07.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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Now is a particularly good time to ditch Windows for good, for workstations as well as servers. For instance, now that Microsoft stopped supporting Windows Server 2003 on July 13, you’ll need to find something different to use for your servers. Whether it’s switching from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 or to Linux-based servers–or changing out tired and faulty Windows Vista desktops for the alien Windows 7 or something more user-friendly–Linux provides you with freedom and freedom of choice.
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I like messing around with my desktop. I decided to give it a retro Windows look. I used the Redmond theme, set all my fonts to Monospace 10, used a boring gray background, and tweaked my editor and terminal colors.
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After doing everything I (and the consultancy I work for) would have done, I determined that the best approach was to re-install the OS. Problem is, he couldn’t find his restore discs and (as I mentioned earlier) he didn’t want to shell out the money for Windows 7. This laptop was just going to be his spare laptop for home use (it was his primary laptop at work).
I decided it was time for an experiment. I knew the laptop had a restore partition so if I left that partition alone we could still restore the machine back to factory defaults (if he could find his restore discs). So…it was time to bring out the big guns. Said big guns? Ubuntu 10.04. I was fairly certain 10.04 would work like a champ on the machine. It did. But the big test would be when the user had the machine in his hands and put it to use.
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Linux is customizable. As the video for Compiz Fusion showed, the visual appearance of linux and the desktop environment can be extensively customized – and once again, this all can be done for free. In contrast, Windows has more limited customization. While there are programs that allow one to change the appearance of Windows dramatically, many of these programs are not free. Additionally, the capabilities for customization with linux extend past visual customization. Beginning users can stick with default settings, but more advanced users can dive deep within the system to tweak how it will work with their hardware, improving speed and power. In contrast, the Windows operating system is closed to a point, and tinkering is not supported or encouraged.
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The question is simple and understandable: does this shift to prepackaged, easy-to-use linux distributions alienate those who appreciate the ideals of linux’s origins? Do user-friendly linux distributions proliferate at the expense of the core users?
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Server
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If you ever wanted to explore the latest content management, wiki, or microblogging products without the headache of setting them up, a free solution from the BitNami Project is just what you need.
One of the benefits of free and open source software is the ability to download world-class software and implement it gratis on your systems. At times, though, there is a big difference between theory and action. Complex server systems, like Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, Joomla!, or even a straight-up LAMP stack can be difficult to install and properly configure on a Linux system, particularly for admins with a little-less-than-expert rating on Linux.
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Audiocasts
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Applications
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Canola is a open source media center application which was primarily built for smart phones and netbook devices. To be frank, I had never heard about Canola before and so I decided to give Canola Media Center a spin in my laptop powered by Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.
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My toolbox is very plain Jane, and for a reason. It’s basic because these are the tools that get the job done on every Unix-like platform available. Everything I’ve come to rely on is open source, even on proprietary platforms like AIX. If there’s a part of my toolbox missing, I’ll download the package or source and make sure it’s available.
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gnuA major power tool that I left out of my sysadmin’s toolbox article is GNU Screen. Screen has been an absolute lifesaver in the past, especially because I sometimes work remotely over wifi connections that might not always be the most reliable. Screen is a session manager for shells, a way to run and preserve multiple shells without actually having to be connected to the server. The most common way I use screen is over ssh. When connected to a server over ssh, the bash session is run over that connection, so any programs or scripts that are run are also dependent on the ssh session being active. However, when screen is run, it runs in the background, separate from the ssh session. That means screen lets your wifi connection die in the middle of running a script without the script dying as well.
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you can play Dwarf Fortress at the console, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. The 40d19 version for Linux which was released a few months ago allows you to set some options and send output to the console instead of its conventional SDL “translation,” if I understand it right.
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Feh is a fast, lightweight image viewer that uses imlib2. It is command line-driven and supports multiple images through slideshows, thumbnail browsing or multiple windows, and montages or index prints using TrueType fonts to display file information.
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There are still a few more unofficial plugins to go until we have 100% feature parity with the 0.8 branch. Among some of the ones I’m working on right now:
* Animations Plus
* Newton (Physics Engine for Compiz)
* Sound (ALSA based sounds on window events)
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5 Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux: The buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks is called electronic commerce (commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce). Today, eCommerce is mostly done on the web and is conducted entirely electronically for buying virtual items such as access to premium content on a website and purchase of physical items using eCommerce payment gateway.
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New website PortableLinuxApps features a number of portable Linux applications, which will work on any Linux distribution. These can run off your flash drive or from a folder in your home directory; it doesn’t matter. Best of all, there’s documentation out there to help you make your own program, should you not be able to find what you’re looking for.
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GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework which provides an interface to programmers for writing various multimedia applications.
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Proprietary
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The new application also provides event notification for backup, continuous data protection (CDP), replication and file level activities; real-time tracking and alerts of user file system activities; and new support for Linux Master, Linux Client and Linux Deduplicated Repository.
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The SDR-2010 is a very powerful and adaptable Linux-based signal processing platform. It is an Intel (News – Alert) 64 Architecture Server hosting the new high-performance PRO-2910 PCI Express based carrier cards. Each card has dual XMC/PMC sites.
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Instructionals
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Expect-lite is targeted at the verification testing environment; it produces a pass/fail result at the end of the script. However, its use is not limited to this environment. The tool is written in the Expect scripting language, but it requires no knowledge of Expect. In fact, it’s so simple it takes no more than five minutes to learn.
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Games
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If you are looking to do some Linux / open-source gaming this weekend but are looking for something new besides the recent release of VDrift, the Sauerbraten developers are out with their first update in 14 months. Sauerbraten 2010-07-19 “Justice Edition” has been released with plenty of changes.
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I’ve been meaning to mention this game for months now, so here it is: Sleep is Death is the latest game from indie developer Jason Rohrer, who also created the acclaimed games Passage, Between, and Primrose. As with his other projects, Sleep is Death is not a traditional game, focusing on two players crafting an interactive story akin to an online multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons session minus the players’ guides.
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For those wondering, FRAPS is a Windows program that can be used to record video streams of applications running on your desktop, most often games. For instance, I’ve used FRAPS to grab a handful of cool videos while playing Live for Speed.
Being able to record your desktop activities has many aspects – educational, tutorial and sometimes sheer bravado. There are circumstances where nothing short of a video demonstration is going to work.
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The Reticule recently posted a new article on the rise of Mac and Linux gaming. The article included discussion of the release of Steam for Mac, as well as the importance of independent developers in keeping Mac and Linux gaming alive. Developers such as Spiderweb’s Jeff Vogel and Wolfire’s John Graham offered their comments about the benefits of supporting multiple platforms.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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When I started looking at moving away from Ubuntu I was leaning toward KDE after the wealth of great screenshot I’d been seeing in the Ubuntu Forums monthly desktop screenshot threads. I was especially interested in the possibilities of Bespin, a theme/widget style for Qt4 that has knocked my socks off in some desktop screenshots. I’ll admit I haven’t played with Bespin much yet but I definitely need to track down the info I was given before so I could look into it. Logo for the K Desktop Environment (KDE)On the whole I’m really liking KDE. There’s a lot to learn, and I do have to relearn how to do some things in KDE but it’s definitely a learning curve worth climbing. One of the things you learn pretty quickly about GNOME is the fact that a lot of the configuration tasks are hidden away from the general user, and while the GNOME Configuration Editor and Ubuntu Tweak do help a lot there are some things, like screensavers, where all but the most basic things are not available, and even then you can easily have to deal with the command line to make further tweaks. If the tweaks are even doable under GNOME. With KDE there are user changeable options for just about everything, if you can figure out where to look. Unfortunately finding information isn’t as easy in KDE as it is in Ubuntu, which lets you search one in the Help app and get results in every installed app. In KDE I first have to know where I want to look and I’ve started in the wrong place a few times. I’ve also found the KDE help files aren’t nearly as in-depth as GNOME’s are so I’ve had to turn to my web browser a few times to find the information I need.
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Will I switch? I don’t know. What I do know is that starting Monday I am going to actively begin hunting for a good KDE distro that plays well with my WiFi card. I would LOVE to keep using this edition of Mandriva, but where I could probably find every package I need or install every utility I need from source I am less sure that I will be able to fix the suspend/resume +no wifi problem that I have.
Because of the WiFi problem that I have in Mandriva I am going back to Ubuntu this weekend. For the sake of this series I stuck with Mandriva in order to use KDE4, but I cannot keep doing the reboot thing, I use suspend/resume a LOT.
All in all this was a very informing exercise for me. I hope I was able to translate what I experienced this week in writing to you guys – if you have any suggestions on how to improve these seven day challenges let me know!
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Today I stumbled across Netrunner GNU/Linux Community Distro and it made me wonder about a few things.
Originally, it was Ubuntu with out the “evil Mono(tm)”, now of course mainline Ubuntu has no mono either, so their USP was gone! So they changed their main idea.
The latest release is based on Kubuntu (which makes it a 4th generation distro) and aims to improve the KDE that is provided by Kubuntu by, this is what really got me, integrating more of Gnome into KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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I’d like to present you The Board.
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What is it made of? The Board is built on top of bleeding edge GNOME platform. It’s written in Javascript using the GObject Introspection-based Gjs. The UI is fully written with Clutter and Mx (with some small bits of GTK+ and Clutter-GTK+). It’s a nice example of how you can do cool apps using the GNOME platform nowadays.
