Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

03.21.12

Links 21/3/2012: Fedora 18 Talked About, Many New Android/Linux Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Exploring DIY Linux Router Distros

    Router lockups have been a problem for me ever since I got my first 802.11G Router in 2004. Since then, we’ve seen companies roll out supposed “power user” routers or routers meant for “gamers,” but for some reason not a single one has alleviated the problem of having to reset the router after running for a few days. After my new “gaming” router locked up while refreshing a server list for a multiplayer game, it was the last straw and I began searching for something a little more robust.

  • New Universal USB Installer for Linux

    The Universal USB Installer converts live CDs of various Linux distributions to run on USB keys.

  • Desktop

    • Past Year of GNU/Linux in Germany

      According to Statcounter, it’s more like 40%, but still quite good. Perhaps more of those units are going into homes rather than businesses. Doubling time at 40% per annum is about two years.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3)

      The license plate on Linus Torvalds’ Mercedes SLK convertible says it all. The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux. King of Geeks.” But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”

      If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.

    • Linux guru: re-merging of Android into kernel eases sysdev a bit

      Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman said the reintroduction of 7,000 lines of Android code into the Linux 3.3 kernel will make it somewhat easier for OEMs creating Android systems. App developers? Not so much

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Direct Rendering For Qt Compositor & More
      • Kdenlive: Superior Video Editor … not just for pros

        Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It’s a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it’s Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.

      • KDevelop 4.3 released with basic C++11

        After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.

  • Distributions

    • Linpus Lite Desktop 1.7 review
    • JoldzicOS 3.31 Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Naming Fedora 18, The Beefy Miracle Successor

          There’s two months until Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, is officially released. However, already getting underway is the codename proposal period for Fedora 18. What will succeed the Beefy Miracle?

        • Fedora 18 Picks Up New Features, Rejects Systemd-Journal

          There’s still two months prior to the official Fedora 17 release — Fedora 17 Beta isn’t even out yet — but besides coming up with a new codename, we have our first technical glimpse at new features to Fedora 18, which will be released by Red Hat and the community in Q4’2012.

          At yesterday’s Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo), they approved the first batch of Fedora 18 features now that Fedora 17 is well into its feature freeze. The items approved for the yet-to-be-codenamed Fedora 18 include:

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – March 19th, 2012

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Zorin OS 6 Lite Is Based on Lubuntu 11.10

              The Zorin OS development team proudly announced yesterday, March 19th, the immediate availability for download of the Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Educational Lite operating systems.

              This major release of the Zorin OS 6 Lite series is now based on the Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating sytem and takes advantage of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, in order to provide an extremely fast and feature-packed desktop experience, especially for low-end machines.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google is the least open part of Android

          I have been an Android user since the release of the G1. I was a Linux server admin at the time, and the idea of an open source environment on my phone was something I had been thinking about for awhile. Before the release of the G1, I was even considering diving into the OpenMOKO project, which nobody remembers (as a result of the G1 launch). For me, open source meant that, like my computer, I could adjust things at will that I wasn’t happy with. I followed the Android Open Source Project with eager anticipation, and watched as this community of developers modify and build and bolt on features to the Android that we know today.

        • ZTE N910 clears the FCC with LTE support for AWS and PCS bands
        • Sony Xperia Neo L MT25i announced as the company’s first Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone

          Sony has officially unveiled its first smartphone to come with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from day one: the Xperia Neo L MT25i, announced earlier today in China.

          As its name suggests, the Xperia Neo L is the successor to the Neo and Neo V (which were introduced last year running Android 2.3 Gingerbread), although it doesn’t bring major hardware enhancements.

        • Huawei myTouch Smartphone Discovered Hanging In The Wild

          If you have been eagerly awaiting a first look at the upcoming Huawei myTouch line heading to T-Mobile, then we have good news for you. Thanks to a TmoNews ninja we’ve got a quick look at the upcoming non-QWERTY myTouch device, expected to arrive on store shelves in the coming months. At this point we don’t know much about the device, though we suspect a WVGA 800×480 resolution display and some other mid-range specs. The myTouch line isn’t billed as a high-end line for T-Mobile anymore — more as a “family” phone that has something for everyone. Huawei marks the third such manufacturer to release a device under the myTouch branding for T-Mobile, after HTC and LG.

        • Getac releases PS326: Android-powered, Milspec-carrying beast of a handset
        • Sony Releases Open Source Archive For The Xperia S, Includes Handy Build Instructions

          Sony released the Xperia S open source archive today, providing all the tools necessary to build a kernel and start cooking up ROMs for the Xperia S from Sony’s source code. In a post to Sony Mobile’s developer blog today, the company also noted that the opening of the Xperia S archive marks the first time Sony has published source code for a product built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S3.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Big Switch Unveils ‘Open’ SDN Architecture
  • Killed email device Peek resurrected with open source app framework

    Amol Sarva, the man behind Peek, recently made waves by giving away his remaining stock of discontinued Peek devices to hackers interested in reusing them for something interesting (the company is still around, but it’s focusing on cloud-based software services now — the hardware, and the cellular service that underpins it, is dead). This all happened less than two months ago, but we’ve already got an open source application framework from a coder by the name of Ryan Krumins available for Peek hackers to take advantage of.

  • Big data enters open-source hype cycle

    Possibly. Open source was all the rage in the tech press for years as it promised to lower costs while improving enterprise IT freedom. Ultimately, a few start-ups cashed out big time (MySQL, JBoss), but for the most part the real value in open source came as both IT vendors and in-house IT organisations turned to open source to provide raw material for their software projects. Open source became less about sales and more about code, which was exactly what it was designed to do.

  • CARS Unveils Free Open-Source IBEAM Portal

    Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems launched a new open-source, freeware version of its IBEAM Web portal to the agent and lender community.

    The company highlighted this new version of IBEAM — available after April 15 — will be specific to repossession and invoice management, providing all the capabilities of asset tracking, real-time monitoring of updates, online condition reports and complete transparency throughout the recovery process.

  • 8 Free Open Source Alternatives To Microsoft Exchange
  • NTIDA advocates open source software

    The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) says Nigerians need open source software if the country must be a full participant in the software industry.

  • SaaS

    • EMC Intros Chorus Open-Source Big Data App
    • EMC wants to be the Linux of big data

      To broaden its reach in the big-data arena, disk-array maker EMC’s Greenplum division, which peddles data warehousing and Hadoop appliances and software, announced that it will open source its Chorus management and collaboration tools. EMC also has acquired Pivotal Labs, experts in agile programming, to help it build better big-data software and, equally importantly, help others do so.

      EMC has always been serious about data, but in case you haven’t noticed it, the company is now very serious about big data and the software that is used to chew it up and regurgitate useful bits of information.

  • CMS

    • DrupalCon 2012 Kicks Off in Denver

      The Drupal Association, hosts of the biannual DrupalCon conference, announced the opening of its North American DrupalCon in Denver, with more than 3,000 Website designers, developers, site architects and IT managers in attendance.

      The first day of full conference events at DrupalCon is March 20. Drupal is an open-source content management platform that powers millions of Websites and applications. Drupal is built, used and supported by a very active community of people from around the world, and that community comes together for DrupalCon.

  • Healthcare

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 5.0 set for a modular future?

      Version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is due out in April 2012 – a second release candidate was released last week. Discussions on the future direction of the utilities collection are currently underway. Musings over making GCC 5.0 more modular have attracted considerable attention. These have been inspired by the increasingly popular Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), a compiler infrastructure part-sponsored by Apple.

    • Interview: Richard Stallman

      RMS: The term “investment” is not applicable here, because that implies spending money on a business to obtain a larger subsequent profit. I set out to do a large job, but it wasn’t a business and the purpose was something more important than profit.

