Summary: How an anti-GNU/Linux and anti-OLPC executive ended up inside a company where GNU/Linux is an option
Microsoft’s principal booster in CNET has indeliberately posted newer details about a revealing conflict of interests. It is a conflict not just because Microsoft's Will Poole participated in sabotaging OLPC but also because he joined an OLPC rival after doing similar work for Microsoft. We wrote about this in:
Poole joined NComputing just after he had been leading the EDGI group. From a de facto Microsoft PR outlet:
The [Microsoft] approach is similar to one taken by NComputing, a start-up run by former e-Machines CEO Stephen Dukker. Will Poole, the former Windows executive who also led Microsoft’s emerging markets efforts for a time, serves as NComputing’s co-chairman. NComputing sells Windows and Linux-based systems to both schools and businesses.
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The product shares a name–but is separate–from an existing MultiPoint product that allows students to each have their own mouse and work off a single display. (Note that the story I link to has Poole–then at Microsoft–talking about the MultiPoint mouse.)
So, he came to NComputing after he had promoted a similar Windows product inside Microsoft. How suitable. As we stressed before, this cannot be beneficial to GNU/Linux at NComputing. Who can ever forget what Microsoft did to OLPC? They should bury their heads in shame. █
In a new article from SJVN, the history of GNU/Linux on the desktop is outlined with the following portion about Corel: “Alas, after Corel experienced some brief success, its efforts came to little. Facing strong opposition from Microsoft and financially ravished by an ill-timed move into the then-hot application service provider (ASP) market and inadequate profits from its application lines, Corel quickly found itself in hot water. By the end of 2000, Corel had changed management and partnered up with Microsoft.”
“On several occasions, Novell had changed management (Schmidt, Messman, etc.) and eventually partnered up with Microsoft.”This sounds just like Novell, doesn’t it? To rephrase the above, Novell experienced some success with Netware, but its efforts came to little in recent years. Facing strong opposition from Microsoft and financially ravished by an ill-timed move into the then-hot *NIX/groupware market and inadequate profits from its application lines, Novell quickly found itself in hot water. On several occasions, Novell had changed management (Schmidt, Messman, etc.) and eventually partnered up with Microsoft.
I know that various members of the Moonlight team are passionate about Moonlight because it is this next generation API for building GUI applications.
Which applications do you think are needed nad could be built with Moonlight?
I say video editing, and I have some ideas of how it should work.
The Mono-Nono Web site calls it “Moonlight Marching Orders” and explains this as follows:
Look for ever more of this sort of thing as Team Mono attempts to expand Mono and Moonlight. Team Mono is already getting marching orders to start pushing Moonlight harder, the first plan being a video editor.
A video editor is a beautiful infection vector for Moonlight, because:
1. Moonlight itself only safe to use for direct Novell customers,
2. All those nice proprietary video codecs that Novell has licensed from Microsoft are only safe for direct Novell customers as well.
So, Novell sees a great opportunity to spread Moonlight and the fruits of its Microsoft collaboration, while pretending to develop a “Linux” application.
So long as your “Linux” comes directly via Microsoft-approved Novell-only channels, of course – other Linux flavors need not apply – or redistribute.
Moonlight is a mess, based on the following message which was posted this afternoon:
Subject: Silverlight crap: the saga continues From: Richard Rasker <spamtrap@linetec.nl> (Linetec) Date: Friday 13 Nov 2009 12:37:13 Groups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Well, it’s been two weeks already since the last Moonlight update — you know, the one that broke Silverlight playback. How time flies. And sure enough, because this Microsoft crap requires on average one update per week, I got yet another notification: http://www.linetec.nl/linux/mooncrap1.png
OK, so I click “Install”. Oh, drat. Once again, it requires the installation of a codec pack: http://www.linetec.nl/linux/mooncrap2.png . Sheesh, this must be the fourth or fifth time that I installed it. Can’t these incompetent idiots even manage to create a codec pack that remains usable for two whole weeks? And yup, as expected, there’s the license again http://www.linetec.nl/linux/mooncrap3.png — in typical Microsoft fashion: unreadable lingo in a non-resizable window, no doubt meant to discourage more perseverent users. Copy/pasted it to a decent text editor, and read it.
