06.09.10
Posted in Apple, DRM, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple’s trap of hype and lock-in concealment is biting in the rear those who try to escape (although some do, leaving Apple for Linux)
ONE WRITER from The Register has composed a long rant that received a lot of responses from Apple “followers” (to put it politely). He calls himself “prisoner of iTunes” and writes about “the iPad file transfer horror”. Yes, Apple’s products do not work as advertised and The Register hopefully helps people see that. The Register — like The Inquirer (a formerly sister site) — likes to provoke those “followers” to whom Apple is the most perfectest company in the whole wide world. There comes the time when this author compares Apple’s product to the Linux-based product:
The solution is by no means straightforward, as this anonymous Android developer explains. With Android, the ability to back up and restore apps also gives users the ability to steal apps, so how does Apple give more access to the file system without trashing the marketplace it’s built with iTunes?
Currently I understand the difficulties the company finds itself in, but I’m likely to get a lot less understanding if there’s no sign of progress in the next update.
Apple claims to be moving forward with new releases of its proprietary operating system (with stronger resistance to jail-breaking and more DRM). The Inquirer has just published “ten reasons why an Iphone 4 is a bad idea” and it’s unusually polite:
Steve Jobs, the Liberace of the tech world, showed off the latest Iphone 4 smartphone with the idea that it will replace his stonklingly successful 3G gizmo. However here are ten reasons why buying an Iphone 4 is not a good idea.
1.Most of the problems associated with living in Apple’s walled garden are still not fixed. You are still too dependant on having Steve Jobs decide what you can download and when. Since Jobs thinks that Adobe Flash is bad and won’t allow it on Apple devices, you can’t see half of what’s out on the web.
2.The name implies that it is a 4th generation mobile phone when it is actually still 3G. Apple says that it is the Iphone 4, however some might be dumb enough to believe that it can use the 4th generation wireless broadband standards, although it really can’t.
3.The Iphone 4 appears to have trouble with WiFi.
Yes, we saw that happening in the live demo.
Of course, there’s no characteristic Apple without some additional restrictions and penalties such as this new example: [via TechDirt, with more discussion at Groklaw]
New York Times Forces Apple to Pull Popular ‘Pulse’ iPad Newsreader
[...]
Apple has pulled the best-selling iPad RSS application, Pulse, from the App Store at the request of The New York Times. Why? Because it downloads and displays The New York Times RSS feed, just like every other RSS reader on the planet.
Had people actually controlled their gadgets, they would simply lift a finger at those outrageous demands from New York Times and then carry on. Apple in this case is a dangerous gatekeeper and we know from experience why that is dangerous. Devices with proprietary software on them become increasingly hostile towards their owner (renter), over time. Here is Apple getting slammed again for its HTML5 snub (previously covered in [1, 2]), with additional coverage of a response from Mozilla (not an official response):
Apple recently launched an HTML5 showcase on its official website with several demos that are intended to highlight some of the advanced Web development capabilities that are made available by emerging standards. The showcase has attracted criticism from standards advocates, however, because it pops up a message telling users that they will need to download Safari in order to view the demos.
[...]
Oddly enough, Apple has a whole separate version of the showcase on its developer website that exhibits none of these offensive characteristics. The more appropriately named “Safari Technology Demos” page has the same demos, but doesn’t categorically block alternate browsers. I was able to test the demos in Chrome and found that most of them worked as expected. This alternate page is accessible by clicking the “Developers” link at the bottom of the HTML5 showcase. This alternate version of the showcase is much closer to how it should be done.
Apple and its restrictive, overpriced toys (the latest one being hypePad) are not so well received in places that don’t view themselves as mere “consumers”. Apple may be popular in Silicon Valley, but that hardly represents the world’s population (and its needs) at large. To them, Apple represents the arrogant charlatan from the West — one who hardly caters for the rest, not even the children who assemble his expensive gadgets under slave labour conditions in China.
The 451 Group, an analysts firm (one of the more honest ones), argues that “Apple gets its Android on”:
Apple is now more formally aligning its different platforms and devices via the operating system, and this is something that has been happening with Android for at least a couple of years and with Linux for longer. There is no question Apple is finding success with its devices and market growth, but it is also interesting to see a more open alternative giving it real competition, not only in smartphones, but in many more facets of technology and our lives.
Here is Frank Ableson with an important point worth being made:
Once place where I see Android excelling is in the non-mobile phone space. This is a place where iPhone is not destined — Steve Jobs is not taking products to a place where there is no App Store, period.