      I quit my job at MIT when I started writing code for the GNU operating system because I wanted to make sure MIT would not be able to claim copyright on the code I wrote for GNU.

      Evidently, financial support was not crucial at the beginning, because I made progress on my own, which drew others to help.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming

Leftovers

03.20.12

Links 20/3/2012: Cyanogenmod 7.2, Humble Android Bundle 2, OSI’s New Board

Posted in News Roundup at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • New Online Video Series Can Prepare You for Linux Certification
  • A Little Linklist Of Linux And Technology Themed Webcomics
  • Linux support for Macs still strong (as usual)

    Recently I’ve had the pleasure of digging out a couple of old Mac computers to demonstrate to a few family members out of curiosity. I am definitely a believer in educating the next generation on computing of the past, and how we got from there to where we are today. So one of the computers I fired up is a Macintosh Quadra 900. As usual, it booted right up without problems after sitting for probably close to 8 years. Everybody was amused and it was actually a lot of fun showing them the Mac OS 8 operating system on it.

    The next day, I remembered at one time I had a GNU/Linux server that had Netatalk running on it, so that I could connect from this Mac to the server and back up and transfer files. That server has since been upgraded, and I never really put in the time to get Netatalk running on it again until now. The server is a Pentium III 667 MHz system running CentOS 6.0, with X11 and all of the bells and whistles. The system runs good despite the fact that it is only a Pentium III. It also houses two 2 TB drives with the ext4 filesystem and runs very well.

  • Desktop

    • New, High-End Laptop Offers Linux Preinstalled

      An attractive option for many reasons, though, is to buy the laptop with Linux preloaded, as I’ve noted before. You typically pay a little bit more, but you also avoid any headaches that may arise from getting everything to “just work.”

    • The Linux Setup – Jon “maddog” Hall, Linux International

      Jon “maddog” Hall is a bit of a legend in the Linux community, so it’s truly an honor to have his participation here. Jon makes a number of interesting (and, of course, provactive points). For instance, he chooses his distribution based upon his client, rather than choosing what he personally prefers. And he gravitates toward software that offers the most functionality, rather than the easiest, which is an interesting counterpoint to the many in the “choose the simplest tool for the job” camp.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.3 Boosts Linux Mobility
    • Android and Linux re-merge into one operating system
    • New Power Management Phases For Linux 3.4 Kernel

      Just one day after the Linux 3.3 kernel was released, the power management pull request for the Linux 3.4 kernel has already been submitted.

      Rafael J. Wysocki submitted the email pull request with the power management changes for the 3.4 kernel. Key items include the introduction of early/late suspend/hibernation device call-backs, generic PM domains extensions and fixes, devfreq updates, device PM QoS updates, concurrency problem fixes, and system suspend and hibernation fixes.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Haswell Graphics Code Begins Appearing

        Last month I mentioned that Intel Haswell graphics driver code would soon surface, it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated, but the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are beginning to push the code publicly so that the hardware enablement can land in Linux distributions ahead of the hardware’s availability a year from now.

        Due to varying Linux release schedules and development cycles, plus that the open-source Linux graphics drivers can’t be easily updated by end-users without updating most of the system’s core components, Intel’s OTC developers are left to push out their new hardware support code quite early. Both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Linux driver code began appearing a year in advance, so it’s that time of the year for Haswell graphics code to begin appearing for the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, and the xf86-video-intel DDX.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Windows 8 and Linux: The perception of change

      This past week, I played around with Windows 8. One overriding thought forced its way to the front of my consciousness. How would the Windows users react to the drastic change?

      Change is a topic that has been much maligned and very heated over the last couple of years in technology. What brought this about? Within the framework of 2011 and 2012, the subject became a hotbed thanks to Ubuntu Unity and GNOME 3. Both desktops were drastically different than what users had grown accustomed to. What really surprised me was that the desktop metaphor had gone with little to no changes since the release of Windows 95. That’s quite a long time with little marked evolution. Both GNOME and KDE followed what Microsoft had declared the standard, and even both the open source heavy-hitters played along for quite some time. It wasn’t until the release of GNOME 2 and KDE 4 that noticeable change was on the way. When GNOME split its panels into two pieces, there was a little guff, but nothing more than a few ripples were heard. When KDE 4 came out, the Linux community was turned up on its head. But then, when Unity and GNOME 3 were released, one would have thought the Four Horsemen were about to make their apocalyptic appearances.

      But now, a change is coming to the Windows desktop that is nearly as drastic as was from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 or from Classic GNOME to Ubuntu Unity. Windows 8 begins a new era with the adoption of what looks like part Windows 7 and part Windows Mobile (and inspired by open source designs).

    • What if Ubuntu were right?

      Last week, I had the chance to have a nice chat with Jonathan Riddell, Canonical employee and Kubuntu maintainer.

      For years, Jonathan was paid to maintain Kubuntu. In a recent move, Canonical announced that Kubuntu will become a community-only project. As a way to start the conversation, I poked him about that:
      — What happened? Is Canonical dropping KDE support?
      — Well, we are doing with KDE exactly what we did with GNOME.
      — Indeed. But what is the reason?
      — Canonical seems to think that none of them managed to reach a non-geek audience.

  • Distributions

    • Do You Trust Your Linux Distro?

      Rogue Linux distributions aren’t something that I tend to put much thought into. After all, considering that Linux distributions make their source code open and transparent, how effective would it be for developers to attempt to include harmful elements?

      Yet despite this commonly held belief, it appears that one new Linux distribution wasn’t exactly it what claimed to be.

      The distribution referred to as anonymous OS wasn’t what many of those who downloaded it thought it would be. Those who tried the Ubuntu-based release thought they were going to be testing a distribution centered around personal privacy and remaining anonymous online.

    • Simply improves and polishes

      There are a lot of Russians in the Linux world. Not only in Russia, but also in other parts of the world. The examples? Eugeni Dodonov lives in Brazil, Artyom Zorin lives in Ireland.

    • Slackware Derivatives: The Superb Mini Server Project

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed

          Ubuntu and Mint don’t want it; Linus called it an “unholy mess.” While most other distros are passing up or postponing GNOME Shell, Fedora is full steam ahead. Does Red Hat know something the rest of us don’t? Or is GNOME 3 really as bad as everyone says?

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby

        I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we weren’t able to convert many of them into sustainable installations.

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Cutting Off The Root: The Future Of Community Developed Android

          The CyanogenMod team made news last week when they announced that future versions of their venerable Android build would no longer include root-level access by default, a massive departure from essentially every other custom Android ROM. Some have questioned the move, claiming that removing root undermines the very idea of running a custom ROM.

        • Cyanogenmod announces 7.2 release candidate

          ANDROID DISTRIBUTION Cyanogenmod has announced that Cyanogenmod 7.2 finally entered release candidate status.
          Cyanogenmod’s popular Android distribution has been ported to many devices and while the outfit is busy readying Cyanogenmod 9 based on Android 4.0, it is still working on Cyanogenmod 7.2. The operating system, based on Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread, has finally reached release candidate status, supporting 70 devices.

        • The Humble Bundle for Android #2
        • Humble Android Bundle 2 Goes Live
        • Second Humble Bundle for Android includes Zen Bound 2, Canabalt
        • Projector Android Phone Samsung Galaxy Beam Coming To India

          Tweet

          Samsung’s projector phone Galaxy Beam is an impressive device. We played with the phone during the Mobile World Congress and liked it very much. While the release date of the phone is still unknown we got reports that Indians will be getting this phone in April. IBN Live reports that “The device will be launched in India in April”. There is no report on the price of the phone.