OK, no truly onerous terms, apart perhaps from the patent provisions: http://www.linetec.nl/linux/mooncrap.txt
Then I noticed something: the installed update was Moonlight version 1.99.8, whereas the codec pack distinctly mentions that it’s “ONLY FOR USE WITH NOVELL’S MOONLIGHT 2.0 ALPHA VERSION.” Ah well, 1.99.8 is close enough to 2.0, so I guess it should work.
Except that it doesn’t. Not only that — the situation has even gotten worse: on some Web pages, Firefox now crashes immediately when clicking Silverlight content, and on other pages, nothing happens. So I tried running Firefox from a terminal window, to catch any messages:
$ firefox
Attempting to load libmoonloaderxpi
Moonlight: Forcing client-side rendering because we detected binary drivers which are known to suffer performance problems.
Huh? The official nVidia drivers “suffer performance problems”? And how come this crapware is the *only* software complaining about it? From what I see, accelerated video rendering works absolutely great with my GeForce 8500 GT graphics card.
Moonlight: Installing signal handlers for crash reporting.
Moonlight: Enabling MONO_DEBUG=keep-delegates.
Moonlight: Plugin AppDomain Creation: OK
Moonlight: Plugin AppDomain Creation: OK
URL /includes/wmvplayer.xaml downloaded successfully.
URL /includes/wmvplayer.xaml downloaded successfully.
Hm, OK, so those latter lines suggest that something’s wrong at the server side. But no, that can’t be, because it works under Windows. So two of the biggest software companies in the world combined can’t even pull off a decent media player that works under Linux. Just compare this sorry mess with MPlayer: just a handful of guys (and perhaps gals) created a media player, complete with browser plugin, that has worked great from day one, on each and every Linux, Windows and Mac version.
So I give up on this closed source rubbish. I uninstalled everything having to do with Moonlight and Silverlight (regaining some 50MB of HD space in the process — probably all those useless codec packs), and I’ll tell my users that they’re out of luck when they stumble upon Silverlight content.
Richard Rasker
http://www.linetec.nl
Rather than present a rational rebuttal, Miguel de Icaza libels me in Twitter (personal attacks with outright lies). He still has some remaining defenders, who nonetheless acknowledge that “Mono is also seen by many as a potential legal landmine, due to Microsoft patents.”
The “Mono Tools” are based on Mono, a from-scratch open source implementation of .NET. Developed by the Novell-sponsored Mono project, which has also developed the Moonlight open source clone of Microsoft’s Silverlight, Mono has proven to be controversial in the open source community, as are most Novell-sponsored efforts that appear to sidle up to Microsoft. While an impressive piece of software, and imminently useful in a .NET dominated enterprise software world, Mono is also seen by many as a potential legal landmine, due to Microsoft patents.
Microsoft has said that it backs Mono Tools, but then Microsoft would put their stamp of approval on products that integrate with its Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) as they “enrich the Visual Studio ecosystem” no less.
Of course Microsoft approves it. It’s beneficial to Microsoft, so it’s not competition. Mono is complementary to Microsoft, just like Novell is to Microsoft. Here is simple visualisation of where Mono fits.
What Microsoft wants
Microsoft finds some other new complements for Visual Studio/.NET while pretending to have embraced “open source”. Only yesterday we wrote about Orchard, which is now being cast as independent even though it’s not. Microsoft knows that in order for people to swallow .NET it needs to pretend that it comes from other companies, preferably those who are perceived as “trusted”. █
The latest serious exploit that affects Vista 7 (there are more examples appended at the bottom of this post) is so valuable for showing how Microsoft ignores security problems and improperly handles them until it’s too late. SJVN argues:
I do wonder sometimes about Microsoft’s quality assurance. No, I tell a lie. I always wonder about Microsoft’s quality assurance. As in, “How can they keep making mistakes like this?” In the latest, a new SMB vulnerability has been found and exploited that can lock-up any Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 system.
As reported in ComputerWorld, Laurent Gaffie posted details of the vulnerabilities, along with proof-of-concept exploit code, to the Full Disclosure security mailing list today, as well as to his personal blog. Gaffie claimed that his exploit crashes the kernel in Windows 7 and its server sibling, Windows Server 2008 R2, triggering an infinite loop. Or, as he puts in so well in the exploit’s code: “‘Most Secure Os Ever’ –> Remote Kernel in 2 mn. #FAIL,#FAIL,#FAIL”
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Oh, and Microsoft, hurry up and fix this. OK? This is embarrassingly bad.