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In the light of the upcoming GNOME 3, the more document-centric Shell and the browser-mode nautilus (instead of spatial mode), I wanted to remix my thoughts a bit.
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In the past week I’ve used Ubuntu 10.04, Mint 9, and Arch + GNOME, but Arch + XFCE seems to beat all of those.
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Reviews
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It’s been a while since our last review of the Jolicloud operating system, and since we just got a brand-new eMachines eM350 netbook (see it in the enclosed image) we thought to give you guys a glimpse into the new release of Jolicloud 1.0. As many of you already know, the distribution is not yet available for download as an ISO image. At the moment, Jolicloud 1.0 is only available as an upgrade option to selected users. But don’t despair, as it will be available for download by the end of the month!
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This is first review of Puppy 5 lucid which is Ubuntu based. It is the fastest OS I used ever,it feels better than DSL.So I am going to share my Experience with you.
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Puppy 5 is a tremendous success. The boot sequence has been improved; it looks nicer, more polished and is more streamlined. The desktop is even more refined. You get tons of great programs. Then, there’s Quick pet. Everything works out of the box, including Wireless, Samba, multimedia playback. All of this in just 130MB.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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#1 PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva Spinoff
It was started with a Mandriva base, but over the years it has grown to different personality. Except for the beloved Control Center none of the components are borrowed from Mandy. PCLinuxOS 2010 is built from the ground up using the home grown repository. Tex and PCLOS devs have taken bits and pieces from Fedora, OpenSuse and Mandriva, even some of the patches used are from Debian, PLD and Chakra. Would you call it a respin of all these distros?
The greatness of a modern linux desktop distribution lies in how well you integrate components, no matter from where they are taken, and how well you take decisions regarding choosing/upgrading the critical components and introducing new technologies. In this regards, PCLinuxOS is tightly integrated, well-put-together, stable and out-of-the-box usable distribution. It’s a respin of none!
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Red Hat Family
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The ClearFoundation has announced the release of version 5.2 of the enterprise edition of its open source Linux server, network and gateway solution. ClearOS, formerly known as ClarkConnect, is aimed at small businesses and distributed environments, and the latest release includes a number of updates, changes and new features.
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Fedora
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Research Purpose
To find out how to maintain, sustain, and grow the Fedora Project’s online open source development community.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As others have said, Ubuntu is the great beginner’s distribution, and now, after seeing how well my less than mainstream hardware was handled, I can say it should be the very first distribution anyone should try. [I did not always feel this way, as only last year I truly believed that there were fewer problems with OpenSuSE 11.2 versus any other distributions I have tried, which includes all the usual suspects, and few less popular ones, like Zenwalk]
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Flavours and Variants
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I make a point of trying as many different variations of Ubuntu as I can, this way I can be informed when I recommend one version over another to friends and family. The following is a round up of my favorites I have found over my last three years in the world of Linux.
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Lubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, the unoficial LXDE flavor of Ubuntu got an artwork update last week. I’m posting this only now because I had some issues downloading the latest Lubuntu development ISO.
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Manhattan OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu created by Kevin McDole, a frequent WebUpd8 reader and commenter. Manhattan OS is in fact inspired by everything we post here, at WebUpd8. Initially I though this review would be really easy to do since I am very familiar with everything in Manhattan OS, but I then realized half of WebUpd8 is used in Manhattan so that would take like… a year for a full review. So we’ll do a light review only and for any application for which you want to find out more, just search for it on WebUpd8.
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Peppermint
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There are so many Linux distributions out there. Some of them are pretty standard and some of them go well out of their way to try to bring something different to the table. I’ve seen just about every take on the Linux desktop. Today, however, I came across a distribution, Peppermint Linux, that added another new twist to the desktop. It’s nothing earth shattering. In fact, it really only takes advantage of a technology given to us by Mozilla Labs. That technology? Prism.
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With just a bit of tweaking on the desktop I believe Peppermint Ice has a real winner on their hands. It’s a unique idea that needs just a bit more work to make for the ideal social desktop.
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As one of the world’s top providers of virtual private server cloud hosting, VPS.NET is constantly researching and developing smarter and more intuitive services to meet these growing needs. As part of its commitment to innovation, VPS.NET is sponsoring the soon to be released Peppermint OS, a Linux-based operating system that is cloud/web application centric. VPS.NET will be providing the infrastructure for Peppermint OS’ online presence.
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Embest has released an evaluation kit – the Devkit3250 – based on NXP’s LPC3250 ARM926EJ-S microcontroller, supporting by the Linux open-source operating system.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The nonprofit Linux Foundation on Friday said the GENIVI Alliance will go with the open-source MeeGo OS for its new In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system. The decision gives automakers like BMW, GM and PSA Peugeot Citroen the new mobile platform and makes Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti-Marelli, Visteon, Wind River and others the suppliers. IVI includes apps in vehicles that can be used by everyone in the car, including navigation, media, location-based services, and access to the Internet as well as media players and phones
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Android
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One of the massive advantages of the Android platform is that it’s open source, so anyone can use it to load onto their phones.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jon Rubinstein confirmed the Fortune Brainstrom Tech that netbooks running webOS platform are in the pipeline.
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Ok, so you know about the XO-1.5 and you’ve been told about the XO-1.5 HS which is an X0 but with a different keyboard.
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On Friday I covered the $35 tablet prototype that the Indian government unveiled. Over the weekend, it’s been called everything from the “future of computing” to “devices [that] cannot compensate for [India's] crumbling education infrastructure and absenteeism of teaching staff.” A few more details have emerged, however, suggesting that this prototype is a lot closer to a reference spec than something that will see the light of day soon.
I started digging into this a little bit further when a little birdie from Intel said “It doesnt add up – the sum of the parts is no where near the whole cost they are claiming…” Not a literal birdie, of course, but I’m waiting for an OK to attribute the quite reasonable statement to a source. Regardless, both the Times of India and thenextweb.com shed a bit more light on the device.
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07.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Games
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First released as a free, open-source download for PC gamers in 2005, the fast-paced twitch shooter Nexuiz is to arrive on consoles as a downloadable title, powered by the tech behind visual feast Crysis 2.
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Originally expected to launch during summer 2010, development studio Illfonic decided to re-code Nexuiz using Crytek’s CryEngine 3 after seeing it in action at E3. The team have until September to get that new version up and running in time for an appearance at the PAX Prime expo in Seattle.
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Ernest Hemingway once said that one cat just leads to another. Somehow, the same happens with Linux: rarely is it that penguin lovers only try one distribution. Of course, the enormous variety of distributions can be frightening to beginners but, once they get over this initial reaction of confusion or fear, if they decide to learn, they benefit from the vast assortment that Linux provides. Yes, one Linux leads to another. Once you try several Linux distributions, you pick your favorite one and, in the process, you learn to navigate several other OSs. Today, that is TRULY A GOOD THING.
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According to HawkBoard, the development board based on OMAP-L138 processor integrates an ARM 926 applications processor processor enables Linux developers to harness the power of floating-point DSP to design open source applications.
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Android
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In his latest pricing and licensing column, Doug Carolus of N’Compass Solutions discusses Digium, Asterisk, and open source software as it relates to enterprise communications. As an aside, Doug provides the best thumbnail definition of “free” software that I’ve heard, and one that’s good to keep in mind when thinking about this category of product. Open source software is “free” in the sense of “free” speech—i.e., relatively unrestricted—as opposed to “free” in the sense of “free” stuff—i.e., it costs you nothing. Theoretically, Asterisk doesn’t cost you anything either, but as Doug demonstrates, actually obtaining it and following through all the way to deployment in an enterprise is not at all without cost.
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McArdle is developing an integration framework for a suite of open-source applications to ensure they all communicate with one another. He is pulling standard applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning, customer relationship management, database and records management, a web content management system and “telephony solutions”, all free open source products, into the framework. The integration element will include an enterprise service bus, a portal, rules management and business process management engines and an overarching administration and configuration console.
The entire package will be known as EOSS, for Enterprise Open Source Solutions, with a company of the same name to sell and support it.
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For companies which are interested in installing collaborative tools on their own servers or modifying the platform in accordance with their specific needs, TeamLab is offered as a free open-source software. TeamLab open-source solution is distributed under GNU GPL v3 license terms and listed in SourceForge open-source library.
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There is no doubt that open-source technologies have gained traction in small to midsized enterprises, especially when IT budgets are tight. But as enterprises take a hard look at open-source technologies, relevant issues must be considered before taking the plunge. Can open source really benefit the enterprise? What areas offer the most potential for SMEs? What are the potential concerns?
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The development of open-source software has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers, according to a report published by the Standish Group. That probably means that consumers who would have to pay to use those products, now may use them for free, under a special software license, which also allows users to contribute to further develop the concept.
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What’s the reason for the lack of adoption of open source software — software developed and shared by a community and available for free — for the power grid? Well, according to our Open Source Smart Grid Primer, published on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), some of the reasons for the lack of support is that utilities are risk averse, used to working with proprietary gear and vendors, and need to recover costs and earn profits on investments into their grid.
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The Open Source Project Imixs Workfow provides a Business Process Management Solution based on Java.The project focus on human based business process solutions also known as workflow Management Systems (WfMS).
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ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that the Luther Rice Seminary and University, of Lithonia, GA. has partnered with them for the hosting and support of their official Koha integrated library system installation.
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Did you know that 50% of the Top 10 downloaded Open Source products are Apache projects?