        • New Motorola phone elbows RAZR aside with bigger screen, gets caught on blurrycam
        • Samsung releases Galaxy S II Android 4.0 source code

          The update to Ice Cream Sandwich just started rolling out to the Samsung Galaxy S II last week and has yet to reach users in many regions, but the build’s code can now be found at Samsung’s open source portal. The release won’t be immediately useful for those looking to get Android 4.0 on their Galaxy S II right now, but it will make it a heck of a lot easier for the dev community to create custom software builds based on the latest version of Android.

        • Samsung Galaxy S III may build LTE into the chip

          Samsung’s long-in-development Galaxy S III may be the first smartphone with LTE-based 4G built into the processor. Apparent leaks from an executive to the Korea Times had a quad-core Exynos processor shipping with both LTE 4G and HSPA 3G inside. The move would supposedly be to reduce the “huge amounts” Samsung has to pay to Qualcomm to get 4G, the anonymous insider said.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Google’s Nexus Tablet Priced At $149?

        Tweet

        Last year in December when Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that “in the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality” it was not clear what he meant by that.

        The rumors were rife that Google was working on its own tablet on the lines on Nexus Phones. A Google tablet is due ever since Google announced ICS, which brings all Google devices under one OS. Now reports are coming that Google has picked ASUS for their tablet and it will be priced to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The tablet will have a 7-inch screen, according to reports.

      • iBerry Launches $198 ICS Tablet For India

        The tablet is running Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich on 1.0 GHz ARM Cortex A8 system processor. The tablet features a 7-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen. It has a 2 megapixel main camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The tablets has an impressive 1GB of RAM and comes with 4GB storage. It sports a microSDHC card slot (with up to 32GB supported) so you can expand as much storage as you want. It has a mini USB port and Rechargeable Li-poly 4000MAh battery. It claims to offer up to 25 hours of music, up to 5 hours of video and up to 6 hours of Web browsing.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Greg Smith Isn’t the First to Leave Goldman Sachs Over Morals

      People are reflected in glass as they walk past Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City. Photo by Mario Tama via Getty Images.

    • Reimagining capitalism—as principled, patient, and truly social

      While the global financial meltdown and its aftershocks have unleashed a flood of indignation, condemnation, and protest upon Wall Street, the crisis has exposed a deeper distrust and implacable resentment of capitalism itself.

      Capitalism might be the greatest engine of prosperity and progress ever devised, but in recent years, individuals and communities have grown increasingly disgruntled with the implicit contract that governs the rights and responsibilities of business. The global economy and the Internet have heightened our sense of interconnectedness and sharpened our awareness that when a business focuses only on enriching investors, managers view the interests of customers, employees, communities—and the fate of the planet—as little more than cost trade-offs in a quarter-by-quarter game.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Demand Swift Rejection of ACTA

          Crucial discussions going on in the EU Parliament will determine the fate of ACTA. Whereas the rapporteur David Martin is siding with the EU Commission in attempting to defuse the debate and postpone the final vote on ACTA, other members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) insist on voting in the coming months, as originally planned. By urging for a swift rejection of ACTA ahead of next week’s meetings in the Parliament, EU citizens have a decisive role to play.

03.19.12

Links 19/3/2012: Linux 3.3, Wine 1.5.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • NYC Activists Differ on Occupy’s Direction

      A day after police broke up a rally at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and arrested dozens, Occupy Wall Street protesters said Sunday that their movement for economic justice would pick up momentum with the spring.

      Activists listed issues including student debt, the environment and the November elections as priorities going forward. But some observers who watched workers hose down the now-barricaded park that was Occupy’s home wondered whether a movement so diffuse could accomplish anything.

    • Goldman Missive Shows Need for Volcker Rule, Democrats Say

      The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employee who criticized the company’s culture in a newspaper column bolsters the case for Wall Street restrictions like the Volcker rule, congressional Democrats said.

      While the March 14 New York Times opinion piece by former executive director Greg Smith drew no requests for hearings or investigations, lawmakers including Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley said the article showed why the U.S. needs tighter restrictions on Wall Street practices. The two Democrats authored the Volcker rule’s ban on proprietary trading and conflicts of

    • Culture of Predation: That Goldman Sachs Exposé Barely Scratches the Surface

      This week people have been buzzing about Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith’s high-profile resignation from Goldman and his description of the way that company’s ethics and morals have declined over the last decade and more, especially under current CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

      But Smith’s revelations aren’t really news at all, and the moral decline he describes at Goldman has been replicated throughout our corporate culture. Behavior at Wall Street firms like Goldman may have been more overtly criminal, but the shift from respect for the customer to the desire to rip customers off is pervasive and insidious.

      Wall Street has, of course, been the epicenter of this behavior. Years ago it was reported that traders at Morgan Stanley used to get off a phone call and gleefully shout “I ripped his face off!” — about their own clients — after successfully selling them what they knew were garbage investments. The surprise isn’t that Goldman Sachs encourages its employees to mislead clients and put its own interests above theirs — the surprise is that anybody is surprised.

    • Goldman Should Be Barred From Returning More Capital, Bair Says

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) should be prohibited from boosting its dividend or repurchasing stock because Federal Reserve stress tests showed the investment bank is too leveraged, according to former regulator Sheila Bair.

      The leverage ratios of four financial firms dropped below 4 percent under the stressed scenario, according to test results the Fed released this week. Two of those firms, Citigroup Inc. (C) and MetLife Inc. (MET), were prohibited from raising dividends or repurchasing shares. The central bank approved the capital plans of two others, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • US judge rules that you can’t copyright pi

        The mathematical constant pi continues to infinity, but an extraordinary lawsuit that centred on this most beloved string of digits has come to an end. Appropriately, the decision was made on Pi Day.

        On 14 March, which commemorates the constant that begins 3.14, US district court judge Michael H. Simon dismissed a claim of copyright infringement brought by one mathematical musician against another, who had also created music based on the digits of pi.

        “Pi is a non-copyrightable fact, and the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea,” Simon wrote in his legal opinion dismissing the case. “The resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non-copyrightable idea of putting pi to music.”

03.16.12

Links 16/3/2012: Wine 1.5.0, HP’s webOS Community Release

Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers

      We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.

  • Kernel Space

    • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – Benchmarking All The Linux File-Systems

      When running Linux file-system benchmarks at Phoronix it is most often a comparison of EXT4 vs. Btrfs, since they are the “hot” Linux file-systems at the moment. Sometimes others like ZFS, Reiser4, and XFS also join the party. In this article is a look at all of the Linux file-systems with install-time support under the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. When carrying out clean installations each time with changing out the root file-system and using the default mount options, ReiserFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS are all being compared in this article.

    • Can Linux Win in Cloud Computing?

    • Graphics Stack

      • Canonical Publishes Apple Hybrid Graphics Driver

        Seth Forshee, a kernel engineer at Canonical since last year, published the Apple GMUX driver to the kernel mailing list. From the commit message, “Apple laptops with hybrid graphics have a device named gmux that is used for switching between GPUs and backlight control. On many models this is the only reliable method for controlling the backlight. This series adds initial support for the gmux device, along with anciallary support for disabling apple_bl when the gmux device is detected. Initially only backlight control is supported.”

      • X.Org Foundation Elects New Board Members

        They barely had enough members voting to meet the minimum 25% quorum to carry out an official election. Only 40 of 144 members voted this year, which comes in at just 27.77%.

      • Participating in Google Summer of Code 2012

        Hello, Wayland developers!

        It’s high time to begin discussing application ideas with mentoring organizations.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Kubuntu Active To Run On Tablets

        The lead Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell has announced the activation of Kubuntu Active project targeted at tablets. The project has started creating daily builds. At the moment the builds are available only for the i386 architecture, but will soon be available for ARMv7.

        “The project is aimed at creating a Kubuntu version of the Plasma Active tablet interface,” writes Fabian Scherschel on H-Online.

