013 of “virtual robots” created using a free open source software program, the DRC Simulator, that DARPA has made available for download on its DRC website.

  • SaaS

    • Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies

      Big Data is on every CIO’s mind this quarter, and for good reason. Companies will have spent $4.3 billion on Big Data technologies by the end of 2012.

      But here’s where it gets interesting. Those initial investments will in turn trigger a domino effect of upgrades and new initiatives that are valued at $34 billion for 2013, per Gartner. Over a 5 year period, spend is estimated at $232 billion.

      What you’re seeing right now is only the tip of a gigantic iceberg.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Does OpenOffice have a future?

      The Apache Software Foundation has made OpenOffice a top-level project but will that be enough to make OpenOffice matter? Should OpenOffice remain an independent open-source project?

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A GNU Protest Against Windows 8

      The Free Software Foundation, in the form of a GNU, crashed the Windows 8 launch event in an effort to persuade Windows users not to upgrade to Windows 8 but move to GNU/Linux instead.

      Activists, one of them in the shape of a GNU, the FSF movement’s buffalo-like mascot, greeted visitors to Microsoft’s launch event on October 25. We can’t say if Microsoft actually noticed their gate crasher but Gnus probably find it difficult to conceal themselves at software launches.

      The GNU’s pumpkin bucket contained DVDs loaded with Trisquel, a free software distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. Volunteers also handed out FSF stickers and pamphlets about the dangers of Windows 8 urging you to sign a pledge to upgrade to free software instead.

    • MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign launches!

      Today we’re excited to announce a crowdfunding campaign to support MediaGoblin run in coordination with the Free Software Foundation! You may have heard that I quit my job as senior software engineer / tech lead at Creative Commons to pursue MediaGoblin fulltime and fund development. Instead of using one of the more mainstream crowdfunding sites, we decided to team up with the Free Software Foundation, who is supporting our fundraising infrastructure.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Don’t Like Partisan Politics? Then Don’t Vote By Party – Just Vote Pro-Science!

    We see Independent 40%, Democrat 31%, and Republican 27%! That’s right, the Republicans are in the minority, at just over a quarter of those surveyed!

  • A Linux User’s Perspective Of Microsoft Windows 8

    Also, I was *livid* when Microsoft’s highly-touted software failed and didn’t provide any meaningful error messages and left my system unbootable. I mean, this is the kind of shit that Lennart Poettering pulls off in Fedora Rawhide when he breaks systemd or dracut. This isn’t something I expect out of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate pushing out production software on millions of people.

    Next, on my ThinkPad T530, I tried upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro. The upgrade failed the first time, but the rollback to Windows 7 was perfect — I had upgraded from Windows 7 to… Windows 7. This Microsoft software is just unbelievably magical. You can’t make this up.

  • The Case for Irrational Voting

    Some smart friends of mine argue for a particular type of quasi-rational voting in such situations. Because of our antiquated electoral college that pretends an entire state voted for Tweedledee even if 49% of it voted for Tweedledum, moral voters should, this argument goes, vote for truly good candidates — even write-in candidates — in most states, in order to send a message. But they should only do so because there are too few such informed ethical strategic voters to actually swing the state. In the all-important handful of Swing States, however, where the contest between the two Tweedles is too close to call, we are advised to vote for the less hideous of the two.

  • Thoughts on Voting “Third Party”

    …we vote FOR things and not AGAINST things.

    This is the real, deeper problem behind a two-party system.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Binders Full of Generals

      Mr. Romney has promised to shoot the defense budget into the stratosphere at levels that have been unseen since the height of the Korean War. As in a past column, I have inserted here a chart that I think is one of the most significant of the presidential campaign, and it should be passed around to as many people possible before the election.

    • ‘They Brought an Army to Take Out a 16-Year-Old Boy,’ Says Father of Suicidal Teen Killed by Police Sniper
    • Researchers Expose Illegal Detention and Torture in Ivory Coast

      Amnesty International said today more than 200 people, including members of former President Laurent Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front, are being illegally detained and tortured months after he was arrested and turned over to the International Criminal Court.

      Researchers spent one month in Ivory Coast interviewing dozens of people who described torture. In addition, Amnesty International met four detainees at the Génie militaire, a military barracks in Abidjan, who have been held incommunicado for more than a month.

    • WikiLeaks Releases US Military Policies for Detention & Avoiding Accountability for Torture

      The media organization WikiLeaks has released the first of more than one hundred classified or “otherwise restricted” policies from the US Department of Defense that lay out rules and procedures for detainees in US military custody. The “Detainee Policies” show how the US military has handled detention for the past decade and will be released over the course of the next month, according to a press release.

      On the first day of the release, five policies have been posted. The most significant of the postings is the 2002 manual for Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

    • Protesters steal the show at Seattle police gathering to explain intended use of drones

      It was hard to hear Thursday night what Assistant Chief Paul McDonagh was trying to say about how the Seattle Police Department hopes to use drones to save lives and increase public safety — what with the chanting of “no drones” and the loud cries of “murderer” and “shame” drowning him out.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs and the sophisticated investor: Who’s duping whom?

      By all accounts, neither Michael Lewis nor Frank Serpico should be concerned about competition from Greg Smith, the erstwhile Goldman Sachs vice president whose supposed tell-all, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs,” was published Monday. I’ve only read the first chapter excerpt that’s been floating around the Internet since last week, but Smith clearly lacks Lewis’s humor and narrative verve, and reviewers who read advance copies of the entire book have said there’s not much substance to his assertions about Goldman’s culture. I suspect that Smith will have a short shelf life as a Wall Street chronicler and whistle-blower.

    • Greens chair shoots down Fennovoima nuclear project

      Green League Chairman Ville Niinistö has described the nuclear power project by the public power consortium Fennovoima as unprofitable nonsense. He said that the project should also be rejected by municipal decision makers.

    • Ten filthy rich, tax-dodging hypocrites

      The irony is that CEOs in the coalition’s leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who’ve mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they’ve boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

    • The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

      There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

      Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

      Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

      Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

    • Greece arrests editor for ‘Lagarde list’ leak

      Detained journalist defends publishing list of well-known Greeks who allegedly use Swiss banks to evade national taxes.

    • Steve Jobs’ Yacht, ‘Venus,’ Sets Sail

  • Privacy

    • CDB: Not Dead Yet

      My main point was that the Bill creates an unprecedented resource for the security services to “go fishing” in everyone’s private affairs. “Communications Data” means “everything that’s not the message” for every kind of internet use (e-mail, instant messaging, voice communication, streaming and so on), and collecting all of it from everyone in Britain on a rolling 12-month basis (with some information held indefinitely) offers a massive pool in which to use heuristics to pattern match answers to open questions.

    • Verizon’s ‘Precision Market Insights’ Data Mining Policy Raising Privacy Concerns

      A new initiative from Verizon is raising questions about the telecom giant’s commitment to protecting the privacy of its customers.

      The company’s new marketing program, Precision Market Insights, collects data information from iOS and Android users, based on geographic location gleaned from apps and sites being accessed. Verizon plans to continue to share that information with potential advertisers.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • What’s behind the science academies’ attack on Seralini?

      It could hardly have been more damning – six French science academies jointly dismissing Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini’s recent paper in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology as a “scientific non-event.”

    • Agriculture Is The Number One Choice of Voters…

      “The appointment of Kofi Annan as AGRA’s chairman was a strategic decision that the Gates Foundation made to silence criticisms that its agricultural development agenda was a “White Man’s Dream for Africa.” In fact, this more reeks of Monsanto’s campaign: “Let the Harvest Begin.” Launched in 1998 to gain acceptance of GE crops around the world by projecting the benefits of the Green Revolution in Asia and its potential in Africa, Monsanto’s campaign managed to draw several respected African leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, to speak for a new Green Revolution in Africa. In response, all of the African delegates (except South Africa) to the UN Food and Agriculture Negotiations on the International Undertaking for Plant Genetic Resources in June 1998 issued a counter statement, “Let Nature’s Harvest Continue.” The delegates clearly stated their objection to multinational companies’ use of the image of the poor and hungry from African countries to push technology that is not safe, environmentally friendly, or economically beneficial.” Voices From Africa: African Farmers & Environmentalists Speak Out Against a New Green Revolution in Africa.

    • How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

    • Copyrights

10.27.12

Links 27/10/2012: KDE Plasma Active 3, Raspberry Pi WebIDE

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A New Era of Operating System Competition Dawns

    …it has been many years since we’ve seen such healthy competition among operating systems.

  • Windows 8 launch – Jim Zemlin and the Free Software Foundation have their say
  • Share Will Shrink to ~30% for That Other OS in a Few Years

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • LG Gets Serious About Linux, Joins ARM Focused Linaro

      LG is in limelight these days, yesterday we posted a story about LG working on open source implementation of WebOS for their SmartTVs, then they announced 4K TV (UHDTV) and now they are joining the Linux for ARM expert Linaro to cooperate on new ARM technologies.

      According to a press statement LG will contribute resources to work together with the resources from existing Linaro members. Linaro uses a unique business model where multiple companies create core open source software once with a shared investment in a single software engineering team, rather than by creating multiple, fragmented software solutions in isolation.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Releases Plasma Active 3

        KDE has released a new version of Plasma Active. According to the announcement, the Plasma Active user interface is touch-friendly and works well across a range of devices, giving users a natural way to organize and access their applications, files, and information. Version 3 features an enhanced and expanded set of apps, improved performance, and a new virtual keyboard.

      • KDE Manifesto in action: bodega server

        I wrote the other day about why the KDE Manifesto is important for the KDE community. Today I’d like to show how it can be used in practice with a real-world case study: the bodega server. Coherent Theory has been working on this content distribution system for a while and it does things rather differently in a variety of ways including:

        * Free software licensed :)
        * multiple owner-defined store fronts to the same (or different) bodies of hosted content thanks to a tag-based metadata system
        * able to federate external content (a feature set I expect will evolve significantly over time)
        * good for books, music, services, artwork, etc. as well as for applications; essentially any content or artifact that can be delivered over the network works just fine (which is why we don’t call it an “app store”)
        * built-in purchasing system using a points mechanism which can be tied to monetary purchases (swipe integration is included), gift cards or pretty much any other system you can think of (e.g. in a school environment students could earn points through their performance in class)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • What’s New in GNOME 3.7.1

        Matthias Clasen has just posted the news that GNOME 3.7.1 will be released sometime today and then takes readers on a tour. The latest on Nautilus, tweeks to the control center, and other tidbits are discussed.

      • The First GNOME 3.8 Development Release
      • Announcing Every Detail Matters, Round 2

        Details matter. Small aspects of a user interface make a huge difference. Get them right, and the experience becomes beautiful, satisfying and easy. Get them wrong, and it can be clunky, awkward and ugly. It’s only by paying attention to the details that we can raise the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience and make it fantastic.

      • Every Detail Matters 2 is open for Hacking!
      • Gnome 3.7.1 Out With OwnCloud Support, Some Screenshots

        he first release of Gnome desktop in 3.7 cycle is out. Among the most exciting features, this release comes with OwnCloud support in Online Accounts and support for faster recursive searching in Nautilus. This release is a early version of the next major release of Gnome 3.8.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Cubieboard is like a Raspberry Pi on Steroids

      Here at GeekTech, we’re big fans of tiny Linux computer boards like the Raspberry Pi. If you wanted even more power after the Raspberry Pi got itsturbo on and a serious RAM upgrade, you might want to take a look at the amped up specs on the Cubieboard.

    • Mobile Devices Will Replace PC In The Workplace

      on26Oct

      Over the next five years, 65 percent of enterprises will adopt a mobile device management (MDM) solution for their corporate liable users, according to Gartner, Inc. With the increased functionality of smartphones, and the increasing popularity of tablets, much of the network traffic and corporate data that was once the primary domain of enterprise PCs is now being shifted to mobile devices.