Did you know that most Enterprise Java solutions are built using Apache?
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Vodafone
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Two years after it bought Wayfinder for 230 million Swedish crowns (now $31 million) to power its location services, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is now giving it away – it’s making almost all Wayfinder code available via open source.
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IBM
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Q. IBM is making EGL open source. What does this mean, really? Will IBM open source all of EGL? Or just parts, like a community edition?
Darnell: The open source offering will definitely just be parts of EGL and its tooling. From my perspective, the best parts are slated to be made open source while some of the “baggage” is being left behind. For instance, the Java and JavaScript generation targets are definitely making the trip to open source but COBOL generation is being left out. Developers working to enhance EGL under the open source project won’t be burdened with ensuring compatibility with COBOL, nor will time have to be spent developing and testing COBOL generation, compile, and debug features.
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Ultimately, I don’t expect the IBM i community to pay much attention to EGL going open source and I think that is a mistake on their part. I also don’t expect that IBM is going to go out of their way to sell EGL (in any form) to the IBM i community–a huge mistake on IBM’s part because EGL has so much to offer to that customer base. I suspect that IBM has a different audience in mind for EGL open source than their traditional customer base. Does that audience exist outside of the imaginations of IBM’s project team? Only time will tell.
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International
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Liferay, Inc., provider of leading open source portal software for the enterprise, recently inaugurated a new office in Recife, one of Brazil’s growing IT centers, as part of an ongoing global growth strategy. The new office will act as a strategic center for sales, development, training and support services to the fast-growing South American market.
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Prominent Malaysian software developer Colin Charles says the site, www.malaysiacrime.com, which is also available as a iPhone app, is made possible by Malaysia’s open source codes policy.
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Mail
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Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source e-mail and collaboration software, announced today an agreement with NetCologne, one of the largest regional telecommunication and Internet service providers in Germany, to replace its existing webmail solution with Open-Xchange. Plus, NetCologne will offer its users additional Open-Xchange groupware and mobility features as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
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Events
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The panel will be chaired by the journalist, author and passionate open source advocate Glyn Moody.
Starting on the 15th September at London’s historic Lord’s Cricket Ground, the two-day conference seeks to unveil the paths of global technological innovation throughout the next decade.
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The engineering and technology students were called upon to work together to promote and encourage the use of open source software at all possible levels of computing.
Participating in the State-level workshop on Free and Open Source Software organised by the Free Software Foundation – Tamil Nadu at Velalar College of Engineering and Technology here on Saturday and Sunday, resource persons said that open source was a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process.
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It’s hardly pertinent to summarize an unconference, because it’s all over the map by (lack of) design. Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you about the the topics at this year’s community leadership summit because you can view the wiki pages for the Saturday and Sunday sessions. What I like each year is the little space we all create for ourselves at CLS in a forlorn corner of an overwhelming, cold conference locale that makes it very hard to feel community.
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OSCON
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Palm was naturally a part of this presentation as many components of webOS are open source, from the Linux Kernel all the way up to the WebKit web browser and V8 JavaScript engine. Unfortunately, Robb didn’t really delve into how Palm fits into HP’s overall open source strategy as I anticipated he would – he mentioned the company maybe once or twice – and Josh Marinacci from developer relations gave a brief 15 minute demonstration of Ares and gave a few phones away at the end of the presentation.
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Beer is near and dear to the open source community, though, and his remarks were well received. The mayor also plugged Portland’s commitment to open source in government, touting technology as a tool to interact and collaborate with citizens, a theme of this year’s conference.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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OpenStack, a new open source cloud computing initiative, is like the porcine ice cream.
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Databases
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CMS
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Joomla vendor Jentla and its integrator, Energetica, won the Local-e contract following a competitive tender process involving both open source and proprietary bidders.
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Healthcare
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After years of talk about taking medical records online, serious action is afoot. The Obama administration is waving $27 billion in incentives at doctors and medical offices to take records online, Verizon is touting its Health Information Exchange as a cloud-based way for records to be shared, and Google has a pilot project focused on electronic medical records, too. Will there be room for open source software solutions as the transition to electronic records begins in earnest?
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Funding
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Portland, Oregon-based Puppet Labs, commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announced today that it has secured a $5 million Series B funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners also contributed, bringing Puppet Labs’ total funding to date to over $7 million.
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Project Releases
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The FOSSology Project has announced the release of version 1.2 of their free software tools for the study and analysis of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The project began as an internal software development effort within Hewlett Packard’s (HP) Open Source and Linux Organisation. Using FOSSology, which originally only consisted of a few simple shell scripts, developers and IT buyers can locate open source software within an enterprise and perform various tasks, such as licence management.
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The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) has introduced Suricata 1.0, an Open Source engine for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) that will secure networks against next-generation network security threats.
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The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) today announced the introduction of Suricata 1.0, an Open Source engine for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) that will secure networks against next-generation network security threats. Available immediately for download under the Open Source GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2, Suricata includes innovative new features that will enable it to identify and prevent more of the pressing security concerns faced by organizations today.
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Government
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In other words no more LA wide deals. None of the VLE or Assessment tracking agreements or MIS lockins are guaranteed anymore. It is one thing to accompany BECTA execs to see Bill Gates in Seattle then ‘help’ LAs back home to ‘make choices’ for schools than it is to jolly along thousands of Head Teachers.
If it bodes ill for the likes of RM in education, DELL who is the second biggest hardware supplier in education and also features prominently in the Public Sector generally is feeling chill from the OGC so much that its public sector VP Ferenc Szelenyi was also moved to make a statement a tiny clip of which follows:
‘…the coalition government’s approach to public sector procurement is too one-sided…’
this was after having just not been invited to a big meeting with the Cabinet Office attended by rivals HP, IBM and Fujistu!
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Licensing
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There’s one more free/open robot operating system option out there today. Jean-Christophe Baillie of Gostai SAS writes, “I thought you might be interested to know that the Urbi Operating System for robotics is now going open source.”. If you’re familiar with Urbi, you may know that the component architecture and library code have been free software licensed under the GPL but the actual Urbi kernel has been proprietary up until now. With this announcement, the kernel is being relicensed under the Affero GNU GPL v3, allowing it to join the other components as free software (or open source software if you prefer).
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Openness/Sharing
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The MP has been given the job after producing a blue-print for a reformed planning system before the election, called Open Source Planning. It is this document that will apparently underpin the reforms.
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Basically, open source software is software that can be tweaked and modified. It’s a way for developers like Headd to build new tools.
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IdeaScale Application Programming Interface; Tornado, a lightweight, open-source web development framework; MongoDB, an open-source, document-oriented database; Googlechart, an API for chart generation; Uservoice, a free, Web feedback forum; and Github, a Web-based hosting service for projects that use Git revision control system.
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Programming
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Our sister site has rolled out the beta of SourceForge 2.0, aimed at offering better tools and an improved experience for anyone developing open source projects. It’s a whole new forge development platform.
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Much of the reflection has focussed around what ScienceBlogs, and indeed Nature Network is, or was, good for as a place to blog. Most have mentioned the importance of the platform in helping to get started and many have mentioned the crucial role that the linking from more prominent blogs played in getting them an audience. What I think no-one has noted is how much the world of online writing has changed since many of these people started blogging. There has been consolidation in the form of networks and the growth of the internet as a credible media platform with credible and well known writers. At the same time, the expectations of those writers, in terms of their ability to express themselves through multimedia, campaigns, widgets, and other services has outstripped the ability of those providing networks to keep up. I don’t think it’s an accident that many of the criticisms of ScienceBlogs seem to be similar to those of Nature Network when it comes to technical issues.
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Figures (albeit unofficial) released today claimed The Times’ website had lost two thirds of its readers since its paywall introduction, leaving just 15,000 clicking through. This was despite 150,000 registering for it when the trial was free.
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Security/Aggression
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For it seems clear to me that on that day Simon Harwood wilfully misconducted himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in him as as a police officer without reasonable excuse or justification.
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Finance
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Since the United States government stepped in to rescue the American International Group in the fall of 2008, Goldman Sachs has maintained that it would have faced few if any losses had the insurer failed. Though it was the insurer’s biggest trading partner, Goldman contended that it had bought credit insurance from financial institutions that would have protected it, but it declined to identify the institutions.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Word leaked out slowly, spread by Web-savvy folks on Twitter: Internet porn that once was blocked by Chinese government censors was now openly available.
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tcrown007 sends along an appeals court ruling that, for once, limits the reach of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention clause.
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Copyrights
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ISPs have called on the government to protect them from having to police their networks for copyright infringement, arguing that such a regulatory change would lead to “de facto censorship”.
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Mass lawsuits against alleged file-sharers, such as those from the US Copyright Group and lawyers ACS:Law and Gallant MacMillan in the UK, are generally accepted to have been generated from evidence gathered from big public BitTorrent sites. Now it appears that at least one other firm has jumped on the bandwagon, this time targeting a large private tracker.
Firefox: Tab Candy
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Instructionals
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Starling NetBook has a starting price of $389. It’s available for pre-order now, and should start shipping the first week of August.
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The Australian Taxation Office is preparing to release a Linux port of its AUSkey authentication software with Ubuntu being the reference distribution for testing and development.
AUSkey is the federal government’s security key that can be used for single sign-on across a number of online services and is required to use the Department of Treasury’s new Standard Business Reporting (SBR) service.