  • Distributions

    • Guadalinex 8 Screen Shots

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Here Comes The New Ubuntu Unity Spread Design

            Be prepared to be amazed because this is huge and would change the way you interact with multiple applications in Unity. The Compiz window manager has been around in Ubuntu for quite a long time, in fact I cannot think of a time when it wasn’t present. The good old days where people in fact use Ubuntu because of the fancy cube effect and other effects. With Compiz, you have a huge list of Compiz plugins like Spread, Expo, Alt-Tab and many more etc. And this has remained the way it has for the past few years, sticking out like a sore thumb in light of the new modern, gorgeous Unity interface. Well, all that is about to change soon.

            John Lea, the lead designer of the Ayatana Team has just provided insights of the new Spread that has been designed. We will be covering the new design here but the detail he goes into is overwhelming. It gives an idea of how every minute thing is thought of during the design process. All right, enough with all this beating around the bush. Let’s dive straight into it, shall we?

          • Sure It’s Popular with Consumers, But Ubuntu Increasingly Means Business

            Most of us who follow Linux know that it has been a huge success at the server level, and powers much of the server infrastucture of the Internet. The fact is, many Internet and enterprise users don’t even realize the extent to which they depend on Linux and related platform technology every day. In addition, Linux is playing a bigger part in business technology deployments, which companies like Canonical and Red Hat are extremely focused on. Now, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth is out with some hard-hitting data that shows just how effectively Ubuntu is competing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Here are the details.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Android Tablets Gain Market, Apple Loses

        According to a study by IDC Android tablets made some strong gains in fourth quarter of 2011. This growth can be attributed to Amazon which introduced its Kinde Fire tablet running cutom Android OS. Android tablets increased their market share from 32.3% in 3Q11 to 44.6% in 4Q11. This is an impressive 12.3% increase. On the contrary iOS slipped from 61.6% market share to 54.7%, losing around 7% market to Android.

      • Spark Linux tablet renamed Vivaldi

Free Software/Open Source

  • NYSE Opens Up About Giving Up Control

    We also had the opportunity to talk to NYSE Technologies’ Head of Global Alliances Feargal O’Sullivan. He will be a keynote presenter at the Collaboration Summit and will be talking about “Open Middleware Standards for the Capital Markets and Beyond.”

  • Cool, Free Open Source Tools for Producing Music

    Music-making technology has improved dramatically in recent years, and software and hardware tools even play a bigger role in the production processes of huge bands ranging from Coldplay to Metallica. Free and open source music making and production technologies have also become very sophisticated, and are worth looking into. If you play and produce music here are some must-have free tools that you can leverage.

  • Zytronic encourages creativity with open-source driver for touch sensors

    In order to increase the depth of support it can deliver to the market, Zytronic has introduced the first in a series of new software drivers for use with its range of Projected Capacitive Technology (PCT) touch sensors and touch controller products. Designed to work with Zytronic’s latest ZXY100 touch controller series, the initial drivers will support the increasingly popular Linux operating system, and for industrial users Microsoft Windows CE . The Linux drivers are supported on both Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian 6.01/6.02 distributions.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Eucalyptus refocuses on open source values

      Even as its competitors generate the headlines and talk more than a little smack, Eucalyptus Systems has been quietly and carefully re-aligning its business practices, while steadily growing. Now the cloud computing company is ready to take on the sector with less quiet and more open source attitude: including a radical shift in how it will deploy its main product.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Magnolia CMS 4.5 improves usability

      Magnolia International has announced the release of version 4.5 of its enterprise content management system (CMS). According to the developers, this update to the Java-based CMS – available as an Enterprise Edition or an open source Community Edition – is the “largest upgrade to date”, improving usability and adding a number of new features.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap completing move to Open Database Licence

        The OpenStreetMap project is preparing to delete data from its database on 1 April if data contributors have not agreed to licence their data under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) or assign it to the public domain. The move is the culmination of a near two-year long process to switch the licensing for the data behind the popular mapping project.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Study analyses ten years of security holes

      Since 2001, S21sec has collected all major software companies’ known security holes in a database, including those of Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. The “Vulnera Database” is fed from 36 sources, among them well-known contributors such as CVE, Bugtraq and Secunia. It currently lists more than 22,000 products and over 74,000 security holes in total.

    • Exploit code published for RDP worm hole; Does Microsoft have a leak?

      Chinese hackers have released proof-of-concept code that provides a roadmap to exploit a dangerous RDP (remote desktop protocol) vulnerability that was patched by Microsoft earlier this week.

      The publication of the code on a Chinese language forum heightens the urgency to apply Microsoft’s MS12-020 update, which addresses a remote, pre-authentication, network-accessible code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s implementation of the RDP protocol.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Understanding the New Price of Oil

      In the Spring of 2011, when Libyan oil production — over 1 million barrels a day (mpd) — was suddenly taken offline, the world received its first real-time test of the global pricing system for oil since the crash lows of 2009.

      Oil prices, already at the $85 level for WTIC, bolted above $100, and eventually hit a high near $115 over the following two months.

      More importantly, however, is that — save for a brief eight week period in the autumn — oil prices have stubbornly remained over the $85 pre-Libya level ever since. Even as the debt crisis in Europe has flared.

  • Finance

    • Public Rebuke of Culture at Goldman Opens Debate

      Until early Wednesday morning, Greg Smith was a largely anonymous 33-year-old midlevel executive at Goldman Sachs in London.

      Now everyone at the firm — and on Wall Street — knows his name.

      Mr. Smith resigned in an e-mail message to his bosses at 6:40 a.m. London time, laying out concerns that Goldman’s culture had gone haywire, putting its own interests ahead of its clients.

    • Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • New Toxic Sludge PR and Lobbying Effort Gets Underway

      A trade association known for using the terms “compost,” “organic,” and “biosolids” to describe sewage sludge is investing in a new public relations campaign to influence policymakers and the public. The US Composting Council (USCC), which was founded by the disposable diaper industry, will be expanding its long-standing efforts to “rebrand” sewage sludge, which is increasingly disposed of on agriculture crops and through garden centers without telling the public that their food is being grown in medical, industrial, and human waste.

  • Censorship

    • Court Orders SOPA-style Blackout of 100+ Music Sites

      Every single ISP in India has been ordered to block 104 sites offering unauthorized music. A total of 387 ISPs must block the sites immediately via DNS and IP address blocking, backed up with Deep Packet Inspection. While the IFPI praised the action, their Indian counterparts are singing are more interesting tune – they don’t want to destroy their opponents, but bring them into the business.

      “Content theft is a global problem and we must have a global commitment to solving it. This is an important opportunity for the Indian government to move forward with strong protections against online theft,” MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd told the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry conference this week in Mumbai.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Links 16/3/2012: GNOME 3.4 Beta 2, Cinnamon 1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 65 Open Source Replacements for Security Software
  • A golden age of open source innovation?

    Open source’s ability to innovate has been challenged many times. But Glyn Moody argues that open source innovation is actually going from strength to strength, creating new opportunities to deliver cheap computing to people corporations would not normally consider.

  • Computer Aided Design the FLOSS way: An Interview with Franz Reiter, lead developer of gCAD3D

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Cranks Firefox to 11
      • Thunderbird 11 has been released! PPA Ubuntu 11.10 & LinuxMint
      • Mozilla struggles with Firefox for Windows 8 Metro development

        Mozilla’s Brian Bondy said the outfit did some preliminary work on getting a basic application working in Metro. However Bondy complained of poor documentation on Microsoft’s part and a general lack of public knowledge, saying, “To get started we read the MSDN whitepaper entitled Developing a Metro style enabled Desktop Browser. This document lacked quite a bit of information though so a lot of registry hacking was needed to get things working. Jim [Mathies] and I documented a lot of this missing information….”