      With most employees coming to work nowadays toting their smartphone, and or Tablet, and it makes sense for businesses to adopt MDM. With more and more enterprise apps coming on the market and as remote access technology improves, more enterprise content will be stored on these devices. Users are already synchronizing corporate content into public clouds for later retrieval on the devices.

    • LG Working on an Open WebOS-Powered Smart TV
    • Raspberry Pi WebIDE

      If you are serious about using your Raspberry Pi (RPi) as a platform for writing and testing code, you’ll appreciate the WebIDE software developed by Adafruit. This server-based solution turns your RPi into a flexible coding environment which you can access and use from any machine with a browser. Although WebIDE is geared towards Python, it can handle other languages, including Ruby, JavaScript, and shell scripts. Better yet, WebIDE seamlessly integrates with the Bitbucket code hosting service.

      Using the provided installer script, you can deploy WebIDE in an RPi in a matter of minutes. Alternatively, WebIDE can be installed manually, and the project’s website provides instructions on how this is done. By default, WebIDE is configured to run on port 80, which can be a problem if your RPi is already running the Apache web server on that port. In this case, you need to configure WebIDE to run on another port. To do this, open the config.js file in the nano editor using the sudo nano /usr/share/adafruit/webide/config/config.js command, specify an alternative port, and restart WebIDE.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google’s Top 4 Free Android Apps

          Google’s top 4 free Android apps are available via Google Play. In order of downloads, they are – Facebook, Pandora Internet Radio, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

        • Android to beat Windows in 2016: Gartner

          Google’s Android operating system will be used on more computing devices than Microsoft’s Windows within four years, data from research firm Gartner showed on Wednesday, underlining the massive shift in the technology sector.

        • Samsung Releasing Arndale Community Development Board

          Samsung announced today the immediate availability of Arndale, a new community development board designed around its Exynos 5 Dual system-on-chip (SoC).

          It features the implementation of both the world’s first dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processor and the world’s first quad-core ARM Mali-T604 GPU based on 32nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology.

        • Samsung Galaxy Premier clears the NCC, shows its hardware
        • Nexus Wireless Charging Pad Shows Up

          We are already pretty well acquainted with the upcoming Nexus devices thanks to all the leaked photos of Quick Start Guide, camera photos, photos of the devices themselves and LG executive revealing info, Nexus is all over the internet. Since we already know so much about the new devices, let’s digest some news about the new accessory they will come with i.e. the wireless charging pad.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • NRO Readies Open Source Cloud For Launch
  • Tiki Wiki 9.2 can now check system requirements

    The current 6.x and 9.x long term support (LTS) branches of the open source Tiki wiki, CMS and groupware solution have been updated to versions 6.8 and 9.2 respectively. Whereas Tiki 9.2 has more than 500 code changes, focuses on fixing various bugs and also includes several improvements, the 6.8 release only includes a patch to close an undisclosed security hole.

  • SaaS

    • Cloudera Open Source Impala Brings Real Time Queries to Hadoop

      Cloudera, one of the leading commercial sponsors of Hadoop, is now aiming to enable faster Big Data queries by introducing a new technology codenamed Impala. The goal with Impala is to enable rapid and interactive queries.

    • OpenStack Foundation Board is all about Blocking and Tackling

      The name Alan Clark is a familiar one to those who follow open source governance. Clark sits on the Board of Directors at the Linux Foundation. He was also the former Chairman of the Board of the openSUSE Foundation, and Clark was recently selected to be the first Chairman of the newly formed OpenStack Foundation Board.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • CoffeeScript 1.4.0 released

      CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas has announced the release of version 1.4.0 of his programming language that compiles into JavaScript. The first upgrade to the language since mid-May brings relatively few changes. Among them, the CoffeeScript compiler has been updated to allow developers to strip Microsoft’s UTF-8 BOM (byte order mark) from source files before compiling them.

    • Proxmox VE works with KVM and OpenVZ containers

      After six months of development, Proxmox Server Solutions has released version 2.2 of its Virtual Environment (VE) virtualisation platform. The system supports virtual machines running both under a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and in OpenVZ containers. Both can be simultaneously and transparently operated and managed on one system. While KVM completely virtualises almost every operating system, OpenVZ conserves resources by only running Linux guests on a common kernel in isolated containers. The company says that this strategy puts its product ahead of alternatives like VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix’s XenServer.

    • Google Web Toolkit 2.5 with leaner code

      According to its developers, version 2.5 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based open source web framework for Ajax applications, offers significant performance improvements. Apparently, the overall code base has been reduced by 20 per cent, and the download size of the sample application dropped 39 per cent.

      GWT is built around a Java-to-JavaScript compiler that allows developers to almost exclusively use Java when writing an application’s client and server code. The user interface code is translated into JavaScript and deployed to the browser when required. The technology recently became a discussion topic when Google introduced its Dart alternative to JavaScript; however, Google has assured the GWT community that it will continue to develop GWT for the foreseeable future.

    • Clementine Music Player 1.1 Released

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The future of our open source world

      Open source shouldn’t just stop at the world of software. In fact, more and more manufacturers are warming up to the cause.

    • Open Hardware

      • Willow Garage’s Robotics Work Inspires a Spinoff

        We’ve covered the extraordinary open source robotics work going on over at Willow Garage a number of times. It is a project that originated at Stanford University. Robots being developed within it run the open source ROS (Robot Operating System) software. Now comes Suitable Technologies, a spinoff of Willow Garage doing some innovative things in the arena of remote presence robotics.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C publishes Working Draft for Push API

      The W3C has published a Working Draft for a push notification API for web applications. Currently, there are more than a dozen different approaches to sending push notifications from a server to a client, including EventSockets, PubNub and Urban Airship. The W3C draft, authored by Eduardo Fullea of Telefónica and Bryan Sullivan of AT&T, is a new approach that can use several different protocols and is intended to become a standard endorsed by the W3C.

Leftovers

  • Will Voter Suppression Tactics Threaten Free and Fair Elections?

    The wave of new voter restrictions and scare tactics being implemented for the 2012 elections — such as voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, threatening billboards, misleading mailers and vigilante poll watchers — could intimidate countless numbers of Americans from exercising their right to vote.

  • Science

    • Eating Cooked Food Made Us Human

      A new paper examines the metabolic restrictions of a raw diet, and suggests that our primate cousins are limited by their inability to heat their dinners. It bolsters the cooking hypothesis of Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who believes cooking is our legacy.

      Brazilian biomedical scientists Karina Fonseca-Azevedo and Suzana Herculano-Houzel note that the largest primates do not have the largest brains, a perplexing question. Encephalization (a larger brain size per body size than you’d expect) has long been thought to be a key feature setting humans apart from other primates, and mammals as a whole, but there is no consensus on how or why this happened.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Spanish unemployment tops 25 percent

      Among workers aged 16-24 the jobless rate towered at 52.34 percent in the third quarter, only slightly down from 53.27 percent in the previous quarter, the institute said.

    • Neoliberalism Kills: Part Two

      Neoliberalism is an evolving ideological paradigm which can be traced back to the work of Hayek and von Mises in the 1920s and even earlier than that. I won’t however, do a historical survey here of the various developments and nuances. Instead, I’ll just rely on the definitions and specifications of this body of thought that seem to me to be the clearest statements of the current state of the paradigm.

    • The Price of Monopoly: $100 million
    • Don’t Be Fooled: For Investors, Charter Schools Are Cash Cows

      In Pennsylvania and across the nation, investors are making big bucks off of charter schools, and donating huge sums to the politicians who protect their interests.

    • ‘We Pay More’: US Austerity Well Underway

      Regardless of political persuasion, there isn’t one person I’ve met who isn’t infuriated by the fact that they pay more in federal taxes than a combined majority of most billion-dollar corporations. But what’s even more infuriating is that under the Budget Control Act that was passed after our austerity- crazed Congress forced it into being during the Summer-long debt negotiations of 2011, budgets for numerous essential social programs will be cut to the bone this January, under the false guise that our country is too broke to pay the bills.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • ACLU and EFF are in court against Twitter ID requests

      FREEDOM GROUPS the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be in a US federal appeals court today as they fight government attempts to get internet user IDs without warrants.

      The ACLU and EFF are pushing back government advances on Wikileaks and Twitter where, they argue, there is a threat to liberty and privacy and want it made public whenever the government requests access.

    • How Companies Have Assembled Political Profiles for Millions of Internet Users

      If you’re a registered voter and surf the web, one of the sites you visit has almost certainly placed a tiny piece of data on your computer flagging your political preferences. That piece of data, called a cookie, marks you as a Democrat or Republican, when you last voted, and what contributions you’ve made. It also can include factors like your estimated income, what you do for a living, and what you’ve bought at the local mall.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN Agencies: A growing threat for the Internet?

      The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), led by Russian diplomat, Yury Fedotov, has just released a report (pdf) arguing for more surveillance and retention of data on all communications, even in the total absence of suspicion. Coincidentally, the Coordinator of the elegantly named 1267 Committee that was in charge of the report is British – and the British government recently proposed (even if it is likely to be rejected at national level) the most extensive suspicionless monitoring ever considered in a democratic society – the Communications Data Bill.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • How Food Became Technology [Excerpt]

      Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • No, Copyright Is Not A Human Right

        We recently discussed the common fallacy that “copyright is in the Constitution”, but that’s only one example of copyright defenders misrepresenting a document to support their cause. Another favorite, often invoked by folks like Rob Levine and David Lowery, is the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a relatively toothless document in the US (compared to the Constitution) but one that feels good to have on your side.

      • Sony Sued Over William Faulkner Quote in ‘Midnight in Paris’

        The lawsuit claims a line spoken by actor Owen Wilson in the Woody Allen film infringes on the author’s literary rights; a spokesman for Sony calls the complaint frivolous.

      • Copyright Office fails to protect users from DMCA

        The FSF has fought for years against the threat of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Users should have the right to modify, share and learn from the software on their devices, and technical measures put in place in the name of DRM offer a substantial roadblock. It’s even worse when those measures have the force of criminal law behind them, threatening people who simply want to change the software on their computers with jail time. The FSF wants to create a world in which there is no DRM. Until then, at the very least, users shouldn’t have to worry about legal consequences for disabling these malfeatures on their own devices.

      • Copyright: The New Mercantilism

        We’ve argued for a while that copyright is frequently used as a new form of mercantilism, the mostly discredited economic theory that basically said that the government should be heavily involved in “protecting” local industries with monopolies and tariffs. Adam Smith’s seminal works, which more or less created the field of economics were really, in part, a critique of mercantilism, and how it could cause more economic harm than good. When you take a wider view of copyright law and policy (especially in international trade), it’s not difficult to conclude that it’s very similar to classic 17th century mercantilism.

      • Six-Strikes “Independent Expert” Is RIAA’s Former Lobbying Firm
      • RIAA Failed To Disclose Expert’s Lobbying History to “Six-Strikes” Partners

        A month before the controversial “six strikes” anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the “impartial and independent” technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology.

10.26.12

Links 26/10/2012: Talk of “EXT5″, Monsanto and Gates Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • How Linux makes the post-desktop world possible

    Much has been said about the look and feel of Microsoft’s new Metro interface and how the operating system that sits on 90-plus percent of the world’s desktops is now getting an upgrade that would be better suited for tablets and touch screens.

    That interface, and the direction that personal computing seems to be heading, represents a big opportunity for Linux… but perhaps not the one you’re thinking of.

  • Throwing Money at Shiny and Worthless Technology

    Intel had to find a way to get into the tablet market, but people only want to buy iPads and Android-powered ones. So Intel surrendered the consumer market altogether in favor of enterprise “solutions”, like its new Intel learning series “solution” for education, which relies on tablets nobody heard of with operating systems nobody heard of running proprietary education software nobody heard of. To sell those, Intel was looking for suckers, and in minister Nicolas Sehnaoui, it found the perfect sucker.