This is not just “embarrassingly bad”, it is practically very bad because exploit code is already out there while Microsoft is still “investigating”.
Microsoft has reportedly begun investigating a potentially nasty denial of service vulnerability affecting Windows 7.
Microsoft has been caught hiding vulnerabilities and their fixes (secret fixes which invisibility of proprietary software enables), probably for raves about numbers, i.e. illusion of safety. How long has Microsoft known about this for and why is there no patch yet? █
Summary: The highly-anticipated torrent of low-cost, energy-efficient, user-friendly, GNU/Linux-only appliances has finally arrived, leaving Microsoft racing to the top again
“High return rates, little market share”: the scare tactic Microsoft used in the spring of 2009 to declare Linux dead in the water in the netbook market. But what might be true for the U.S. doesn’t hold for the European and worldwide market as a whole.
Not only did Dell repeatedly confirm that it found no higher a return rate than Windows for its 30% Ubuntu-installed netbooks, a new independent study by the ABI Research firm forecasts a 32% market share for Linux on netbooks for 2009.
In a new article over at IDG, Microsoft booster Shane O'Neill opines that Microsoft is either giving up on or trying to lessen the appeal of sub-notebooks. He tries to spin this in favour of Microsoft, but it’s really quite pathetic and bad.
The fact that Windows Mobile sales declined may not be a surprise, but the size of the decline is.
Microsoft says that it may withdraw Windows XP from sub-notebooks rather shortly, which leaves just a very crippled and resource-hungry version of Vista 7 to guard against GNU/Linux (Linux is gaining on ARM-type processors anyway). A former Microsoft MVP who regularly participates in our IRC channel wrote a couple of days ago: “I was making fun of a friend with XP [...] “Windows XP loves you, Windows XP wants to be with you, Windows XP wants to stab its tentacles into your brain and merge with you” [...] I am not thrilled with Windows 7 [...] seems like a hillbilly duct tape repair to Vista [...] It seems to have all the problems of Vista and very few actual improvements.”
When it comes to sub-notebooks, Vista 7 Starter Edition has already been mocked by Acer, which claims that Vista 7 has no impact on sales. Acer’s CEO also said ‘on behalf’ of the entire industry (OEMs) that they were disappointed with Vista. How long before the same thing is said about Vista 7, which is not selling well (Microsoft claimed that Vista was selling exceptionally well, but the numbers that truly matter don’t lie)? █
“Acer and Intel, for example, are already complaining that Windows 7 Starter Edition simply won’t sell.”
For the last three years, Novell, keeper of the SUSE Linux distribution, has had an interoperability pact with Microsoft. This includes a celebrated – and sometimes controversial – agreement that protects users from intellectual property (IP) issues, but also includes support for interoperability of the two systems, within a virtualised data centre.
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On 9 December, eWEEK Europe, UK Editor will chair an interoperability webinar, in which senior technical spokespeople from Microsoft and Novell will explain the arguments behind their technical offering for interoperability – and answer your questions.
Given the disturbing headlines that we see echoing Novell spin and propaganda we thought it would be reasonable to show this latest item of ‘news’ from eWEEK. It parrots everything that Microsoft and Novell claim without doing any independent investigation into the truths; it just gives them a platform for FUD.
Microsoft and Novell celebrated the third year of their interoperability agreement at an event taking place at the Society for Information Management, SIMposium09, conference in Seattle on Nov. 9.
Yes, Microsoft and Novell meet in Seattle. Sign of things to come [1, 2, 3]? █
“Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand.”
The $1995 Matrox M9188 comes with 2GB of video RAM, and works with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Linux. It can be combined with a second one to form a seamless desktop across 16 monitors. Apparently, this is perfect for “energy, transportation, process control, financial trading,” and making your head explode.