      • Now You Can Chat From Thunderbird

        Thunderbird, the popular email client, has added chat support for future versions. The feature was introduced in the daily builds of Thunderbird. I am running 14.x series on Kubuntu.

      • Silent Updates Are Coming to Firefox in Version 12

        Back in December, we covered a blog post from Ehsan Akhgari, a Firefox engineer, which discussed work on what could eventually become an essential part of delivering silent updates to the Firefox browser. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you may already appreciate the fact that updates to the browser happen in the background, and now, according to a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog, background updates are coming to Firefox. Not every user is going to be happy with the news, though.

  • SaaS

    • Hadoop Training Is Easy to Get, Online or Offline
    • Is the OpenStack Foundation All about Big Money?

      An interesting argument and McKenty knows alot more OpenStack than I do. That said, I think that McKenty is wrong.

      You need to look no farther than the Apache Software Foundation to see how this dual system of money and meritocracy can work. The Apache Software Foundation takes big money from vendors like Microsoft, who yield little influence on development. Development is managed by The Apache Way of meritocracy and it works. The Eclipse Foundation has a similar model that has also worked well.

      So yes, you can have big money and a meritocracy for developers too.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Brand Confusion

      I cannot pinpoint accurately what caused to inflate the whole issue, but it seems that some at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) would like to stress that there are the rightful continuation of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project, to the point of showing outright hostility to LibreOffice. They base their claims upon the following elements:

      * they own the OpenOffice.org domain name
      * they own the trademark of OpenOffice.org
      * they must be the right heirs of OpenOffice.org since the Apache incubating project they’re contributing to was born out of the will of the copyright holder (Oracle) through its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

    • Update on Apache OpenOffice

      Not too long ago, many, yours truly included, thought that OpenOffice was dead. That opinion was informed by the decision the major Linux distributions made to replace OpenOffice.org, as it was known at that time, with LibreOffice, the new office suite forked from OpenOffice.org by its former contributors.

      If this is all news to you, here is a brief recap of what happened. OpenOffice.org was a Sun Microsystems-sponsored project. It was, then, the most popular office suite, as it was pre-installed on almost all Linux and BSD desktop distributions. Then something happened. And that “something” was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. by Oracle Corporation.

    • IBM on Licensing OpenOffice.org

      Clearly Heintzman does not get FLOSS. The GPL, for instance is a licence, not a contract, so one it not “contractually obliged to do anything”. One is permitted to copy by a licence from the creators under the conditions laid out by the GPL. OpenOffice.org ships under a mixture of licences for different parts of the code, reflecting its long history and huge number of contributors.

      He never does get around to explaining why IBM chose Apache/ASL licensing except to state that IBM chose it. He certainly does not explain why IBM went with the code contributed to Apache instead of the code forked to LibreOffice and the greater numbers of contributors if they were interested in “community”. OpenOffice.org has yet to make an ASL release while LibreOffice is chugging away making release after release and doing well while OpenOffice.org is still under code review years later.

    • LibreOffice 3.5.1 Is Now Available for Download

  • CMS

    • Drupal, Joomla and WordPress face challenges in Germany

      Last week, I attended CeBIT, the enormous technology trade fair that takes place every March in Hanover, Germany. This year, as I walked through the building devoted to content management and other enterprise technologies, I spied a booth with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and TYPO3. All except for the latter are well known in the United States, but I was surprised to find that those three are struggling to find market share in Germany.

      I found it remarkable that the three open-source web content management systems that are so popular in the United States were having trouble getting the same level of recognition in Germany.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • PulseAudio 2.0 Is Set To Be Released Very Soon

      While many Linux desktop enthusiasts still have nightmares concerning the early days of PulseAudio, the developers behind this common open-source audio server are planning to do a major 2.0 release before month’s end.

      PulseAudio has been found in major Linux distributions like Ubuntu going back to 2008, but it was only in September of 2011 that they hit the 1.0 status. Their next major release is now PulseAudio 2.0.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • The Code for America brigade effect

      Have you ever seen results from your community engagement and realized the impact of your efforts? We recently told you about the LocalWiki project and shared some of the results from the Triangle Wiki day event. But then our friends at Code for America took it a step further.

      The co-founders of LocalWiki were in the Code for America offices last week to see how they could build on the success of the Code Across America event. They took the data–633 page edits, 100 maps, and 138 new photos–and amplified it.

    • GCC 4.7 RC2 Released; The State Of C99 Support

      The second release candidate of GCC 4.7 is available today for those wishing to try out this open-source compiler that will be officially released in the coming weeks. Separately, there’s also updated documentation concerning the state of the C99 language support.

    • The Prominent Changes For The GCC 4.7 Compiler

      With GCC 4.7 being released soon, new compiler benchmarks at Phoronix will be published in the coming weeks (beginning next week Monday), but for those wondering what’s different on the feature side, here’s a look.

      Most of the key GCC 4.7 features have already been talked about in a number of different Phoronix articles, but here’s a concise summary of what to expect from this open-source compiler collection.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • A Response from Goldman Sachs

      The following letter to Goldman Sachs’ worldwide clients was issued today by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein:

      Dear Goldman Client:

      By now, many of you have probably read the regrettable resignation letter published in today’s New York Times by former Goldman executive Greg Smith, explaining why he is leaving the firm after twelve years.

      In the letter, in which he excoriates Goldman and its practices, Mr. Smith comes across as a man of conscience, ideals, and high moral standards. And as you read his words, you no doubt asked yourself this troubling question: how could Goldman have hired such a person?

      At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

03.14.12

Links 14/3/2012: GIMP 2.7.5, Microsoft Has Massive RDP Hole

Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Is Ubuntu Beating Red Hat Linux In Enterprise Market?

      Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has once again lit the fuse of another explosive discussion. This time he came out with some data. “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.” Mark then presents us with this chart from w3techs.com.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel 3.2.11 Is Available for Download
    • Samsung Has G2D Driver, Virtual Display For Linux 3.4

      Besides the DRM work already piling up for Linux 3.4, there’s more. The Samsung developers responsible for the Exynos graphics driver have sent in their “-next” pull request, which brings several new features, including the basis of 2D acceleration for this open-source ARM graphics driver. There’s also a virtual display driver that could be used for handling wireless displays.

    • Look at Linux, the operating system that is an universal platform
    • Silicon Motion Has Open-Source Driver, But Fails

      For those that don’t closely follow the various development lists, at the end of February a Silicon Motion developer came to the DRI list announcing he had “a kernel driver for all our graphics chips” that he was looking to mainline. It sounds nice, but in the end it’s a let-down and the most you’ll probably get out of it is a few laughs.

    • The Synaptics Driver That Does Multi-Touch, ClickPads

      Following last weeks release of the new X.Org EvDev input driver that introduces support for multi-touch and smooth scrolling, the updated Synaptics input driver is now available for Linux users. Key features, of course, are multi-touch and ClickPads support.

    • Preview: Sandy Bridge Become Quicker With Linux 3.3, 3.4

      With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that’s largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.

    • Linux File System — Analyzing the Fsck Test Results

      The results of our Linux file system fsck testing are in and posted, but the big question remains: What do the results tell us, what do they mean, and is the performance expected? In this article we will take a look at the results, talk to some experts, and sift through the tea leaves for their significance.

  • Applications

    • Using Gimp in George
    • GIMP 2.7.5 (last test before GIMP 2.8) now available!

      This will be the last in the unstable GIMP 2.7 series. GIMP 2.7.5 is considered somehow a beta version for 2.8 or even a release candidate. It has exactly the same features and functionality which 2.8 will have. The devs want to really release in (late?) March. No more real bugs are blocking the release (Michael Natterer and others have fixed them all in the last weeks). The last big missing thing was the lack of support for the PDB paint API which has also been fixed now! So all the important stuff is completed.