    Students in America are getting iPads, students in Africa are getting Kindles, but students in Lebanon will be getting MANDRIVAs.

  • Welcome Windows 8 to a Post-Desktop World

    Google’s Android OS only accounted for a 3.9% share of the smart phone market in 2009 (according to Gartner Group); last year that rose to 64% of the smartphone market. In 2011, smartphones for the first time outsold PCs (including tablets.) With hundreds of millions of those smart phones running Android, the consumer market is fully accustomed to Linux-based software.

  • Linux Foundation: Windows 8 is stuck in a “liminal space”

    If Microsoft has reinvented and reengineered itself to be able to position its OS to serve not just the desktop WIMP space, but also now the touch-enabled search-centric mobile-first always-on cloud-driven market — then this is a reinvention that was never going to happen without the firm facing a little criticism.

  • Desktop

    • ROSA Desktop 2012 Beta Is Compatible with Windows 8

      Konstantin Kochereshkin has announced yesterday, October 24th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the upcoming Rosa Desktop 2012 Linux operating system.

    • The Windows You Love is Gone

      Last month, I suggested that the transition to Windows RT bares the same hurdles as transitioning to Linux. Many obstacles blocking our path, like Adobe and PC gaming, are considering Linux; the rest have good reason to follow.

    • The Windows You Love is Gone

      Consumers who bought Vista or “7″ believing what they were told are justified in thinking “8″ is unnecessary. After all their current hardware idles all the time and it’s choked with RAM and storage. What could anyone possibly want from “8″? A new PC? Nope. They might buy a tablet this year however it won’t be running that other OS because all their friends don’t have that.

  • Server

    • Parallella: Low-Cost Linux Multi-Core Computing

      Parallella is an attempt to make Linux parallel computing easier and is advertised as a “supercomputer for everyone”, but will it come to fruition?

      Parallella is designed to be “a truly open, high-performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing.” The Parallella computing board is built around Epiphany multi-core chips out of the Cambridge-based Adapteva semiconductor company.

  • Kernel Space

    • systemd for Administrators, Part XVIII
    • systemd for Developers III
    • Talk Of “EXT5″ File-System; Should EXT4 Be Frozen?

      In the discussion that followed when it was found a nasty EXT4 file-system corruption bug hit recent Linux kernel stable releases, one user proposed that EXT4 be put in a feature-freeze mode and future work then be put towards an “EXT5″ file-system, to which Ted Ts’o did respond.

      In the Phoronix Forums discussion about the EXT4 corruption bug hitting the Linux 3.4/3.5/3.6 kernels, Ted Ts’o, the EXT4 file-system maintainer, ultimately jumped in on the discussion to respond to the numerous and polarized opinions of Phoronix readers.

    • KVM Virtualization Support For ARM

      Within the forthcoming Linux 3.7 kernel there is support for Xen virtualization support on ARM when using a Cortex-A15 SoC. While not yet merged to mainline, KVM virtualization support for the ARM architecture is also coming about.

      Patches are now up to their third revision that enable KVM/QEMU support on ARM when using Cortex-A15 hardware. There’s kernel patches still needed to go upstream, which one would hope will happen for the Linux 3.8 kernel.

    • QEMU: Support KVM on ARM
    • AMD FX-8350 Linux Performance-Per-Watt

      The latest Phoronix benchmarks to share of the AMD FX-8350 “Vishera” processor are performance-per-Watt results for the Piledriver eight-core processor compared to the previous-generation Bulldozer FX-8150. Tests were conducted when running at stock speeds as well as overclocked settings.

    • Graphics Stack

      • ARM Freedreno Driver Begins Work On Gallium3D

        Rob Clark has provided a status update on Freedreno, his reverse-engineered ARM open-source graphics driver for the Qualcomm Snapdragon / Adreno hardware.

        The latest update on Freedreno came on Tuesday via his blog. Aside from getting the stencil buffer working and fixing batching problems in the 2D driver, Rob has also begun eyeing a Gallium3D-based driver and he’s already implemented DRI2 support within the xf86-video-freedreno DDX driver.

      • Atomic Mode-Setting Still Being Enriched

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • BackBox 3.0 Screenshots

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Recruitment: How do we perform?

        A couple of days ago, Tomas and I, gave a presentation at the Gentoo Miniconf. The subject of the presentation was to give an overview of the current recruitment process, how are we performing compared to the previous years and what other ways there are for users to help us improve our beloved distribution. In this blog post I am gonna get into some details that I did not have the time to address during the presentation regarding our recruitment process.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Linux 12.10 review

            As Canonical looks to recoup some of its investment in the Ubuntu Linux project it was widely thought that the firm would follow Red Hat’s route of offering paid product support, but instead Ubuntu 12.10 is the first glimpse of how Canonical apparently wants to recoup its investment. The firm’s decision to release Ubuntu 12.10 with Amazon adverts has added a sour taste to what still remains an accomplished desktop Linux distribution.

          • Mark Shuttleworth’s big mistake

            Last week marked eight years since Ubuntu made its appearance on the GNU/Linux scene. Since October 2004, there has been a release of this distribution every six months, the initial buzz being very loud and then gradually fading away.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Yocto Project 1.3 includes AutoBuilder

      With the release of version 1.3, the team at the Yocto Project has added a number of developer-visible features to its embedded distribution builder. First announced in October 2010, the open source collaboration project (a Linux Foundation workgroup) is aimed at device builders. It provides templates, tools and methods for developers to create Linux-based systems for various embedded systems and processor architectures such as ARM, MIPS, PPC or x86.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • IRCTC.co.in: Boon or Bane?

    It was in 2003, IRCTC felt the need of a high-performance and high-availability system to handle the high load of its operations and partnered with open source-based solution provider Red Hat to run its IT infrastructure, in order to automate and streamline its processes.

  • Why I left my MacBook for a Chromebook

    The Chromebook has inserted itself into my life in a way I never expected. Sorry, MacBook Pro — I just don’t need you right now

  • CMS

    • Acquia Introduces Open Web Experience Management For Drupal

      Acquia, a provider of paid cloud services specifically designed to support the Drupal open source web content management platform, is introducing a new concept it calls “Open Web Experience Management” or OpenWEM. It looks like digital marketing has officially come to Drupal.

  • Healthcare

    • VA unveils plans to certify VistA for meaningful use

      The Department of Veterans Affairs has laid out a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA EHR system, with a version that’s being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.

      The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).

  • Public Services/Government

    • Cork City Council to increase open source use in IT projects

      Aidan O’Riordan, systems analyst with Cork City Council’s IS operations, confirmed that the council is undertaking the projects in a way that will be compatible with open source work that will be carried out by the LGMA and the Local Government Efficiency Review Group.

      [...]

      Cork City Council already uses some existing open source applications and servers and is looking to build on that. To date, open source at the council had been restricted to operational applications, like network monitoring solutions or list servers rather than end-user applications, O’Riordan said.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • High School Teacher Lesson Plans Go Open Source

        For a high school French teacher looking for a creative approach to verb conjugation, new lesson plans are only a website away. The same is true for a biology teacher covering a unit on mammals, or a history teacher trying to spice up a lesson on the Gettysburg Address.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Exclusive: As Obama and Romney Agree on Afghan War, Israel and Syria, Third Parties Give Alternative
  • Australian Consumer Advocate CHOICE Encourages IP Spoofing To Get Better Prices

    I’ll be honest about my viewpoint to start this piece: I hate geo-restrictions, particularly on digital goods. I simply cannot see how they benefit anyone. Customers are blocked or pay different prices for like goods, often times angering them (not something you typically want to do to customers). Companies feel the brunt of this anger, or else at least feel the impact of the a restricted customer base through their own unwillingness to deal fairly in a global marketplace. Perhaps most importantly, for savvy customers, there are tools to simply get around the artificial barriers these companies erect, making them just more useless DRM-like nonsense.

  • Microsoft Surface gets the thumbs down in early reviews
  • ‘Obama, Romney – same police state’: Third party debate up-close (FULL VIDEO)

  • Security

    • Experts warn about security flaws in airline boarding passes

      Security flaws in airline boarding passes could allow would-be terrorists or smugglers to know in advance whether they will be subject to certain security measures, and perhaps even permit them to modify the designated measures, security researchers have warned.

    • Sony PS3 hacked “for good” – master keys revealed

      Perhaps “hacked” is the wrong word, because it can imply both criminality and lawful exploration. But we’ll stick with “hacked” here, in the sense of “some reverse engineers have figured out how you can adapt, or jailbreak, your PS3 to make it interoperable with software of your own choice.”

      The PS3 has been hacked before, but Sony was able to inhibit the hack with an update to its own firmware. This is much like the history of jailbreaking on Apple’s iOS, where hackers typically uncover a security vulnerability and exploit it, whereupon Apple patches the hole and suppresses the jailbreak.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • BP Deepwater Horizon Won’t Settle Before the Election

      Political cycles present the obvious opportunity for prognostication. Polling is happening daily. Rather than present another poll, let us take this opportunity to make a simple prediction.

      There will be no pre-election BP Deepwater Horizon settlement despite an $18 billion deal being on the table last month and a rumored $21 billion settlement this past Friday, October 19.

    • US downplayed effect of Deepwater oil spill on whales, emails reveal

      Documents obtained by Greenpeace show officials controlling information about wildlife affected by the disaster

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • NY Times blocked in China as it reveals Wen Jiaobao’s obscene family wealth

      I remember when Wen Jiaao first became prime minister. There were such high hopes, and they’ve never really abated: Wen has always been seen as “the good CCP leader.” As if by magic, he was always on the scene as tragedies struck, be they earthquakes or floods or winter storms in Guangzhou at Chinese New Year time or high-speed rail crashes. And there was something genuine about the Man of the People, the one who cared about China’s disenfranchised. And maybe he really does care. He would have to be a damned good actor if he didn’t.

  • Privacy

    • Don’t want us to give false details? Then don’t ask for them

      Debate has once again surrounded social media and the topic of whether individual’s should be able to post anonymously and give false details when creating a social media account. Andy Smith, head of security at the Public Sector Technical Services Authority, caused controversy by advising internet users that giving false details to social networking sites was a “very sensible thing to do”.

      In an age where our personal information is becoming more and more valuable as a commodity, it is clearly sensible that people don’t share data unless it is absolutely necessary. The answer to the problem is that internet services need to reassess how much personal information they request from a user, for instance is it really necessary for a social network site to ask for your full birthday and gender?

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Intellectual Property Policy Incoherence at the African Union Threatens Access to Medicines

      In a stunning development, following an obscure vote of Heads of State at the Africa Union in 2007 (Assembly Council/AU/Dec. 138(VIII)), the AU Scientific, Technical, and Research Commission has proposed a draft statute to establish the Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO). This proposed legislation will be presented to a meeting of the African Ministers in charge of Science and Technology on 6-12 November 2012 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

      The statute, drafted by true believers of IP-maximalist ideology, proposes to establish a region-wide intellectual property organization with the sole agenda of expanding IP rights, strengthening enforcement, harmonizing regional legislation, and eventually facilitating the granting of IP monopolies by a central granting authority that may well be legally binding on Member States.

    • Will Proposed Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization Enable The West To Impose Its Monopolies?
    • Monsanto, Bill Gates and AGRA (Axis of Greedy Rip-offs in Africa)
    • Gates and Monsanto Go After Milk

      In the near future, human development can potentially be dictated by corporate America, through the Bill & Malinda [sic] Gates Foundation and their $8.3 U.C. Davis grant.

    • Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push GE Crops on Africa

      Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show of images amid descriptions of the foundation’s fight against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a “Trojan horse” to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to have approved in the United States and abroad.