As long as Mac OS X is tied to Apple hardware, Mac users are missing out. They also overpay. █
Summary: Apple has retention issues with users due to excessive lock-in and control; Snow Leopard suffers from more bugs
IN RECENT days we have posted several new examples of people who escaped Mac OS X and moved to GNU/Linux, usually because of KDE4 which is one of the best options out there (admittedly, that is subjective). Apple’s development on OS X has been slow for years, by its very own admission. Maybe it should be called Slow Leopard, if not “Snot” or “Snort”. Either way, this leaves the door open to the Free (libre) desktop.
In this refreshing new post, the author who is a Mac user explains that “Control Issues” are “Why Apple Doesn’t Want You to Use [GNU]/Linux.” To quote some portions:
I dove into Linux at the suggestion of several commenters who urged me to take a look at the open-source end of the OS world before deciding to go over to the Microsoft “dark side.” Why not? I figured. One-half of my goal is never again to have to pay several hundred extra dollars for specially branded hardware just to run my OS of choice, and the other half is to remove myself from Steve Jobs’ heavy-handed control of the applications I choose to install there.
Now, Linux is to Apple the way that Protestantism is to Catholicism: there’s little secretive mysticism, and lots of free choice. Most surprising to newbies like me, there is no single “official” version of the OS. Instead, dozens of freely available, mostly open-source distributions of the software exist, each aiming to satisfy a different set of users, and most installable on almost any machine.
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Apple’s brand of one-way trip marketing sounds a lot like a cult to me. Or that scary fish from Finding Nemo where you’re attracted to the shining light, only to be devoured upon coming too close the the shadow-shrouded jaws. Perhaps even the bits and bytes version of a roach motel. Yes, I’m that over Cupertino at this point.
Ultimately, I couldn’t care less about iTunes in and of itself. I’ll eventually own an Android phone and there are third-party syncing solutions for Google’s phone platform on all three major OSes. But for right now, I’m annoyed. Apple’s ongoing attempt to control the OS choice of former users by trying to steer them clear of Linux is mean-spirited. Every time I encounter another such element of Apple’s deeply entrenched strategy to control its own users–and apparently, its former users, too–all it does is stiffen my resolve to get the heck off this computing platform once and for all after a decade and a half of use.
In other news, Apple’s Snow Leopard continues having serious issues that are too often overlooked. From The Inquirer we have the following description which more typically fits the experiences with Vista and Vista 7.
BRITISH USERS of Apple’s latest Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, have been complaining that they can no longer use their broadband dongles in their fruity machines.
Any peril of Apple looks like a promising opportunity for GNU/Linux to gain a lot more market share. In the next post we’ll show a nice video demo of cutting-edge Free desktops — something that Apple is unable to replicate (marketing versus potency). █
I was browsing the Vatican Library website when I chanced upon this bit of interesting information. The Information Technology Center (C.E.D.) of the Vatican Library uses Red Hat. The site’s info page reveals that C.E.D.’s networks “are protected internally by two first-level firewalls in a Linux Red Hat environment”. But that’s not all. Of the 27 servers the Center uses, 19 are in a SUSE and Red Hat environment. The rest are running in a UNIX AIX environment and in a Microsoft environment (virtualized on Linux systems with VMWare).
More than 3800 technicians have been already trained in the country, and Ciego de Ávila, located in the mid eastern part of the Island, is a good example of this. In that province, there are around 600 people taking intensive 4-month courses to learn about the use of Linux and replace the Windows operation system.
Sure, you’ll say, but what this has to do with Linux? Well, the fact that and the Park of Renewable Energy (PeR) have teamed up to create a great package.
Binario Etico is a trashware cooperative, which uses Free Software to save computers from the landfills. The PeR is a beautiful guesthouse built and managed with zero emission principles, serving meals prepared with locally produced organic foods.
We’ve been relatively quiet over the last few weeks, because we’ve been busy pulling together 60 issues of Linux Format magazine, converting all the reader questions and answers about Linux into web-friendly formats.
SimplicITy is offered in two different suites (£435.99 & £525.99 respectively), but what you have to consider is this is for a complete solution (no pondering over which version is most suitable). A new user buying a Windows PC for example is probably going to be presented with choices to make that they are relying on the salesperson to know whats best. Should they buy anti-virus software? Should they have support extended? Which version of Windows? As we all know with a proprietary platform theres always something else you can buy and always someone more than happy to sell it to you. SimplicITy aims to take all that away and present the user with a solution which is all in one, but more importantly, simple.