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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, today announced its support for the Ubuntu Free Culture showcase. The showcase will offer artists, photographers, and musicians of every background the opportunity to have their work ship with Ubuntu 10.10, the popular Linux-based operating system available in October 2010.
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Each time a new Android phone is released, groups of power users will try to improve it by digging into Android source code and by cooking ROMs. The path they choose is not easy: They have to do guesswork or reverse engineering and often they are stopped in their attempts by hardware limitations, closed systems and in some cases by legal matters.
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If you’d rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you.
Raleigh, NC – infoZine – Google’s Android lets you write Java programs that run on any compatible cell phone in the world. The power of Open Source meets the ubiquity of mobile computing—it’s a combination you can’t afford to ignore.
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Prices could drop to an absurd $10-$20 when these hit scale.
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Innovators, engineers, developers and hobbyists can now effortlessly create state-of-the-art products with the flexible, user-friendly HawkBoard, an open source embedded processor development board.
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Android
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Mediatek is sewing up the smartphone chipset market with several ‘strategic partnership’ deals. Back in February the company announced an alliance with the Vole to provide smartphone components for Windows based mobiles. Now Mediatek wants a piece of open source action and has buttered up Google by joining the OHA.
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iOS game developer OpenFeint has pronounced of offering an open-source gaming platform to Google’s Android OS.
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Tablets
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All of a sudden, tablet computers are all the rage, with Apple’s iPad stoking the fire. But Apple is hardly going to compete unchallenged in the tablet space. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claims that his company is “hardcore” about tablets, and is working with Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony before the end of the year. Ballmer demonstrated an HP slate at the Consumer Electronics Show in January as well. One has to wonder if the real opportunity in tablets lies on the open source front, though.
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Businesses everywhere clearly want to achieve maximum visibility and control over key management information. Whether open source tools can play a special part in building more cost effective IT infrastructures for the acutely ‘cost-aware’ charity sector is open to question.
Looking to realise efficiencies via this route, Virgin Money Giving will be using the open source Talend Integration Suite with the Jaspersoft reporting tool to restructure and optimise its data for reporting.
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ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, of Allen Park, MI. has partnered with them for the installation and support of the official Koha integrated library system.
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Asterisk is the open source telephony software created by Mark Spencer in the late 90s as an alternative to more expensive proprietary PBX systems. At the time, Spencer needed a telephone system to distribute customer service calls to his Linux engineers and decided to “build” his own PBX rather than pay for a new system.
Spencer also opted to make Asterisk available as open source software to minimize ongoing development costs (this business model was also consistent with the anti-proprietary software movement of the time). A beautiful example of necessity (+ limited capital funds) being the mother of invention.
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Facebook supports its social network of 500 million users with LAMP software infrastructure. This open source approach, also used by Google, Twitter, Yahoo and others, is a departure from the proprietary products offered by Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.
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Reports
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Several major IT vendors, including Dell, HP, Citrix and Rackspace Hosting gathered at OSCON this week to deliver a host of open source-related announcements to the ever growing open-source market.
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More than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increasing their investment in open source technology, according to a recent survey by Accenture. With such an open source expansion, there is a need for effective training solutions that will show organizations how to harness open source technology properly. LevelTen has released a schedule that will offer a fast-paced Acquia training overview for Drupal users.
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Of those surveyed, 40% said they plan on migrating mission-critical software to open source platforms within the next 12 months.
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Open Source Software (OSS) has been a part of the IT market for over two decades. Recently, the commoditization of IT markets, changing attitudes to the production and distribution of intellectual property, and the recession have put the OSS firmly in focus, particularly in the application infrastructure part of the stack.
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Open Source as a concept is solely devoted to finding out the best methods to spread a product in an open manner, where open is to be understood purely within the logic of the market. The hacker attitude, based on play and sharing amongst peers, has been co-opted therein by an approach that is based on the logic of exploitation of time and labor with profit as the driving motive, and not individual and/ or collective welfare.
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Events
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At the OSCON 2010 open source convention taking place in Portland, Oregon, O’Reilly Media’s Edd Dumbill has announced the winners of this years O’Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their “dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source”.
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The concept of open source hardware has interested me for some time. There are a number of wildly popular (at least with the geeks) products available for “free”. This particular type of free is akin to freedom and not cost. If you have the materials and tools on hand you could build a Makerbot from scratch or mill a circuit board and solder up your own Arduino compatible board, but even then it isn’t completely free. The freedom comes from sharing the design, making incremental improvements, and combining the community effort with a product to make it better.
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Mozilla
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In the days after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had ground its browser rival Netscape into the digital dust, Baker, who had been working on the open-source Mozilla project within Netscape, was laid off in 2001. She stayed on at the nonprofit Mozilla organization as an unpaid volunteer because she believed its mission was crucial to the Internet’s future.
Nearly a decade later, Mozilla’s Firefox browser is the window to the Web for nearly a third of the planet’s Internet users. Firefox is even more popular in most of the rest of the world than in the U.S., and in some countries, including Germany, has become the most popular browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer, meanwhile, has slid from a dominating 95 percent of the market to a bare majority of users.
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Databases
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credativ, a global open source consulting, service, and support company, announced today introductory and advanced training on PostgreSQL database development and administration which will jump-start cost saving projects.
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Oracle
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Jaspersoft, the world’s most widely used business intelligence platform, today released the findings of a global survey of open source community members about the future of Java and MySQL under Oracle (ORCL). Contrary to dark predictions by many in the open source community prior to its acquisition of Sun, Oracle was viewed by most respondents as a better steward of Java and MySQL than Sun. Indeed, most large organizations planned to use more Java than before and most expected to see MySQL innovate and improve faster under Oracle than under Sun.
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There is a generally accepted edict in the technology publicity business that when you run out of news and product announcements, the best idea is to commission a survey for the hell of it. Despite this reality of ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’ – on the face of it, the poll carried out by open source BI player Jaspersoft may have some validity.
The company polled 130,000 customers and community members and found ‘people’ are planning to do more with MySQL and Java under Oracle than Sun. I’m slightly worried by the fact that the company used the term people rather than programmers (or IT professionals at least), but let’s continue.
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Some 43 percent of respondents said they believed MySQL development would improve under Oracle. Another 35 percent expect it to remain the same, while 22 percent are anticipating the database will suffer under the giant vendor’s wing.
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CMS
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WordPress is now seven years old and, with millions of active users, is widely recognised as the world’s most popular blogging platform. The latest release is the open source platform’s 13th major update and is crucial to WordPress’ ambitions to move on from its blog-based origins.
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Healthcare
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Semi-Open Source
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On the former, OpenGeo offers a whole stack of geospatial data. Those sophisticated enough to be able to plow through the databases and apps and extract the data they need or desire can do so. For others, OpenGeo sells its services in building software based on that data or in supporting that software.
Though the “open core” business model has come under attack lately, this doesn’t seem to fall under that category.
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Government
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The number of schools in Austria that are considering to use or are using open source is increasing, according to school IT administrators and open source developers involved in education.
For instance, the number of schools using LinuxAdvanced, based on Debian Linux, is ‘continuing to increase slowly’, says Rene Schwarzinger, one of the developers of the Linux distribution tailored for use by schools.
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Openness/Sharing
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OpenPlans believes that open source software can provide a business model that will make new digital media companies of the future profitable – and, crucially, provide relevant, quality information directly to the reader, online and in real time.
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Open Data
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The basis of reporting an experiment is in part to allow other scientists to falsify the experiment. A scientist should expect others to try to disprove their work – they may not like it when it happens, but it’s a fundamental rule. Therefore a scientist should agree that when reporting an experiment they should make available all data necessary to repeat the experiment.
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Additionally, AOL announced a $1 million fund to support the growth of open-source mapping in the United States.
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It is an open-source platform that aims to provide reliable, real-time information about a crisis as it unfolds, to help people on the ground stay informed and be safe.
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Programming
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2) NetBeans
If you’re a Java developer, you’ve at least heard of NetBeans, a free, open-sourced IDE originally created for Java development. With this Java focus, NetBeans — with its just-released 6.9 version — supports the full Java EE 6 specification as well as a basket of Java standards including Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1, JAX-RS 1.1, JAX-WS 2.2, JAXB 2.2, and Java Persistence JPA 2.0. Aside from Java, NetBeans also supports JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, C/C++, Scala and Clojure. The IDE includes direct integration of Project Kenai for hosting open-source projects.
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Security/Aggression
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Perhaps it was only a matter of time. But wireless security researchers say they have uncovered a vulnerability in the WPA2 security protocol, which is the strongest form of Wi-Fi encryption and authentication currently standardized and available.
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Hundreds of thousands of us have now seen the footage of the newspaper-seller shambling peacefully home from work. We’ve seen how, without warning or provocation, PC Simon Harwood attacked him from behind, hitting him with a baton then shoving him to the ground. We know that the officer had unlawfully removed his badge, and that his face was obscured by a balaclava. We know that, a few minutes afterwards, Ian Tomlinson collapsed and died. We also know that the Metropolitan police lied about his death to the media and to Tomlinson’s family.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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This is the second in a series of posts explaining what the Digital Economy Act will do, how it works and how it will affect individuals. It is aimed at providing an objective and descriptive overview of the legislation, rather than opinion or comment on the content. Some parts may be legally technical.
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The FSF is calling on opponents of the law to use the government’s online feedback service to call for it to be repealed
[...]