    • Wholesale Murder of Africans
    • Monsanto’s Former Head of Research Teams up with Bill and Melinda
    • Genetically Engineered Rice is a Trojan Horse: Misled by Bill Gates and Monsanto

      The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has approved $20 million in new monies toward the development of “golden rice” — an untested, highly controversial GE (genetically engineered) crop that threatens biodiversity and risks bringing economic and ecological disaster to Asia’s farms.

      The leader of the Golden Rice project is Gerald Barry, previously director of research at Monsanto.

      Sarojeni V. Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), has called the rice a “Trojan horse.” According to Rengam, the rice is “… a public relations stunt pulled by the agri-business corporations to garner acceptance of GE crops and food. The whole idea of GE seeds is to make money.”

    • Copyrights

      • Making The Most Of File Sharing: Free Market Research & A Captive Target Audience

        The demonization of file sharing by copyright maximalists blinds many companies to the fact that it is marketing in its purest form. That’s because people naturally only share stuff they think is good, and thus everything on file sharing networks comes with an implicit recommendation from someone. Not only that, but those works that appear on file sharing networks the most are, again by definition, those that are regarded mostly highly by the filesharing public as a whole, many of whom are young people, a key target demographic for most media companies.

      • Overworked, Underpaid, Illegal? Hollywood Interns Fight Back (Guest Column)
      • How Porn Copyright Lawyer John Steele Has Made A ‘Few Million Dollars’ Pursuing (Sometimes Innocent) ‘Porn Pirates’

        The rather long list of “People Most Hated By The Internet” — that guy who sued the Oatmeal, RIAA, Hunter Moore, Julia Allison, Violentacrez… — would be incomplete were it not to include John Steele. Steele is a lawyer who has partnered with the pornography industry to go after “pirates” who download their XXX films without paying for them. He has filed over 350 of these suits, and says he is currently suing approximately 20,000 people.

      • Megaupload Can’t Come Back Online, U.S. Tells Court

        The U.S. Government has just submitted its objections to Megaupload’s motion to temporarily dismiss the criminal indictment against the company. Megaupload’s lawyers had argued that a dismissal would allow the cyberlocker to rehabilitate itself, but the U.S. believes this can’t happen as Dotcom has sworn that the old Megaupload won’t return. According to Kim Dotcom the DoJ’s opposition is “full of frustration.” “Their bluff case is falling apart,” he says.

      • Torrent Site Webhost Ordered to Pay “Piracy” Damages

        Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won a landmark case against XS Networks, the former hosting provider of torrent site SumoTorrent. The Court of The Hague ruled that the provider is responsible for damages copyright holders suffered through the torrent site’s activities. The Dutch verdict has far-reaching implications for the liability of hosting providers for the conduct of their clients.

      • William Faulkner estate sues Sony over Midnight in Paris line

10.25.12

Links 26/10/2012: Chinese Stock Exchange and 64-Bit Server Platform Use Red Hat

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux needs a second look – review

    Cape Town – Linux Ubuntu is a viable alternative to users who don’t feel comfortable with Microsoft’s latest version of Windows.

    The software giant has launched its latest version of its iconic operating system and has targeted mobile devices like tablets, but many have criticised the company, saying the OS is a departure from what users expect of a desktop operating system.

  • Desktop

    • Beta of ROSA Desktop 2012 released

      The ROSA development team has released a beta version of ROSA Desktop 2012, its Mandriva-Linux-based operating system aimed at desktop users. The beta of the next major release of the Russian firm’s distribution, also known as Marathon, addresses various compatibility issues and brings with it several changes and new features, such as a new boot menu option.

      The new “Install in basic mode” option has been added to allow users to run the ROSA Desktop 2012 installer on lower-spec hardware. Aimed at testers and developers, the release also sees the inclusion of full support for EFI/UEFI; basic support for UEFI was added in the in the second alpha as an experimental option, but is now fully integrated into the main system.

    • ROSA Desktop 2012 Getting Closer

      The ROSA team has announced the release of ROSA 2012 Beta saying only two more steps until final. This release represents lots of work behind the scenes as well as several key improvements to ROSA. Now is the time to test and report bugs.

    • Windows 8? It Won’t Win Microsoft’s Biggest Battle
    • Dear Microsoft, Thanks for Windows 8! Love Linux

      Microsoft has a big launch event today in New York City for Windows 8. Surprisingly I got invited, but no I won’t be there. Linux users like myself however really should thank Microsoft though, Window 8 is truly a great gift.

      Unlike Windows 7, which provided Microsoft’s large user base with an evolutionary path forward from Windows XP, with a look, feel and overall experience that was better – Windows 8 is a different beast.

      I’ve had to support a couple of Windows 8 (preview) users for a few months now and the experience has taught me one thing – Windows 8 is unlike other Windows and it’s not something that most users will like. In my case, the users wanted Windows (but they wanted it for free) so I said ‘hey you can try Windows 8. Windows 8 takes an app-centric view of the desktop, which might work for tablets, but deskop users aren’t used to that. In fact, in my users’ experience the most often clicked app was ‘desktop’ because all they wanted to do was get the ‘regular’ Windows experience.

    • Southern India Overtaken By GNU/Linux Desktops
    • Hands-on with the Asus X202 11.6 inch notebook

      The Asus VivoBook X202 is a notebook with an 11.6 inch display, Intel Core i3 Ivy Bridge processor, and a starting price of $599. It’s expected launch with Windows 8 on October 26th.

      Asus will also offer a cheaper model with Ubuntu Linux soon, but I haven’t been able to get US pricing for that model just yet.

  • Server

    • Dell donates concept ARM server to the ASF

      Dell has donated an ARM-based concept server to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The company provided the server, which uses Calxeda’s EnergyCore processor architecture, to the ASF so that it can test and optimise its software for ARM server deployment. The Apache web server, Hadoop and the Cassandra NoSQL database are of particular interest to Dell customers, according to the company.

    • Dell Lends An ARM Server Concept To Open Source Community

      Dell has donated an ARM server concept to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), in the belief that the open source community will help develop and promote the model.

      Servers based on ARM chips are gaining some traction, although still are miles away from challenging Intel’s x86 architecture, which dominates data centres across the globe.

      Yet ARM server designs, due to their low-power and high-efficiency attributes, have caught the attention of a host of tech giants, including HP and Dell. Customers are looking at them for hyperscale deployments, or Big Data projects, where lots of parallel processes are run across numerous servers.

    • Zend Takes PHP Mobile and Into the Cloud

      Commercial PHP vendor Zend today took the wraps off a trio of new initiatives designed to enable developers for the new world of mobile and cloud development.

      The new Zend Studio 10 IDE provides new visual development options for mobile developers while the update Zend Server 6 and Zend Gateway products provide enhanced cloud capabilities.

    • Facebook Adapts Open Compute for Colo Space

      A rack of Facebook servers in a third-party data center in Virginia, adapted to work with Open Compute designs normally used in Facebook’s company-built facilities. (Photo: Open Compute Project)

      We’ve been closely tracking the progress of the Open Compute Project, wondering if these uber-efficient open source hardware designs would ever be available at your local colocation center. Facebook has now shared details of its first use of Open Compute hardware in its third-party colo space.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • TI Linux Developers Continue Work On The OMAP5

      While the ultimate future of Texas Instruments’ OMAP division remains uncertain, their software engineers continue to work on maturing the OMAP5 Linux support.

      Rumours began circulating back in September that Texas Instruments would begin winding down their OMAP operations as it pertains to producing ARM SoCs targeting smartphones and tablets, in order to put more emphasis on embedded devices where they have more power to succeed compared to the extremely competitive smartphone/tablet market. There have also been rumours that Amazon might even acquire TI’s OMAP division since they have the resources to do so, they already use OMAP4 chips within their Kindle tablets, and would put them at a greater competitive advantage over some of the other tablet vendors.

    • Stable Linux kernels hit by serious file system bug

    • Graphics Stack

      • DirectFB Continues To Gain New Features

        While Wayland is sitting in the public limelight, DirectFB continues to exist as another means of handling Linux displays and input. DirectFB continues to quietly march on with new capabilities.

        DirectFB 1.6 was released in June after being set back by delays but it did bring several features. DirectFB 1.6 brought a new core architecture, dynamic registration of window managers / compositors, support for new image providers, Xine/VDPAU acceleration, improved video drivers, better performance, initial Android support, and much more.

      • A Proposal To Fix The Full-Screen Linux Window Mess

        Ryan Gordon, the well-known Linux game porter and developer of SDL and other open-source projects, along with Sam Lantinga, another key SDL developer and recent hire for Valve’s Linux team, have proposed a window manager change to work out the full-screen X11 window mess.

      • Calxeda ECX-1000 Benchmarks vs. Intel Atom, TI OMAP4

        Last week I began delivering benchmarks of the low-power yet massively scalable Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM Server and followed the initial tests with some ARM compiler benchmarks and other benchmarks from this 5-Watt Linux Server. In this article is what many Phoronix readers have been waiting for: comparing Calxeda’s quad-core Cortex-A9 ARMv7 performance against a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES and then an Intel Atom processor.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 26th August 2012
      • KDE PIM October Sprint

        While not as traditional as the annual KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück near the beginning of each year, a second meeting around October/November is starting to become a tradition of its own. Similar to last year and in contrast to the Osnabrück meetings—which usually focuses on discussing ideas and planning—this year’s October sprint again concentrated on improvements to existing features.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Shell 3.7.1 Brings New Features
      • 7 Amazing Custom Gnome 3 Desktops!

        deviantART is the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 19 million registered members, attracting 45 million unique visitors per month.

        dA hosts the best Gnome Shell, GTK and Icons themes, but also has many enthusiasts that come up with extremely designs how a desktop should look like. If you think that Gnome Shell can’t be customized, think again :)

  • Distributions

    • Pear Linux 6 review

      Many Linux users really love Ubuntu because of its huge software repositories, its familiar system, the community … But when the guys in Canonical decided to use Unity on Ubuntu, it caused a discontentment to many users and that created an opportunity to thrive for other Ubuntu-based distros that still have the advantages of Ubuntu but dont use Unity.

      Pear Linux was first created just right after Ubuntu totally switched to Unity. But unlike Linux Mint that aims for the users who love the traditionally-featured desktop, the aim of Pear Linux is to created a Linux distro that has the nice features of Ubuntu and looks and behaves similarly to MacOS.

      Pear Linux 6 was released some days ago. It is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with several new and nice features.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu To Work On Rapid Hardware Enablement

            Ubuntu developers will be discussing this week about how they can rapidly bring-up support for new hardware within the Linux distribution.

            One of the many discussions to be had next week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen aside from ridding old GNOME code, pushing Ubuntu as a gaming platform, looking at Ubuntu TV, XZ packages by default, porting Ubuntu to the Nexus 7, and listening to Valve talk about Linux will be a session about rapidly bring-up Ubuntu on new hardware.

          • Nitro Is a Super Simple To-Do App that Syncs with Dropbox and Ubuntu One

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Edubuntu, Canonical and the Education Channel

              Most recent buzz in the Ubuntu world has centered around the mobile and business markets, not education. But the team behind Edubuntu, an official variant of Ubuntu designed for use in the classroom, has been quietly at work shaping future versions of that platform. Here’s what they’re hoping to bring to the open source channel in upcoming releases.

              Although Canonical endorses Edubuntu as an official Ubuntu spinoff, and not merely a community-based variant, the education-oriented face of Ubuntu remains a much more low-key, grassroots affair than its more commercial cousins, including Ubuntu Business Remix. Its core development team includes only a handful of programmers who in some months exchange no development-related emails at all.

            • Ubuntu Studio 12.10 Out, Ships With Xfce 4.10

              After Ubuntu and related distros released a new edition last week, Ubuntu Studio developers have released a new version of their OS which is based on Ubuntu Quantal. Ubuntu Studio is mainly focused on content creation and ships with a low latency kernel by default. You can download the DVD image and burn it to a USB stick or disk.