Just as Linux powers routers and storage systems, I believe that Android can be used as a “better Linux distribution”, powering appliances in the consumer, commercial and even military markets. Short of some version of “Apple TV”, Android can expect some freedom from iPhone in these markets. And yes, I think BlackBerry will sit this one out too.
This is why Linux is well ahead of Apple, contrary to intuition which is based on the message pushed by our mainstream press. Microsoft is not as ubiquitous as Linux, either (except in areas like the desktop). “Microsoft’s irrelevance is taken for granted,” said one of Apple’s longtime supporters (via Zonker) and as we showed some moments ago in the daily links, a Redmonk analyst is dumping Apple for Linux/Android. No wonder Apple is suing Linux/Android. The megalomaniacal bully called Steve Jobs just can’t handle defeat. He can’t compete fairly, so he inherits the behaviour of the other Steve (Ballmer). █
Original photo by Matthew Yohe, modified by Boycott Novell
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D.”
–Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
–Steve Jobs
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Patents at 6:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Important news from all around the Web, regarding patents (monopolies) on software and on life in particular
In Re Bilski Delays
AS we noted yesterday, the important decision on the Bilski case is not here yet. Patently-O commentators believe that “the delay might indicate (1) that the court will issue multiple opinions (concurrences or dissents); or (2) that the decision will be especially long.”
Progressive people at the Against Monopoly Web site opine that “the Court is waiting until the end of the term to release” this decision:
They are probably right to be. A delay this long in the decision most likely means that the Court is waiting until the end of the term to release it – which they traditionally do for what the Justices consider to be their most important and/or far reaching decisions of the year.
It may also be the case that there are either important dissents or concurring opinions on the case, thus prompting a delay with back and forth rewrites and revisions to the final decisions. (Though one should recall that at oral arguments, the Justices seemed universally critical to the idea of broad-based business method patents.)
Feld's contribution to the good cause is mentioned alongside very long comments here and here.
Reforms or revolutions that actually support the interests of the populist movement — so to speak — are rather rare. The patent system has been perturbed and perverted beyond recognition now that even biology becomes a person’s monopoly.
Amazon Still Misguided
Over in the United States, the company behind the notorious one-click shopping patent is now trying to patent “online orders with a nod or a smile,” to put it the way TechFlash did: [via]
Amazon.com is famous for its 1-Click ordering system. But what about 1-Nod ordering? Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is seeking a patent on a system that would let people make purchases with a nod, a smile or even a raise of the eyebrow.
Called “Movement recognition as input mechanism,” it envisions a computing device that could interpret certain facial expressions and enhance or potentially replace “conventional input devices such as keypads and touch screen.”
The many managers that Amazon hired from Microsoft are hopefully not ruining the company from the inside.
WebM and Software Patents
It is still being argued that Google has not resolved patent issues around WebM. LWN had what is now an out-of-date discussion considering that Google resolved the issues around the WebM licence. Alastair Otter and Linux Journal wrote about this too.
Patents of Life or Death
It is looking iffy for patent law in Australia, where software patents are mostly possible to sneak into the registry and gene patents too become a controversial debate. One Australian reader/contributor told us that in the Australian press there is a major discussion on the subject. From the ABC Web site (the Australian ABC, not the US-based one):
ELEANOR HALL: Australia’s biotechnology industry is warning that the court challenge being launched today against the patenting of human genetic material could kill off investment in the industry.
Lawyers have begun legal action against four biotechnology companies, which co-own the patent to the breast cancer gene.
They say companies shouldn’t have the right to commercialise the human body.
But representatives of the biotechnology industry say the landmark legal case could stifle innovation and investment in important medical research.
Malicious companies like Monsanto have a stake in it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. These patents impede development, they don’t facilitate it. These patents facilitate massive profits (hoarding) by impeding competition. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Linux Live USB Creator or “Lili” is a Windows app that allows you to make a persistent USB Linux distro. Now I will admit that it’s been a while but the appliciations that are available in Linux to do this task would fail better than half the time…problem is, they wouldn’t fail until you had 30 minutes invested in the process. It was frustrating to say the least.
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The end-user never has to actually download anything himself, so GNU/Linux package managers are superior to the systems the whiners claim are better.