In a statement this week, the FSF called on UK citizens to use the government’s newly created “Your Freedom” site to call for the repeal of the Digital act. The “Your Freedom” site was created by the coalition government as a forum for citizens to nominate laws and regulation which should be scrapped.
OSCON 2010: Paul Fenwick, “The World’s Worst Inventions”
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The government is hoping to launch the first version of a “national operating system” for its computers as early as next year, a senior Communications and Press Ministry official said Thursday.
The operating system, for use on the computer systems of government agencies and state-run companies, will be 90 percent based on the open-source Linux operating system, Deputy Communications and Press Minister Ilya Massukh said.
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Infinitely Virtual is pleased to announce a new partnership with Turnkey Linux–an open source project that develops a free virtual appliance library, featuring the best server-oriented open source software. Infinitely Virtual looks forward to announcing the benefits and the exciting new products the partnership between Turnkey Linux and Infinitely Virtual will bring to current and future virtual server clients.
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Tester will be tasked with providing senior consultancy to customers, helping them to integrate their business and technology functions. Dionisakos will focus on growing the Netsolutions Linux support offering.
Prior to joining the company, Tester worked as an independent consultant, helping companies improve operational performance through developing and implementing training programs and procedures.
He has more than 15 years consulting experience and has held a number of senior roles at PMP Print.
Dionisakos previously worked for Goldman Sachs, where he was Linux lead engineer.
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Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux computing, today announced the preview release of Userful Linux MultiSeat 2010™ – a complete Linux-based classroom software solution on a single install DVD. Userful’s flagship product, Userful Multiplier™, turns 1 computer into 10, and is the foundation of this new product release. This evaluation software provides a sneak preview of some of the major feature enhancements that will be included in the commercial release of Userful Multiplier V.4.0 and Userful Linux MultiSeat 2010™, in Q4 2010.
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Maxconsole is reporting that the various lawsuits aimed at Sony after they removed the option to keep a Linux installation on your PS3 if you chose to upgrade your firmware have been combined into one mega-sized super-powered Über lawsuit.
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Quest vWorkspace manages, secures and provisions virtual desktop environments, brokers connections, and delivers virtual applications and desktops from multiple hypervisors, Remote Desktop Session Hosts (Terminal Servers) and blade PCs through a single user access point and management center. The Quest vWorkspace Connector for Linux offers features for an enhanced end user experience on Linux workstations and thin clients, including multi-monitor support, Flash redirection and bi-directional audio.
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Server
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Cloud Linux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, announced recently that its CloudLinux’s SecureLVE security solution will be supported by Parallels Panel products by Q4 2010. Parallels Plesk Panel is the number one control panel in the world with thousands of applications that deliver the easiest, most profitable and most complete service for virtual, dedicated, and shared hosting providers. Integrating SecureLVE into the control panel will give hosting providers new security controls previously unavailable.
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The hardware box runs Linux and is powered by open-source tools. So theoretically, you could put together software with the same features for free. But the product’s interface is its real strength.
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Typical host OSes are bare bones Linux installations for which you have to manually set up Secure Shell (SSH). This means the host OS is very secure since it runs few, if any, standard network services.
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Kernel Space
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Another week (and a couple of days), another -rc.
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The Linux Plumbers conference planning committee[1] is announcing an extension to the call for papers deadline by one week to July 26th, 2010. We’re also taking this opportunity to clarify the difference between presentation[2] and micro-conference[3] proposals. There has been some confusion, and we want to make sure that everyone is happy with their submissions.
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Applications
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The VideoLAN project, known for such developments as the popular VLC media player have developed a free library for Blu-ray playback. The main task for libbluray is navigation, menu control and the support of the BD Java (BD-J) used on Blu-ray discs.
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Wine
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Wine is announcing the second stable release since hitting the 1.0 mark, with the launch of Wine 1.2. The major version adds support for 64-bit applications and boasts new graphics. It has been in development for two years and comes with a significant amount of changes under the hood.
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Damn Vulnerable Linux is a security distro, which can be an excellent learning tool. The distro includes older version of popular software like Apache web server, MySQL, PHP and others. The objective to create such a distro is to let users try out known hacks and vulnerabilities on these technologies and hone their skills.
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I will be installing a lightweight linux on my mobile classroom of Dated Dells, as I am noticing quite a lag using the GNOME desktop, lovely though it is.
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Reviews
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Lucid Puppy Linux 5.0 was released back in May of 2010, but as one of my favorite distros, I have been playing with it heavily since then. I have been so impressed with the new version that I wanted to take a moment and write a quick review of this release.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Zencafe 2.2
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3
· Announced Distro: T2 SDE 8.0
· Announced Distro: Netrunner 2
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9 LXDE
· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 5.3 XFCE & LXDE
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The Japanese Fixstars Corporation, which specialises in software for the Cell processor line, has announced the release of version 6.2.1 of its Yellow Dog Linux for CUDA distribution optimised for GPU computing. CUDA, an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA that uses GPUs to improve the performance of some types of applications.
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Red Hat Family
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Michael Proper from the ClearFoundation announced yesterday evening, July 21st, the immediate availability of the ClearOS Enterprise 5.2 operating system. Being based on CentOS 5.5, the new release adds some important features regarding security and overall performance, as well as various improvements and fixes. ClearOS 5.2 is a network & gateway solution, a Linux server based on the open source CentOS distribution, which is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux mammoth.
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Ubuntu Flavours and Variants
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This week the developers launched Peppermint Ice, a new version which replaces Firefox and the Mozilla Prism web app installer with Google’s Chromium web browser. Chromium also allows you to install web apps as if they were desktop apps, and Peppermint Ice comes with shortcuts for facebook, Google Docs, Hulu, Pandora, and Seesmic preloaded. It also has native apps including DropBox, Transmission Bittorent client, and XChat.
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I’ve plumped for Xubuntu as it’s a very close relative of Ubuntu, and it uses the lightweight window manager Xfce.
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The Killer M1 and later the Killer K1 boasted dedicated processors that the company deemed Network Processing Units (NPUs), and were mini systems in their own right, running a version of Linux and having access to their dedicated memory.
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With an increase in the number – and quality – of chips available, a win in the netbook sector could leave ARM well positioned to make an assault on the far larger notebook market – and should Microsoft feel threatened enough by open-source Linux distributions making inroads on ARM-based netbooks to produce an ARM-compatible version of Windows 7, even industry leader Intel could have cause to worry.
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According to Xinhua, China’s official news agency, Chinese search company Baidu is working on a Linux-based mobile OS of its own to take on Google’s Android. Baidu is currently the largest search engine in China, with a search share of a whopping 70 percent versus Google’s 27.8 percent, and it makes sense that with over 800 million mobile phone users in China, Baidu would want a piece of the mobile operating system pie on which to put a scoop of its own search engine sorbet.
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Phones
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Android is an open source operating system/platform intended for mobile devices and sponsored by Google. It features applications written in Java with security precautions designed to allow a variety of different applications to live on the same device without exposing user information. Android is also notable for being designed to support an ever increasing variety of hardware functions. The operating system presents a very favorable environment for both hardware and application developers because it is open source and Android’s low level kernel is based on Linux.
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Tablets/Android
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With both Dell and Lenovo putting their considerable weight behind the Android operating system, the onus is now on HP to see how it can whip Palm’s WebOS into shape to be a viable competitor in a tablet.
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C Umashankar (an IAS Officer) is a well known name in Indian FOSS community. An ardent supporter of FOSS, the Tamil Nadu bureaucrat has been instrumental in implementing FOSS solutions in several e-governance processes ranging from documentation to servers. He regaled his young audience with two inspiring talks on “Why free software is going to rule the world”.
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● Use open-source software. Free software such as Linux is used by millions, including organisations like Google, Ticketmaster and the Canadian government. They pay no licence fees, and the mainstream systems are constantly supported by armies of volunteers around the globe. Many in the IT industry hate the concept because it undermines much of its business model, but qualified advocates are becoming more and more common.
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SaaS
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Since the announcement of OpenStack crossed the wire on Monday, much of the emphasis has been on Rackspace’s decision to open source their code and what this might mean in terms of the other major (proprietary) cloud players. But there are 25 companies who’ve signed on to the OpenStack organization and the benefit of the open source project will be far-reaching beyond just the cloud service providers.
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Programming
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Eclipse 3.6, which arrived on the Internet on 23 June sporting the code name Helios, comprises 39 different Eclipse projects, collectively called a release train. While all of the projects are based on the open source, Java-based Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment), the train covers so much ground that it can be difficult to digest all of its enhancements and additions.
OpenBSD Interview
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07.24.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GeoHot, or George Hotz to use his real name, has built up quite a following and reputation online. This is mainly due to his antics jailbreaking the iPhone and iPad, and working to re-enable PS3 Linux after Sony removed it with a firmware update.
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I know, I know… Linux is a “4 letter word” to all of the Mac/Windows users out there that like their pretty GUI’s (Graphical User Interfaces). But I want to take a minute or two to show you some of the things that you can do with Linux without diving in head first. Basically there are two popular methods to try Linux without having to change your existing OS. They are “CD/DVD Live” or “USB Pen Drive Live”. First, let me begin my discussion by explaining why you should care.
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A guy has a nice report of a construction project, a PC he built for $200 and a bit of his time. It uses an AMD64 X2 CPU and 1 gB of fast RAM on a minimal motherboard. He was under budget and if the construction and installation time cost $50/h, this project cost less than $250. He then benchmarked it against a $300 box with “7″ installed in the factory. He got what he paid for and it is faster in every test compared to that other OS on similar hardware.