Well known face Valerie Singleton is the host for “training” video’s which aim to teach those who are new.
I have this computer. It came with windows xp pre-installed. I formatted it and installed CentOS Linux for some tests. The computer was then needed for an employee so we put windows xp back on. This is a step by step comparison of installation of the two operating systems on the exact same hardware.
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Total time taken for windows? One day. Stress level reached? Out past Mars’s orbit. Peace of mind installing Linux? Priceless.
After conquering the desktop virtualisation space on the Mac, Parallels has decided to take the fight to VMware with a client for Windows and Linux desktops. But unlike the bi-polar world of the Mac (with Parallels and VMware being the only options), Parallels faces a multi-pronged attack on Linux, from proprietary brethren like VMware’s Workstation, and free-to-download options such as Sun’s VirtualBox.
All of the 8” x 8” boxes run on some kind of AMD Athlon Dual-Core processor and offer a choice of Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Ubuntu Linux. You can stuff in up to a terabyte of hard drive space, 8GB RAM and opt for a rewritable DVD drive or Blu-ray.
This DRM ioctl patch touches about 400 lines of code (mostly the addition of new code) and is now hopefully ready to enter the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, which is great news for those using the X Server and also those wanting to experiment with Wayland but have been waiting for more of the work to land in mainline trees. The Linux 2.6.33 kernel will be the first release in 2010.
Man oh man have I had an experience. It stems largely from living in the Windows world when it was king (and therefore the only standard) and then moving to larger world of free software and real standards. Like many in this down economy I am looking for work and in an effort to make myself stand out and thought that a video resume might be a good way to do it.
FFmbc (FFMedia Broadcast) is an off-shoot of the FFmpeg project that is targeted squarely at the broadcast media world. The project while still in its infancy, but available for around 6 months already, is currently at release version 0.2.
By the time you read this Karmic Koala will have been released to a waiting world, but I couldn’t wait. A felicitous combination of a desire to do a distribution upgrade to the release candidate and a Twitter arriving on my laptop giving me a link to Raindrop kept me busy for the day. I was intrigued by Raindrop and having used other Mozilla lab experimental software I was determined to see what all the hype was about. If you like the idea of combining a tool for aggregating Twitter, e-mail, RSS and other social Web 2.0 stuff with free and open standards then read on.
This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2010.0 desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.
The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Andrew Strick, Assistant Editor. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons
It’s interesting to see how many people automatically associate criticism with “Anti-X distro”.
I have seen ‘rational’ Linux users who can say they like a distro, find pro’s and con’s about it, even if it’s one of their favorites and move on along to the next topic.
Now, you should have an Arch Linux system that is fully functional. You can also install more applications if you want, and customize it even further. Next time, in the final chapter, it’s time to do some gaming!
Mandriva 2010 includes the usual array of utilities, applications and packages. Firefox 3.5.5, OpenOffice 3.1.1, GIMP for grpahics, Amarok for audio and Dragon Player for video, and of course lots of KDE applications and applets. If a particular package that you want, need or prefer isn’t installed, you can generally find it through “Install & Remove Software”, as I did for things like Thunderbird.
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To summarize, Mandriva 2010 is, as expected, a worthy successor in their long line of distributions. It installs easily, it supports all of the hardware that I tried it on with ease, and it works well. Their Moblin desktop seems to work better than Moblin’s own distribution, but that is rather thin praise. If you have been using Mandriva Linux previously, you are likely to be pleased with this one.
Many people want to create their own Linux distro, perhaps for fun, perhaps to help them learn more about Linux, or perhaps because they have serious neds to solve. But the secret is this: it doesn’t need to be hard to get the perfect distro for you. In fact, we’ve put together several ways that everyone – yes, even you – can make your own perfectly customised distro that suits your individual needs, applying as many or as few changes as you want – it’s your Linux, your way.
Mainstream Linux distro developers have to make decisions that affect thousands of potential users. Should they include or remove a particular package? Should they apply a patch that may break compatibility with older machines? These matters are discussed fiercely in forums where trolls growl, flames burn and project leaders defend their decisions against an onslaught of dissidents.
Red Hat Inc., the biggest seller of the Linux operating system, said it hopes to continue to work closely with Sun Microsystems Inc.’s MySQL database regardless of the outcome of a European Commission antitrust complaint.