    • Mirage Image Viewer: Seeing Is Believing

      I am fond of programs that do not impose standards on me. The Mirage image viewer follows that philosophy. The image editing preferences let me select the default scaling quality, whether or not to auto-save or prompt for action, and the saving quality to apply. But since its focus is on file viewing and not file controlling, Mirage starts with a clean slate.

    • Games

      • Half-Life 2 Benchmarks On Linux Are Imminent

        Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Cinnamon 1.4 Released With New Hot Corner Behaviour, More

        Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: it comes with a panel at the bottom by default (optionally, you can use 2 panels or a panel at the top) that supports autohide, panel applets, a classic system tray, GNOME2-like notifications and so on, but using GNOME 3.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Microsoft closes critical RDP hole in Windows

      Microsoft has released six security bulletins to close a total of seven holes in its products. According to the company, one of the bulletins (MS12-020), rated as critical, addresses two privately reported vulnerabilities in its implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

      The first of these is a “critical-class” issue in RDP that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. Although RDP is disabled by default, many users enable it so they can administer their systems remotely within their organisations or over the internet. All supported versions of Windows from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Rather Than Speaking Out Against Domain Seizures, ICANN Provides A ‘How To’ Manual

      A couple weeks ago, we noted that with all of these questionable domain seizures going on, it was a shame that ICANN wasn’t speaking out against such questionable abuses of the domain system. We thought its silence was a sign of its impotence to actually take a stand. Turns out we may have actually overestimated ICANN’s willingness to stand up for the internet. You see, late last week it put out a “Thought Paper on Domain Seizures and Takedowns.”

    • Fake Political Attack Video Doesn’t Violate Lanham Act–Ron Paul v. Does

      The Doe Defendants registered the alias “NHLiberty4Paul” at YouTube and Twitter and posted a YouTube video attacking Jon Huntsman. The video ends “American Values and Liberty – Vote Ron Paul.” The Does acted without Paul’s permission–so much so that Paul sued them for violations of the Lanham Act and defamation. After filing the lawsuit, Paul sought to unmask the Does.

    • Shielding the Messengers: StubHub Un-Snubbed in Court Victory for Online Speech and Innovation

      Owners of online marketplaces can breathe a little easier this week: on Tuesday, a state-level appeals court issued a decision flatly rejected a dangerous court precedent that threatened not only online auction sites but social networks, message boards, and every other platform for online expression.

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • KEI Statement on India’s granting of compulsory license to patents on cancer drug sorafenib (NATCO Vs. BAYER)

      The India Controller General Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks has just (March 12, 2012) issued an order granting a compulsory license to patents on the cancer drug sorafenib/Nexavar, in the matter of NATCO Vs. BAYER. A copy of the decision is attached below, and is also available from the government’s web site here: http://ipindia.nic.in/

      KEI filed an affidavit in the case, which is available here. http://keionline.org/node/1359. The Bayer price in India for sorafenib was 69 thousand USD per year. A survey of prices on sorafenib is available here: http://keionline.org/prices/nexavar. Bayer’s main defense of the pricing was its program of discounts to lower income patients, and the fact that CIPLA was selling an infringing product at a lower price (Bayer is suing CIPLA, and asking for damages and injunctions).

    • Author’s Guild Boss On E-Book Price Fixing Allegations: But… But… Brick-And-Mortar!

      No sooner had the Department of Justice announced its plan to investigate Apple and five of the Big Six publishers for e-book price-fixing than a representative of those benefiting most from this (alleged) collusion boldly stepped into the fray. Scott Turow, bestselling author and president of the Author’s Guild, has issued one of the most profoundly self-serving and wrongheaded statements ever to grace the pages of a legacy industry’s website. There’s a ton to unpack here, so let’s get right to it.

    • Belgian rightsholders group wants to charge libraries for READING BOOKS TO KIDS

      I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.

      People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.

    • Trademarks

      • Scrolls will be Scrolls

        For us this was never about a trade mark but being able to use Scrolls as the name of our game which we can – Yey.

    • Copyrights

      • Pols fear ‘SOPA backlash’

        In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: “Don’t get SOPA’d.”

        Lawmakers are tiptoeing around issues that could tick off tech heavyweights such as Google or Amazon. They don’t want a legislative misstep to trigger the same kind of online revolt that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate in January.

      • Guess What? Copying Still Isn’t Stealing

        Every time you think we’re done seeing totally ridiculous arguments about file sharing, the old really silly ones pop back up. Musician Logan Lynn has written a pretty silly rant on Huffington Post entitled Guess What? Stealing Is Still Wrong. And, indeed, it is. But nowhere in the article does he actually discuss stealing. He discusses infringement. In silly black and white terms that assumes that every single download is absolutely a lost sale, that no one who downloads ever gives him any money and that his biggest fans are criminals.

      • Richard O’Dwyer case: TVShack creator’s US extradition approved

        Home Secretary Theresa May has approved the extradition to the US of a student accused of copyright infringement.

      • ACTA

Links 14/3/2012: Linux 3.3 Delayed, elementaryOS 0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • USDA to Serve Kids More “Pink Slime”

      A product made by grinding up connective tissue from cows and beef scraps that used to be made into dog food is too disgusting to serve at McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell, which have all dropped it due to public pressure, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) thinks it’s fine to serve in school lunches. The USDA plans to buy seven million pounds of the “Lean Finely Textured Beef” (LFTB) from Beef Products Inc. (BPI) and serve it to school children this spring.

  • Finance

    • Wall Street’s Broken Windows

      New York City’s police strategy embraced “broken windows.” The police increased the priority with which they responded to even minor offenses that upset the community – “squeegee men,” graffiti, and street prostitution. Reported blue collar crime fell in New York City. It also fell sharply in most other cities, which did not implement “broken windows” programs, but Wilson and the NYPD got the credit and popular fame for the sharp fall in reported blue collar crime in New York City. Wilson became one of the most famous blue collar criminologists in the world.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Don’t Let the European Parliament Freeze ACTA!

          The European Parliament may be about to side with the Commission in its strategy to stall the ACTA debate, and postpone by one year or two the vote that could kill it once and for all. It is urgent that citizens contact Members of the Parliament to urge them to continue working towards a clear and strong political position, leading to the unavoidable rejection of ACTA, rather than allow these technocratic manœuvres.

        • Gotcha. Commissioner De Gucht in three strikes denial

          European Digital Rights (EDRI) sent a briefing document to the Parliament, and Mr. Kamall relayed an item raised by the organisation to the European Commission by written question. The answer of De Gucht is remarkable on multiple levels. But there is more to it. The footnote issue from the leaked documents was openly discussed by Commission staff during hearings, in fact Luc Devigne argued about it with Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist. The key caveat below is the word mandatory. Again the Commission and Council cover up the negotiations as a result of confidentiality. Here is another video from the stakeholder hearing where Margot from XS4all did a bunny test for the snake on 3strikes.

        • FOX International wants “evidence regime in favor of content provider and rights holder”

03.13.12

Links 13/3/2012: Linux 3.3 RC7, Arch Linux Turns 10

Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Brazil and GNU/Linux

      Not to worry, though. This month, Net Applications shows that other OS had 93.84% but a year ago the share was 94.38%, a decline of 0.5% in spite of the bias. In California, the bias in business is probably 10:1 so a change of -0.5% could be -5% in reality, a serious shift for M$. The monopoly is on a short leash with government and education using GNU/Linux. In Argentina there is an active anti-trust investigation of M$’s practices. It would not take much for business usage to change dramatically if GNU/Linux is allowed to compete fairly. According to the US embassy in Argentina, “42 percent of Argentine firms use Linux on at
      least some of their computers”. Brazil should not be much different.