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Since Dell has recently been caught out boycotting AMD and accepting payments for the boycott from Intel, is it not very likely that Dell would boycott Ubuntu upon payments from M$? What do you think?
“Intel made exclusivity payments to Dell in order for Dell to not use CPUs manufactured by its rival — Advance Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD). These exclusivity payments grew from 10 percent of Dell’s operating income in FY 2003 to 38 percent in FY 2006, and peaked at 76 percent in the first quarter of FY 2007. The SEC alleges that Dell Inc., Michael Dell, Rollins, and Schneider failed to disclose the basis for the company’s sharp drop in its operating results in its second quarter of FY 2007 as Intel cut its payments after Dell announced its intention to begin using AMD CPUs. In dollar terms, the reduction in Intel exclusivity payments was equivalent to 75 percent of the decline in Dell’s operating income. Michael Dell, Rollins, and Schneider had been warned in the past that Intel would cut its funding if Dell added AMD as a vendor. Nevertheless, in Dell’s second quarter FY 2007 earnings call, they told investors that the sharp drop in the company’s operating results was attributable to Dell pricing too aggressively in the face of slowing demand and to component costs declining less than expected.”
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While the SBR scheme – flagged in the Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for Reform of Australian Government Administration report on public service reform – purports to simplify business-to-government reporting, Linux users have cried foul over the lack of AUSkey compatibility with the platform, while the ATO has told some businesses that the software “doesn’t like Macs”.
“There’s some more discussions we’ve got to have with AUSkey about Linux,” Madden said. “If we get through the Linux process where Linux themselves would like to provide support for some of these facilities, those facilities will get published the same way as the rest of the Linux things do, in an open source way.”
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Kernel Space
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We are announcing some new arrivals today in the Linux.com Store– hats, hats and more hats! To be more specific, we’ve added four new baseball caps, each with a different choice of a Linux-related graphic. My favorite is the “Green Fresh Kernels.”
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Instructionals
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS is a Red Hat based free operating system which enjoys widespread use among servers. It does not have the recognition of Ubuntu, Fedora etc. since it focuses entirely on servers not on desktops.
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Fedora
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There’s a new virtual machine on my block, for the purposes of creating crisp and squeaking clean screencasts. And the VM goes by the name of Fedora 13, my chance to dip my toes in alternative Linux distro waters, away from the familiar shores of Ubuntu.
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The HawkBoard is available for global shipping today from Farnell. Offering portability and diversity in its small, 9×10-cm form factor, the HawkBoard, based on the OMAP-L138 processor from TI, enables Linux developers to harness the power of floating-point DSP to design unique open source applications. Developers can utilize ARM without DSP with TI’s pin-for-pin compatible AM1808 microprocessor from the Sitara family of processors. This low-power board requires only a five-volt power supply, allowing portability by connecting to a laptop.
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Android
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ARM has announced commercial availability of ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Application Edition.
According to ARM, the software development tool is intended to “simplify the development of Linux and Android native applications for ARM-based systems”.
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Since not everyone may wish to get to grips with Java, the main Android development language, PHP fans have now developed an extension for Android which allows developers to create programs using the PHP scripting language.
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Events
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The linux.conf.au 2011 organisers now welcome proposals of papers from all areas of the open source community. linux.conf.au is a fun, informal, seriously technical conference. In 2011 it will also cater to a range of end users including those new to the open source community.
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Oracle
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New features include support for Oracle Enterprise Linux, an enhanced virtual desktop client, and a Sun Ray connector for VMware View 4, the virtualisation vendor’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product.
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Standards/Consortia
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Back when I originally reviewed VP8, I noted that the official decoder, libvpx, was rather slow. While there was no particular reason that it should be much faster than a good H.264 decoder, it shouldn’t have been that much slower either! So, I set out with Ronald Bultje and David Conrad to make a better one in FFmpeg. This one would be community-developed and free from the beginning, rather than the proprietary code-dump that was libvpx. A few weeks ago the decoder was complete enough to be bit-exact with libvpx, making it the first independent free implementation of a VP8 decoder. Now, with the first round of optimizations complete, it should be ready for primetime. I’ll go into some detail about the development process, but first, let’s get to the real meat of this post: the benchmarks.
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“Having a symbol for the rupee will take up less memory,” said Satish Mohan, director of software engineering at Red Hat (India), which distributes the Linux OS.
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Livel Law Abuse
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Whether you’ve heard of Tangent Labs is a way of separating the political geek goats from the sheep, but if you’ve ever been on a Labour Party site you’ve probably come across something they’ve designed and built.
My views about their products are a matter of record. This is from March:
When I commented on the Political Scrapbook story, I referred to Labour’s favourite digital agency, Tangent Labs, who have been responsible for monstrosities such as this (which is vastly improved from its state at launch) and this. If such sites were free, that would be one thing – but Labour paid handsomely for them.
Someone else who’s apparently less than enamoured of their work is Luke Bozier, a Labour supporting communications consultant, who took the time to give a more detailed comment on the subject earlier today, explaining why he felt the Labour party’s relationship with Tangent Labs resulted in an array of very similar, and not very attractive, sites.
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How is it possible to stop someone from expressing an opinion? In a society that cherishes free speech as a fundamental principle, there are no legal lengths that a person or organisation can go to by way of imposing such a limit. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Well not exactly…
British libel laws are some of the most abused in the world. Libel reformists have long been campaigning for an end to laws which, amongst their many faults, leave the burden of proof on the defendant. This is a principle that condemns that accused as guilty until such a time as they can prove their innocence.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Reinstalling GRUB
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Although GIMP is often compared to Adobe Photoshop, the people in charge of the project do not consider their graphic manipulation tool to be a replacement for Photoshop. There is a great deal of controversy about whether or not the GIMP is a truly professional-quality image manipulation tool, at or exceeding the quality level of Photoshop. It is generally held that it is not, although it is usually recognized as the best free alternative to Photoshop, which is usually considered to be the ultimate professional tool of the trade.
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Available immediately for download under the Open Source GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2, Suricata includes new features that will enable it to identify and prevent more of the pressing security concerns faced by organizations.
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Conclusions: MZmine 2 is freely available under a GNU GPL license and can be obtained from the project website at: http://mzmine.sourceforge.net/. The current version of MZmine 2 is suitable for processing large batches of data and has been applied to both targeted and non-targeted metabolomic analyses.
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Events
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OSCON is worth attending, or at least watching from a distance, if for no other reason than it gives a pretty clear picture of what the developer community and industry around open source is thinking about. To sum up OSCON 2010 in three words, it’s community, cash, and clouds.
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Mozilla
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Firefox Tab Candy is a new tab management feature for Firefox that organizes tabs into groups to help you keep your tabs grouped by task. Not only does it offer incredibly handy features, but it looks beautiful.
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SaaS
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The new OpenStack project will power NASA’s own Nebula cloud and puts new pressure on Eucalyptus, as well as Amazon’s EC2 and the whole Hadoop ecosystem. The system is being released under an Apache 2 license.
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Red Hat has a big portfolio of cloud computing tools, as our Dan Kusnetzky is quick to note, but it lacks the enterprise credibility of an IBM or Microsoft.
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Global sales of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the enterprise application segment will jump more than 14 percent to $8.5 billion this year when compared with the $7.5 billion generated in 2009, a spike attributed largely to the business community’s growing endorsement of cloud computing, according to data compiled by researcher Gartner Inc.
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Oracle/Sun
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As Oracle continues to consolidate the assets of Sun Microsystems, questions about which technologies will go and which ones will stay are still being asked. One such technology that could be at risk is the open source NetBeans IDE , which competes against the Eclipse IDE and its ecosystem, which Oracle also supports.
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Discussing the announcement, ForgeRock chief strategy officer and former Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems Simon Phipps said, “This is an important milestone for the OpenAM community”, adding that, “This achievement marks the first fully community-sourced release of OpenAM. We’re very pleased that users of OpenSSO Enterprise 8 can easily and freely migrate to OpenAM 9.5 now that the updates have been made.”
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CMS
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This leaves Drupal and Acquia, the company Buytaert founded to offer Drupal support, caught between the Moon and New York City. WordPress is hammering it in the mass market, among people who just want to build blog sites, and Acquia’s enterprise footprint remains minimal.
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Project Releases
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The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.53 Beta. This release is the first official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.
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Licensing
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From the ‘Open Source Licensing” files:
Google’s open source programs manager Chris DiBona (pic left) took the stage at OSCON today and he had some interesting things to say, about licensing.
I’ve heard DiBona speak on open source licensing several times over the years. This time his talk wasn’t about licensing specifics, but rather about adoption.
According to data presented by DiBona, the GPLv3 license now represents more than half of the GPL licensed code that Google hosts on its Google Code site.
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Openness/Sharing
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It doesn’t matter if you’re new to open source or a long-time user, there is always more to learn about. We scoured the Web for the best open source books. All of these are free books that can be downloaded and shared.
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Online video service Vimeo started allowing its users to release videos under a Creative Commons licence. The company says that the feature was introduced because a number of users specifically asked for it. The settings dialogue of each video now contains an added “Licence” section in which users can choose from one of six Creative Commons licences. This allows users to determine the sharing conditions for their videos. While searching specifically for videos released under CC licences is not yet possible, Vimeo says it’s working to provide this functionality.