            • Don’t like Ubuntu’s Unity? Try the new GNOME Remix instead

              We’ve known for some time that a “pure GNOME” version of Ubuntu Linux was in the works, and following last week’s release of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal,” the first GNOME Remix of the software has now made its debut as well.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Surface – XBox of Personal Computers

    Once again, M$ with its tens of thousands of employees have been unable to compete with FLOSS, a cooperative project of the world to produce software that works. When will they learn? When will markets realize the emperor has no clothes?

  • Contest aims to give open source projects a second wind

    The Code for America Brigade recently launched Race for Reuse. It’s a different kind of contest that aims to increase adoption of existing open source projects with real dollars. The goal isn’t to build something brand new—it’s to encourage volunteer teams (called “brigades”) across the U.S. to stand up and support existing open source projects. Because one of the more difficult parts of deploying open source apps is building the user community around the projects and getting citizens engaged.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • My next big thing
    • Cloudera Announces Real-Time Query Engine for Hadoop

      Cloudera’s Apache-licensed, open-source query engine, Cloudera Impala, is specifically designed for real-time query of data stored in a Hadoop Distributed File System, or HDFS, and in HBase, a non-relational distributed database, and the company said it is the result of two years of in-house development. The queries for Impala can be expressed as SQL.

  • Databases

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Sangoma Releases Answering Machine Detection Software for Asterisk

      Sangoma Technologies, a provider of hardware and software components for IP communications systems for both voice and data, today launched the Sangoma Answering Machine Detection (AMD) for Asterisk software solution.

      The solution is backward-compatible to Asterisk 1.4 and delivers all of the features of other sophisticated dialer analytics packages at a price-point aligned with the open source marketplace. AMD for Asterisk is available immediately to select early-adopters, and Sangoma anticipates a general availability release before the end of the year.

    • Tine 2.0 groupware adds human resources management module

      The Tine 2.0 developers have released another major update to their open source groupware and customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Version 2012.10 of the software, code-named “Joey”, includes a new human resources management module, security guidelines for ActiveSync, PostgreSQL support and improvements to the calendar features.

    • Xtuple ERP – Free and Open Source Software

      I recently published an article that looked at using GNUCash for personal budgeting on Linux. The comment thread made for a fascinating read – it seems that many people feel that personal Linux accounting is just too painful right now, and opt for Quicken (using Wine front-end PlayOnLinux). One product that was given honourable mention, however, was xTuple’s PostBooks-based ERP system. What’s it about?

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Wassamatta GNU?

      “Today visitors to the primary Windows 8 launch event were greeted by an unexpected and uninvited visitor—a gnu.”

      Thus began a Free Software Foundation (FSF) press release I read today that I just couldn’t resist sharing with you. Partly because, hey, it involves a gnu walking the streets of New York City (see press release for the photo), and partly because of the reason why a gnu was at the Windows 8 event.

      “Activists, one dressed as the free software movement’s buffalo-like mascot, converged on Microsoft’s event to distribute pamphlets about the hidden dangers of Microsoft’s latest proprietary creation,” the press release explained. “The Halloween-themed action included plastic pumpkin buckets full of DVDs loaded with Trisquel, a free software distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.”

    • Windows 8: Don’t buy the hype

      Microsoft has shelled out a mind-boggling $1.8 billion to convince the public that it needs Windows 8. Why the record-breaking marketing deluge? Because a slick ad campaign is Microsoft’s best shot at hiding what Windows 8 really is; a faulty product that restricts your freedom, invades your privacy, and controls your data.

    • Activists trick-or-treat for free software at Windows 8 launch event

      New York, New York, USA — Thursday, October 25th, 2012 — Today visitors to the primary Windows 8 launch event were greeted by an unexpected and uninvited visitor — a gnu. Activists, one dressed as the free software movement’s buffalo-like mascot, converged on Microsoft’s event to distribute pamphlets about the hidden dangers of Microsoft’s latest proprietary creation. The Halloween-themed action included plastic pumpkin buckets full of DVDs loaded with Trisquel, a free software distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Does Open Source Hold The Keys To Innovation In Government?

      new narrative is emerging in government innovation and it goes something like this: Truly great leaps in innovation are almost never possible with monolithic, proprietary approaches to software development, and many small innovations, when taken together, often lead to large, game-changing paradigms.

    • Open source platform targets Australian Government

      PreviousNext, an Australian website strategy, design and development firm, has launched a free Drupal CMS platform specifically designed to meet Australian Government mandatory web requirements.

      It says aGov is a free open source platform that ensures all government sites are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) compliant, and provides a full set of common website features delivered via a responsive mobile device interface.

Leftovers

  • International monitors at US polling spots draw criticism from voter fraud groups

    United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.

    The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers from its human rights office around the country on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places. It’s part of a broader observation mission that will send out an additional 80 to 90 members of parliament from nearly 30 countries.

  • The Voter-Fraud Myth
  • Our legal fight for free and equal debates

    Yesterday, Monday, October 22nd, Florida attorney Kathleen Kirwin filed an emergency complaint on behlf of Dr. Jill Stein requesting an injunction against the bipartisan presidential “debate” sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), Lynn University, the Democratic and Republican national committees, and approved by the Federal Election Commission. The injunction request was denied, and the bipartisan campaign event was allowed to proceed.

  • Is The EU’s New Directive On Clinical Trials Moving In The Wrong Direction?

    It’s a cliché that we live in a world increasingly awash with digital data. Even though it all comes down to 1s and 0s, not all data is equally important or valuable. Data about clinical trials, for example, is literally a matter of life and death, since it is used to determine whether new drugs should be approved and how they should be used. That gives clinical data a critical role in the approval process: results that support the use of a new drug can lead to big profits, while negative results can mean years of expensive research and development have to be discarded.

  • What an anti-Google antitrust case by the FTC may look like

  • Health/Nutrition

    • California GMO Labeling Supporters Confront $41 Million Opposition and 13-Point Poll Slide

      California Proposition 37 to label foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is up for a vote on Tuesday, November 6. It enjoyed broad popular support as of September, with a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll showing support by 61 percent of registered voters.

      But in the two weeks following that poll, support dropped to 48 percent, according to a poll done by Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and the California Business Roundtable.

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • American Farm Bureau caught in crossfire over biofuels

      Tensions among ranchers and farmers might lead the nation’s largest farm lobby to alter its position on the federal biofuel mandate.

      The American Farm Bureau Federation has been a staunch supporter of the renewable fuel standard (RFS), a mandate for blending biofuels — currently, mostly corn-based ethanol — into traditional fuel. The rule has been a boon for the nation’s corn-growers, who have a guaranteed customer for 40 percent of their crop.

  • Finance

    • 1 hr special interview with Chris Hedges
    • Bank of America sued for alleged mortgage fraud

      The Justice Department is seeking $1 billion from Bank of America, alleging the bank committed fraud by selling defective mortgages from a program it says was known within the bank as “the Hustle.”

    • Ex-Goldman exec given 2 years for inside trades

      A former Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble board member once widely respected worldwide for his business smarts was sentenced Wednesday to 2 years in prison for feeding inside information about board dealings with a billionaire hedge fund owner who was his friend.

      Rajat Gupta, 63, of Westport, Conn., was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, who also ordered him to pay a $5 million fine. The Harvard-educated businessman long respected on Wall Street was one of the biggest catches yet for the federal government in its five-year crackdown on insider trading that has so far resulted in 69 convictions.

    • Barney Frank Defends JPMorgan Against Bear Stearns Suit

      Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, defended JPMorgan on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” Wednesday, calling the recent lawsuit brought against the bank for alleged fraud at Bear Stearns a dangerous precedent.

    • Futures market: Wall Street’s thirst for water

      Moves towards a global water commodities market must be stopped. It will push the price of food far beyond the peaks of the past five years, warns Frederick Kaufman.

    • What Ex-Goldmanite Greg Smith Didn’t Say, and Some Guesses as to Why

      Smith’s sin seems to be that he’s an insider from an uber prestigious, connected firm who dared say something bad about his former employer. The “don’t rock the boat” attitude is so deeply ingrained in America that it’s considered reckless to be candid about why you are quitting a job in an exit interview. And it’s not a stretch to call the reaction totalitarian when it’s Wall Street that is on the receiving end of criticism. Look how, despite running again and again to Wall Street’s aid, Obama is an official enemy for a mere “fat cats” remark. Similarly, the industry depicts Elizabeth Warren as a power-mad Commie bank serial killer, when her fault-finding is based on clear eyed analysis of how deceptive and predatory practices hurt consumers.

  • Censorship

    • Spineless Web Host Shutters Site Over Toothless Legal Threat Because Comments Are Too Much Trouble

      What is it with hosting companies who are quick on the trigger to take down entire sites in a kneejerk response to legal threats, going way, way beyond their legal obligations? We recently wrote about hosting firm ServerBeach taking down 1.5 million blogs over a single copyright claim (when to keep their DMCA safe harbors, they only needed to take down the one bit of content highlighted). Now another hosting company, PhoenixNAP, has done something even more ridiculous. In response to a takedown notice (pdf) sent by Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed’s lawyers, PhoenixNAP took the entire gossip site LipstickAlley offline without any notice to the site owner.

    • Jesus & Mo cartoon censorship controversy reaches LSE

      Following the recent controversy surrounding the use of a frame from the satirical cartoon strip Jesus & Mo by the atheist student society at University College London, it has now emerged that the cartoons are at the centre of a similar dispute at the London School of Economics.

      The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society at LSE (LSEU ASH) reproduced the Jesus & Mo cartoons on their Facebook page following news of the controversy at UCL, and were yesterday instructed by their student union (LSEU) to remove them. In a statement released on the union website,

  • Privacy

    • EU Surveillance Team: We Need More Surveillance To Justify More Surveillance

      Whether or not you believe that CCTV surveillance makes the world a safer place, there’s a big problem with deploying it more widely: you still need someone to look at that footage and pick out the things of interest, and it’s much harder adding new personnel than adding new cameras.

    • In Court: Uncovering Stingrays, A Troubling New Location Tracking Device

      The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed an amicus brief in what will be the first case in the country to address the constitutional implications of a so-called “stingray,” a little known device that can be used to track a suspect’s location and engage in other types of surveillance. We argue that if the government wants to use invasive surveillance technology like this, it must explain the technology to the courts so they can perform their judicial oversight function as required by the Constitution.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Veteran Parodist Turns To Kickstarter To Fund Downton Abbey Spoof After Publisher Gets Spooked

        Kickstarter provides a way for creators to route around the strictures of traditional publishing industries for a variety of reasons. We’ve seen Double Fine break the bank on Kickstarter, after getting a lot of blank stares from publishers who didn’t think there was a market for point-and-click adventure games. We’ve seen top Hollywood talent fund a film on Kickstarter to ensure no studio execs would be meddling with their movie. Now, in what I think is a first, we’ve got a parody author turning to Kickstarter after his publisher dropped the project, citing fear of a legal backlash.

      • BuzzFeed lawsuit over celeb snaps raises copyright questions

        A photo agency is demanding $1.3 million from BuzzFeed after the viral news site published photos of singer Katy Perry and actress Kathy Griffin. The case comes at a time when online media is increasingly image-based, and raises questions about whether current copyright law is still working.

10.24.12

Links 24/10/2012: Fortress 2 Comes to GNU/Linux, Raspberry Pi Opens ARMs

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • More Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD FX Vishera

      To OpenBenchmarking.org today I uploaded more results beyond all of the data offered in the comparison of my AMD FX-8350 Linux CPU review.

      While in that review I compared the FX-8350 Eight-Core processor to several different Intel and AMD CPUs, these new results uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org are just some standalone numbers. However, there’s more than 100 new Linux benchmark results from this Piledriver-based AMD processor.

    • Greg KH Updates USBView For GTK3, DebugFS

      Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated his USBView program, a user-space utility he started more than one decade ago for displaying USB device information under Linux.