Providing Ubuntu server users with powerful, enterprise-ready network backup for free, fully licensed solution, network backup solutions provider Arkeia Software (www.arkeia.com) has released Arkeia Network Backup version 8 in the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS repository as a no-cost, small-network package exclusively for Ubuntu users.
Timesys announced LinuxLink support for two new Cortex A8-based processors from Texas Instruments (TI) that are based on OMAP35x SoCs, but aimed at the industrial market. The LinuxLink framework for embedded Linux development is now available for the Sitara AM3505 and AM3517 SoCs, which run at 500MHz while using less than one Watt.
The ION is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and carries a full software feature set. The system supports the much beloved Boxee, which acts as a web video aggregator. Boxee on the ION can be synced with other Boxee installations. XBMC is also featured for media management tasks, and the ION sports a beta version of Hulu Desktop.
We’ve written about the Boxee media center application a number of times here on OStatic. One of the main differentiators between Boxee’s open source media center platform and other similar applications is that Boxee is chock-full of social and sharing features. You can discuss shows and video clips and music with friends online–as you consume them. Boxee is also gaining more and more community-built plug-ins. Today, at the NewTeeVee Live event in San Francisco, Boxee CEO CEO Avner Ronen made a significant product introduction, and quite a few surprising predictions.
Boxee, the open source home entertainment system has announced that it will be launching its own set top box next year when the service goes into public beta.
Currently available on the PC and Mac, as well as the Apple TV (before Apple’s latest 3.0 update), the company has confirmed that it has “signed our first partnership with a CE company”.
The Boxee Box in currently being developed and prepared for commercial release after the launch of the public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES earlier this year.
Lanner Electronics is shipping an entry-level, Linux-compatible DVR for the surveillance market that records NTSC and PAL video using H.264. The VR-1208 offers a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, a gigabit Ethernet port, four USB ports, and dual 3.5-inch storage bays, and supports eight channels of D1 analog video.
As I just got done saying a couple days ago, we here at OStatic love our chumbys. The always-on wireless device is as cute as it is handy, keeping you connected to all your favorite Web sites like Flickr, Weather.com, and Twitter. The chumby is fully hackable, from its open source software to its leather-and-plastic housing. Now, the chumby has a little sister fresh on the shelves — the chumby One.
Chumby Industries is readying an updated version of its Linux-based “Chumby” web-connected clock radio. Like the original, the “Chumby One” streams a personalized broadcast of web content over WiFi, and it offers a much lower price, a faster processor, far more flash memory, an FM radio, and a battery option.
This report compares and evaluates the value of the three consortiums: Symbian foundation, LiMo foundation and Open handset alliance (android) analysing the business models for both proprietary and open source.
To begin with, the Android operating system being used in the X10 is a product of Linux development which has its roots in open source technology. For those unfamiliar with programming, the concept of open source is like a fast food chain releasing its fried chicken recipe in order for everyone to try it, modify and ultimately improve it. This will mean that the money earning recipe will be made open to all but at the same time, this potentially creates vast improvements over the original recipe.
Litl’s operating system is rooted in open source — Ubuntu, to be exact — but its uniqueness lies in the sleek design. When not being used as a laptop, users can prop it up like an easel then set it to display photos or stream content from Weather.com and other popular Web sites.
At Qualcomm’s annual analyst meeting today, the company demonstrated a Linux- and Qualcomm Snapdragon-based “smartbook” from Lenovo, say reports. Qualcomm also announced a new 1GHz MSM7x30 smartphone chipset family which incorporates the same superscalar Scorpion CPU technology as the Snapdragon, and is capable of 720p video at 30fps, says Qualcomm.
Scott Schwarzhoff, the company’s vice-president of marketing, said developers could use Titanium to write once in Javascript, HTML, and CSS and publish an application for either the iPhone or Android devices. Support for the Blackberry and Palm Pre is on the way.
He said the underlying technology used “a combination of Webkit (the browser rendering engine for Safari) for presenting web information and native code (Objective-C for iPhone, Java for Android) for hooking into native functionality on mobile devices, like the camera, geo-location, filesystem, etc.”