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Programming
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I owe a whole lot to Perl. So does the practice of computing in general, and the construction of the Web in particular. Perl’s situation is not terribly happy; I wouldn’t go so far as to say “desperate”, but certainly these are not its glory days.
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Standards/Consortia
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Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved?
According to Chris “Monty” Montgomery, nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format. Which means that every software video decoder has to have MPEG-licensed technology in order to process/edit video.
[...]
Which circles us back to where Montgomery is today: preparing that army of mages. Looking forward to a landscape where MPEG-LA is not quite so powerful, Montgomery anticipates that video, now that it’s no longer as expensive, could become a real source of innovation in the FOSS community.
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It seems like every few days or so we’re seeing lawsuits attempting to stretch the hot news doctrine further and further. News organizations who support hot news as a concept really have no idea what sort of can of worms they’ve opened up. Since the infamous (and ongoing) theflyonthewall case, we’re seeing hot news pop up in all sorts of weird places. The latest, as sent over by Eric Goldman, is that Costco is being sued by “Banxcorp” for hot news violations (along with copyright violations and a bunch of other things) for republishing Banxcorp’s data showing national average money market and CD rates.
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One problem with positing that a high-end Unix system will be used for a single transaction-processing application is that it leads to some pretty silly results. Take the leading TPC-C result on the Transaction Processing Council’s Web site, for example. Consider what this 6 million transactions-per-minute figure means in the context of the TPC-C benchmark, a widely used metric for comparing system performance.
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Science
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Somewhere in the Milky Way, astronomers have found a world that sports crucial ingredients for life. When they trained a high-resolution spectrograph on starlight reflected from the planet’s moon, they picked up traces of ozone, oxygen, sodium, and nitrogen. Alas, the planet is Earth. But the researchers say a similar technique could be used to find signatures of life on planets orbiting other stars.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Corporate web filters at organisations like Shell and the National Australia Bank (NAB) are blocking web access to the AEC-registered Australian Sex Party.
The party is contesting the August 21 Federal Election with seven candidates in Victoria, including convenor Fiona Patten, who challenges Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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“The internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be,” according to Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman.
KDE SC 4.5 RC1 – The Desktop part 1
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some catch-up with news from the past week or two
GNU/Linux
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I’ve posted many times over that I used to be an avid Windows and Microsoft supporter, mainly around the Windows 95/98 days. However, after being introduced to Linux, I soon realized that Linux surpasses Windows in many ways, especially system reliability.
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Learners with very little prior computer exposure were taught programming languages in a primarily Linux environment at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town and the course organisers feel that they will have the tools to begin further studies in computer programming.
[...]
He explained the choice to teach using the Linux platform.
“Linux is a free OS (Operating System) and is also virtually virus free. Unlike Windows, it comes with a variety of useful applications which are also free and all the PCs the kids have has (Linux) Ubuntu installed,” he said.
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- Linux users: Many have used Windows and Linux at some point. Windows/DOS was around before Linux, so there are even some that used Microsoft’s earlier products. But for some reason they have chosen to dump Windows and stick with Linux. I know very few within the past 3-4 years or so, that know Linux in and out, and have chosen to use Windows as their primary operating system. I would be happy to hear from somebody that has done this, to find out why they took the path they did. Personally, I made this move myself in 2002 (about 8 years ago) when I attempted to migrate to Linux from Windows for my personal workstation, and I ended up back on Windows XP. I didn’t like Windows, but there were too many things that didn’t work in Linux at the time. However, within the past 3-4 years, things have changed significantly; Linux is now capable of handling Windows software with ease, as well as its own catalog of software growing exponentially. In 2008 I finally made my migration from Windows XP to Fedora Linux on my personal PC plus two other PCs in our home used by my family, and I will never use Windows as my primary operating system again.
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Low-cost Computing
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Nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child on Thursday said it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware.
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India
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On July 22 a $35 (or 1500 INR) hand-held Linux computing device was unveiled by Shri Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Human Resource Development of India. The goal of the project is to lower the price to around $20 in time and eventually reaching the amazing price of $10.
In a tablet form-factor and using an unspecified variant of Linux (that some have said might be Android), the cost should remain low while offering a wide range of functionality. The Sakshat descendant is said to be capable of supporting video conferencing, viewing a wide selection of video and image files, word processing, de/compressing files, printing with CUPS, full Internet browsing with Javascript and Flash, wireless communications, and remote device management.
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Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi doesn’t mind following the Marxists when it comes to providing cheaper IT education in schools. On learning that the Kerala government used the open-source free software, Linux, for its schools, he has decided to do the same in 3,650 schools in his state. Though his babus objected, Modi saw he could save Rs 100 crore by installing Linux in schools. Before opting for Linux, his aides tried to negotiate to install the Microsoft Windows operating system at a cheaper rate. But the talks failed.
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China
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So three years later, Taobao, a user of Linux and FOSS, sets a precedent by not only admitting to be using Linux (OMG!) but also launching their own open source repositories, hosting their own projects and sharing them with the world–yes, the world! Its objectives are for the message not to only be constrained within the Chinese borders but as with any other corporation, to extend across the globe. Here’s the blog post announcement from a member of the Taobao Technical Committee, Coly Li.
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Muller calls this “a dream come true for those of us who have been advocating openness and contribution from those Chinese companies using FOSS.” His hope is that other companies will join the effort, and “admit” to using open source. He thinks it could boost the quality of open source worldwide.
Which is the important point. Taobao isn’t doing this out of the goodness of its heart, although the company may have a very good heart indeed. But companies create forges and open their code to scrutiny to improve it, and in hopes a community will form they can benefit from.
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Server
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IBM’s zEnterprise server pushes mainframe performance on, and converges mainframe technology with blade servers
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Vietnam Joint Stock Bank for Industry and Trade (VietinBank), one of the largest banking institutions in Vietnam, has selected an IBM System z10 mainframe to support the expansion of its banking businesses.
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This is important to counter the entire “2.0″ stupidity and media brainwashing. Linux runs the internet. Almost totally. There are several factors in play, not the least of which are security, lack of viruses on linux, useability, accessibility, and cost. All these factors weigh heavily in favor of non-Microsoft products. It costs anywhere from TEN to a HUNDRED times less to operate an internet service using Linux. Why? Support is cheaper, the initial software is FREE, and there are no licensing or patent issues to fight over!
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According to the launch announcement, key to The Planet’s server cloud is transparency into the systems running behind the interface. The offering is built on high-end physical infrastructure, from Dell, Intel, Juniper, Cisco and Sun, along with the Canonical Ubuntu Linux OS and virtualization using Kernel-based Virtual Machine.
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Cutting Edge Networked Storage (www.cuttedge.com) and Esri (www.Esri.com) are pleased to announce new Linux Server Solutions with ArcGIS Server Enterprise 10 preinstalled to the U.S. Geographic Information Systems community. Esri has selected Cutting Edge Networked Storage to manufacture and deliver the new Linux Servers with ArcGIS Server 10 based on the popular Redhat Enterprise operating system to its customer base.
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VoIP
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Linux-based VoIP for Intel architectures
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Alternatively, many Linux aficionados have taken the Asterisk freeware to create a Linux PBX appliance with excellent results.
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Teo Technologies today announced a unified communications (UC) platform that relies on a Linux-based server to provide multiple applications, including voice mail, across a variety of devices.
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Teo’s system relies on a single Linux server, a single administrator’s portal, and a single user interface to track calls, emails, and voice mails. The company claims that the Teo UC could cost customers 30% less than conventional approaches, which tend to rely on multiple servers, each supporting a different communications function.
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Kernel Space
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Happen Business’ technical director, Paul Berger, has had a fairly meaty history in IT. Entering the industry with an electronic background, he is responsible for building a popular kit computer in the mid-1980s – the Applix 1616 – and the partner he built it with is now a co-maintainer of both the ext3 file system and the Linux kernel.
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I’m willing to try my solution, some others on the linux-arm-kernel lists considered it worth trying, too.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Supports Linux-based Vms and reduces the size of thin provisioned VMs Vizioncore, a provider of virtualisation data protection and management offerings, and a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest Software, has released new version of vOptimizer Pro that provides greater benefits and additional value from their virtual infrastructure.
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Chrome
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Google announced today via the Chromium Blog that it plans to release new stable versions of Chrome every six weeks. Though the team has managed to ship five major revisions in less than two years, the new accelerated pace means we could see Chrome 9.0 by the end of this year.
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Google said that it is planning on releasing a new stable version of Chrome every six weeks, which is about twice as fast as the release pace today. The goal is to make new features available when they are done and to make Chrome releases more predictable. Has anyone complained that there were too few new Chrome releases?
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Instructionals
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PulseAudio is a Linux sound server that, through abstraction layers, promises a myriad of flexible audio features: combining multiple sound cards into a single, multi-channel device, changing output devices on the fly for running applications, even redirecting input and output between machines over the network. Sadly, though, it is usually used just as a bare-bones drop-in replacement for older, buggier sound servers like ESD — because that is the most common use case, and because the PulseAudio documentation and tools aren’t caught up to the same level as the underlying library. Full PulseAudio nirvana entails digging into the project in depth, but you can at least get your feet wet over the weekend, directing and even multicasting audio between Linux machines on your local network.