      USBView is a small program for showing the device tree of the USB bus and then displaying information about connected devices on the bus.

    • Latest release of systemd includes time-based log rotation

      Lennart Poettering has announced the release of the latest version of the open source startup daemon systemd. With version 195, the tool, which is being used by Fedora, openSUSE and several other Linux distributions, has received what Poettering calls a “non-trivial amount of cool new features”.

    • EXT4 Data Corruption Bug Hits Stable Linux Kernels

      As a warning for those who are normally quick to upgrade to the latest stable vanilla kernel releases, a serious EXT4 data corruption bug worked its way into the stable Linux 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernel series.

      Being discussed recently on the Linux kernel mailing list was an “apparent serious progressive ext4 data corruption bug in 3.6.3.” Theodore Ts’o was able to successfully bisect the kernel and found the serious bug, which first appeared within the Linux 3.6.2 kernel and was since back-ported to older stable kernels.

    • Stable Linux kernel hit by ext4 data corruption bug

      Linux kernel developer Theodore “Ted” Ts’o has released a series of patches for what he has called “a Lance Armstrong bug” in the kernel, meaning behaviour that does not trip up tests but also makes the kernel work differently than intended. A user had reported a problem that caused them to lose data; the kernel developers quickly narrowed this down to a fault in the ext4 implementation that was introduced with the release of Linux 3.6.2, just over a week ago. Apparently, the data corruption bug was hard to track down as it only manifests itself if a system is rebooted twice in a relatively short period of time.

    • Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part XVIII (controllers)
    • FX-8350 Piledriver Tuning On AMD’s Open64 Compiler

      With this week’s unveiling of the FX-8350 eight-core processor being based on AMD’s new Piledriver architecture, in this article are benchmarks when testing out the Piledriver “bdver2″ optimizations within AMD’s own Open64 compiler.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Manifesto

        Kevin Ottens recently blogged about the shiny new KDE Manifesto. He does a great job of explaining the motivations behind such a document. As he noted, I gave a keynote at Akademy six years ago on this very topic. Evidently it’s something that has been on my mind for a while, and the reason has to do with sustainability of the KDE community.

        By the time I wrote that keynote, KDE already had very clear social principles, agreements and mechanisms. They are reflected in the new Manifesto, so there is in one sense nothing really new there. What is new is that those principles are being stated openly and clearly. Not everyone felt they needed to be, and so I’d like to address the reasons why this is such an important step for KDE.

      • The Freedom to Innovate – Interaction Design for Plasma Active

        I first learned about Plasma Active on a KDE User Experience sprint in April 2011. Sebastian Kügler was talking about their new project called Plasma Active, which aimed to bring the KDE experience to devices other than desktops, laptops and netbooks. It would provide a framework for application creators to easily adapt their UIs to different from factors, pixel densities and input methods.

      • KDevelop 4.4 C++ IDE released

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Puppy Linux 5.4 “Precise” based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

      Puppy Linux project founder and lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the first release of a new edition of his independent Linux distribution, code-named “Precise”. Based on binary packages from Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS “Precise Pangolin” and built using the Woof build tool, Precise Puppy represents the latest version of the Ubuntu-based flavour of Puppy Linux 5.4 and includes access to Ubuntu’s package repositories.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Nexus 7 demo
          • Ubuntu 12.10 release marks announcement of next upgrade

            Ubuntu 12.10 reviews are reeling in as the upgrade for server and desktop variants are now available for the users. Canonical Ltd., which provides access to the Ubuntu releases announced the Ubuntu 12.10 upgrade in April 2012. The recent update of the open source operating system, Linux 12.10 was named as Quantal Quetzal.

            Ubuntu 12.10 release marked the final update of the Linux software this year with the first installment coming in April 2012 which was named as Precise Pangolin. Ubuntu 12.10 server provides administrators with an enhanced platform for cloud deployment by integrating the Folsom feature with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC).

          • Cairo-Dock 3.1 with improved Unity integration

            Cairo-Dock in action Zoom
            Source: Cairo-Dock The developers of Cairo-Dock, a feature-rich and extensively configurable Mac OS X-style dock for Linux desktops, have released version 3.1 of their open source application switcher. Cairo-Dock 3.1 features integration improvements for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop: for example, like the Unity launcher, icons in the dock can now display progress bars for actions that take time to complete. New indicators have been added, including for the Sync, Print and Messaging menus. The developers have also improved the configuration window and updated the Recent Event applets.

          • System76 debuts a sleek, all-in-one desktop PC featuring Ubuntu Linux
          • Puppy Linux 5.4 “Precise” based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

            Puppy Linux project founder and lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the first release of a new edition of his independent Linux distribution, code-named “Precise”. Based on binary packages from Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS “Precise Pangolin” and built using the Woof build tool, Precise Puppy represents the latest version of the Ubuntu-based flavour of Puppy Linux 5.4 and includes access to Ubuntu’s package repositories.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind River Launches Its Intelligent Network Platform

      on24Oct

      Wind River has launched its Intelligent Network Platform, a software platform for the development of sophisticated network equipment that can accelerate and secure the flood of traffic for current and future networks.

    • Raspberry Pi team announces open source ARM userland
    • Raspberry Pi opens its ARM graphics code
    • Raspberry Pi graphics code is now open source
    • All code on Raspberry Pi’s ARM chip now open source
    • Raspberry Pi Gets Open Sourced Down to the Hardware Core

      Without a doubt, the Raspberry Pi has grabbed the most headlines as a tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, but it’s actually only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.” Several others, such as the Cotton Candy device, have warranted attention as well.

    • Raspberry Pi Open Sources Video Drivers

      The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced the open sourcing of its VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM chips. The foundation has chose a more permissive 3-Clause BSD licence for the driver code. The source is available from the foundation’s new userland repository on GitHub.

    • Raspberry Pi Gets Fully Open-Source Graphics Stack

      The popular budget-friendly Raspberry Pi ARM development board now has a fully open-source graphics stack — the user-space graphics drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore included!

      Since July of this year I had been exclusively hinting that a major open-source announcement was coming… In that article for the clued Phoronix readers it was made sort of apparent it was about ARM graphics drivers and the Raspberry Pi. Well, today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is finally able to announce they have a fully open-source graphics driver stack for their low-cost development board!

    • Raspberry Pi graphics gets open source drivers

      TINY COMPUTER MAKER the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the system-on-chip (SoC) used in the credit card sized computer now has open source drivers.

      While the Raspberry Pi Foundation has promoted the Raspberry Pi computer as a device to teach programming, it has become a hit with hobbyists and developers due to its low cost and Linux support. Now the foundation has announced that all drivers for the Broadcom BCM2835 used in the device has been open sourced.

      The foundation’s announcement means that all the components of the BCM2835 SoC have open source drivers that are provided by Broadcom rather than reverse engineered like the open source Nouveau graphics driver that attempts to work around Nvidia’s decision not to disclose specifications for its chips. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said that all of the Videocore driver code has been released under a three clause BSD license and is available from its userland repository.

    • Phones

      • Sprint’s Adib talks about Softbank’s pending support, Tizen’s appeal and Sprint Zone’s success

        First, I’m going to correct you. We actually have stopped referring to our conference as a developers’ conference. We now call it the Open Solutions Conference, and the reason this matters is that we have seen over time that the nature of who attends our events has changed. It’s not just developers. It’s a conference where we tend to invite partners from our ecosystem. And by ecosystem, I mean everything from people that we buy services and products from like HTC or Samsung or Ericsson and Synniverse. They are part of our consortium, but we also have people like individual developers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. And we also have opened up and welcomed people from different industries that are not necessarily part of the wireless industry, such as banking and advertising.

      • Android

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Does Pad Mini Fall Short In Comparison With Nexus 7?

        Apple unveiled the long rumored iPad Mini in San Fransisco this afternoon, and it turns out to be a 7.9 inch device with internal similar to iPad 2. Apple is very much aware of the tough competition that iPad Mini will face in this segment from the highly successful Google Nexus 7. At the launch event, Apple’s Phil Schiller tried his best to defame the Nexus 7 when comparing it to the iPad Mini and how was the new Apple’s new device superior to the Nexus 7.

      • iPad mini : copycat / end of innovation for Apple ?
      • Nice iPad Mini Apple, but I’m keeping my Nexus 7

        I have to say I was impressed. The new iPad with its extremely fast A6X chip looks great, pity it just instantly obsoleted every iPad 3 out there, but… oh wait. That”s the new iPad 4. That’s not what Apple is running up against the Nexus 7. Instead, they’re putting out the iPad Mini. Seriously? That’s just sad.

        True, Apple senior vice president for marketing Phil Schiller may say that the Nexus 7 is an example of how “Others have tried to make smaller tablets, but they’ve failed”, but that’s just showing that the Apple reality distortion field is still at work within Apple’s halls. The truth, as everyone knows who’ve used the Nexus 7, is that it’s a great tablet. Heck, without it and its relatives such as the Nook and Kindle, Apple never would have produced a 7″ tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Get Well Plan: How to Integrate Legacy Systems with Open Source Software [FLIPBOOK]
  • State of Sexism in FOSS

    Yet somehow, against this hostile background, FOSS feminism has managed to survive and expand. Today we see many obvious signs of the growing influence of FOSS feminism: greater reporting of incidents of sexism, networking and teaching opportunities for women, the availability of related resources, women speakers at conferences and the adoption of anti-harassment policies or codes of conduct.

  • Open Source looking more attractive in Kenya – AITEC

    The AITEC East Africa ICT Summit, officially opened by Hon. Samuel Poghisio, Minister for Information and Communication, is drafting a first ever map of ways in which Open Source Software (OSS), which is frequently free, can be used to drive regional economic development.

  • What Open Source Software has Good Usability?

    Are you interested in software usability and open source? If so, my friend Jim would like your help. He is doing a study of usability in Open Source software. I’ll post his entire request below along with a link to his blog. Also, he’ll probably be doing some other interent based interolocution about this; I’ll pass on to you whatever he passes on to me.

  • Open Source Cost – The Google Trend That Has Not Wavered
  • Dell Inc. : Dell Extends ARM-based Server Ecosystem Enablement with Open Source Development for the Apache Community

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice’s time to shine

      The promotion of Apache OpenOffice to top-level project status within the Apache Software Foundation is good news for the open source office suite project, but it also means that it’s time to put up or shut up for OpenOffice innovation.

      Much has been said about the “innovation gap” that exists between OpenOffice and the two-year old forked offshoot LibreOffice. To be honest, much of what’s said is coming out of the stewards of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation. And while they’re not wrong – to date, only one big release of OpenOffice, v 3.4, has come out since the code was donated to the ASF by Oracle – it’s not been entirely fair to the OpenOffice team to smack them around about it.

    • Feature Comparison: LibreOffice – Microsoft Office

  • Healthcare

    • VA lays roadmap to certify VistA for meaningful use

      The Veterans Affairs Department is preparing a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA electronic health record version that is being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.

      The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Fellowship Interview with Hugo Roy

      Since 2010 I’ve been representing FSFE in France. This involves getting involved in events and conferences, and occasionally acting as an interface between various organisations and FSFE — some very local, and some national. There is a very strong and organised Free Software community in France — for instance with the yearly conference RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) — so one of my ongoing jobs is to show a face for FSFE, make a personal connection and explain what we do and why we exist. Then on further levels, it sometimes gets into collaboration on campaigns or issues. For instance, one of my main area of activities in Free Software is legal and public affairs.
      At the moment I’m mainly working on setting up our Free Your Android campaign in France, with phone liberation workshops. I really believe in this project: I think mobile devices are becoming more and more important, and having control over them, and more importantly over the services that we run them with, is becoming more important too.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Open source GitHub clone GitLab reaches version 3.0

      The GitLab development team has released version 3.0 of its open source repository management software for the Git version control system. Used for self-hosted repositories, GitLab is based on Ruby on Rails and Gitolite, and is described as a “fast, secure and stable solution” by its developers. It includes the same features as those offered by the GitHub project hosting service, which also appears to be the inspiration for GitLab’s user interface.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • BP’s failed Deepwater containment dome is still down there, leaking away

      A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of oil appeared on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. BP was all, “Hm? What’s this about oil?” Then the government said, yeah, it’s from the Deepwater Horizon spill. And BP was all, “Hm? Oh, that? Yeah, I guess.” And the government suggested that maybe BP try and figure out what’s happening? Maybe make sure the broken well isn’t leaking again? And BP sighed heavily and whined about how none of its friends had to do chores and how it had all this homework and blah blah blah so the Coast Guard decided to just check for itself. BP, pleased, put its headphones back on and mumbled under its breath about what dicks these government dudes are.