    • A Linux desktop and tablet user and Windows 8

      I’m a Linux user, but I kind of like Windows XP, and I can get along fine with Windows 7, but Windows 8? Argh!

    • Meet the new Windows 8

      Usually, if you say “linux” people think about a very hard to use OS. But is it true? Is Kubuntu really an OS for developers and nerds? I’m going to present “common people” Kubuntu, saying it’s the new version of Windows 8: let’s see what they think about it without any prejudice. And, since I’m a serious person, I’m filming it.
      By the way: I got the idea because KDE has been awarded as best desktop environment of the year.

    • Q4 2011 Was a Nightmare for M$

      # Philippines saw shipments down 33%.

  • Server

    • What’s the best Linux server for you?

      When it comes to clothes, I’m a normal guy. I just want to walk into a store, grab something that fits, buy it (What, try it on? Are you kidding!?), and head home. Well, that’s what I want to do. I’ve learned over the years that just because something should fit doesn’t mean that it will fit. It’s the same with Linux servers. Sure, they’re all built on the same code base and can run the same applications, but one may fit you perfectly while another may make you look like a clown.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Enesim: A Flexible, Extensible Graphics Framework

      Enesim is said to be similar to the Fog Framework and started out as a research project to optimize the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, but then ended up becoming a project in its own right. The Enesim graphics framework supports vector and raster-based graphics, is considered highly-extensible, supports OpenCL and OpenGL renderers along with a software-based fall-back, and multi-threading support. The SVG renderer for Enesim is also said to be significantly faster than other common SVG libraries.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Tethered Shooting with digiKam
      • REVIEW: KDE SC 4.8.1

        Just a few days ago I upgraded KDE SC to its latest release, 4.8.1. This first dot release is very interesting in that it incorporates a significant number of fixes to elements as critical as Dolphin and KDE PIM. Now that the first round of polishing is there for KDE SC 4.8, and since I have been using it extensively for weeks, I think it is a good time to put together a review and see where KDE stands as of today. THE GOOD NEWS There are three main areas where KDE SC 4.8 shines: Stability, Performance and New Features.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3: conditional love

        I’ve recently spent a couple of months using Gnome 3 in Fedora and a few weeks using Gnome 2 in Debian Squeeze, Now I’m using Gnome 3 again in Debian Wheezy. Switching from the new to the old and back has given me a good idea of what I like or don’t like in Gnome 3, and what makes life easier or more difficult using it.

        Overall, I much prefer using Gnome 3, which puts me at odds with a lot of people who have written about it. What I love most is the minimalist elegance of layout. Gnome 2 just looks 20th century while Gnome 3 looks 21st.

  • Distributions

    • Arch Linux turns 10 years
    • Arch Linux turns ten years old
    • Arch Turns Ten

      It was a full decade ago that Arch Linux made its public debut. Over the weekend developers and users posted of their early experiences and brought the milestone to the forefront. However, users have been discussing just how to mark this upcoming anniversary for several months on the forum.

    • Vector Linux: Lightning fast throwback to old-school Linux

      The title can be somewhat deceiving. When you think of “Old School” you think of out of date, whimsical technology that most people only look at on occasion. Well, scrap that train of thought when applied to Vector Linux, because Vector is just as useful as nearly any modern platform. That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone — but if you long for the days when your Linux distribution didn’t eat up your resources and an installed OS contained everything you needed to get through the day, then look no further than Vector Linux 7.0 Standard Edition. You’ll wind up with an easy to use, lightweight desktop (Figure A) that is ready to perform like few other distributions.

    • Introducing the Window Maker Live CD

      Paul Seelig announced last evening, March 11th, the immediate availability for download of the Window Maker Live CD 2012-03-11 Linux operating system.

      Window Maker Live CD is a Linux distribution based on Debian Linux and the lightweight Window Maker window manager.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • A look at Sabayon Linux 8

        The Sabayon Linux distribution is a Gentoo-based project which attempts to provide a cutting-edge user experience which “just works”. The project provides several editions, the main ones being the GNOME, KDE, Xfce and Core flavours. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds so the hardest hurdle to cross is figuring out which ISO we want to download. I opted for the Xfce edition which, if you’ve been following my reviews of late, you’ll notice is becoming a bit of a trend. Recently I’ve been finding GNOME 3 too unpleasant and cumbersome to use and, while I enjoy the features of KDE, I’ll be the first to admit it’s a bit on the heavy side. More and more I’m finding Xfce provides my ideal balance of features and performance.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Raspberry Pi USB Microcomputer tries Fedora Remix Distro

          The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that owners who managed to grab its USB microcomputer before supplies depleted can now download and install a recommended Linux distribution.

          The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is a distribution from software packages of the Fedora ARM project, with a “small number” of extra packs modified from Fedora versions that Fedora could not include due to licensing problems.

        • Fedora 17 New Security Feature part VII – thumbnail protection.

          John Leyden wrote an interesting article Linux vulnerable to Windows-style autorun exploits, about how security researches had discovered that Linux is potentially vulnerable to a user sticking a USB device or CDRom into a locked machine. The basic idea was that “Nautilus” would execute thumbnail drive code, to display thumbnails icons in the file browsers based on the content on the removable media, even if the machine was locked. If the thumbnail executables were vulnerabile, a cracker could use the code used to process the thumbnail images to kill the screensaver/lock.

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Squeeze box DOESN’T spring forward

        I’m always wondering about people who forget to spring forward or fall back when daylight saving time begins or ends.

        Now I’m one of them.

        I have a 10 a.m. conference call today, and looking at the clock on my GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, my operating system on this laptop since late 2010, I dial into the call.

        There’s nobody there.

        Later I’m working on my test laptop, running DragonFlyBSD, on which I have the ntpd daemon running. It’s an hour ahead.

        Except that it’s not. My Debian laptop is an hour behind.

      • Derivatives

        • SkoleLinux 6.0.4 has been released

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Has Canonical Found the Keys to the Computing Kingdom?

            “My concern is that the evolution acceleration curve for technology, specifically how users interact with the interfaces, is too steep, and Ubuntu starts running the risk of being too clever, too quick,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. “It’s hard to evangelize linux/ubuntu/favorite distro and find out users are too confused to understand and use it because every time they look, it’s different.”

          • Peeking at the Pangolin

            Among the most eagerly anticipated features, the heads-up display, makes its debut in Precise. The HUD is supposed to eventually replace the traditional menu system by guessing the command you want to issue based on the first few letters you type into a search box. In the beta version, you can call up the HUD by hitting the Alt key. In his blog, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth describes HUD as a revolutionary change in the way people will interact with their computers, but the version that comes with the 12.04 beta is a long way from that vision.

            For example, HUD is supposed to be able to search through the available application and system (indicator) menu commands and offer these as you type, but the HUD isn’t as smart as it should be. To adjust the volume settings on your computer, for instance, you ought to be able to type “volume” into the search box, but doing so produces no result whatsoever. To get to that command, you need to type the less intuitive “sound” instead and choose from four options. How this is more efficient than merely clicking on the speaker icon and adjusting the volume on a slider is beyond me. Performance was even quirkier when I tried to use the HUD to find commands in an application. It worked to a limited degree with the image-editing program Gimp, but the search itself seemed slow. To save a file, I typed “save” and the HUD went through 15 options before offering me “File > Save As” whereas I could easily have saved time by using the keyboard shortcut, CTRL-S.

          • HUD Won’t Replace Traditional Menus: Mark Shuttleworth

            When Mark Shuttleworth announced HUD, I had my worries. Unity itself needed a lot of work to be further polished. In a recent interview with Mark at MWC I asked about the worried around HUD and he explained his vision of HUD. So, let me get one thing out of our way ‘HUD is not going to replace the traditional menus’.