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76 packages updated in 30s of downloads with no re-re-reboots while I am still using it…
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Server
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Back in February 1999, IBM announced it would work with Red Hat to support Linux. By May 2000, Linux moved from being an experiment on mainframes to being a fully supported option. And in 2001, IBM announced it was spending a billion bucks that year on Linux. It wasn’t that big an expense; as Bill Zeitler, IBM’s senior vice president and group executive for eServer at the time, explained, “We’ve recouped most of it in the first year in sales of software and systems.”
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Ballnux
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The HTC Evo has arrived on Sprint’s nascent 4G network. The Android smartphone can use the carrier’s latest high-speed cellular network in the small number of places where coverage is available, or rely on 3G when 4G isn’t around. HTC loaded the big handset to the gills with features, but early reviewers claim to have spotted a few bugs in the soup, most of which could be fixed through updates.
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Kernel Space
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This talk is by Michael Dorrington on the alternative kernels of kFreeBSD and Hurd to Linux for the GNU System. The talk will explain what a kernel is and its role in a system, it will explain the GNU and Linux in GNU/Linux, it will then investigate GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/Hurd including showing them running. If you are interesting in Linux or Free Software or GNU or FreeBSD or Hurd then this talk should be of interest to you.
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A group of open source software developers working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have implemented a native Linux port of Sun’s ZFS filesystem. Although the code is functional and available for download (but not production-ready yet), it cannot be merged upstream or shipped in binary form with the Linux kernel due to a licensing conflict. Sun distributes the OpenSolaris source code under its own Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is incompatible with GNU’s General Public License (GPL).
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So -rc2 is out there, and hopefully fixes way more problems than it introduces.
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Graphics Stack
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On the same-day as publishing new Gallium3D benchmarks of the ATI R300g driver, we have more Gallium3D news to share. Zack Rusin has just announced a new Gallium3D branch that provides support for “Stream Out” with this advanced graphics driver architecture.
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Right now, this is only enabled for fragment shaders, but I am working on
enabling it for vertex shaders.
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Ok, so I was supposed to do this last Friday, but I wanted to get ‘a few more patches’ merged in before closing things down. And, some of those patches were more of an adventure in merging than others. I’m hoping the devPrivates adventure will be resolved this week; as expected, many bugs were found after that code landed and I’m grateful to those of you who helped find and fix them quickly.
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Beyond that, I’d like for people to consider the tree closed to large-scale changes as we prepare for the 1.9 release. There are a couple of additional cleanup patch sequences floating around and I think we should plan on leaving those for 1.10 unless they fix actual bugs.
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Applications
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One good thing about Linux system is that you can change almost every single aspect of the system. Dislike the dull wallpaper? Change it. Not happy with the default splash screen? Change it. Getting bored of the default panel menu (the place where you access Applications, Places and System)? You can change it as well.
In Gnome based system, there are several panel menu applets that you can use. Some of them are great eye candy for spicing up your desktop while others are small and fast and aim to improve your productivity. Let’s see what choices do you have:
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A server log is a log file which is created and updated by a server. A common example is an access log generated by Apache (open source web server software), which provides a history of web page requests. However, Apache does not only capture information to that access log. There is also information captured in its error log as well as a process id file, script log and a rewrite log.
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PhotoRec is licensed under the GNU GPL. It was created by the same team that developed TestDisk, an app that recovers lost partitions and makes non-bootable disks bootable again.
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Proprietary
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One of the hiccups in Bordeaux, a for-profit, costs-$20 implementation of Wine that allows for easy installation of a variety of Windows applications in Unix/Linux environments, is that while installing the IrfanView image editor is clickably easy, users are on their own when it comes to the IrfanView plugins.
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Instructionals
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Games
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We recently released a new version of our games distribution.
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Desktop Environments
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What this exercise has shown though is that Linux does not need to stand back to Windows as far as UI design is concerned. There are areas of improvement for sure. The beauty of Linux, of course, is that you, the user, can take this information, figure out better ways of doing it, and actually have a reasonable chance of suggesting it to your favorite Distro and have your suggestions adopted.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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As previously mentioned in this blog — and as I tell anyone who’ll listen to me — I go back and forth between the two top desktop environments with Fedora on my Fujitsu laptop — the even numbers, as it turns out, have been GNOME and the odd (with nothing to read into this, honest) have been KDE. Since we’re now at Fedora 13, it’s KDE time.
For those Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox and IceWM fans out there, I do have machines in the Jungle Room — the lab at Redwood Digital Research in Felton, Calif., named after the same room at Graceland — running those desktops. While I’m a huge fan of Xfce on the machines that run it, I normally don’t stray too far from GNOME and KDE.