    • Penn State Climate Scientist Sues National Review for Libel

  • Finance

    • Ryan’s Riots: Plan Will Starve One in Five Americans and Create Massive Social Unrest

      It’s Food Day, so let’s put Paul Ryan’s soup kitchen stunt aside for the moment and take a serious look at what a Romney/Ryan budget might mean for the future of eating. Today, the number of Americans receiving food stamps has reached nearly 15 percent of the population, and 17 million American households experience hunger. Despite such indications of growing domestic food insecurity, Paul Ryan has proposed a $133 billion cut to nutrition assistance, an evisceration that would add 10 million more Americans to the 50 million who already are missing meals.

    • Bain Capital and the Race to the Bottom in Manufacturing and Wages

      On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney wants to have his cake and eat it too. “Governments do not create jobs,” a stern Romney told CNN’s Candy Crowley twice during the second debate. Here in Wisconsin, however, he is running ads promising to “crack down on China” and create 12 million new jobs.

    • The Vampire Squid has feelings and Obama is no longer her BFF

      When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to finance his campaign than Goldman Sachs. This election, none has done more to help defeat him.

  • Censorship

    • Commission’s Plan for Online Gambling: Risk of Anti-Democratic Censorship, Again

      While the European Commission sets out an action plan for online gambling, La Quadrature du Net warns about the risk of Internet content censorship, and urges Member States’s governments to refuse the instrumentalisation of child protection for unacceptable measures.

    • Empirical Data Suggests That Website Blocking Is A Useless Weapon Against Infringement

      Calls for evidence-based policy-making in the copyright domain are increasing on both sides of the Atlantic. How do we best regulate the fair remuneration of artists? How do we enforce it? Evidence based on sound methodologies and research is slowly but surely appearing. Now the highly respected Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam joins the league of evidence-givers with a new report, Filesharing 2©12, Downloading in The Netherlands, about how blocking websites is not a worthwhile remedy (The report is in Dutch, but the executive summary is translated. It was an initiative by the IViR itself and was partly financed by the Ministry of Culture, Education and Research, some ISP’s, Dutch society for professionals in the book industry and done in collaboration with several other institutes. Small disclaimer: I did my masters at this institute).

  • Civil Rights

    • No Fly list strands passenger in Hawai’i

      .

      The episode left Hicks scrambling to figure out how he’d get home from Hawaii without being able to fly. Then he was abruptly removed from the list on Thursday with no explanation.

    • Law Enforcement Looking To Create A Searchable Database Of Everywhere Your Vehicle Has Been

      Back in August, Mike wrote about some questionable sharing of license plate information between the US Border Patrol and various insurance companies. While the stated aim of tracking stolen vehicles might seem to make this sharing justified, the fact that this is going on with no oversight or accountability is cause for alarm.

    • SCOTUS must be last bulwark against NSA snooping

      Later this month, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could define the government’s ability to monitor innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. The lawsuit, Amnesty International v. Clapper, argues that the Constitution bars the National Security Agency from listening to or reading Americans’ international conversations and emails without court oversight, even if Congress blesses the NSA’s actions.

      Unfortunately, the government has tried to block the courts from ever reaching that constitutional issue, arguing that unless the plaintiffs can prove they will be monitored (which is impossible, since the list of who is monitored is classified), they cannot sue. Now that threshold question has reached the Supreme Court. Based on our combined six-plus decades of experience working at the NSA, we are sure there is only one just outcome: The justices should let this case proceed, giving the courts the opportunity to determine whether the executive and legislative branches have gone too far.

      Part of the Defense Department, the NSA was created to listen to and analyze foreign communications to protect our nation from threats outside our borders. Today, it is bigger than the CIA and FBI combined. For decades, those of us inside the NSA prided ourselves on our respect for the Constitution. Our touchstone was the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and its guarantee that warrants could be issued only with probable cause and against specific targets. Whenever we suspected that an American abroad or someone inside the United States might be involved in terrorism or espionage, we carefully gathered the evidence and presented it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret to protect classified information. Only if that court gave us permission would we monitor an American’s communications.

    • Indian Politician Plans To Install Surveillance Cameras In His Ministers’ Homes And Offices

      Recently, Tim noted that, for some strange reason, politicians don’t like having the same level of surveillance applied to them as they wish to inflict on the public. Here’s a nice case from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, found via Evgeny Morozov, where politicians aren’t being given any choice:

  • DRM

    • Turns Out When Random House Said Libraries ‘Own’ Their Ebooks, It Meant, ‘No, They Don’t Own Them’

      Earlier this week, we talked about how publishing giant Random House had very explicitly stated that when libraries buy their ebooks, the libraries “own” those ebooks, rather than license them. They left no doubt about it. Skip Dye, Random House’s VP of library & academic marketing and sales was explict: “when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them… this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Costa Rica: Students Protest Veto of ‘Photocopying Law’

        Thousands of students participated in a march in San José on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, protesting for their right to photocopy textbooks for educational purposes. The unrest was caused by President Chinchilla vetoing Bill 17342 (known as the ‘Photocopying Law’) which seeks to amend Law No 8039 on Procedures for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, on the grounds that it removes protection of the work and intellectual property in the artistic, literary and technological areas.

      • Universities Are Vast Copy Machines—and That’s a Good Thing

        Universities are and have always been vast copy machines. Evolved from medieval monasteries and their vast libraries and scriptoria, universities have always had as central functions of their mission the copying, transforming, and preserving works of art, thought, and science and making them available to their patrons.

      • ACTA, CETA, etc. Stop Denying Democracy!

        In 2011 and 2012, European citizens took to the streets to protest against secret negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that threatened their fundamental freedoms. This led to a massive rejection of the agreement in the European Parliament in last July. The message was clear: no repressive measures without a democratic debate by our elected representatives.

        Nevertheless, the European Comission and the Member States are still trying to force the adoption of repressive measures that undermine fundamental freedoms, under the cover of trade agreements kept secret. The Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), the India-EU, Thailand-EU, Moldavia-EU Free Trade Agreements, etc.: all these agreements might include dispositions harmful for Internet users’s rights, access to essential drugs or the use of free software.

      • Stupid Copyright Licensing Tricks Strike Again: NBC Can’t Show Viral SNL Pandora Intern Clip
      • Economist’s Defense Of Perpetual Copyright: It’s Best To Just Ignore The Economics

        We’re rapidly approaching the time in which perpetual copyright hits its existing statutory limits — so I’ve fully been expecting an increase in arguments for why copyright needs to be extended again. Of course, the actual economic evidence doesn’t support this at all. Instead, the evidence suggests there’s tremendous value in a broader public domain. So how will maximalists argue for copyright extension? If a recent paper from economist Stan Liebowitz is any indication, it will be through strawmen and the argument that we should ignore the economics. Seriously.

Links 24/10/2012: First GNOME 3.6 Update

Posted in News Roundup at 1:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Big Oil and the US Chamber of Commerce Fight to Keep Foreign Bribery Flourishing

      In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • ORG urges caution over web blocking orders

      In response to the BPI’s call to block three websites before Christmas, Jim Killock Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:

      “Web blocking is an extreme response. The orders are often indefinite and open ended, and will be blocking legitimate uses. The BPI and the courts need to slow down and be very careful about this approach.

      “The BPI seem to be trying to speed things up and that is not good. It will lead to carelessness and unneeded harms.

      “As an approach, censorship is a bad idea. It leads to more censorship, and is unlikely to solve the problem it seeks to address.

    • How Would Twitter Handle A Crackdown On Free Speech In Saudi Arabia?

      Twitter has put itself out there as being a strong defender of free speech, arguing that it’s not just a principled stand, but one that provides the company with a competitive advantage. Standing up for free speech is good — not just for people, but for Twitter too.

    • Public shame should be punishment enough

      As another individual is sentenced to jail time for causing offense, it seems that at present a week doesn’t go by where outrage over a joke or insensitive comment isn’t splashed across the front pages.

      There have been two notable cases in October: Barry Thew, who wore a T-shirt bearing the message “One less pig; perfect justice” and “Killacopforfun.com haha”, was sentenced to jail for eight months under the Public Order Act and Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail after posting “grossly offensive” jokes on his Facebook page about missing April Jones under the Malicious Communications Act 2003. It is worth noting on the same day and in the same court that Woods was sentenced, a man was fined £100 and ordered to pay £100 compensation for racially abusing a woman to her face.

    • DPP to issue guidelines on prosecutions over Facebook and Twitter abuse

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • Rights? You have no right to your eBooks.

      News spread quickly on the web today of the predicament faced by a woman in Norway, Linn, who has lost all access to the eBooks she legitimately purchased from Amazon. The story first emerged on a friend’s blog, where a sequence of e-mails from Michael Murphy, a customer support representative at Amazon.co.uk were posted. These painted a picture some interpreted as Amazon remotely erasing a customer’s Kindle, but in conversation with Linn I discovered that was not what had happened – something just as bad did, though.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Tim Tebow Trademarking ‘Tebowing’ Tarnishes Trademark

        In case you missed the last two years on the internet and don’t know what ‘Tebowing’ is, it’s essentially genuflecting in prayer on one knee and bowing your head onto your clenched fist.

      • Tiananmen Square Activist Loses Trademark Bullying Case Against Critic, But Ruling Is Weak

        We’ve been covering the absolutely ridiculous lawsuit of educational software firm Jenzabar against documentary filmmakers Long Bow for a few years now. The short version is that Long Bow made a documentary about some of the activists from the Tiananmen Square uprising, that was somewhat critical of them — including a protest organizer named Ling Chai. Chai later moved to the US and founded an educational software company called Jenzabar. She has regularly played up her history as a Tiananmen Square organizer in getting PR for the company. The filmmakers called into question some of her actions back during the protests, and also set up a webpage, associated with the movie, critical of Chai. Chai sued for defamation — which was quickly thrown out. However, she also had Jenzabar sue for trademark infringement, because the page about her on Long Bow’s site mentioned Jenzabar in the title and in the meta tags.

    • Copyrights

      • Korean Music Industry Embraces The Future While US Counterparts Fight It

        The awesome folks over at Planet Money recently did a podcast about why Korean pop music (K-Pop) is taking over the world, using (obviously) Gangnam Style as exhibit number one. Of course, you could argue that one faddish song is not proof that they’re taking over the industry, so there’s a bit of journalistic hyperbole at work here — but the larger point comes clear in the podcast: the US’s music industry was built for the 20th century — a world of scarcity, limited distribution channels, hyperfocus on music and a strong reliance on copyright — but the Korean pop music landscape is focused on a much more 21st century strategy.

      • EFF Files Motion To Have Court Release Seizure Warrant In Megaupload Case
      • October 19 WIPO negotiations on copyright exceptions for disabilities

        After three days, the WIPO intersessional negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities adjourned. On July 26, 2012, the SCCR negotiating text (SCCR 24/9) was 26 pages long, with 4051 words, and included 56 brackets, and 20 alternatives. The Final document on Friday (copy here) evening was 26 pages, with 47 brackets, and 22 alternatives.