We, the developers of the Proteus Intelligent Processes (PIP) Project, are pleased to announce the availability of source code for tools related to the clinical decision support guidelines model, Proteus under an open source license (EPL). The open source development effort will now proceed in the PIP project.
3 seats on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are to be taken by community members to represent their constituency. After the nomination and introduction period now the 3 elections are open.
]project-open[ announces the release of version V3.4 of its Open-Source (OSS) web-based Project and Service Management application. V3.4 is the first release in 18 months and includes a large number of improvements and enhancements. Amongst others, it features new service management modules, an updated GUI, localization into 10 languages and an online context help system.
There is a need for greater promotion of the use of open source software for information and communication technology (ICT)-based teaching and learning.
Professor Kannan M Moudgalya of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), highlighted this on Monday. Moudgalya, who heads the Centre for Distance Engineering Education Programme (CDEEP) at the IIT, was delivering the keynote address at the launch of kPoint, a software solution for interactive learning and training.
Consulting firm Healthcare Innovative Solutions has partnered with Misys Open Source Solutions to offer the expertise and technology to build health information exchanges.
Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS), an international communications and information technology company, has released the next version of the CONNECT open-source software.
Two universities–one in New York City and the other in Switzerland–are adopting Sun Microsystems technologies. Columbia University will use an open source Sun solution to manage storage of assets in its digital preservation project, and the University of Zurich is deploying Project Wonderland projects as part of a global e-learning initiative.
The 8th annual Med-e-Tel conference (14-16 April 2010) will include a track that is dedicated specifically to Free/Libre Open Source Software in Health Care (FLOSS-HC).
I’ve been collaborating with open source and BI experts Jos van Dongen and Mark Madsen in this process. Jos is the founder of Tholis Consulting in the Netherlands and co-author of the recently published book Pentaho Solutions. Mark is the founder of Third Nature and a fellow instructor at TDWI.
One of the challenging aspects in evaluating open source is in assessing what is in the free community editions versus in the premium, supported editions. So while many associate open source with “free,” how free it is really depends upon which project you are talking about. Pentaho seems to make more for free than JasperSoft and Actuate, for example.
A $200 million group and an ISO 9001:2000 company, Sheela Foam is the largest manufacturer of flexible Polyurethane Foam (PU) in India. The company ranks among the top five PU foam manufacturing companies in the Asia-Pacific region. In India, the firm has many manufacturing units, supported through a distribution network of over 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers.
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After evaluating a host of options, Sheela Foam consulted Red Hat Enterprise Linux partner Keen & Able Computers. Convinced about the value offered, the company decided to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on an Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server. The preloaded Dell 2950 PowerEdge server and the thoroughness of the implementation team made the migration and installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) quick and easy. The system was ready to be tested and could be deployed immediately.
Indeed, the speed is likely to be the biggest attraction for many: a video introduction to the system demonstrates around a thousand lines of Go code compiling in around two hundred milliseconds on an average desktop machine – making testing out changes a lot less painful than with a traditional compiled language.
Scott Talbott is a top lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable. The Roundtable lobbies on behalf of 100 of the top banks, credit card companies, insurance and securities firms operating in the United States. Its membership includes many bailed-out banks including: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC.
Set aside for a moment that even the head of the biggest, baddest investment bank in the world, in the heat of doing “God’s work,” is at a loss over how Goldman works. The operative word in “too big to fail” is big (as evident in Michael Lewis’s famous coinage).
Complex and small is OK. Complex and big is dangerous, as we learned when taxpayers had to funnel $14 billion to Goldman by way of AIG to cover the bank’s potential losses on credit default swaps.
As we pointed out recently, excess reserves at banking institutions have hit yet another all time record over $1 trillion, courtesy not just of the Fed’s burgeoning reliquification efforts via direct asset purchases, but also due to its strategy to wind down the SFP program, and keep the Federal debt level under the legal cap, thereby providing even more liquidity to banks, to the tune of$185 billion. Yet if you thought that this inability to pass liquidity over into the broader currency pool was something to be concerned about (you know, that whole lending to consumers thing), you were wrong. Or so claims Goldman Sachs in this extended expose on why central planning is in fact good for Communist America. Also, for anyone who still doesn’t understand how modern Fed-subsidized cash hoarding works, this primer should explain it all.