Moving right along, though, in those instances where I use KDE on the laptop, I’ve always been impressed with the number of programs that KDE includes when downloading the KDE version of Fedora. This time around, it occurred to me that maybe I should give some of them a chance — rather than just downloading the programs I’m used to (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) during the post-install phase — I should give the K its due.
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We’ve received a number of excellent designs and now it is time to pick the best. The judging panel will include four members of the KDE promotion team and you.
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Of course, there are also a lot of KDE related talks in the presentation tracks:
* What Is Special About the QML Declarative Language? by Daniel Molkentin, Thursday 10:30, Europa I
* Beyond Groupware: Thinking Differently About KDE PIM And Kolab by Paul Adams, Thursday, 11:00, Berlin I
* KDevelop 4 – Schneller C++ Programmieren by Milian Wolff, Thursday, 11:30 in Europa I
[...]
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Greetings! Second week of the KDE at openSUSE blog. We are now on PlanetSUSE as well, so hello to all its readers. And since you did not get the last post: this blog is a short summary of what’s happening at openSUSE regarding KDE and it tries to give all those that bring KDE to the openSUSE users the credit they deserve.
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GNOME Desktop
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Two months ago, the GNOME Foundation started a fundraising campaign to get money to hire a part-time system administrator. Actually, we started this effort much earlier, but we made it much more visible with this campaign. Thanks to all the donors and to Canonical, Collabora, Google and Nokia, we were able to reach our objective. It was actually too fast for me and I wasn’t even able to blog about the campaign in time! Once we realized the money was there, we moved on to the next steps — actually, we had those steps ready in the past, so it was mainly a matter of making sure everything was still okay.
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Qubes is an open source operating system based on Linux, which is designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Its unique selling point is that all applications that are run on Qubes is sand-boxed from each other.
This is achieved by way of virtualization of all applications using Xen Hypervisor.
Computer systems usually provide OS security in three basic ways, namely -
1. Security by correctness,
2. Security by obscurity, and
3. Security by isolation.
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New Releases
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We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.4. Continuing with our goal to make VortexBox the universal server for any media player we have added full DLNA support to VortexBox. DLNA is the future of media sharing and many players such as PS3, Windows 7 Media Player, and Samsung televisions support DLNA. Now you can easily serve your music and video files to all these devices.
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The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Threeh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!
Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.3 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated, it’s there: you will find outstanding amount of new applications and features, like XBMC, KDE 4.4, GNOME 2.28, Linux Kernel 2.6.34, and so forth.
So, come on, go catch it, it’s half a DVD away from you!
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I run Kubuntu on my other desktops and laptops, so I made the UNR boot flash drive using Kubuntu’s Startup Disk Creator. Ubuntu has this utility as well — it’s dirt simple to use. Just download the UNR iso image and follow the Startup Disk Creator instructions.
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Is there a market out there for completely open source computers, where even the design of the hardware components is shared in community fashion? That’s the question that Qi Hardware’s Ben NanoNote laptop is trying to answer. According to Linux News, you can now order the systems for $99. Linux is on board, and all aspects of the hardware design are open and free for tinkerers to modify.
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Development on the Sitara AM3715 is supported not only by the BeagleBoard-xM, but by a more fully featured TI TMDXEVM3715 evaluation module (EVM). According to Crane, the current Linux BSP (board support package) will be followed by a Windows CE BSP in the third quarter. An Android version will come “relatively soon,” he added.
The current Linux version offers a BSP based on Linux kernel 2.6.32, and provides a graphical user interface, graphics, applications, demonstrations, and development utilities, says TI.
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At presstime, HP had yet to respond to a request for OS details, but it would seem that all four new printers are based on Linux. The e-All-in-One printers are not, however, the WebOS-imbued printers that HP recently said it planned to offer in the future. (HP’s pending acquisition of Palm and its Linux-based WebOS operating system is expected to be completed soon.)
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Set of open source software tools to interact directly with the kernel.
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Android
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As far as we know, this is indeed the first dedicated desktop Internet radio to run Android. In fact, touchscreen-based Internet radios of any kind, such as the Linux-based Sensia from Pure, are still fairly novel.
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Intel’s barking up all kinds of trees (ones planted by Qualcomm, NVIDIA and ARM) with its Moorestown Atom platform, and while it’ll be quite some time before we see an Atom Inside sticker gracing the face of a smartphone, the company’s making sure the world sees what it has ramped up so far with reference builds here in Taipei.
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In an article over at Chinitech.com, it is being reported that the television set pictured to the left is the fist set in the world to have the Android platform built into it. Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL has reportedly been working in their labs since 2008 to integrate Android with one of their displays, with this unit being the product of their efforts.
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Linux-based IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) have been around for several years. Some, such as the Myka Ion, offer full web access over the TV in addition to access to video-on-demand sites.
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An internal screen shot is being passed around showing T-Mobile’s Cole Brodman pledge of “no phones left behind” when it comes to the latest Android release and their flagship phones.
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Motorola has confirmed its plans to launch a full twenty Android based smartphones this year, with a range of devices running MOTOBLUR like the FLIPOUT and some packing hardware QWERTY keyboards.
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Motorola announced a Europe-destined version of its Motoroi phone called the Milestone XT720, offering Android 2.1, 720p video capture, HDMI, and an eight-megapixel camera with xenon flash. Meanwhile, Motorola is also prepping a somewhat similar “Droid Xtreme” successor to its original Droid for Verizon in the U.S., reports claim.
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Android is ready for prime time. It’s not going to beat the iPhone – not yet – but it’s ready for mainstream users. Which is probably why they’re shipping 65,000 of them a day. FroYo will only make this readiness more evident. The hiring of Matias Duarte, formerly of Palm, only underscores Google’s commitment to improving the UI.
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Tablets
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The Linaro group seems to be answering this demands. IBM, Samsung, TI and Freescale can be considered the ‘hardware roots’, while Ubuntu, MeeGo and Android communities can be considered leaves, but what this tree lacked is a trunk. Linago might be that trunk that will enable quicker time to market. It is the node at the cross that was missing. The other two notable hardware makers working together with the software community in the MeeGo environment also got the message. What we’re basically seeing is a trend towards consolidation in ‘foundations’ in which competitors cooperate instead of consolidation in one company. This marks an important step in a quicker time to market, the much needed step to advance in the direction of the ultimate goal: Linux world domination.
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There are plenty of open source email clients already on the market, but there’s always room for more. Roundcube is a free and open source Web mail application that contains full support for HTML and MIME messages, IMAP folder management, and more.
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Today I got a email about registration for “Qt Developer Days 2010″. This conference will be in Munich (October 11-13) and in San Francisco (November 1-3).
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Databases
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Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the general availability of Ingres VectorWise for Linux, the next generation of database technology. Ingres VectorWise has been proven by Ingres customers and partners over the last six months to provide performance gains of 10x to 70x over existing database and analytic servers whilst running sophisticated analytics on large to truly massive data sets.
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OpenOffice.org
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OK, the title of this blog was a bit misleading. We are actually talking about Better Defaults, which are the focus of the most recent Renaissance status presentation, which you can munch on if you find time for a light snack.
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Last Friday the Minister of Justice revealed a report regarding the Danish police’s finances. The background is that the police in Denmark has been spending much more money over the last many years, than they where allowed to in the budget.
[...]
The opposition parties are now asking the Minister, why there crystal clear recommendations of F/OSS and OpenOffice.org has been erased from the official version.
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Why was important recommendations from McKinsey omitted in the report ‘A professional and well driven police’ to the Parliament?
From the report from McKinsey with the financial analyzes:
The section ‘Use of cheaper software’:
That in stead (of Microsoft Office) works with a scenario with a shift to OpenOffice.org or Star Office, as the product is called, when delivered from SUN (Oracle). By using a well know supplier such as SUN(Oracle), that now also develops and supports MySQL as well as Star Office, it will be assured that support is available with the quality the police needs. (p. 83-84)
A shift to OpenOffice.org or Star Office will according to McKinsey result in savings around 100 mio DKK untill 2017.
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Popular open source productivity a154 million downloads since version 3.0
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Bidding
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Last week Laurent Bounin of Savoir Faire Linux in Quebec wrote in with good news.
A Canadian court ruled the provincial government broke the law in 2006 when it upgraded Windows on 800 workstations and excluded open source from the bid.
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In recent years, numerous governments and government entities around the world have issued mandates regarding increased adoption of open source software. We’ve written about the trend from numerous angles, but one of the more interesting spins on this trend has just occurred, as reported by Savoir-faire Linux. A Canadian court ruled that Quebec broke the law when it migrated 800 workstations to Microsoft software without performing a “serious and documented search” for alternatives.
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CMS
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WordPress 3.0 looks like an especially compelling release of the seven-year old blogging platform. The much-anticipated custom menu system features lots of drag-and-drop options along with the ability to create sub-menus hide specific pages, and more. The WordPress admin page has also been altered to users to focus more on content
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Business
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Billions of mobile phones and devices can now automatically sync pictures with the Web thanks to Funambol, the open source mobile cloud company. The company today announced the general availability of Funambol v8.5, which adds syncing of pictures and rich media between mobile devices and the open cloud. Once synced, pictures and mobile data can be viewed online, synced with connected devices and shared with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
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One of the most common observations in the open source marketplace is related to the low level of contributions by companies, especially small and medium sized businesses, to the projects behind the open source software (OSS) they use within their embedded systems or as part of an internal IT infrastructure. Looking at the Eclipse Foundation, one of the best run open source projects, it is possible to see that most contributions are from large companies that use Eclipse as a basis for their products or from open source companies that are aware of the strategic importance for code contributions to OSS projects.
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Daniel: KnowledgeTree’s focus is on delivering easy to use, turnkey document management solutions to small and medium business. We also have a significant number of global 2000 customers, mostly at the department level. The reason why we have those large organizations is because of our open source value proposition, a story you have heard many times before and know and love.
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Government
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Open Source for America, an organization sponsored and supported by some of the biggest names in the FOSS world has launched a study to measure openness in government. With today being the 6 month anniversary of President Obama’s “Openness in Government” directive, which directs “executive departments and agencies to take specific actions to implement principles of transparency, participation and collaboration.”
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Watch this space. And while you’re watching it, consider this: the website for the UK Supreme Court and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was £360,000. Or as it puts it: “The cost to create and develop the UKSC and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) websites was £360k in total. The development of both sites was treated as a single project and therefore the costs cannot be broken down by website.”
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Openness
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I first learned about the open source way years ago as a tech lawyer in a private law firm when I was introduced to Red Hat. I found the open source model interesting, but from a different perspective than developers. For context, at the time, many technology licensing lawyers started talking about open source because of the innovative use of copyright law to protect transparency and sharing of the open source code through the general public license (GPL).
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India’s Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) collective is the driving force behind the Connect 2 Decode project that aims to pool research data and create a central repository accessible by anyone organization in the world that’s doing TB research of its own. More than 1.7 million people die from tuberculosis each year, and the virus is growing increasingly resistant to existing drugs. The gene research will hopefully lead to better medicines and vaccines that haven’t been improved since they were first developed in the 1960′s.
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Programming
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Fifteen years ago today, on the 8th of June, 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf launched PHP with a post to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Usenet news group. He announced version 1.0 of his “Personal Home Page Tools”, software that was originally intended for managing job applications on a web site. As Lerdorf made the tools available as open source code (originally under the GPL, since version 4.0 under the PHP Licence) his PHP software, written in C, was bound to find a wide audience.
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Standards/Consortia
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In mid-April, four of us from the Aspose.Words team have attended the ODF Interoperability workshop that was held in the beautiful city of Granada in the province of Andalusia. The main themes of the trip were learning more about Open Document initiatives in Europe, meeting people, talking about nuances of ODT and testing how well Aspose.Words supports it. Besides, we had a chance to make a presentation about Aspose.Words to the ODF Plugfest community.
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View and edit OpenDocument files inside Emacs
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The new version of ODFDOM – our Apache 2 licensed ODF library in Java has been released!
Aside of a more than a dozen patches there were two outstanding new features for the 0.8.5 release:
1. The support of all ODF templates. Nearly all document types of ODF 1.2 are now supported.
Only the support for Formula (MathML) and Database front end documents will follow later.
2. The new high level Presentation API for slide handling. An API supporting exchange of slides, copy and much more.
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CNN is close to dropping its subscription to the Associated Press, people familiar with the decision tell TVNewser.
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After last week’s successful completion of the Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project, CEO John Paton was looking for a new project that would keep the momentum of innovation going for the beleaguered newspaper network.
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A new libel law proposed by a Liberal Democrat peer would clarify how quickly ISPs and publishers have to act when told of a defamatory post or article. Defamatory material would not have to be taken down for 14 days, under the proposal.
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Security/Aggression
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The toughest lesson to draw from the Whitehaven tragedy is that there might be no lesson at all. We cannot stop people having rows at home or work, taking leave of their senses, finding a gun and going berserk. Such things rarely happen. But even the most authoritarian state must allow some personal liberty, and everyone accepts the resulting risk. No free community can be wholly safe without losing its freedom.
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About 150 car numberplate recognition cameras installed in two Muslim areas, paid for by government anti-terrorism fund
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Environment
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Possibly the most famous instance of poor propriety was when Hayward, while apologizing to the people of Louisiana, told them “I would like my life back”, a comment that sounded particularly insensitive after the Gulf catastrophe claimed 11 lives in the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Further casualties now include nearly 500 birds, 227 turtles, and 27 mammals, including dolphins. Hayward’s poorly-conceived statements do not stop there; he also famously said, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
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On Google, paid results are awarded to the highest bidder.
Scott Slatin, an analyst who runs search engine marketing company Rivington in New York, estimates the company is paying upwards of $10,000 per day to maintain the various search terms.
“They paid to lock themselves into the first position against the oil spill terms, essentially putting a positive message on top of the news,” Slatin said.
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Finance
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I think that the continuing global financial crisis has now put an end to the ideological fantasy that highly complex markets can effectively function with minimal government oversight.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., already under fire for its actions leading up to the financial crisis, came under attack from a federal commission that accused it of refusing to divulge information, including documents detailing its controversial bets on the mortgage market.
Saying it had been stonewalled, the federal commission investigating the financial crisis on Monday took the unusual step of issuing a subpoena to Goldman that demanded information about the investment bank’s role before and during the mortgage meltdown and credit crunch.
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Ten Washington lobbying firms have represented a whopping 130 different clients in the financial regulatory reform debate — raking in millions of dollars as the bill heads for final passage.
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The global war over new bank capital requirements for banks is intensifying, with a clash between powerful U.S. regulators drawing widespread international attention.
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The future of improved financial regulations depends largely on how the differences between the House and Senate bills are resolved.
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For months, Wall Street banks have been biding their time, serenely confident that Democrats would eventually drop their get-tough stance on derivatives and quietly excise a tough new proposal from the financial reform bill.
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The commission investigating the causes of the financial crisis said on Monday that it had subpoenaed Goldman Sachs and harshly accused the investment bank of trying to delay and disrupt its inquiry.
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Banks are not investors. They need to get paid back. We have an S.B.A. loan program that works. Some people complain that it requires too much paperwork. I’ve taken two S.B.A. loans, both many years after I started my business. The amount of paperwork involved was not unreasonable. This is the land of opportunity. Entrepreneurs have an opportunity to borrow money, if they can, or to look for investors. If they can’t find the money that way, they may have to do it the old-fashioned way — earning it themselves and using their own money.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd bring to the negotiations experience from the government’s rapid and often ad hoc response to the financial crisis, including the controversial decision to risk taxpayer money to bail out the financial sector.
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Manufacturing job gains in the Midwest helped lower the nation’s economic stress in April to its lowest point in five months, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis of conditions around the country.
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The scandal led to euro5 billion (more than $7 billion at the time) in losses once the bank unwound Jerome Kerviel’s positions in January 2008. The case gave a taste of the spiraling crises to come in the finance world, from the fall of Lehman Brothers to Bernard L. Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
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Job openings jumped in April to the highest level in 16 months, a sign that private employers may boost hiring in coming months.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Earlier today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asking for an investigation into two appointments made by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC). The two members, Drs. Neal Benowitz and Jack Henningfield, have financial conflicts of interest based on their ties to pharmaceutical companies that make smoking cessation products.
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The company was part of a vanguard of corporations that, in 2007, began demanding federal action to stop global warming. Until then, America’s big businesses had largely been silent on the issue or actively supporting the other side.
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A powerful lobbying organisation representing agribusiness interests helped draft a key government report that has been attacked by environmentalists for heavily favouring the arguments of the genetically modified food industry.
The revelation comes after the resignation of two government advisers who have criticised the close relationship between the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the body that oversees the UK’s food industry, and the GM lobby.
Emails between the FSA and the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) show the council inserted key sentences strengthening the case for GM food that ended up in the final report.
The report, “Food Standards Agency work on changes in the market and the GM regulatory system”, examines how GM products are entering the UK, where the growing of GM products is banned, through the animal feed system. It acknowledges food prices could go up if GM products continue to be excluded.
Emails from the council – which represents leading GM food companies such as Monsanto and Bayer – to Dr Clair Baynton, the then head of novel foods at the FSA, show a close dialogue between both sides between 2008 and August 2009, when the report was published.
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There is no funny U.S. Chamber of Commerce math that can overcome the fact that U.S. government data show that we have lost 5 million net manufacturing jobs since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) went into effect. The U.S. trade deficit peaked at $830 billion during this period, and U.S. real median wages still lurk at 1972 levels.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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State Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett’s subpoena of the social networking organization Twitter, in an attempt to identify anonymous posters, has drawn criticism from the legal community.
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Zimbabwe has an independent daily newspaper for the first time in seven years after the launch today of NewsDay, which aims to provide a counterpoint to state media that is fiercely loyal to longtime president Robert Mugabe.
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Montana’s law states, “A corporation may not make a contribution or expenditure in connection with a candidate or a political committee that supports or opposes a candidate or a political party.” The law was passed in 1912 to curb the influence of the notorious mining interests, known as the “Copper Kings.” Now, a right-wing, 501(c)(4) group based out of Colorado called Western Tradition Partnership, has teamed with the local Bozeman, Montana Champion Paint store to challenge the constitutionality of that law in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. The suit was filed in the Helena District Court.
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The U.S. Supreme Court ordered an emergency halt to matching-funds payouts from Arizona’s publicly funded Clean Elections program on Tuesday.
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DRM
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I spent the next 10 minutes explaining to Alice about DRM and what it is doing to people who legitimately purchase music. It seems that the DRM’ed CD allowed itself to be “ripped” but when the copy of the CD was attempted to play in MP3 format, the DRM kicked in, and the “screw you” message, as Alice refers to it, appeared on the screen.
Alice listened without interupting. I could hear her scribbling furiously as I spoke but she never stopped me to repeat something or clarify a point. When I finished and was sure I had covered the entire issue, only then did she speak.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The past few weeks has seen the somewhat unlikely resurrection of Newzbin. The world’s premier Usenet indexing site was crushed by huge debts but through a tangled web worthy of the most dramatic soap opera, it has somehow been reanimated. While ex-owner Caesium eyes future opportunities away from file-sharing, lawyers already have plans to bring Newzbin2 to its knees.
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Copyrights
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When the British public are asked which band they most want to make a comeback, there is usually only one winner. Abba are generally the number one choice, which reflects the timeless appeal their unmatchable canon of pop classics continues to command, both here and internationally.
It also explains why there are so many Abba tribute acts. At the last count, at least 40 were on the circuit, entertaining fans across the UK with their own take on the ‘70s chart stars’ back catalogue. But they could all face ruin if legal action launched by Universal Records is successful.
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Now, one response to this might be that these professors need to be better educated on the boundaries, exceptions and limits to copyright law. However, it’s not so simple. Part of the reason why there is so much fear of copyright law is because of the actions of many copyright holders, who not only aggressively push an extreme version of copyright law out to the public — such as the MPAA’s infamous (infamously wrong) “if you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it” education campaing — but who have used ridiculously high statutory rates to publicize the idea that for very marginal copyright infringement, you may be liable for millions in damages awards (not counting legal fees).
The copyright holders themselves have been trying to paint this picture of copyright as being much more than it really is — and as a result of that, it’s now actively stifling all kinds of important research.
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These worlds don’t match. Both Glee and the RIAA can’t be right. It’s hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can’t do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue’s Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.
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Kornarens apparently misrepresented Indian copyright law, citing an “immaterial concurring opinion” and misquoting other rulings by inserting parenthetical notations into those rulings, that changed the meaning. The court doesn’t take that sort of stuff kindly:
The district court did not abuse its discretion in concluding Kornarens’ misrepresentations of Indian law evidenced his bad faith and recklessness in pursuing Lahiri’s copyright claim.
Kornarens now concedes his written submissions to the district court contained “mistakes.” However, viewed in the context of the history of this litigation, the court did not abuse its discretion in finding that Kornarens acted recklessly and in bad faith in pursuing a frivolous copyright claim for five years.
Now, this situation is clearly a pretty extreme one, given the details of the case, but with so many copyright lawsuits being filed these days on such flimsy evidence, some of the lawyers involved might want to pay attention to what can happen when you aggressively pursue a bogus copyright claim.
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Either way, it would be interesting to see if anyone has more evidence that Viacom properties are improperly monetizing CC non-commercially-licensed videos. That would seem like a relevant point in the ongoing lawsuit…
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Now, however, news have surfaced that show that the judge was corrupt and the case all but predecided. It turns out that the lawyer for the copyright lobby, Dirk Visser (who has previously represented the infamous BREIN against Mininova), is actively running an anti-piracy business together with the judge.
DAD: Desktop Adapted for DAD (2006)
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