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Games
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For those of you who have not heard of Nexuiz, it is a free open-source first person shooter developed by the folks over at IllFonic that was released in 2005 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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Specialised
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A new flavor of the Linux Operating System is now available that might prove to be one of the strongest defenses put up against malware. The new Operating System is called Qubes, and it is a combination of Linux with the Xen Virtual machine. Qubes is the invention of Joanna Rutkowska, a Polish researcher of malware and exploits. Rutkowska is famous for a paper she authored and presented at a Black Hat conference in 2006 that described a technique called ‘Blue Pill’ for moving a running OS into a virtual machine using hardware virtualization.
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The new functionality enables Fuscan Linux Cloud based web hosts to better control the load-balanced and High Availability services on the Cloud.
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Although SystemRescueCD offers a desktop, it can be complicated to use and requires a some basic computer knowledge. However, it doesn’t require much Linux specific knowledge to operate most of the tools, so I would be happy to recommend it to a Windows guru. Besides, people who don’t understand the basics shouldn’t be operating partition managers and file recovery utilities anyway.
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Reviews
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It has been many years since I spent much time with Mandriva. I did try the last release for a bit when writing up the Linux.com 2010 Distro Scorecard, but haven’t used Mandriva as a primary distro in many years. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that I’ve never used Mandriva as a primary distro. The last time I used the distro consistently, it was called Mandrake.
I still prefer the old name, but I like Mandriva 2010.1 much more than I liked the last Mandrake release I used. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Mandriva 2010.1 to any user looking for a solid, user-friendly Linux desktop. It’s not the only distro that I’d recommend, but it’d be one of a handful that I’d be comfortable recommending.
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New Releases
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SystemRescueCd has been updated bringing newer Linux kernels and a newer GParted. With SystemRescueCd 1.5.8, both kernel lines offered have been updated to Linux kernel 2.6.32.16 and Linux kernels 2.6.34.1 respectively. A newer version of GParted, the graphical partitioning tool, has been included which fixes a couple of critical bugs from the previous release.
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A reputed security expert named Lenny Zeltser, who specializes in reverse-engineering malicious software has put together a special Linux distribution tailored to the specific needs of malware researchers. Called REMnux, the distro contains a wide variety of tools for analyzing malicious traffic and inspecting various threats.
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The Zencafe developers have released version 2.2 of their Linux distribution designed specifically for internet cafés. Zencafe includes a built-in, “Deep Freeze like” auto-recovery tool and various specialised internet café applications, such as software for billing and system management.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Russia-backed fund NGI acquired a stake in Mandriva, a French maker of software based on the Linux operating system, as part of a program to develop a Russian operating system, Kommersant reported Thursday.
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Red Hat Family
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The new CEO of a Moore County company that makes touch-screen kiosks is a former top executive at Linux software company Red Hat.
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HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced joint consulting services to help clients more effectively migrate to a Red Hat open source platform on an HP infrastructure.
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Debian Family
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This operating system that we have been creating is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. Every year, DebConf allows new and existing Debian project participants from around the world to assemble, share knowledge and ideas, make collaborative contributions to Debian, build tighter community bonds and improve communication within the project.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Google’s biggest search rival in China – homegrown market leader Baidu, is to develop a Linux-based smartphone to rival the Californian search giant’s Android-based devices.
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ARM
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ARM has solidified its position today as master of the mobile processor universe, announcing a deal with TSMC that will take smartphone chips all the way down to a 20nm process. That means: faster, better, more efficient.
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A group of hardware companies that produce ARM-powered mobile devices have gotten together to create a consortium called Linaro. ARM produces ultra-low-power consumption chips for mobile devices, like for the iPhone, and is available at a relatively low unit price. ARM has been successfully attacking the low end of the chip, a game-plan similar to Intel’s from a couple of decades back, and now ARM is capturing market share that would normally have belonged to Intel. About 98 percent of mobile phones use ARM chips and the chips are also used heavily in other consumer electronic products. It is expected that Linaro should help speed the time to market for new mobile devices.
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Wind River (Intel)
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Caanoo
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GamePark is not quite dead just yet, as the company recently unveiled a spanking new Linux-powered portable gaming handheld known as the Caanoo. While it ships with a similar 533MHz ARM9 processor as its predecessor, the built-in memory has been doubled to 128MB (rather measly in this day and age, we might add), not to mention the presence of a dedicated 3D GPU to make full use of its 3.5″ touchscreen display. In order to further keep up with the times, it will come with a built-in accelerometer and vibration functions for added immersion when playing.
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iRiver
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The Linux-based device now supports WiFi (802.11b/g), which allows the Story to connect to and download ebooks from the WHSmith online book store.
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You can download books and comics wirelessly and read them on the move on iriver’s latest Linux-based ebook reader.
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It is built on Linux so clever programmers are sure to have their wicked way with it and add new functions to the operating system.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Members of Stanford University, Nokia and other partners have surfaced with an interesting offering that grew from the Camera 2.0 project. Stanford University has collaborated with Nokia to create FCam which is an open-source digital photography platform for the company’s Linux based N900 handset.
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Android
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As the sole arbiter of Android’s dominant application delivery channel, Google has enormous control over the platform and how it is used. This is an extremely effective tool for preventing platform-level fragmentation and discouraging vendors from building forks that deviate from upstream Android in ways that might diminish application compatibility across devices.
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Hardcore Android fans have been leery of the Motorola Droid X because of the chip and bootloader combination in the device that could potentially brick it if custom versions of the Android operating system are loaded on it.
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The Droid 2′s been leaking out all over the place in the past few weeks, but it looks like it’ll be another month before it officially hits shelves — we just got these shots from a packaging facility that’s handling the phone, which puts it right on schedule for that rumored August 23rd launch. We’re also told that the phone will definitely ship with an 8GB microSD card, and that pricing appears to be $199 on contract and $599 standalone, although those numbers could change. Just a few short weeks left, we suppose — although give the rate at which this thing is leaking, we’re thinking Motorola and Verizon might do well to push that date up a couple weeks. We’ll see.
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Google’s launched a new software tool that it says allows anybody to become an Android developer.
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Google has released App Inventor for Android, a new Java development environment aimed at the recently oft-targeted non-coder developer who wants to build an app for the Android operating system.
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WebOS
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The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Hewlett-Packard a trademark for the term “PalmPad” late last week.
HP hasn’t released specific details on what it plans to do with the trademark; however, the application form confirms that HP will limit its use to “Computers, computer hardware, computer software, computer peripherals, portable computers, handheld and mobile computers, PDAs, electronic notepads, mobile digital electronic devices.”
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According to reports, a PalmPad is on its way — at least is in consideration. HP has been granted a trademark for name ‘PalmPad’ by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
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In its bid to take on Apple and Google in smartphones, Hewlett-Packard won’t use Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software.
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Tablets
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Lenovo is launching its own tablet to debut in China by the end of this year.
Dubbed “LePad,” the tablet will run Google’s Android operating system, according to comments made by Liu Jun, senior vice president for Lenovo Group, as reported by TradingMarkets.com and other sources. Details are few so far, and there’s no word from Lenovo or other sources on whether the tablet will venture abroad after its initial debut in China.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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New York – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) this week served a motion to quash dragnet subpoenas that put privacy and anonymity at risk for the operators of dozens of Internet blogs and potentially hundreds of commenters.
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In a landmark announcement issued today, the data protection officials across the European Union found that the way that EU Member States have implemented the data retention obligations in the 2006 EU Data Retention Directive is unlawful. The highly controversial 2006 EU Data Retention Directive compels all ISPs and telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain telecom and internet traffic data about all of their customers’ communications for a period of at least 6 months and up to 2 years.
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This week, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill shielding journalists and publishers from “libel tourism.” The vote on Monday slipped past the Washington press corps largely unnoticed. Maybe it was the title that strove chunkily for a memorable acronym: the Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act. Journalists and press freedom defenders outside the United States did, however, pay attention to the legislation, which they hope will spur libel law reform in their countries.
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The federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians’ web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear the document could cause “premature unnecessary debate”.
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Today the Eleventh Circuit issued an unfortunate amended decision in Rehberg v. Hodges. The case arose from an egregious situation in which, among other misconduct, a prosecutor used a sham grand jury subpoena to obtain the private emails of whistleblower Charles Rehberg after he brought attention to systematic mismanagement of funds at a Georgia public hospital.
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Ofcom’s proposal denies us the ability to check whether the methods of collecting of the evidence are trustworthy. Instead, copyright holders and Internet Service Providers will just self-certify that everything’s ok. If they get it wrong, there’s no penalty.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) has branded their system of “Universal DRM”, which was first announced at CES 2010, calling the technology UltraViolet. The system is designed to allow consumers the ability to view purchased movies wherever, whenever, over multiple platforms and formats.
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Copyrights
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Brazil has proposed a broad update to its copyright law (Portuguese) and it contains a surprising idea: penalize anyone who “hinders or impedes” fair use rights or obstructs the use of work that has already fallen into the public domain.
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The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has launched a campaign to raise money from its members to hire lobbyists to protect them against the dangers of “Copyleft.” Groups such as Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are “mobilizing,” ASCAP describes in a letter to its members, “to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’” “[O]ur opponents are influencing Congress against the interests of music creators,” ASCAP warns. Indeed, as the letter ominously predicts, this is ASCAP’s “biggest challenge ever.” (Historians of BMI might be a bit surprised about that claim in particular.)
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How to Install WebM in Ubuntu
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