I thought about telling her that this was like a child closing her eyes so that the monster wouldn’t get her. The tactic would never work but there is no monster so it doesn’t matter. But then I saw the way she was looking at me, at the bar, at her drink, and I thought she didn’t need any lessons about life tonight. She just needed a drink.
So how is the great Goldman Sachs (GS) charm offensive going? Among the latest to weigh in is none other than Charles Gasparino on the Huffington Post. It’s fair to say that he smells BS when Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein suggests that the bank really didn’t need the TARP infusion and that the AIG (AIG) bailout didn’t really help Goldman survive.
Geraldine Fabrikant gets her hands on the 2008 tax filing for the Goldman Sachs Foundation today, and it’s pretty astonishing stuff:
The latest tax filing for Goldman Sachs’s foundation is as thick as a phone book. The list of trades is more than 200 pages, single spaced. Goldman, it seems, invests like no other, even for its own charity.
“I have never seen anything like it,” said Verne O. Sedlacek, president of Commonfund, when shown the 2007 filing, which was nearly three inches thick. He has a good overview from the Commonfund, which manages more than $25 billion for universities, foundations and other not-for-profit groups.
What good does all this extreme trading do? Not very much, it would seem, according to Fabrikant’s numbers:
* Goldman has given $501 million to the Goldman Sachs Foundation since 1999
* The present size of the foundation is $404 million
* The foundation gave away $12.6 million in 2007 and $22 million in 2008.
Good news (but could be better): The Times managed to get its hands on the tax filings for Goldman Sachs Foundation today. (We reported on the previous year’s charitable donations a couple of weeks ago, as you may recall.) According to the filing (which “is as thick as a phone book”), the firm has set aside another $200 million to give away to charity and the foundation now has a total of $404 million in assets. Unfortunately, it isn’t giving much of it away. (It doled out $12 million in 2007 and another $22 million in 2008.) And it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to what the bank will be paying out in bonuses: “[T]he money allotted for its foundation is dwarfed by the sums that will be doled out to its bankers. In the first nine months of this year, the firm set aside about $17 billion for bonuses and other compensation.”
While almost all of Asia has ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and is moving to implement the WHO treaty FCTC, the global tobacco industry is intensifying is grip on Asia.
Tabinfo Asia 2009, a tobacco convention, is calling itself ‘one of the most important events held in one of the world’s most important tobacco regions. Tab Info is not open to the public health community. However, it will address topics that are of grave concern to public health. This is our interpretation of what the programme will address:
Since the publication in May of his book, ”Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science,” Ian Plimer has been the darling of conservative media commentators and the global network of climate change skeptics. Plimer, an Australian geologist, has been strongly criticized by climate scientists for errors in his book. More recently, he has been in the news over his challenge to British journalist, George Monbiot, for a debate over climate science. Monbiot agreed, subject to Plimer answering some questions in writing ahead of a debate, but Plimer retreated.
That, by itself, isn’t a huge surprise these days, but the article does note that the publisher decided to go without DRM on the books. Now, that seems like a smart, consumer-friendly move that should be applauded.
You would think that a Supreme Court Justice (and the people who work for one) would know better than to tell any sort of news publication — even a high school newspaper — that he needed to approve any articles written about a speech he gave, but that appears to be exactly what happened with Justice Anthony Kennedy and a recent speech to Dalton High School students in Manhattan.
But this one we’re giving away: in the 10-Q that footnoted frequent flyer Crocs (CROX) filed last week, there was an interesting new disclosure about Porsche, the German car-maker, suing Crocs, the Colorado-based shoe manufacturer over the use of the name Cayman.
And that — right there — is the key point we keep trying to make around here. You don’t need to rely on intellectual property. And, if you do, you are opening yourself up wide to competition that doesn’t rely on IP and innovates in a way that simply cuts your legs out from under you. Yet… we’ll still hear stories for years about how all of Google’s billions are because of its intellectual property, even as it gives away more and more of it each and every day.
More importantly, songwriters who get hung up on “devaluation” confuse recordings with music. They equate the two. A recording is not the song, it’s just an instance of it, and a digital audio file is just an instance of the recording.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Roy is a Software Engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and an advocate of fair competition. He holds a doctoral degree in Medical Biophysics. Contact us (encrypted/PGP)
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