10.23.12

Links 23/10/2012: DRM Nightmares at Amazon

Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: H. Peter Anvin

      This week, the 20th week in our 30-week series profiling Linux kernel developers, we talk to H. Peter Anvin. His Linux story starts in 1992 and involves a hospital stay, stolen OS/2 manuals and a computer hardware order made by pay phone.

    • Linux Kernel 3.6.3 is out, upgrade now

      Linux Kernel 3.7 may still be in development, but that of course doesn’t mean development has halted on 3.6.y, with an updated version out now

    • Intel Keeps Pushing Haswell Code For Linux
    • AMD FX-8350 “Vishera” Linux Benchmarks

      AMD today is lifting the lid on their Piledriver-based 2012 FX “Vishera” processors. Just weeks after the “Bulldozer 2″ Trinity APUs were launched, the new high-end AMD FX CPUs are being rolled out. Being benchmarked at Phoronix today under Linux is the new AMD FX-8350 processor.

    • Graphics Stack

      • With Wayland 1.0, A Large TODO List Remains

        Wayland 1.0 will be released as soon as today, but this doesn’t mark the death of X11 and Wayland beginning to secure major traction on the Linux desktop.

        Kristian Høgsberg, Wayland’s creator that began coding this likely eventual X.Org Server replacement back in 2008 and was first publicly covered on Phoronix, has always reinforced since earlier this year when planning the 1.0 release that this won’t mark a point of domination on the Linux desktop. Wayland 1.0 simply marks the point at which Wayland developers will ensure backwards compatibility with the Wayland core protocol and API. If your tool-kit or application is targeting the 1.0 API/protocol, it will work with future versions rather than in the pre-1.0 state where there was significant breakage without notice.

      • AMD Catalyst 12.10 For Linux Surfaces

        The AMD Catalyst 12.10 Linux graphics driver for x86 and x86_64 architectures is available from the download link offered here.

      • Wayland 1.0 Officially Released

        Kristian Høgsberg after developing the project the past four years officially announced version 1.0 for Wayland. As described earlier on Phoronix, Wayland 1.0 doesn’t mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to replace the X11 Server as there’s still a lot of work left to do but it marks the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release. Regardless of there being a lot of work left until Wayland is common to the Linux desktop, Wayland is exciting many users although it means real bad news for some users.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • New EFL release cycle 1.7.1

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3.6.1 Has Been Released

        Frederic Peters had the pleasure of announcing the first maintenance release of the GNOME 3.6 desktop environment, on October 18th.

        GNOME 3.6.1 is a necessary upgrade for all users of GNOME 3.6, brining lots of small improvements, updated translations, as well as numerous bug fixes.

        “The first update to GNOME 3.6 series is now available. As usual it provides bug fixes, translations updates and tiny improvements, in order to make our stable release even more stable and useful.”

  • Distributions

    • Which Linux Distro is Best?

      Here’s a topic guaranteed to start controversy. Which Linux distribution is best? It all depends on your criteria for judging. Even then the topic is highly subjective. Here are a few nominees for “best distro” in specific categories.

    • Qubes OSQubes R1

      Last week, when I went in search of a distribution with which to experiment, I thought the choice seemed obvious: Qubes OS. The Qubes project is working to produce a Xen- and Linux-based operating system with a strong focus on security. As the project’s website says, “Qubes is an open source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Qubes is based on Xen, X Window System, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications”. Qubes, which comes from Invisible Things Lab, takes an unusual approach to security where the user’s desktop system is divided into separate domains. Each domain gets its own virtual machine. A person might have a few of these different domains, such as one for work-related applications and files, another for casual web browsing & e-mail and perhaps another for security-sensitive tasks like on-line banking.

    • ROSA Marathon 2012 review – Ahem

      Maybe it was my own mistake. Maybe I did not read well enough before trialling ROSA. The truth is, it makes no difference. You do not need and should not need to spend time learning about operating system before using them. The whole idea is to get a seamless, transparent behavior and a pleasant experience, and if this means having to figure out what is free and what is not, and somehow know that your Wireless card firmware might be considered non-free by some vague standard, then thank you, but no thank you.

      If you’re looking for five years of support, you’re better off with Ubuntu. Shame really, because I was rather looking forward to testing ROSA. Finally, something new, something fresh. A system that does not come from the English-speaking world, which means a different mentality, five years, Mandriva baseline, they all sound like a damn good recipe for awesome fun. Alas, no. Not since Trisquel was I this disappointed. Another potential gem, killed by politics. Lastly, I cannot tell you how good or bad this distribution really is, because I didn’t get to test it properly. My hunch tells it’s a fairly decent one, but we shall never know now. Well, I might test the non-free version one day, but my goodwill for today is spent. Take care.

    • Under the Hood with Arch and Gentoo

      Arch and Gentoo are rolling community distributions that emphasise self-help and choice for the adventurous user. Richard Hillesley investigates…

    • Ubuntu 12.10 Virtualization vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.3

      For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarks, here are some results of a high-end Intel Extreme Edition workstation when comparing the bare metal host and KVM virtualization performance between Ubuntu 12.10 and the earlier Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS release and then the RHEL-based CentOS 6.3.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Epitome Travel Solutions Adopts Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Mission-Critical Travel Portal

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Epitome Travel Solutions (India) Pvt. Ltd. (ETS), a unique Indian travel organization that offers diverse travel-related solutions and services to corporations and individuals, has selected Red Hat as its trusted solutions partner and implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its core enterprise platform. The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its enterprise platform has made Epitome Travel Solutions’ core business more agile, increased performance and enhanced customer satisfaction.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Video: Ubuntu Linux hits Google’s Nexus 7
          • Ubuntu Founder Takes Aim at Red Hat

            Canonical has suffered more than a little flack over the years for what some critics call a lack of openness in Ubuntu development. But if one agrees with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, the truly closed platforms are Ubuntu’s competitors, especially Red Hat. At least, that’s what Shuttleworth had to say recently on his blog. Here’s the full story.

            Criticism of Canonical’s standards has often centered around issues such as the proprietary licenses that govern some of its software, such as the server side code for the Ubuntu One file syncing service. The company has also irked users for introducing major changes to Ubuntu, like the Unity interface, without soliciting much community feedback first.

          • Ubuntu less Unity: A first look at Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10

            For users who want GNOME 3 rather than Unity, a group of developers has now made the first GNOME 3 desktop remix of the Ubuntu Linux distribution available. Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 is based on the recent release of Ubuntu 12.10 and even uses a GNOME package management tool.

          • Installing Ubuntu 12.10
          • Can Canonical Put Ubuntu on Phones, Tablets and TVs?

            Will 2013 be the Year of the Linux Tablet? Personally, I’m not about to bet any cash on it just yet. But if Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has his way, Linux developers increasingly will be turning their attention to mobile, tablet and TV platforms over the coming year. Here’s what he had to say.

            There’s been plenty of talk in the open source channel about bringing Linux to new types of hardware devices such as phones, tablets and TVs. And some major open source applications — the Unity, GNOME Shell and Plasma Active interfaces, to name a few — are being designed with mobile hardware in mind at least as much as traditional PCs.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Screenshots

            The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.10 for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.

            There is no longer a traditional CD-sized image, DVD or alternate image, but rather a single 800MB Ubuntu image that can be used from USB or DVD. Users who previously installed using LVM or full-disk encryption via the alternate CD will find that these installation targets are supported by the consolidated image in 12.10.

          • Thank you, Ubuntu Tweak will continue
          • Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.1 Released: Install in Ubuntu 12.10
          • Protecting Your Ubuntu Desktop
          • Ubuntu 12.10 review: Quantal Quetzal is quite adequate

            Let’s cut right to the chase: Ubuntu 12.10 is a totally, 100%, utterly, completely acceptable release.

            It has some new features. It has some bug fixes. In almost every way, it is very, very similar to Ubuntu 12.04 – which makes a great deal of sense, considering that the two releases are only six months apart.

          • The UDS Design Track

            One week to go! We’re looking forward to UDS. For me personally it will be my first and I’m thrilled to check out all the interesting sessions and hear your stories about Ubuntu and design. There will also be a very exciting design track in which we hope to work together on many cool topics, such as fonts, Juju GUI, Danish toys, the theater and many more!

          • Is Mark Shuttleworth Really Arguing Against Open Ubuntu Development?

            Late last week, Mark Shuttleworth set off a series of heated debates about just how transparent the development process for Ubuntu should be. Specifically, he wrote this regarding the next 13.04 version of Ubuntu: “Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate, we’re happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility (membership, or close to it) in Ubuntu, who want to be part of the action.” The question is, why is everyone interpreting this as the end of an open Ubuntu development model?

          • Key parts of Ubuntu Linux 13.04 to be developed under wraps

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Google LG Nexus Phone Confirmed By LG India Executive

          The rumors were bang on target! For past several weeks, our RRS feeds were full of leaks and speculations about new Google LG Nexus flagship phone. Now suddenly the focus shifted to India, where Amit Gujral, head, Mobile Product Planning, LG India, in an interview with IBNLive stated “Google will unveil the LG Nexus on October 29 and the phone will be available in the Indian markets by the end of November.”

        • Amazon: Kindle Fire HD is a global best-seller

          Amazon just dropped us an email to let everyone know that their Kindle Fire HD is a worldwide best-seller. Yeah, like that’s a surprise to anyone.

          In all seriousness, the Android-based tablet has become the retailer’s #1 best-selling product across all of Amazon worldwide. Also, today sees the roll out of a an over-the-air update to add in the Kindle FreeTime feature that lets parents control what a child is able to see on the Kindle Fire HD as well as how long they can use the tablet.

      • Android

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Google to Get Last Word in Week of Tablet Launches

        Google isn’t ceding the tech media spotlight to Apple and Microsoft. As Apple gets set to unveil its iPad mini, and as Microsoft revs up for its Surface launch, Google is lubricating the rumor mill with some hints about an expanded Nexus line — perhaps a 32 GB 7-inch tablet, one with 3G, and maybe a 10-inch version. A new Nexus smartphone could be in the works too, perhaps running an updated Android OS.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Humble Ebook Bundle Breaks $1 Million; All The Authors Should Be Best Sellers

    We’ve been talking about the first Humble eBook Bundle, which launched recently, and has taken off really successfully. Over the weekend, it zoomed past $1 million in money raised. As author John Scalzi (whose book Old Man’s War is included in the bundle) noted, if Humble Bundle purchases were counted by the NY Times every one of the authors would be on the best seller list. Think about that for a second.

  • Italian scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake risk report

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How Food Stopped Being Food

      In 2008, farmers grew more than enough to feed the world, yet more people starved than ever before—and most of them were farmers. Harper’s magazine contributing editor Frederick Kaufman investigates the connection between the global food system and why the food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as the world’s biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever. In Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, he moves down the supply chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing the forces undermining our food system.

  • Finance

    • Gupta to Urge Probation From Judge Who Defended Insiders

      Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) director, will come before Rakoff in Manhattan federal court on Oct. 24 to be sentenced for leaking stock tips to Galleon Group LLC co-founder Raj Rajaratnam. Prosecutors say Gupta, convicted by a jury in June, deserves as long as 10 years in prison. Gupta seeks probation.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Big Brother comes to BitTorrent
      • To the ABA – Tear Down the Pay Wall that Keeps Ethics Opinions From Seeing the Light Of Day (Sign My Change.org petition)

        If you thought that aggressive enforcement of copyright was only for the RIAA, think again. The ABA is just as intent about enforcing copyright interests in its ethics opinions. But whether you agree with the RIAA’s tactics or not, at least its copyright enforcement activity is intended to protect RIAA’s constituents; artists, musicians and record companies who lose money when their music is misappropriated. By contrast, the ABA’s policy of copyrighting ethics opinions — the source of authority that govern lawyers’ conduct and inform many state bodies regulating lawyers — and locking them behind a paywall hurts lawyers and the public.

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