          • Unity fixes in newly released Midori 0.4.4

            Christian Dywan, the main developer of the open source WebKit-based browser Midori, has announced the release of the latest version of his project. Midori 0.4.4 has improvements in several areas, including better GTK+ 3 support, improved interaction with Ubuntu’s Unity menubar and other fixes.

          • Ubuntu User Survey: Who’s Behind the Curtain?

            Who runs Ubuntu? Where, why and how? That’s a question lots of people — including probably even Canonical employees — would like to be able to answer better. Toward this end, a survey of general Ubuntu users is underway. Here’s the scoop.

            Last month, Canonical completed a survey of Ubuntu server users that revealed quite a bit of interesting information — from the apparently hobbyist nature of many Ubuntu server deployments to the ways people are and aren’t currently deploying Ubuntu servers in the cloud.

          • New, shiny, Unity 5.6 released!

            Phew! it’s been a long road to release the next unity, but I’m more than happy to finally announce the release of 5.6. Unity components (dee, libunity, bamf, lenses, nux) and unity itself, plus some compiz snapshots (post 0.9.7.0) are part of this release. The packages are currently building on the official builders and should be soon available to you.

            No particular new feature apart from better ibus support are part of it, plus a tons of bug fixes and some miscelleanous improvements: – Daniel van Vungt landed a patch in compiz that enhances its performance for more than 51%! When you test it, I can ensure you feel a real noticeable difference (in particular on older machines, like mine). – The alt tap false positive revealing the HUD is now part of the past. We know this one was annoying people, I can only tell you it’s been technically challenging ;). This has been a rocking combined effort in compiz/unity sides. – the file lens can now find files that were never opened before.

          • Unsettings- A graphical configuration tool for Unity
          • Mark Shuttleworth Weighs In On Ubuntu 12.04
          • Ubuntu For Android Can Disrupt The Enterprise Market

            Ubuntu for Android has become extremely popular among enthusiasts. There was a lot of excitement around Ubuntu for Android during the Mobile World Congress. I was at the booth for coverage and I saw how people were excited about it. Ubuntu for Android, as I understand after talking to Mark Shuttleworth, is much more than yet another prototype. It’s much more than just another Canonical project. It is undoubtedly a Linux geek’s toy, but it is a real business device which, if executed well by Canonical, can disrupt the enterprise market.

          • Interview: Jo-Erlend Schinstad

            Jo-Erlend Schinstad is one of the most active and dedicated members of the Ubuntu community who tries to clear confusion around Ubuntu related issues. He also takes pain in explaining technologies, how it works and how it can be improved. Jo was recently appointed as a member of EMEA and it was a great opportunity to talk to Jo-Erlend about his engagement with the free software community, especially Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 Just Got Faster

            Ubuntu 12.04 is currently in its beta and updates are rolling everyday to remove existing bugs and polish the system for the final release on April 26th. However, today I received almost 100 updates which is huge considering I update my system every few hours (call me paranoid). Notables updates have been made to Compiz and Unity. Most of the updates however are performance improvements rather than visual tweaks. Still, I will try to list them all to the best of my knowledge.

          • Ubuntu disables app logging for privacy

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • W.H. tries cyber scare demo

      The White House orchestrated a simulated cyberattack on New York City’s power supply during a summer heat wave late Wednesday to illustrate not only potential human and economic casualties, but to tee up support for Senate passage of a sweeping cybersecurity bill.

      During a classified briefing in the Office of Senate Security, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan showed lawmakers how a hacker could breach control systems of the city’s electric system and trigger a ripple effect throughout the population and private sector, according to a source familiar with the scenario.

      “The fact that we could be subject to a catastrophic attack under the right circumstances and we now know some of the things that would help us to protect against such an attack, that’s why it’s important now for the Congress to take this up,” Napolitano said in an interview with POLITICO.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • US Soldiers Should Avoid Geotagging On Facebook

      It won’t be a surprise to see that even the smartest users behave in the most stupid manner when on Facebook. They give out their location without even realizing what they are doing. It becomes increasingly dangerous when members of US army start giving out their location in different ways.

      A deployed service member’s situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit, said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence, or MCoE.

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • MF Global: Mark Melin Interviews Haar And Koutoulas On What Really Happened

      This soft censorship of the financial news by the visual and print media in the States is nothing new. I have spoken to a number of people who find themselves and their viewpoints shut out of the discussions on financial and economic issues in the US. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the area of stock and metals market abuses and their reforms.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Why Did PhRMA Spend $356K on ALEC in Wisconsin?

      The pharmaceutical drug lobby PhRMA gave $356,075 to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “scholarship fund” in 2010, but listed the recipient’s address at a lobbying firm steps away from the Wisconsin State Capitol, rather than ALEC’s Washington, D.C. offices, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service. The PhRMA contribution is leading to calls for greater transparency about how the ALEC scholarship fund operates.

      In its 2010 IRS filings, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as PhRMA, listed a $356,075 contribution to the “ALEC Scholarship Fund.” That fund pays for flights and hotels for state legislators to attend ALEC conferences in places like New Orleans or Florida.

  • Censorship

    • Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable

      When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.

    • Tell PayPal: Don’t Censor Books

      PayPal, which plays a dominant role in processing online sales, has taken full advantage of the vast and open nature of the Internet for commercial purposes, but is now holding free speech hostage by clamping down on sales of certain types of erotica. As organizations and individuals concerned with intellectual and artistic freedom and a free Internet, we strongly object to PayPal functioning as an enforcer of public morality and inhibiting the right to buy and sell constitutionally protected material.

      Recently, PayPal gave online publishers and booksellers, including BookStrand.com, Smashwords, and eXcessica, an ultimatum: it would close their accounts and refuse to process all payments unless they removed erotic books containing descriptions of rape, incest, and bestiality. The result would severely restrict the public’s access to a wide range of legal material, could drive some companies out of business, and deprive some authors of their livelihood.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Regulator Shows Operators Restrict Net Access, Deploy Intrusive Technologies

      In January, La Quadrature du Net responded to the BEREC consultation, based on the findings of the RespectMyNet platform. Although these only give a partial account of the situation, the submission presented 144 confirmed reports of breaches to Net neutrality, concerning 44 operators in more than 14 Member States.

    • Dear Parliament: Say no to the Internet Lockdown

      Canada’s politicians are set to make a decision any day, setting the course for copyright and the Internet that will last for years. Please send a message to your MP and the government by filling out the form on the right.

  • DRM

    • Penguin Pointlessly Annoys Readers With USB-Only eBooks

      Reader Jason Alcock alerts us to another example of a company taking a backwards approach to value-added services by putting artificial restrictions on their content. Apparently, while ebooks from the popular publisher Penguin are available to borrow from Kindle libraries, Penguin requires that they only be transferrable by USB, not wireless. This, in turn, means that they cannot be read with the free Kindle apps on platforms like iOS and Android, since USB transfer is only supported on the Kindle device itself.

    • Latest Calibre Update Brings KF8 Support to Linux, OSX

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. Using Trademark Law To Prevent The Use Of Public Domain Stories

        The public domain is meant to be a source of free culture for all the world to enjoy, mix and derive other works from. Unfortunately, there are many people and organizations in the world that wish to block the use of public domain material. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERB) is one such organization. Founded in 1923, this corporation has been handling all the copyrights and other rights for the works created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Amongst the rights held by the corporation are the rights to the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars characters. What makes this situation somewhat unique is the fact that only a portion of the Tarzan and John Carter books are still covered by copyright in the US. A number of the early works were published prior to 1923 when modern copyright terms of life plus 70 years went into effect. Even though the copyrights of the early works are long expired, ERB has shown that it will block the use of both characters in modern derivative works.

    • Copyrights

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts