05.26.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Xi3 Corp. announced the first desktop PC based on Google’s Chrome OS, based closely on its Linux-ready Xi3 Modular Computer mini-PC. The ChromiumPC offers a modular design, including a swappable processor board with a single- or dual-core x86 processor, as well as two upgradable I/O boards.
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In about three weeks, we can stop talking about how Chromebooks-light-weight laptops running Google’s Chrome OS-might, or might not, work in the real world because we’ll get our hands on the first two models: the Samsung Series 5 and the Acer Wi-Fi Chromebook. Here’s what we know now about them.
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Server
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Cray’s latest supercomputer will run Cray’s modified version of SUSE Linux on AMD’s upcoming 16-core “Interlagos” Opteron chip and Nvidia’s Tesla 20-Series GPU (graphics processing unit). The XK6 system should deliver up to 50 petaflops of performance when it ships later this year, claims Cray.
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IBM’s server revenues grew 22.1% in the first quarter, outpacing rivals as demand for the types of high-end systems in which Big Blue specializes picked up.
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The company’s latest offering, rPath X6, expands its ambitions with powerful configuration management capabilities and a spruced-up user interface.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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It isn’t easy to find a great way to make business cards and labels using FOSS software. If LibreOffice and Scribus leave you unsatisfied, take a look at gLabels. gLabels is a lightweight program useful in creating labels and business cards for the GNOME desktop environment. It gets the job done smoothly once you know how to use it, but a lack of templates makes getting started a trial-and-error process.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Players of the cross-platform, open source, real-time strategy game, ’0 A.D.’ can look forward to a whole range of new features, as the game’s publisher, Wildfire Games, has announced the fifth alpha version of the game.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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After Adwance (Ambiance ported to GTK3), we now have a GNOME Shell theme to get a complete Ambiance look in GNOME Shell thanks to Half-left’s latest “Ubuntu Ambiance” Shell theme:
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New Releases
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We are proud to provide Zenwalk gnome 7.0 based on gnome 2.32.1. It is the last step before going to gnome 3.0.
[...]
Kernel 2.6.37.4 with BFS scheduler and performance tweaks
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) is the most popular Linux distribution used for web servers, running around 30% of the world’s Linux-based websites, according to a survey by W3Techs. CentOS is built from the freely available sources for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL) and supports 32- and 64-bit x86 architectures. Since it depends on Red Hat releasing the sources, CentOS is always behind the current Red Hat release. RHEL 5.6 was released in January 2011, and CentOS 5.6 followed last month. I downloaded and tested the latest version and found that CentOS remains a trustworthy server solution. System administrators familiar with any of the CentOS 5 releases will feel immediately at home with this release.
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Storix Inc., a provider of a Unix-based system recovery solution for AIX, Solaris and Linux systems, announced Tuesday general availability of System Backup Administrator 7.2 (SBAdmin), now with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 offers a number of feature enhancements and additions optimizing the capabilities of customer hardware. Now, with SBAdmin, customers can perform system recovery to the same or different hardware, or to and from virtual systems. SBAdmin works on all supported Red Hat platforms, including Intel 32-bit, 64-bit or IBM Power.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ever since I got my HP probook 4420s I have been on a search for the Touchpad (or Clickpad as it is called) Nirvana. On Kubuntu 10.10 Out of the box the clickpad was basically useless, right click and middle click did not work. Thankfully though, a work around helped get the most basic functionality working, but lacked multi-touch (even though the clickpad supports multi-touch) Another patch was released which gave clickpad multitouch support but removed right click option (You have to do a 2 finger tab to right click)
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Flavours and Variants
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Barry Kauler, the father of Puppy Linux, has just announced today, May 25th, the immediate availability for download of the Puppy Linux 5.1.2 Wary operating system, an edition of Puppy Linux intended for antique machines.
The new Puppy Linux Wary 5.1.2 distribution focuses on supporting older hardware components. It also brings lots of improvements and bug fixes over previous releases.
“I was thinking of this release as a bugfix release of 5.1.1, but when I started to tally the changes, I realised that there are a lot and probably I should have bumped the version to 5.2!” – said Barry Kauler in the official release announcement.
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Now, say what you will about Google – and there are certainly things to say that aren’t exactly complimentary – but this provides a very useful boost for free software, which finds it hard to fund coders to do all those little tasks that need doing but that nobody ever quite got round to. It also helps train the next generation of hackers – something of vital importance.
And that’s just one of the ways that Google supports open source. Releasing the code for Android (well, eventually) is another, as is employing many of the top open source hackers at presumably generous salaries (who says giving away your code doesn’t pay?)
Now let’s compare Google with another leading technology company that also runs its operations pretty much entirely on free software: Amazon.
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…to the business-friendly Apache 2.0 free and open source software license. This migration represents a big win for the SIF software development community and existing customers can migrate to the new release with no change in their agent development, sales or delivery approach.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome web store, an online web store for Google Chrome that houses extensions, themes and web-apps. Some web-apps are particularly worth mentioning. The apps reviewed in this post are free and are not aimed at any particular group (such as developers, project managers, cloud service users or for users from specific etc.) They have a wide-range utility!
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Google Chrome netbooks are being targeted directly at education and for good reason. Initial press reactions to the Chrome-book are enthusiastic … with two caveats. These are: ‘it’s a bit expensive for an empty book isn’t it?’ and ‘great concept … maybe too soon?’.
Nonsense, the Chrome books will save education an absolute fortune and render existing ICT models obsolete: here’s why.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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Business Solo: the phone plan that gives you more
Citrix has announced that it will offer its own version of OpenStack, the open source “infrastructure cloud” platform originally created by NASA and Rackspace.
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RedMonk co-founder and analyst Stephen O’Grady recently gave a talk at Open Source Business Conference. He’s posted his notes and slides here. In the talk, he emphasized his idea that there are four generations of software companies, and that selling software is becoming harder and harder. O’Grady sees the way forward for open source companies is leveraging data.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Buying the latest edition of a pricey word processor like Microsoft Word for a large number of employees can seem like a bitter pill.
So you might stick with the last edition for a bit longer, or turn to one of the free options like OpenOffice. These tend to be simpler and less capable than Microsoft’s programs but since many people only scratch the surface of Word’s advanced functions, a cheaper, simpler alternative is worth considering. LibreOffice is the newest free suite of word processor, speadsheet, database and so on.
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Healthcare
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Results: After conducting a detailed needs analysis, the Quebec National Institute for Public Health developed and implemented an integrated web application leveraging open source software for the real-time Surveillance and Prevention of Extreme Meteorological Events impacts on public health, called the SUPREME system.
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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just a short note, to tell you that a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to be invited to give a lecture at CERN [...] I learned about their needs vs C++ and its runtime library, and sometimes have been able to suggest specific C++0x features to try together with the latest GCC releases, which potentially could improve their software, from the performance point of view or somehow else.
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Project Releases
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Here we are! The new and yet the most powerful with almost twice faster database engine CUBRID 8.4.0 beta has arrived!
This new release is a combination of great new features, frequently request by the users, and increased performance. We have managed to improve the engine performance by almost three fold for certain functions. Based on the same scenario [link to a QA Completion Report (PDF)] we usually used to conduct the quality assurance of a new release, we have seen huge improvements.
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Public Services/Government
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Licensing
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We’ve compiled a single resource that guides you through the process of choosing a license for new software, documentation, and other functional data.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Alexander Kiselev is a 19-year-old immigrant from Moscow who is worried that scientific advances in the biosciences aren’t developing fast enough. To spark a new age of discovery, he wants to make experimentation cheaper by creating affordable scientific instruments. With help from the open source hardware community, his first project will be an inexpensive high performance liquid chromatography system, a tool that helps biochemists analyze the components of a sample.
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Programming
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The open source Ruby on Rails community is gearing up for their next major release.
This week Rails 3.1 was released as a release candidate, debuting new features for streaming, JavaScript integration and security. Rails 3.1 is the first major update to Rails since the 3.0 release in summer of 2010.
“There is some very important stuff in Rails 3.1,” Nic Williams, VP of technology at Engine Yard told InternetNews.com.
[...]
From a security perspective, Rails 3.1 also provides developers with a number of improvements. The new Force SSL controller is all about making sure connections are safe and encrypted.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Earth Policy Institute reported on figures today showing that cancer is now the leading cause of death in China, accounting for a quarter of all deaths in the country. The most common type? Lung cancer – caused in large part by increasingly foul air due to a heavy reliance on coal:
Deaths from this typically fatal disease have shot up nearly fivefold since the 1970s. In China’s rapidly growing cities, like Shanghai and Beijing, where particulates in the air are often four times higher than in New York City, nearly 30 percent of cancer deaths are from lung cancer.
The figures, which were compiled from the Chinese Ministry of Health, show the other side of China’s rush to develop new sources of energy. In the case of lung cancer, the bad air is compounded by soaring tobacco use.
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Security
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Security researchers from Elcomsoft have discovered a method that allows them to copy and decrypt the memory of iPhones that have built-in hardware encryptionPDF (3GS and 4); hardware encryption is also built into the iPod Touch (3rd generation or later) and all iPad models. What makes their discovery special is that they apparently read the memory directly, which, for instance, even enabled them to restore deleted data. ElcomSoft says that this is particularly relevant for forensic investigations.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Egypt will open its crossing with the Gaza Strip this weekend, Cairo’s interim military government has announced.
The move will significantly ease a four-year blockade on the Hamas-ruled territory, but sets up a potential conflict with Israel.
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Shortly after a supervisor told Daniel Alvarado to stay with the victim of a minor assault and not search for the suspect, the school district officer ran into the backyard of a Northwest Side home with his gun drawn.
Moments later, Alvarado fired his weapon, killing an unarmed 14-year-old boy.
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You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
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The federal Patriot Act could briefly expire by the end of the week if U.S. Sen. Rand Paul insists on votes for controversial amendments, officials say.
The Hill newspaper said if the lapse occurs it could severely impact the law enforcement community, which uses it to track suspected terrorists.
Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., tabled a motion to extend the Patriot Act in what the newspaper said was a complicated maneuver to circumvent Paul, R-Ky. The maneuver was designed to save time while Paul resists the extension of the law, which expires at 12:01 a.m. Friday, Senate aides told the newspaper.
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Cablegate
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When oil prices hit a record $147 a barrel in July 2008, the Bush administration leaned on Saudi Arabia to pump more crude in hopes that a flood of new crude would drive the price down. The Saudis complied, but not before warning that oil already was plentiful and that Wall Street speculation, not a shortage of oil, was driving up prices.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali al Naimi even told U.S. Ambassador Ford Fraker that the kingdom would have difficulty finding customers for the additional crude, according to an account laid out in a confidential State Department cable dated Sept. 28, 2008,
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Censorship
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Addressing some 800 technology executives in Paris on Tuesday at the “eG8″ conference that he created, French President Nicolas Sarkozy presented a vision of greater government involvement in and regulation of the Internet. He plans to push this vision onto G8, G20 and United Nations countries, but it’s an innovation-smothering approach that President Obama should avoid at all costs.
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Civil Rights
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The personal data of millions of passengers who fly between the US and Europe, including credit card details, phone numbers and home addresses, may be stored by the US department of homeland security for 15 years, according to a draft agreement between Washington and Brussels leaked to the Guardian.
The “restricted” draft, which emerged from negotiations between the US and EU, opens the way for passenger data provided to airlines on check-in to be analysed by US automated data-mining and profiling programmes in the name of fighting terrorism, crime and illegal migration. The Americans want to require airlines to supply passenger lists as near complete as possible 96 hours before takeoff, so names can be checked against terrorist and immigration watchlists.
AVATAR – Official Launch Trailer (HD)
Credit: TinyOgg
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05.25.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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Not everybody who needs to build a cluster wants to be a Linux expert. And that is why Platform Computing has slapped an all-encompassing Web-based graphical user interface onto the 3 release of its Platform HPC cluster management tool.
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Applications
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Syncany is a brand new open-source file sync software (similar to Dropbox, or Sparkleshare). “Oh no, not another Dropbox alternative” you might say. Well Syncany is different and has the chance to become better than other such applications. Read on!
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Photoshop is one of the most popular image editing proprietary software, with extensive capabilities and a rather un-affordable price! It will be interesting for you to note that most of the Photoshop copies running on thousands of computers are illegal, that seems to be obvious as even professionals cannot afford to buy such an expensive piece of software. On the other hand, GIMP, photo manipulation software is a free counterpart that is fairly popular in the Linux circle. GIMP is preinstalled on some Linux
distributions or it can be installed with great ease. In this post we will draw a comparison between the two softwares! The debate is old yet it interests many. In this post we will compare the two softwares, according to current standards.
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Proprietary
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One thing that keeps Linux in the back foot is the lack of good quality applications that can compete with the best out there. The advent of paid softwares section in Ubuntu Software Center is a start, things like that can kick start application development for Linux in a big way. But things were not as bad I thought it would be. On further browsing, I found out that there are indeed a good number of paid applications for Linux, some of them were a total surprise for me. Here are some of those paid applications for Linux which I found interesting.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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We recently covered the best paid games that are out there for Linux. We know that the list was too small and disappointing for any Linux fan. The size of the list can only be attributed to the lack of any major progress in this area for years. To be honest, most of the games that are available for Linux are graphically poor with loose plots and terrible AI levels. However, before you start bashing Linux developers for that, let’s take a look at why gaming sucks so badly on Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project has released version 15 of its Linux-based operating system. Beyond an updated kernel, updated standard package updates, and the switch to LibreOffice from OpenOffice, the most significant changes are the adoption of GNOME 3 and RPM 4.9. In other news, the first daily builds of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot are now available to download and test.
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And what we’re going to offer you now? You can have 4.6.2 and fresh 4.6.3 already available in updates.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So, here’s the thing. I have two monitors set up in my office, one plugged into my primary Ubuntu machine and one plugged into a Windows PC that I keep around for my business accounting. (Yeah, yeah, I don’t like GNUCash, okay?)
To move my mouse and keyboard control between them, I use a neat little tool called QuickSynergy that enables control signals to move across the LAN so I can just use both operating systems as if it were one big screen. Normally, the Windows monitor is off the left and the Linux monitor is centered in front of me because it’s the giganto monitor and I use it 90 percent of the time.
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Next week, Canonical will present an executive briefing on developments in Ubuntu Desktop, Cloud and Server. Christopher Kenyon, Canonical EVP, will be sharing developments in Ubuntu, including:
* Introducing Ubuntu 11.04 with critically acclaimed interfaces and developer APIs
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To help us celebrate the 100th issue of Linux User & Developer, Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, agreed to take the reins from our regular Ubuntu columnist (Dave Walker) and take us through why he believes it was the right decision for Ubuntu to embrace the future with Unity…
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Ubuntu Light is an alternative OS designed to sit on a separate partition to a PC’s Windows operating system. With a look and feel that’ll be familiar to users of Ubuntu Netbook Remix – whose Unity interface has now been rolled out across all versions of Ubuntu – it’s neither full featured nor powerful. But it is fast.
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Phones
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If you haven’t expanded out to using multiple operating systems on a single device through virtualization, definitely try it.
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Android
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Galaxy S smartphones from Samsung outsold Apple iPhones in Japan during Q1 2011, which places Samsung in the ranks of the top four handset vendors of Japan for the first time, according to Strategy Analytics. Android smartphones are now outselling iOS smartphones in Japan.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Barnes & Noble announced a Kindle-like six-inch monochrome touchscreen version of its Nook e-reader, featuring an E Ink Pearl display. The Android 2.1-based “All-New Nook” offers 2GB of RAM, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, and that’s about it — but it weighs only 7.48 ounces, lasts up to a claimed two months per battery charge, and costs just $139, says the company.
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On May 26, Google will introduce a widely anticipated near field communication (NFC) mobile payment system for Android 2.3x phones with Sprint, Mastercard, Citibank, and VeriFone Systems, say multiple reports. Meanwhile, Motorola says its Droid X, Droid 2, Droid 2 Global, and Droid Pro phones are all getting Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”) updates this year.
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The Apache Libcloud project has left the Apache Incubator where projects mature and has become a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation. Libcloud is a Python implementation of a common vendor-independent API for cloud services which supports multiple backends to work with cloud provider specific APIs. The project hopes to allow developers to write cloud applications for a single API without the need to write vendor-specific code. The current Python implementation has back-end driver support for over twenty cloud platforms including Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, Rackspace, GoGrid, IBM Cloud and Linode.
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Web Browsers
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All right, the big moment has come. In the past dozen weeks and a similar number of Internet-related articles, I have alluded, hinted and clear-stabbed at various trends and hypes that seem to be gripping the modern browsers. In my Taming Firefox 4 article, we had a brief if heated piece on Tabs on Top thingie. Firefox came into spotlight again with Aurora, a dev-build, and so did Internet Explorer, with its version 10 preview.
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Mozilla
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The Firefox team is moving as quick as a…well, you get the idea. Nearly two months after releasing its latest browser to the masses, the folks at Mozilla have unleashed Firefox 5 for Android as a beta for willing souls who happen upon it in the Market. The latest rendition will hook you up with support for CSS animations,
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Public Services/Government
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Romania’s minister for Communication and Information Society, Valerian Vreme, said at a conference in Bucharest that the country’s public authorities should “use free and open source systems, such as Linux, when a mature evaluation shows it is the proper solution”. According to a report at OSOR.EU, Vreme said he would not support a law which required institutions to use open source, as the job of the ministry was to present the pros and cons of a product and its alternatives.
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GitHub, for those that don’t know, is an online repository for source code and software projects. It supports both open and closed source projects, and gives developers a central location to both share and store their projects.
For the most part the projects listed on GitHub are legitimate, and in the case of the open source repositories, viewing and downloading is encouraged. But sometimes code that shouldn’t be available is posted there, and the owner wants it taken down quickly.
[...]
They describe it as the “decompiled source code” of the game and that it represents “infringing material”.
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One in eight government IT tenders in the European Union illegally specifies a brand, according to a new report from Openforum Europe (OFE).
OFE’s annual assessment of procurement in E.U. member states has found that 13 percent of a sample of tenders for IT products published in the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union made reference to specific trademarks or brand names. This is usually illegal under E.U. procurement rules as it is anti-competitive.
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Licensing
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Programming
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Mentor Graphics has developed Embedded Sourcery CodeBench, a next-generation integrated development environment (IDE) based on the open source GNU toolchain. The technology provides embedded developers with a powerful and easy-to-use tool suite for developing and optimising systems based on a broad range of devices from the most advanced microprocessors to microcontrollers.
Sourcery CodeBench incorporates technologies which Mentor acquired from Code Sourcery in November last year. The tool introduces new support for the NetLogic Microsystems XLP multicore processor, Freescale Kinetis and Xilinx Zynq. The Sourcery CodeBench product is integrated with the Mentor Embedded Sourcery Probes and third-party probes.
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Science
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Infrared images identified 17 lost pyramids and thousands of ancient settlements after researchers at the University of Alabama concluded a yearlong research, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
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Finance
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Wall Street executives and senior people inside Goldman Sachs (GS) say Lloyd Blankfein may want to hang on as CEO of the big Wall Street firm, but the final decision will not be his to make. Rather, his fate rests in the hands of the U.S. Justice Department, which is probing statements he made before a Senate committee investigating Goldman’s role in the 2008 financial crisis, FOX Business has learned.
If a probe by the DOJ into Goldman’s conduct ahead of the financial crisis is expedited and the focus turns to Blankfein’s actions, the thinking goes, Goldman’s board of directors will likely offer Blankfein up as a sacrifice in exchange for leniency.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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You are a new Governor pursuing a radical, budget-slashing agenda. In your spare time, you work to pass the most restrictive Voter ID law in the nation, which turns out to be quite costly. What to do? Here is an idea. To pay for your voter suppression efforts, why not rob public financing for elections, a system designed to encourage a diversity of candidates and a flourishing of democracy?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Earlier this year, Access Copyright won a Copyright Board decision that granted a new interim tariff for post-secondary education institutions. This is the first of three posts that examine the aftermath of that decision, the current economics behind Access Copyright, and the challenges the copyright collective faces over the long haul. The interim licence, which effectively sought to maintain the status quo as the copyright collective and educational institutions sort through the Access Copyright demand for a massive increase in its current tariff structure, provided the collective with a potential continued revenue stream and delayed what appeared to be a near-universal decision among Canadian universities to drop the Access Copyright licence altogether.
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I would like to add my condemnation to that of Sebastian Nerz and Rick Falkvinge, amongst others on yesterday’s police raid of German Pirate Party IT Assets.
A French investigation into an attack on the IT infrastructure of the energy group EDF resulted in German authorities disconnecting and then confiscating the German Pirate Party’s servers. This had the effect of partially crippling the party two days ahead of state elections in Bremen.
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As you will be well aware, German police officers seized a number of servers belonging to the Piratenpartei (The German Pirate Party), provided by AixIT in Offenbach. Some of these servers constituted the information technology and communications infrastructure of the party, a legal and officially recognised political party in Germany apparently at the behest of French investigators.
Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli – Minor Swing
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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As the U.S. arrival date approaches for the first Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer, hardware maker Xi3 on Friday announced its own entrant in the form of a desktop PC running Chrome OS.
[...]
Indeed, such flexibility is also a hallmark of Linux and most free and open source software, and it’s exciting to see it coming built into this new desktop PC. Can there ever be too much choice or room for customization? I’m thinking not.
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Server
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Stromasys S.A., the pioneering leader in legacy system virtualization, today announced the first production release and availability of the DEC Alpha virtualization product line (CHARON-AXP/4100/DS10/DS20/ES40/GS80/GS160/GS320) for Linux Red Hat Enterprise 6 (64 bit) and Fedora 14 (64 bit) hosting platforms. CHARON-AXP for Linux provides functionality and performance levels comparable to those of CHARON-AXP for Windows. Product details are readily available on the Stromasys website.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has indicated on the kernel developer mailing list that he will probably finish merging major changes for the next Linux version derived from the main development tree on Sunday evening, in advance of a trip to Japan on Monday. He had previously suggested that this might be the case in the release email for last week’s Linux kernel 2.6.39 release, with the aim of ensuring that subsystem maintainers were able to submit their changes on time before the closure of the merge window, which opens the development cycle.
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Support for running Linux on new hardware — whether it be motherboards, wireless adapters, graphics cards, or complete systems — has largely eased up in the past few years. As can be seen from Phoronix reviews of new hardware at launch, in many cases there is Linux support available (e.g. with AMD’s launch today of the FirePro V5900 and FirePro V7900 there is already Catalyst support) that continues to be refined over time whether it be in closed or open-source drivers. Even for vendors committed towards delivering open-source Linux hardware support, the path to new hardware enablement is not easy.
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Graphics Stack
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While not exactly uncommon for a major X.Org Server update, the video driver ABI for the DDX drivers will break with the forthcoming xorg-server 1.11 release. This means that for those using the proprietary graphics drivers, namely the AMD Catalyst driver, you may be stuck waiting a couple of months for support.
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Applications
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wxCam is a webcam application for linux. It supports video recording (in an avi uncompressed and Xvid format), snapshot taking, and some special commands for philips webcams, so you can also use the program for astronomy purposes. It supports both video4linux 1 and 2 drivers, so it should work on a very large number of devices.
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Creating a custom launcher for unity is simple. Quicklists provide a easy and efficient way to quickly access commonly used tasks for a specific application.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Phonon, the amazing multimedia abstraction layer for KDE and Qt software is growing younger by the day. How cool is that? Ladies and gentleman, I give you the all new phonon.kde.org…
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GNOME Desktop
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If you have read any of my recent articles that touched upon GNOME Shell, of if you use it yourself, you probably know and perhaps already use one or more GNOME Shell Extensions. These extensions are good for many things, from switching Shell themes to adding panel indicators.
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New Releases
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Wary Puppy is built from a “Puppy builder” system named Woof (http://bkhome.org/woof), which can build a Puppy Linux distribution from the binary packages of any other distro.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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During the course of running the beta for Fedora 15 KDE — Fedora 15 is out now, by the way, and you can get this outstanding release here — I had many problems with connectivity on some hardware running the beta, which forced me to look at alternatives.
It’s not that I wasn’t filing bug reports — I was — but I know enough about my abilities to realize that any contributions I might make to solving the problem would be outweighed by the fact that I’d clearly be in the way were I to try to fix them. Someday that may not be the case, but until then I let those with the heavier developer chops fix the big stuff and I’ll just be over there bowing in homage.
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There’s no question that GNOME 3 will be something of a shock for those accustomed to working with the GNOME 2.x line, but once you spend some time with it, GNOME 3 really does feel like a vast improvement over GNOME 2. After all, GNOME 2 borrowed much of its UI design and basic interface concepts from Windows 95 – and it’s been a long time since Windows 95 was cutting-edge.
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Today has been released Fedora 15 (codename Lovelock); it’s some time i don’t use Fedora as Desktop, i think to have switched distribution around Fedora 2 or 3, from that time I’ve become a Fan of Gentoo or all .deb distributions, but I’ve read wonderful review of the last 2/3 Fedora and so, why don’t test this.
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So, all in all, Fedora 15 looks like a whole lot of good work. Thank goodness for them too. With all the uncertainty in some projects lately, it’s nice that Debian and Fedora are sure bets.
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Fedora 15 is out. Get it while it is hot! It is probably the biggest distribution release of a all time with being first in shipping both GNOME 3 and systemd.
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Debian Family
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It’s been a slow process of cleanup, fixing everything that was broken by my upgrade to Debian 6.0, and KDE 4. Some things were fixed when I replaced KDE 4 with Trinity. But Trinity brought its own issues, so I’m fixing problems as I encounter them.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I was curious what Unity would look like, but the first thing I got was a message that Unity was not supported on my hardware, and it automatically switched to Gnome 2.32.2. My new desktop looked almost exactly like my old one. So now I got to wondering about all the rending of garments out there about Unity. If Gnome is still an option, and still works just fine.. what is the big deal? You’d think it was the end of the world as we know it.
The thing about Linux is that there is this choice thing. Linux does not just have one user interface. It does not even have just 10. Counting all the desktops, the new Lubuntu for example, plus all the different user interfaces in Android, and the embedded Linuxii and on and on, the user interface can pretty much be whatever it *needs* to be. It drives some people nuts, but it is also one of the strengths of Linux.
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Flavours and Variants
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The platform, called MeeGo Smart TV 1.2, is based on the MeeGo 1.2 release that came out last week. It is being reviewed now by the task group for Meego TV and should be released by the end of next month, though final tweaks might push it back a few weeks, said MeeGo TV Architect Dominique Le Foll.
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Phones
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Android
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2GB built-in memory, and a microSDHC slot. Like its predecessors, this model has Android (2.1) running things from inside. Look for the All-New NOOK at Barnes & Noble stores for $139 once it goes on sale June 10th.
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We’ll reveal more next week at the ASUS Computex press conference on 30th May, so drop back then!
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I guess in the end “open” is a loose term when it comes to the mobile market. Yes, Android is more open than a good deal of other mobile operating system alternatives – but it is far from the freedom we see in desktop computing. Our mobiles won’t be truly “open” until hardware manufactures stop riddling FOS operating systems with closed source hardware and software components.
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Experts say that interest in IT project management has grown substantially in recent years. A December 2010 report from Dice.com put project managers fourth on its list of the most in-demand IT jobs for 2011. And a Forrester report found that for 2011, CIO priorities are shifting from cost reduction to improving execution. As a result, they’re looking to the disciplines of project management and project portfolio management to help them “allocate resources effectively while killing off bad ideas quickly.”
Project managers have a huge list of software tools that can help them do their jobs, ranging from simple spreadsheets to groupware with collaboration features to full project management solutions. These tools can be very expensive, but a growing number of open source projects offer similar functionality without the high price tag.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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We all have similar goals: a free office suite, available to everyone. So let’s not discuss about the past, about what has happened and about the reasons that led to this, but rather focus on the future.
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Business
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One of the ‘things I wrote down during OSBC’ was this statement from Benchmark EIR, Rob Bearden:
“Misalignment between a business model and the community’s tolerance point will never be accepted. This will manifest itself in multiple distributions.”
At first glance the statement may seem obvious to anyone who has studied open source-related business strategies or communities, but I believe provides the context for further understanding the complexities of balancing the needs of a business for control and the needs of a community for openness.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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That Free Software from its conception until now is not only an alternative software without viruses or a software given gratis. Is another way of life. Another point of view. Another development model which can help confront with the crisis.
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Florian Effenberger has been a Free Software evangelist for many years. Pro bono, he is founding member and part of the Steering Committee at The Document Foundation. He has previously been active in the OpenOffice.org project for seven years, most recently as Marketing Project Lead. Florian has ten years’ experience in designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on Free Software. He is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as Free Software, Open Standards and legal matters.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Sweden’s public administrations, municipalities and health care are increasingly turning to free and open source software solutions, following legal clarifications made to a public procurement framework contract. From April 2011, a new framework agreement makes providers of services based on this type of software legally responsible for issues pertaining to copyright, licences and distribution. This has made public administrations less hesitant about using open source, says Daniel Melin, one of the software procurement specialists at Kammarkollegiet, a government agency.
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All truth passes through three stages, said the philosopher Schopenhauer. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Just over a week ago the Financial Times paraphrased the formula I have been promoting for a decade in business, and in Politics for the last five years:
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Foosball tables, that ever-present staple of dot-com startups, YMCA rec rooms and your parents’ basement, have long been in need of a digital upgrade. Now, a German interactive firm has devised a way for you to spruce up the play behind those miniature plastic soccer players.
[...]
Unfortunately, the actual detailed instructions on how to complete all the steps haven’t yet been posted, but SinnerSchrader claims they have a proof-of-concept prototype that works, and that the blueprint and software will be available for download soon.
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Science
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Researchers have set a new record for the rate of data transfer using a single laser: 26 terabits per second.
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Security
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The cost of a criminal intrusion that exposed sensitive data for more than 100 million Sony customers and resulted in a 23-day closure of the PlayStation Network will cost the company at least $171 million, executives said.
The estimated cost doesn’t included expenses related to any lawsuits that may be filed in response to the security breach, which was discovered on April 19. The estimate includes expenses of an identity theft prevention program and promotional packages to win back customers, among other things.
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We have mentioned the “Microsoft Support” scams a few times over the last 6 months or so (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=10135), but a recent change in their operations grabbed my interest. A colleague of mine mentioned that other day that he had been the recipient of the mystical “Microsoft Support” call to inform him that they had received an alert from his computer. It was the usual scenario, with a twist.
In previous iterations of this scam the person on the phone would get you to click through to the event viewer to “find something red”. Strangely enough there is usually something red in most people’s event log log. However, do not despair if you don’t have anything red, yellow is just as bad. Once the problem (well any problem) was identified your support would have expired and they redirect you to a web site where you can part with your money and download some version of malware.
The new iteration of the scam goes one step further. Rather than get the victim to look, they get you to install teamviewer (although no doubt other similar tools are likely used). They take control of your machine and start moving the files across. Manually infecting, sorry fixing, your machine. In this particular instance they noticed they were in a VM and promptly started removing the files they had moved, before the link was dropped and the phone call terminated.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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All eyes remain on London for the second day of the US president’s state visit, which will see talks on violence in the Arab world. These talks come amid calls for Obama and British PM, David Cameron, to overcome their addiction to war games.
Obama’s visit comes as NATO escalates its involvement in the war in Libya. France has said it will deploy helicopters, bringing combat operations closer to the ground. The global war machine rumbles on, with the alliance of London and Washington in the engine room – and this new agreement to pool information and resources may only add fuel to the fire.
Warm greetings and a royal banquet on the opulent premises of Buckingham palace – Britain has well and truly rolled out the red carpet for Barack Obama, designed to affirm the so-called “special relationship” between the two nations.
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NATO warplanes pounded Tripoli for a second day, raising military pressure on Muammar Gaddafi while diplomatic efforts mounted to force his departure.
Six loud explosions rocked Tripoli late on Tuesday within 10 minutes, following powerful strikes 24 hours earlier, including one on Gaddafi’s compound, that Libyan officials said killed 19 people and state television blamed on “colonialist crusaders.”
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The Center for Media and Democracy, Common Cause, the AFL-CIO, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen and other organizations have signed onto a letter to members of Congress opposing a draft bill by Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) that would weaken whistleblower protection and award programs at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). Grimm’s bill seeks to strip newly-enacted protections for whistleblowers who face retaliation for contacting enforcement agencies. It would also remove incentives for corporate insiders to inform regulators about wrongdoing, hamstring enforcement at the SEC and CTFC and give lawbreaking financial firms a way to escape accountability for their actions.
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Cablegate
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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism picked up the Digital Media prize for it’s dedicated website www.iraqwarlogs.com at the 2011 Amnesty Media Awards on Tuesday.
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Officers received training biased against the United States at a prestigious Pakistan army institution, according to Wikileaks, underscoring concern that anti-Americanism in the country’s powerful military is growing amid strains with Washington.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The folks at Recompute have taken the notion of “Going Green” to a whole new level. They’ve made computer cases out of recyclable cardboard. We had the pleasure of speaking with Recompute’s Brenden Macaluso and took one of their computers for a test drive.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs has already received subpoenas from unnamed regulators investigating its mortgage securities operations. Now, federal prosecutors appear to be interested in those operations as well, and subpoenas could follow.
If so, this would signal a new and potentially more threatening inquiry into its conduct during the financial crisis.
Goldman paid $550 million last year to settle civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its structuring of a collateralized debt obligation known as Abacus that regulators said was designed to fail. But the size of that settlement may pale in comparison if federal prosecutors find sufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges.
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CUNY Professor Fred Kaufman and FBN’s Charlie Gasparino debate the growing pressure for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to step down.
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When Goldman Sachs went public 12 years ago this month, an elite group of 221 executives controlled the strategy and shares of the investment bank.
While the clubby culture remains, the tight-knit group has lost its viselike grip on the company, as the wishes of the insular partnership have given way to the demands of the outside shareholders. The roughly 480 partners currently own less than 10 percent of the company, down from approximately 60 percent at the initial public offering in 1999.
Their power base may soon erode further. Senior Goldman executives are considering whether to cull partner-heavy divisions like investment banking, according to people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak on the record.
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Over the last few weeks prices on oil, food and gold have all hit all-time highs, and then suffered pricipitous drops. And there seems to be little agreement as to why.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The reaction of health insurers to the Obama administration’s requirement that they start justifying rate increases of 10 percent or more was quick and predictable: “Not fair!”
The PR and lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) absolved the industry of any responsibility for constantly rising premiums and pointed the finger of blame at just about everyone else. The real culprits, AHIP president Karen Ignagni insisted, are greedy doctors and hospitals, state legislators who make insurers provide coverage for an overly broad range of illnesses, and, of course, irresponsible American citizens, especially healthy young people who decide not to buy insurance.
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Privacy
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Lawyers and celebrities seeking to prevent the world knowing their indiscretions have another hurdle in their path – Wikipedia – after its founder, Jimmy Wales, pledged to resist pressure to censor entries.
Referring to the case of the “family footballer” who has injuncted the media from revealing that he had an affair with the Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas – whose Wikipedia page now records this fact – Mr Wales said: “This only became a story because the footballer is pursuing legal action against Twitter. It started to become a big political and social issue. Once that happens it is a valid issue for Wikipedia. As an encyclopaedia, we try to document facts taken from reputable sources. We should not be stopped from recording facts.
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Whenever an average consumer is confronted with the idea of “opting in,” typically they don’t bother. They are not aware they have a choice, it’s too complicated to follow through or they simply don’t understand the importance.
A great example of this is Facebook’s introduction of HTTPS via opt-in back in January. In a post on the Facebook developer blog, Naitik Shah points out that 9.6 million Facebook users are now using HTTPS on the service.
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BT reserves, and makes use of, the right to remotely detect all devices connected to LANs owned by its broadband customers – for their own good, of course.
BT Broadband customers can expect to have their network checked any time the operator feels it needs to take a peek to help it provide the service, or when the safety of the customer is in doubt – the latter being the motivation behind the only instance where we know the capability has been used.
That happened last week, when some BT Broadband customers received letters about the kit they had plugged into their networks.
The kit in question were powerline networking (PLT) boxes originally supplied by BT. Some of the units supplied suffered a manufacturing flaw that could, potentially, expose live wires. So BT shipped out replacements back in October last year. But customers who eschewed the operator’s advice (having examined the devices and satisfied themselves that they were safe) have now received letters telling them that BT’s “remote diagnostic test” shows the devices are still connected and warning the customers of the ongoing danger.
PLT devices don’t have IP addresses; they operate like switches, so they shouldn’t be detectable from the internet. We assume that BT is getting round this issue by running a scan of MAC addresses from the supplied router, but the company hasn’t confirmed that.
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FURIOUS residents have taken action against a CCTV camera they say is spying on their homes.
They have branded the device on Elm Drive, Mold, as Big Brother having ‘gone mad’ after discovering it was pointing at a row of houses instead of a trouble hotspot opposite.
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I wrote last Friday’s blog before the weekend’s Twittering events and it is quite clear that the injunction protecting the footballer’s privacy is unsustainable. Clearly barring all of the press from mentioning a name simply is a non-starter (especially as the footballer’s name was chanted by fans at yesterday’s Premier League games).
However, several facts are being missed in the current reporting furore. First is that the Court granted the footballer an injunction because the newspaper concerned was the beneficiary of an unsuccessful blackmail attempt. Then the newspaper concerned arranged photographers to be present at meetings between the woman and footballer as pretence so that it could claim that it stumbled on their relationship by accident.
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As of May 25, new European privacy laws come into play, which will determine how web users can be tracked online.
The changes will require technology companies, retailers and other suppliers that track information online (usually via cookies) to seek consent from web users in order to do so.
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Civil Rights
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The identity assurance scheme, announced by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude last week, will create services that will verify a person’s identity when they access public services online. The scheme will, according to Maude, allow people to access various government services online without having to remember multiple log-in details.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Netherlands might be a tiny country, but when it comes to broadband, it is one that likes to make big moves. It had been quick to embrace fiber broadband. It was early to the idea of gigabit per second connectivity. And now it is enacting a law that guarantees “net neutrality” for its citizens.
The country’s telecom law was amended yesterday, to ensure free access, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation. In addition to the wired Internet, the new amendment will ensure network neutrality is extended to the mobile network and services such as Skype are allowed to work without interference.
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For some time, French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy has talked about his dream of a “civilized” Internet, but this dream has long been a nightmare for those who worry that “civilization” is really a code for “regulations favorable to big business and the national security state.” To make his vision a reality, Sarkozy helped to create this week’s e-G8 meeting currently underway in the Tuileries Gardens next door to the Louvre—and the critics are fuming.
“I was invited to the e-G8 and declined,” said author and activist Cory Doctorow recently. “I believe it’s a whitewash, an attempt to get people who care about the Internet to lend credibility to regimes that are in all-out war with the free, open ‘Net. On the other hand, I now have a dandy handwriting sample from Sarkozy should I ever need to establish a graphological baseline for narcissistic sociopathy.”
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Do you know what happens on Wednesday this week? In late 2009, the European Parliament and all 27 EU Member States agreed that the new telecom rules must be implemented into national laws by 25th May 2011. I know Member States are working hard to meet the deadline – and there are only two days left. But let me be clear, if these rights are not made available in practice, I will take the necessary measures to fix the situation.
Both citizens and businesses across Europe will benefit from the new EU telecom rules. From higher levels of consumer protection and more choice, to improved online privacy and safety and more consistent regulation across the EU, I hope customers will take full advantage of the opportunities these new rules will give them.
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DRM
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In a little over a week, we surpassed our goal of taking 200 brick orders for Nintendo, to protest their claim that they have the right to “brick” (disable) users’ devices when used outside of Nintendo’s outrageous Terms of Service.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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“I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call ‘intellectual property.’ I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.
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Copyrights
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As detailed in our earlier reports, anti-piracy company Trident Media Guard (TMG) recently failed to secure some of their systems. Blogger and security researcher Olivier Laurelli, aka Bluetouff, originally reported the breach which included a wide open virtual ‘test’ machine containing various tools. These, of course, spilled into the wild.
Jeremy Zimmermann
Credit: TinyOgg
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05.24.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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I happened to chance upon a post which spoke about Desktop Linux being the final frontier for Linux as it has already conquered the server market. To break the barrier vendors need to bundle Linux or its derivatives with their hardware. It seems Ubuntu has now made them think along those lines and Ubuntu preloaded PC’s have started to trickle in. Lets have a look at some of them.
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Kernel Space
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While it’s not known yet what the next Linux kernel will be called, right now it’s looking like the next release could be the Linux 3.0 kernel. With that said, David Airlie has a pull request to go in before the merge window closes for the Linux 2.6.40/3.0 kernel. He’s sent in the DRM pull request for this next kernel as the Gardenshed-rc1 kernel.
This pull request brings initial support for Intel Ivy Bridge (the next-generation 22nm successor to Sandy Bridge that’s launching before year’s end) and “hopeful” RC6 support. This Intel code is also working better for me with Sandy Bridge support overall after the last-minute SNB fallout in the Linux 2.6.39 kernel pertaining to semaphores.
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The discussion surrounding Linus Torvalds’ proposal to end the Linux 2.6 kernel series and continue on as the Linux 3.0 kernel has continued on since it began less than 24 hours ago. The reaction has largely been positive and supportive of this proposed change. Of the few objections, some see no reason to mess around with the versioning, but now there may be a reason for this change: to drop the old cruft that’s been living in the kernel.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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In all the articles this past month about GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity, video drivers have received only passing mention. Yet video drivers (or their lack) could not only determine each desktop’s success, but also be the area where each has the most influence on Linux and free and open source software (FOSS).
Specifically, I’m referring to the fact that drivers with 3-D hardware acceleration are required by both GNOME 3 and Unity. Whether each development team decided on this requirement separately, or whether one decided that it must match the other in sophistication, will probably never be known. But the fact remains that two of the leading desktops now require what, for FOSS, is advanced — at times, even bleeding edge — technology.
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Jack Wallen was jonsing for GNOME 3 and discovered the best route to this new desktop was Fedora 15 beta. Can you image how surprised Jack was to find out that GNOME 3 blows away Ubuntu Unity? Read on to find out more.
In lieu of the release of Ubuntu 11.04 and the default Unity desktop, it seems GNOME 3 (aka GNOME Shell) has fallen out of the spotlight. Most GNOME-based distributions have been sticking with classic GNOME and, well, there’s Ubuntu. And since GNOME 3 doesn’t play well at all with Ubuntu 11.04, it’s in a bit of a situation. Unless you’re willing to give Fedora 15 beta a go.
I decided I needed to do just that, since I am ever so quickly becoming disillusioned by Unity. Believe me, I wanted to like Unity — and I did, at first. It seemed very slick, efficient, and just what the stale desktop needed. But then, after a few weeks of use, I realized there were many annoyances. It was time for something completely different, and that something was GNOME 3.
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New Releases
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This release of GParted further improves motherboard BIOS RAID support and includes bug fixes, and language translation updates.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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As heart-breaking as it is to cancel a years old tradition (we started the tradition of gathering the community for a face-to face meeting in the very release day with Fedora 8 and continued it release after release, no matter what), this time there will be no Fedora 15 release party in Bucharest.
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Here’s the announcement from Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith.
Several new features are available, many which I am excited about.
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Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 15! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have several major new features with special focus on desktops, developers, virtualization, security and system administration.
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Fedora Linux 15 is now available, providing users on the desktop with a full GNOME 3 experience including the GNOME Shell user interface.
Fedora 15, codenamed ‘Lovelock’ also introduces new security, spin, networking and virtualization features to the community Linux project, sponsored by Red Hat.
“GNOME Shell is a big change and I’d be doing people a disservice if I didn’t say that GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell is a fairly radical departure from the GNOME 2 experience,” Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader told InternetNews.com. “That being said, a lot of people find the change refreshing.”
[...]
“Personally, I have found GNOME 3 to be quite usable,” Smith said.
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The Fedora Project proudly announced a few minutes ago (May 24th) the immediate availability for download of the final and stable version of the highly anticipated Fedora 15 operating system.
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Debian Family
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When the Personal Package Archive (PPA) system was brought out of beta in November 2007, it was heralded as a game changer for Free Software developers within the Ubuntu community and beyond.
The PPA system was designed to make it easier for developers to get their software packaged and available to users for testing, thereby speeding up project development and delivering higher quality software.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Indeed, Linux is marching forward as the core platform driving solutions such as Chrome OS and Android that impose none of the historical administrative hurdles on users that some Linux distros used to impose. Graphical environments for interacting with Linux, ranging from GNOME to Unity, are reaching millions of users. For many “Linux users,” Linux–in the old “administration required” sense– doesn’t enter the equation anymore.
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The Linux crowd has a reputation as a group that doesn’t like paying for things. That stereotype may or may not be fair, but either way, it hasn’t stopped Canonical from introducing more than a dozen for-purchase software packages to Ubuntu Desktop users over the last 10 months. Here’s a look at what the company has done, and what it says about end users in the open source channel.
It might be hard to believe, now that the Software Center has assumed such a central role in Ubuntu for adding, removing and maintaining software applications, that back in the day — until 2009, to be exact — the Software Center didn’t exist at all.
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Google has decided to block the access to Google Movies for all devices running on any unofficial versions of the Android operating system, modified through the process known as Android root.
This type of intervention provides users with administrative rights on the operating system installed on the phone, thus removing all the restrictions which protected the Android platform against any unauthorized interferences on system’s components.
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It’s time for impossible to prove conjecture Tuesday! Today I’ll be looking at freedom and price. Those two great pillars of our movement from barbaric propriety and gouging monopolies into a bright future of open sharing and low-low prices.
I read about the Future of Open Source Survey and according to it’s findings most respondents value ‘open source’ and will be deploying it. But more intriguingly this time around instead of valuing ‘open source’ for costs reasons, the value is more firmly placed in Freedom.
[...]
Once you’re using an open source platform, of course it’s much easier to calculate the benefits of investing in the improvement of the code (hiring/contracting developers) against simply buying a replacement off the shelf product. This is what makes advocating FOSS so interesting, you never know if the person you’re convincing to use Ubuntu will turn around and spend money on helping it grow later.
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Flavours and Variants
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Here is a look at everything that is offered with the stunning new release of Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. With the Stability of Ubuntu and the powerful KDE software selection, this distribution is ideal for desktops and laptops. Try downloading the Plasma netbook or Plasma desktop editions for a workspace that will suit your every need. The latest version of the KDE desktop offers many features and improvements that make everyday tasks faster and easier to complete. Kubuntu has been among my favorite distributions for quite some time now, and this release definitely ranks near the top.
[...]
the awesome KDE software selection ensure that Kubuntu is always a worthy download.
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Phones
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Google released an update to the mobile Web version of Google Maps on Friday, adding many features previously included in the native app—well, the Android app, anyway. The added features bring Web Maps up to par with the native app Android users have had for some time, though the Web app is less slick on Android in comparison to the native app. The mobile Web version also makes many features available to iOS users that never made it to the native app, such as bicycling route overlays and directions.
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Android
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Recent comments about Android’s alleged violations of the GPL have been proven to be little more than smoke and mirrors, according to Free Software advocate Bradley M. Kuhn, but there are instances of Android GPL violations out there, Kuhn writes.
This all started on May 11, when I posted an article that dove into the meaning of the Android operating system’s Apache Software License (ASL). That’s operating system, not the Android kernel. This was promoted by a May 9 statement from Google that the source code for the current version of Android, Honeycomb, will not be released until the next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, is released.
In my article I walked through how the ASL not only doesn’t specify when source code must be released but also how the ASL, which is a permissive, non-copyleft license, doesn’t even require source code to be released at all.
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Zanby, a Minneapolis-based maker of online community software, recently announced at the Open Gov West conference in Portland, Ore. that it is going open-source. The company released the code for its enterprise groupware under a GPL3 license and launched a community to encourage software developers to build new projects and help improve the Zanby codebase.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 5 beta release for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Android. The new desktop version includes a built-in release channel switcher and support for CSS animations. The new mobile version introduces support for the Do Not Track header and a number of other improvements.
Mozilla is transitioning to a faster-paced development model with shorter cycles between major releases. The organization is aiming to deliver three more major updates this year, bringing the Firefox version number to 7 by the end of 2011. To accommodate the more iterative release management strategy, Mozilla has established a system of release “channels” through which new improvements will flow before arriving in a stable release. It’s similar to the approach already used successfully by Google for its Chrome Web browser.
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SaaS
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Despite a lot of speculation lately about who’s winning the private-cloud race and what companies might be on the way out, it’s far too early to call the game in anyone’s favor. Private-cloud adoption is picking up, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous yet, and there’s plenty of time for everyone still standing to make the moves they need to in order to keep competing.
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Databases
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CLA
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As part of an interview in LWN, Mark Shuttleworth is quoted as wanting the community to view the use of contribution licensing agreements (CLAs) as a necessary prerequisite for open source growth and the refusal by others to donate their work under them as a barrier to commercial success. He implies that the use of a CLA by Sun for OpenOffice.org was a good thing. Mark is also quoted accusing The Document Foundation (TDF) of somehow destroying OpenOffice.org (OO.o) because of its decision to fork rather than contribute changes upstream under the CLA. But I’d suggest a different view of both matters.
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I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, for an wide-ranging, hour-long conversation while at Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest. In his opening talk, Shuttleworth said that he wanted to “make the case” for contributor agreements, which is something he had not been successful in doing previously. In order to do that, he outlined a rather different vision than he has described before of how to increase Linux and free software adoption, particularly on the desktop, in order to reach his goal of 200 million Ubuntu users in the next four years. While some readers may not agree with various parts of that vision, it is definitely worth understanding Shuttleworth’s thinking here.
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Some projects, like the GNU projects run by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in some instances require an assignment of code submissions if they are to be included in the project. [See, Contributing to GCC as an example. There the FSF asks that contributors either assign their copyright or disclaim it (put the code in the public domain). In neither case does the contributor retain any rights under copyright in their contribution. Such an approach likely works for the FSF because they have been a trusted partner in assuring code stays free.
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Business
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Bosworth has over 20 years of experience in the database industry, most recently as VP and GM of the database business unit of Quest Software. Under his leadership, the business grew from supporting traditional relational databases to a portfolio that now includes tools for cloud, NoSQL, columnar, and Hadoop databases, as well as business intelligence offerings. Prior to Quest, Bosworth led product teams for Embarcadero Technologies’ database productivity solutions. He holds a bachelor of science in computer science from the University of Louisville.
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Funding
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Public Services/Government
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U.S. Department of Defense has published a report with lessons learned on the use of open technologies: “The 68-page report has the goal of helping the U.S. government to implement what they refer to as open technology development (OTD) for government software projects.
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Earlier this month, Bell and Quebecor, two giants in the Canadian broadcasting and telecom landscape, became embroiled in a dispute over Sun News Network, the recently launched all-news network. At first glance, the dispute appeared to be little more than a typical commercial fight over how much Bell should pay to Quebecor to carry the Sun News Network on its satellite television package. When the parties were unable to reach agreement, Bell removed Sun News Network, leaving a placeholder message indicating “the channel has been taken down at the request of the owners of Sun News Network.”
While the dispute is now before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission – Quebecor claims Bell is violating the legal requirement against “undue preferences”- more interesting is Bell’s claim about the value of Sun News Network signal.
According to Mirko Bibic, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs at Bell Canada, the market value of Sun News Network is zero because Quebecor makes the signal available free over-the-air in Toronto and is currently streaming it free on the Internet. Given the free access, Bell maintains that the signal no longer has a market value.
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Health/Nutrition
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From next year, GPs will receive a payment for every obese patient they advise to lose weight – on top of money for keeping lists of those who weigh too much.
The plans form part of a desperate bid to tackle soaring rates of obesity in Britain, with two out of three adults now classed as overweight or obese.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Police in Wales hold more personal records than there are people in the country, our figures show.
Three of the nation’s four police forces hold 3.2 million individual records between them – with hundreds of thousands relating to innocent victims.
Civil liberties groups called the “vast” scale of the databases “horrifying”. But the figures also show just how many people are touched by crime, from perpetrators to victims to those who call in an offence.
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Cablegate
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The Frontline documentary will include footage of a number of individuals who have a collective, and very dirty personal vendetta, against the organization. These include David Leigh, Adrian Lamo, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Eric Schmitt and Kim Zetter. While the program filmed other sources, such as Vaughan Smith who provided a counter-narrative, these more credible voices have been excluded from the program presented to the US public.
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Finance
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Until last Thursday, there was some cause for hope. True, the day before the New York Times had written a piece reporting on the growing prevalence of “acqhire” transactions. That’s where a company (like Facebook) buys a company for millions of dollars, only to promptly shut it down. Why? Because it wants the employees — $500,000 to $1 million per engineer is the current going rate. That’s not quite as high as it was during the Internet Bubble years, but the same companies are doing lots of big-ticket acquisitions as well. Whether or not these transactions pay off in new revenues, the dilution to existing stockholders will be the same.
And then there are the valuations. Groupon, which sold its first half price pizza coupon only two and a half years ago, turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google only a few months ago. By April, it was said to be valuing itself in the $15 — $20 billion range. But that was a whole month ago, so the number $25 billion is now in the air. And then there’s Facebook. Goldman Sachs, everyone’s pick for most savvy investment bank on the Street, announced an investment round in Facebook in January of this year at an eye-popping $50 billion valuation. Facebook had revenues last year south of $2 billion.
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Censorship
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At the moment it is unclear what types of video are being selected by the government for blocking, however Google provides a website detailing how many requests each country’s government have made for the removal of data.
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Privacy
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In a move that could open up a whole new debate on privacy issues surrounding cloud computing, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced a bill in the Senate that would require authorities to get a court-ordered search warrant before gaining access to messages and other data stored on cloud platforms. Currently, access to such data is subject to restrictions set by the 25-year old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The newly proposed bill, dubbed the ECPA Amendments Act, not only requires a search warrant for access to cloud data, but also requires officials to have probably cause to obtain one. This proposed legislation promises to have a big impact on cloud players, including the many open source cloud players.
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I think it’s fair to say that we’re all comfortable with public content being served from public services that anyone can access. I think it’s also fair to say that given the choice, we would all choose low cost public services to store un-sensitive, non-critical or unbound by law and compliance data.
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controversial CCTV policy in schools is under review after a meeting held last Friday.
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Under the European Commission’s Privacy and Electronic Directive, due to come into force on Wednesday, British firms and organisations with websites based in Britain will have to ask for permission to store and retrieve information on users’ computers – a process done by installing computer code known as a cookie.
Businesses could face a maximum fine of £500,000 if they fall foul of the regulations. But there is concern that many may not be aware of the changes or what steps they need to take to ensure they do not breach the new regulations.
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This story slipped in under the radar recently, but it is important that it gets more exposure. Freedom of Information requests recently revealed that police departments in Britain are routinely paying marketing companies huge fees to carry out ‘customer satisfaction’ surveys. The cost of these surveys is around £1,000,000 per year.
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Civil Rights
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Wow. In the legacy entertainment industry’s latest “you’re either with us or against us” mentality, it appears that expressing concern about the free speech implications of bills like PROTECT IP means you’re a horrible, horrible person. Both the MPAA and RIAA are quite upset about Eric Schmidt coming out against PROTECT IP and saying that the impact on free speech would be disastrous. Both responses are so sickeningly disingenuous, it really makes you wonder how out of touch they are.
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Crime-scene investigators could soon have the ability to perform DNA fingerprinting on site without the need for lengthy post-analysis in a lab.
Currently, forensic swab samples obtained at a crime scene are sent off for analysis where a specific part of the sequence, containing blocks of repeating elements that vary between individuals, are amplified and then read out.
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A merged strategy for data protection and freedom of information has been launched by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
The information regulator said it was committed to integrating their data protection and freedom of information responsibilities and that the new Information Rights Strategy was designed to “make this commitment a reality”.
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Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, revealed last week that the coalition government plans to develop a national ID database to allow for easy access to online public services.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Two researchers at Georgia Tech can tell you exactly how American ISPs shape Internet traffic, and which ones do so. Bottom line: of the five largest Internet providers in the country, the three cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox) employ shaping while the telephone companies (AT&T, Verizon) do not—though that fact is less significant for the user experience than it might first sound.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Digital libraries may be able to include more copyrighted works under European Union rules proposed today.
The European Commission is seeking to bolster the EU-funded Internet library Europeana, a rival to the Internet book service operated by Google Inc. (GOOG), owner of the most popular Internet- search engine.
Some so-called orphan works, including newspapers and video footage for which no one can be identified to authorize digital use, may be included in digital libraries after a “diligent search” can’t trace the author, the commission said.
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Entrepreneur Media Inc. sells the idea of the self-made little guy getting ahead. Based in Irvine, Calif., EMI, as the company is known, publishes Entrepreneur, a monthly magazine with a circulation of 607,000 and a colorful history. According to newspaper reports, the periodical’s founder and former owner, Chase Revel, once tried robbing banks for a living. Today, EMI conducts seminars revealing “business success secrets” of a more mainstream nature. It markets instructional CDs and sells advertising to package deliverers, health insurers, and franchisers such as Wahoo’s Fish Taco restaurants. In other words, EMI caters to all things entrepreneurial. Strangely, it also smashes the dreams of the self- starters it aims to serve.
[...]
An attorney with the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins informed Castro that EMI owns the U.S. trademark for the word “entrepreneur.” With 2,000 lawyers in 31 offices around the world, Latham polices EMI’s intellectual property aggressively. The firm even instructed Castro to surrender his domain name to EMI. “If you fail to abide by these demands,” the letter said, “Entrepreneur Media will have no choice but to take appropriate action to prevent continued use of an infringing mark and domain name.”
Tetris Cube Tutorial
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Fedora 15: Lovelock Continues the Fedora Heritage of Innovation
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Desktop
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At Google I/O earlier this month, Google introduced (briefly) a Samsung-labeled Chrome desktop box. But while it looked a lot like the Mac Mini, there still aren’t any true details to show people what it may be capable of. Google also stated that they’d continue to push Chromium for those who want a taste of Chrome on a non-sanctioned machine, and it looks like Xi3 is jumping on that notion to make a timely announcement.
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Server
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For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.
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Terracotta, home of open source projects such as the Ehcache Java cache and Quartz scheduler, has been acquired by Software AG. The acquisition will, says the German company, act as a foundation for its in-memory and cloud offerings, allowing it to run business processes which use in-memory cached data access at “up to a thousand times faster than database access”; it expects to offer the first combined products in the fourth quarter of 2011.
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Software AG has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Terracotta. Terracotta provides in-memory technology for high performance applications and cloud services. The company also owns the de facto caching standard for enterprise Java used by over 1 million developers worldwide.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The MeeGo conference is running from tomorrow through Wednesday in San Francisco. This is the first conference for the Moblin-Maemo-mix since Nokia parted ways to team up with Microsoft and ship Windows Phone 7 on their future devices, but there’s interesting work still going on in the MeeGo world. In particular, of interest to many Phoronix readers will be the fact that it sounds like the adoption of the Wayland Display Server is going quite well within the MeeGo world. It appears that there’s already an experimental version of MeeGo Tablet UX working atop Wayland.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Hacker Evolution Duality, new hacking simulation and strategy game developed by Exosyphen studios will be available for Linux and you can pre-order the game now for $19.95.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Calligra project, part of the KDE community, has announced the release of the first snapshot for version 2.4 of the Calligra Suite, a set of productivity applications. According to the developers, since splitting with KOffice five months ago, they have improved their core libraries as well as the applications themselves, adding that their goal is to “provide the best application suite on all platforms based on open standards.”
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GNOME Desktop
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If you use GNOME 3 and Adwaita theme, GTK2 applications look different (as in ugly) than GTK3 apps. That’s why maximo1010 @ Ubuntuforums has ported Adwaita GTK3 theme to GTK2.
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Even more Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal customization tips. We have seen some of the most beautiful themes for Ubuntu 11.04 Unity desktop already and one of the highlights of that list was Nautilus Elementary Ambiance Theme. We think we have just found out an icons theme that gels pretty well with Nautilus Elementary Ambiance Theme and it’s called Clarity.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UDS-O is now over, I had a chance to meet with the Ensemble team (a bunch of awesome engineers), also had a chance to attend or lead a few sessions concerning future directions of Ensemble. I’ll try to summarize UDS outcome wrt Ensemble from a project newcomer perspective
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Phones
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Android
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Rooting and jailbreaking are not illegal, but they usually will void your phone’s warranty. Typically, though, you can restore the original OS before taking a phone in for service, and the company would never know.
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According to reports Google is blocking the installation of its Android Movie Market on rooted Android devices. Google’s decision seemed to be driven by content providers who don’t want rooted phones to be able to copy or download their movies.
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The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) has announced the launch of Miro 4, the open-source desktop media player (read more about Miro here).
Miro 4.0 allows users to manage music including iTunes libraries, videos, playlists and apps in one place and to sync these digital libraries with Android devices.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a remarkable media-chomping tablet with Android 3.0, a crisp, 10.1-inch touchscreen, 10-hour battery life, and a slim, lightweight design, says this eWEEK review. Despite the modest three-megapixel camera and lack of ports — or even an SD slot — the tablet is said to best the Motorola Xoom for straightforward media consumption purposes.
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Additionally, prices for Android 3.1-based tablet PCs to be launched by other vendors in the second half of the year may also be affected, with ASPs of Android 3.1 models likely to be dragged down by US$100, the sources commented.
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Red Flag Software, the Linux major of China, is planning to release one of the first tablet operating systems based on the MeeGo open source software platform.
The Red Flag Midinux Tablet Edition operating system will incorporate the MeeGo v1.2 common code base and a user experience built by Red Flag Software that uses the MeeGo user interface building blocks and demonstrates the flexibility MeeGo offers companies to differentiate their products. The tablet will be demonstrated at Computex in Taipei May 31 to June 4, 2011.
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Digital Opportunity – a review of Intellectual Property and Growth, the 132 page report published on May 18, 2011, is the result of an intensive 6 month independent review lead by Ian Hargreaves, commissioned by PM David Cameron in November 2010.
The basis for the review was a ministerial concern that in a digital age the intellectual property framework was not keeping pace with new innovation an
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Jim Jagielski, Simon Phipps and Mark Radcliffe at OSBC unveiled OSI plan during the ”A New OSI for a New Decade: Rebooting the Open Source Initiative OSI” session (presentation). Some reports stressed the importance of organizations, but volunteers are welcome too!
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla Foundation launched a beta version of its fifth edition of the Firefox Web browser Monday — just eight weeks after it rolled out Firefox 4.
This includes a mobile version for Android as well as versions for Windows, Mac and Linux desktops.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation presents the members of the Engineering Steering Committee, the second body to be announced – after the Membership Committee – of those envisioned by the foundation bylaws. The ESC has come into being in early 2011, and is now officially in place to coordinate all development activities and set future technology directions.
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The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has announced the members of the Engineering Steering Committee. This is the second body announced by TDF after the Membership Committee.
The ESC has come into being in early 2011, and is now officially in place to coordinate all development activities and set future technology directions.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Parallel 20115022 (‘Pakistan’) has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/
This is a major release. So far GNU Parallel has been focused on replacing a single for-loop. The Pakistan release introduces ways to replace nested loops.
If you are using the {1} {2} syntax for multiple input sources, then you need to read about –xapply as the function has changed.
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Public Services/Government
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The 68-page report has the goal of helping the U.S. government to implement what they refer to as open technology development (OTD) for government software projects. As part of OTD, the report includes a number of specific recommendations for open source software usage. Some of those recommendations are somewhat of a surprise, considering that the U.S. military is often seen as an organization that is not likely to be very open about their software development practices.
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Standards/Consortia
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Next time you feel like your head’s in the clouds, don’t fret: that’s where the action is. Advancements in information technology have made it possible to store virtually endless amounts of information in a system of “clouds.” Opening numerous possibilities, cloud computing is on par with the Internet in terms of its potential to change the face of computing and the way we live and do business.
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As the World IPv6 Day approaches, recent research reports show that a majority of organizations are still postponing migration to the IPv6 networking protocol. Despite the growing scarcity of IPv4 addresses, due in large part to the growth of mobile and embedded devices, a British Telecom Diamond IP survey says that only 35 percent of respondents considered IPv6 a “huge concern.”
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Group developing audit specs that could build faith in cloud applications
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Security
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A House of Lords Committee report spotlights the vital contribution the EU makes to UK security and urges swift action to implement European Union proposals to improve security in the UK and other Member States.
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Finance
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In a video interview with RT America, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, the author of Griftopia, says that as of now, and until the government more aggressively prosecutes financial fraud, Wall Street has a continued incentive to bend the rules in their favor. (Hat tip to Naked Capitalism.)
Since the financial crisis, Taibbi has been one of Wall Street’s most outspoken critics. Earlier this month, Taibbi wrote “The People. vs. Goldman Sachs,” a sweeping investigation into the Senate report on Goldman Sachs that accused the investment bank of profiting by misleading investors.
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The high profile financial analyst and investment manager Marshall Auerback explains in this exclusive interview his views on: the IMF; the ongoing financial crisis; the commodities rally; the implications of the current oil price; the conflict in Libya/Middle East; the rigging of the precious metal markets; and last but not least this, ironically spoken, “bunch of cranks“ – the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA.
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California reported its April jobs data on Friday. The LA Times repeated the figure, laid out in the report from EDD, that on a year-over-year basis the state had created 144,000 jobs. What The LA Times did not clarify is that these were non-farm payrolls. For the fuller picture of the Golden State’s job market, I track the total employment figure. In the same time period called out in media headlines, therefore, the number of employed persons actually fell by 22,000, from 15.960 million to 15.938 million. | see: California Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2000-2011.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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It was an unusual topic for the News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) CEO. In November, News Corp hired New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein as an advisor, and bought 90 percent of ed-tech provider Wireless Generation for $360 million. In January, Klein got his own education division in News Corp and a $2 million salary.
Judging from his keynote to the eG8, which was assembled by France’s president Sarkozy to hear tech business’ views to be fed to the French-hosted G8 summit, Murdoch is both passionate and excited about what he sees as both a duty and a business opportunity.
This could encompass both e-books and learning materials and group learning platforms, and could be a gauntlet thrown down to one of the digital learning sector’s big beasts – Pearson.
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Civil Rights
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A detailed analysis of exchanges between the French President and his former Minister of Foreign Affairs on G8 related matters appears in tomorrow’s edition of the French magazine Marianne. La Quadrature du Net has had access to sources that confirm the existence of a control-oriented policy, explicitly hostile to the support to the freedom of expression on the Internet, in blatant contrast with the farcical “eG8 forum” smokescreen. Governments must be made accountable for the positions they take on these issues when they speak behind close doors.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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We recently posted about an ITC report that, among other things, estimated that US companies “lost” $48 billion due to “piracy” in China. This $48 billion number generated plenty of headlines, and since the report was requested by the Senate, you can bet that it will be used politically. The problem, however, was that the methodology was ridiculous. Rather than using any sort of objective measure, the ITC went out and asked 5,000 businesses who were in “IP-intensive fields” what they thought their “losses” were, and then extrapolated out.
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ACTA
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We are writing to express our concerns with ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Whether the Parliament will ratify or reject ACTA, it will be a landmark decision. Yet, ACTA is still surrounded by uncertainties. We call upon you to decisively resolve these uncertainties. We urge the Parliament to seek an opinion of the European Court of Justice on the compatibility of ACTA with the EU Treaties, and to commission independent assessments of the effects ACTA will have on access to medicine, diffusion of green technologies needed to fight climate change, fundamental rights within and outside the Union, innovation, small and medium sized companies and a fair balance of interests.
Prior to ratifying the 1994 WTO TRIPS agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), the Commission asked the European Court of Justice whether TRIPS complied with the Treaties. The Court decided that the Community was not competent to ratify the criminal measures.
The Passion of the MeeGo Community
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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A whole lot of things, actually, among them the fact that Linux has become the engine that runs somewhat over 90% of the world’s supercomputers, Linux servers now handle a large fraction of all traffic on the Internet, Linux powers major stock markets all over the globe, and the Android surge is currently swamping iDevices of all sorts. But then there’s the desktop…
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Perhaps these errors are already here, perhaps they have been here all along. These ubiquitous (like my choice of big word?
errors which are so common in the mainstream desktop world now appear to be showing their faces more and more frequently in the hallowed Linux halls.
Granted I have created my fair share of PEBKAC and ID 10 T errors in my computing lifetime and no doubt I will create many more. As someone who is having trouble remembering yesterday’s breakfast I would bet on it being a dead cert. I would say that when comparing the different user bases between operating systems. The frequency of PEBKAC and ID 10 T errors is much lower for Linux than for the others.
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Desktop
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The 2120 I have, for example, sports a high resolution touch screen. It’s a resistive touch screen, so it’s no iPad with a keyboard, but many kids with development disabilities can handle a touch interface while their instructors and aids can make use of the keyboard. The touch screen works out of the box with Ubuntu Linux 11.04 as well as the included Windows Vista (yes, really, and no, I don’t know why they’re still shipping Vista) and the optional Windows 7.
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Kernel Space
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Since the release of the Linux 2.6.39 kernel on Thursday, Linus Torvalds opened the merge window for the Linux 2.6.40 kernel and it will stay open until month’s end. While the 2.6.40 kernel will bring several open-source graphics driver improvements (performance improvements, Intel Ivy Bridge support NVIDIA Optimus, etc), new hardware enablement, and other enhancements, there’s a few features that you will not find in this next major Linux kernel release.
[...]
- Along the same lines as Poulsbo, there still is no open-source upstream kernel driver for other PowerVR SGX hardware from Imagination Technologies. The Free Software Foundation deemed creating a reverse-engineered PowerVR driver for Linux to be a high priority, but there’s no active ongoing work towards reaching this goal. Fortunately, something good will soon be happening, but not to be found in the Linux 2.6.40 cycle.
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In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List today regarding the shortened merge window for the Linux 2.6.40 kernel, Linus Torvalds brings up that there’s already been many Linux 2.6 kernel releases and that he could end up tagging this as the Linux 2.8.0 kernel.
Linus issued an e-mail address today entitled (Short?) merge window reminder As mentioned last week when tagging the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, the Linux kernel creator expected the 2.6.40 merge window to be shorter than usual due to his travels concerning LinuxCon Japan at month’s end. The merge window is likely just to be shorter by a few days than normal, which is usually about two weeks following the major release of each kernel.
[...]
The Linux 2.6 kernel series is now on its way to its 40th release in the past seven years of development.
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It was just a few hours ago that we were the first news site to point out the message by Linus Torvalds on the kernel mailing list about his desire to end the Linux 2.6 kernel series and move future releases to the Linux 2.8 or even Linux 3.0 series. While efforts to change the Linux kernel versioning have been voiced in the past and ultimately failed, it looks like the effort this time around is building momentum and the change could very well happen.
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Applications
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We’ve covered a lot of applications for Linux, but we haven’t really touched upon the social media applications out there for this platform. When the whole tweetmania started, there were only a handful of social media apps for Linux, and those too were mostly Adobe Air-based. However, quicker than expected, a large amount of social media applications started coming out for this often ignored platform. But, despite there being a myriad of such applications, we have chosen to cover only the best ones.
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For anyone who has owned a Mac in the past few years, it is unlikely that you are not familiar with the wonderful Time Machine backup system that Apple has implemented on Mac OS X. The beauty of this backup software is that the backups are taken in a differential manner rather than backing up the entire system with every backup. This means that you use your backup storage more effectively. This also means that you have more versions of your backed up data available for restoration.
In TimeVault, the developers have tried to create a similar system for Linux-based machines. Because Mac OS is based on a system similar to that of Linux, this is quite possible. Tools such as rsync allow you to do this. However, TimeVault wraps all the fine tools with a nice looking graphical front end. Let’s take a look at TimeVault and take it for a test drive to see what it’s capable of.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Here is a guide that shows you how to assign a wallpaper to a specific workspace. To do this you need to have the CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) installed.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Calligra project has announced the first snapshot release of the Calligra suite, five months after Calligra and KOffice split ways. During that time, the Calligra team has improved the core libraries and all the applications.
This is a technical preview, not recommended for production work. Inge Wallin, the marketing coordinator for Calligra, says, “We have worked very hard to improve the underlying engine, making it more versatile and improving stability. The time has come to improve the user interfaces. This is why we are releasing the snapshot now. We want feedback on the user experience as it improves in future snapshots.”
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GNOME Desktop
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So where did this all start? Well you know the tinkering thing I was talking about? That is pretty much the ethos of the “hacker” subculture. Popular culture tells us this: hackers are the bad guys[1]. The actual definition is way more complicated. For the most part, if you ask someone in Linux/GNOME culture about the word hacker, they are going to distinguish between the computer criminals (which are referred to as black hats, crackers, or script kiddies) and the people who abide by the law but like to see how things work, fix them and/or repurpose them. This is where the need for Open Source comes in.
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As mentioned several times, we are lucky to have GNOME 3 PromoDVDs to give away, either at events, or in user groups. They really make a great material to distribute in order to promote GNOME 3, and to help people play with it once they get home. We dispatched 2,000 DVDs to five locations: China, Europe (Berlin), Europe (Paris), India and USA.
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Gnome Shell Weather extension displays the weather next to the clock in Gnome Shell. Unfortunately there’s no GUI to configure the extension so you must manually enter the YAHOO weather ID for your city in the extension.js file.
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good news for Virtual Machine addicts : VirtualBox team has fixed issues which were preventing VirtualBox to work properly with GNOME Shell. You need VirtualBox release 4.0.8 (minimum) and GNOME 3 live image release 1.3.0 (it contains updated VirtualBox guest additions, required for openGL).
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As things stand now, there are more Linux distributions available than most of us know what to do with. However, there are still instances where going along with the crowd and using a ready-made distribution might not be the right fit for your company.
Whether it’s from a branding perspective or marketing opportunities, the reasons to seek out an alternative to the “big name” distros could easily run on all day. In the end, though, the goal is find a way to integrate the advantages of the Linux desktop into your workplace without feeling like you’re being “re-branded” with the name of the chosen distribution itself.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Even though Mandriva picked up my wi-fi without any problem, it did not work in Mageia because the b43 files were missing. I read in the forums that they are planning to correct that problem and I ignore if they did it in the RC1. Anyway, one can get the same situation in Mandriva if one updates the kernel. I described how to solve this unexpected complication in Mageia here.
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Red Hat Family
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Like its parent operating system, Linux, and its open source rival, Xen, the kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor is said to be ready for prime time enterprise use.
That’s the message that Red Hat tried to broadcast at its recent annual summit in Boston. The Linux leader – the biggest corporate backer of KVM – announced at its recent summit a major partnership with IBM designed to advance KVM in the enterprise.
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Seven vendors recently launched the Open Virtualization Alliance, an organization aimed at promoting the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for enterprise applications. Initially formed by Red Hat and IBM, the Alliance also includes Intel, HP, BMC Software, Eucalyptus and SUSE Linux and is aiming to attract others involved with enterprise virtualization. The members clearly hope that KVM can provide an alternative to VMware, though they appear to have slightly different aims: the hardware vendors want to commoditize the hypervisor, the software vendors to leverage it as a way to sell service and support.
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Well, this “consortium” of consorts is made up of BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE. It’s rasion d’etre is to foster the adoption of open virtualisation technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
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Fedora
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In a nutshell, the Fedora Robotics SIG has been working hard over the past few releases to create a fast and easy way to dive into robotics development, for newbies and seasoned developers alike. The first visible result of this effort is the Fedora Robotics Suite, a package group that brings together many different robotics related libraries to make it as easy as possible for developers to use Fedora in their robotics projects.
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For some use cases, a one size fits all operating system doesn’t fit the bill. That’s where customized operating systems can come into play, with Linux being a key enabler.
As part of the upcoming Fedora 15 Linux release, there will be multiple ‘spins’ or customized variants of the general-purpose Linux operating system release, to meet specific needs and use-cases.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I bought a coffee machine just before the UDS. It’s a very user-friendly machine: you put in a capsule, pull a trigger, and voilá… latte macchiato (or capuccino, or espresso, or chococino, or whatever you like) is ready. You don’t need to know too much about coffee. You don’t even have to know how to froth milk… and you won’t burn your hand with the steam for sure. This machine provides me the perfect user experience: I can focus on my job which is turning caffeine into text.
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It has been over 3 weeks since I wrote about my adventure with the Latitude 2120. Time for an update!
After confirming that the DELL image I downloaded from the manufacturer’s site seemed to work fine, I ran the certification tests on the 10.10 build. They all passed! no glitch.
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Sometimes it seems like there just aren’t enough ways to endanger your stable Ubuntu set-up.
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The Linux crowd has a reputation as a group that doesn’t like paying for things. That stereotype may or may not be fair, but either way, it hasn’t stopped Canonical from introducing more than a dozen for-purchase software packages to Ubuntu Desktop users over the last 10 months. Here’s a look at what the company has done, and what it says about end users in the open source channel.
It might be hard to believe, now that the Software Center has assumed such a central role in Ubuntu for adding, removing and maintaining software applications, that back in the day — until 2009, to be exact — the Software Center didn’t exist at all.
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In the interests of transparency, at the beginning of each cycle I tend to summarize my team at Canonical’s plans for the forthcoming six month period of work. This is the result of an extensive process of assessing requirements, gathering needs, discussing topics at UDS, fleshing out actions, documenting blueprints, and determining resource availability. Part of the goal of this process is to ensure the team (Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, David Planella, and Ahmed Kamal) knows exactly what to do, but to also clearly communicate to other entities (such as senior management and the community) what the team is seeking to accomplish.
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s been a while since the buzz of the Open Source community has been wandering around Ubuntu and its various distro variants. Lubuntu, claimed to be a lighter version of Ubuntu, has now been officially recognised as a derivative of Ubuntu and will be released as Lubuntu 11.10 in October 2011. This is expected to be a milestone in the evolution of Light weight desktop environments and hopes to make its presence among smaller devices like net books and smart phones. Lubuntu is finally going mainstream and let us see what it brings to the table.
[...]
Lubuntu is growing into an amazing project with phenomenal contribution from the OpenSource community.
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Pinguy is a decent if confusing Ubuntu fork. It has a solid set of programs, although a third could be pruned away without blinking. Multimedia and desktop effects work really well. There were not many configuration errors or bugs, which is a nice thing considering the complexity of the interacting elements bundled with the distro.
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Instead of Unity, Mint 11, which is now at the release candidate stage, uses the old Linux Mint desktop layout, mintMenu system, and the same desktop elements featured in previous releases. It also doesn’t use GNOME 3.0. That’s fine by me since I don’t care for GNOME 3 at all, but my reasons for that are a story for another day. Today, I want to tell you why I think Mint 11 is a great desktop Linux for experienced Linux users.
To put Mint 11, Katya, which is based on Ubuntu 11.04, through its paces, I first installed it on one of my main Linux workstations. This is a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.
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The executive director of the Linux Foundation has outlined the financial and development virtues of the MeeGo mobile platform.
Jim Zemlin told developers at the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco that the mobile version of Linux could enjoy the same type of success claimed by its 20 year-old enterprise server counterpart.
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That was the message delivered at the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco on Monday by the executive director of The Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin and his supporting keynote cast.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In its quest to impart the knowledge of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to school children at a tender age, the previous government initiated what was termed ‘One Laptop Per Child Policy (OLPC).’
The initiative is to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries.
Since its introduction, the desire and anxiety of school children in the Eastern Region, particularly, those in the rural areas, to have a feel of computers have been in the balance.
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If you search the Web for flame wars between open source and proprietary software advocates, you will surely find more examples than you can use. Even just searching TechRepublic for such fights is likely to provide a glut of examples. Among such flame wars, it is dismayingly common to find a case of someone on the pro-Microsoft side of the divide blaming draconian licensing on people “stealing” software (never mind that theft and copyright infringement are not just distinct areas of law, but distinct concepts), and blaming the piracy on open source software advocates. This unfairly characterizes anyone who uses Linux — the most visible target amongst open source software advocates — as someone who just wants something for nothing, regardless of the consequences.
[...]
In fact, if the people offering the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle had access to such information, I would bet you $50 right now that the lowest-paying Linux users were — on average — the people who had most recently made the switch from MS Windows to open source operating systems. Given time to get acclimated to their new software choices, their generosity would grow.
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One of the ironies of open source over the years has been that the organisation formed to “educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source”, the Open Source Initiative, was itself *perceived to be* something of a closed shop [see the comments for clarification on this point].
That is set to change as the OSI has publicly launched its plan to encourage greater participation by shifting to a membership model and elected board members. The plan was announced during a session at the Open Source Business Conference (slides) and is part of an effort to focus on the second half of the organisation’s mission statement: “to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community”.
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With so much turbulence going on in the FOSS world these days — let’s not even mention the “U” word this week, shall we? — it’s always nice when a straightforward and unambiguous piece of good news comes along.
That, fortunately, was just what happened last week during the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, where North Bridge Venture Partners announced the results of its annual “Future of Open Source Survey.”
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Experts say that interest in IT project management has grown substantially in recent years. A December 2010 report from Dice.com put project managers fourth on its list of the most in-demand IT jobs for 2011. And a Forrester report found that for 2011, CIO priorities are shifting from cost reduction to improving execution. As a result, they’re looking to the disciplines of project management and project portfolio management to help them “allocate resources effectively while killing off bad ideas quickly.”
Project managers have a huge list of software tools that can help them do their jobs, ranging from simple spreadsheets to groupware with collaboration features to full project management solutions. These tools can be very expensive, but a growing number of open source projects offer similar functionality without the high price tag.
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CMS
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Drupal. the open source Content Management System (CMS) used to power everything from personal sites to the White House’s Web site, is legendary for its flexibility and power. But Drupal has also been known for its labyrinthian administrative interface.
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IKEA is everywhere. With over 300 megastores in dozens of countries, it’s one of the world’s most recognizable brands. Chances are you have some IKEA furniture in your home — I certainly do.
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Public Services/Government
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A new Defense Department-sponsored document urges the department to adopt more open source technology development.
The May 16 report, sponsored by officials from the assistant secretary of defense (networks & information integration) and the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, touts open source development as a way to increase innovation, agility and application security even in an environment of constrained resources.
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On 18 May 2011, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) launched an appeal for users to supply information on recommended open source software applications for use in the UK public sector. The FSFE’s intention is to write a paper which shows how widely deployed the applications are, thereby making them as attractive as possible to UK public sector procurers and suppliers.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Multinational companies still foul Louisiana beaches. The problem is not the nationality of the company, it’s government subservience, but Peter Fonda’s outburst is interesting. Exxon did the same things to Alaska.
Fonda appears in the film [he co produced] trying to visit Louisiana beaches to see the spill’s impact only to be turned away by BP personnel. “I sent an email to President Obama saying, ‘You are a [expletive] traitor … you allowed foreign boots on our soil telling [the Coast Guard] what they can and could not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do’.” The final report of the presidential commission on the disaster discussed U.S. reliance on foreign oil as a national security issue [but does not] address the implications of foreign ownership of oil companies operating in U.S. territory.
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LNG plant to set sail. This is better than burning gas off dry wells and a lot better than fraking on land, but not as good as moving to solar and wind and not drilling. Will this giant harvest as much energy as will be consumed making it?
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Finance
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Civil Rights
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The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that Golden Shield — described in Cisco marketing materials as Policenet — resulted in the arrest of as many as 5,000 Falun Gong members.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Nvidia Island HD Water Effects Demo
Credit: TinyOgg
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05.23.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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In my opinion no ‘professional’ writer uses Windows.
[...]
That sort of thing doesn’t happen to computers which run Linux or OS X. By cutting Windows out of the loop, you cut your system problems down drastically. You can still have hardware issues (ask me about the time I poured chicken soup on the keyboard of my laptop), but with a good backup regime (you are backing up your data aren’t you) you limit your problems.
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Desktop
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Nothing screams ‘win’ like Ubuntu preinstalled on some sexy hardware.
Sadly the Xtreamer Ultra, a relatively new HTPC from hardware manufacturer Xstreamer, manages to lose on both fronts. Aesthetically the device is a bit on the ‘functional’ side of style (it looks like a PS2 reimagined as a wireless router) and the Ubuntu 10.10-based OS it ships with is… well, we’ll come to that in a second.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Today marks exactly 5 years since Bullet Candy was released! So to celebrate, i was going to celebrate to give away free copies, but i can’t due to various silly clauses in distribution agreements. Plus there’s no Linux version.
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Desktop Environments
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When I install a Linux distribution to a new user sometimes I ask: “Which desktop environment would you like to use ?” and after looking at their puzzled face I realize that for Windows user this is an unfamiliar term. Usually they answer, I would like icons, or put that photo as wallpaper…or nothing at all.
[...]
So, this is a small overview of some of the most famous Desktop Environment of Linux…
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One of the oft touted reasons to use openSUSE is the stellar support and packaging for a wide-variety of desktop environments, normally leading people to think of the four mainstays of the Linux desktop: GNOME, KDE, LXDE, XFCE. While the amount attention focused on the “big four” is certainly the lion’s share, there is still a lot of attention paid towards less popular window managers and desktop environments like Enlightenment, Openbox, Window Maker or Fluxbox.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I vividly remember how everybody, including me, hated this new KDE-4 stuff a few years ago. On top of the list: semantic desktop features like nepomuk. After the KDE-4.6 upgrade I gave it a new try and I must say I’m quite impressed. I have a folder with downloaded pdfs that I read or plan to read (or just downloaded).
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Just a quickie, after the new Activity configuration dialog, in order to have more continuity of the style, the widget explorer, to add Plasma widgets has been refreshed, in its graphical style as in its behaviour:
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GNOME Desktop
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If you’ve been dying to get your hands on a development version of the elementary projects’ new music player ‘BeatBox‘ then you’re in luck! Beatbox now has its own development PPA for intrepid testers to try it out from.
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Have you used the Gnome Shell 3, yet? If not, you can try Gnome Shell 3 with Fedora 15 Beta or openSuse with Gnome Shell 3. And if you are use the Gnome Shell 3, you might want to get better control over this space age desktop environment.
Giovanni Campagna has announced the release of Gnome shell Extension 3.0.2. GNOME Shell Extensions is a collection of extensions providing additional and optional functionality to GNOME Shell.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The release of Fedora 15 is just around the corner (this tuesday, 2011-05-24)!
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For me it could go down as this – in Fedora the Terminal is a System Tool, in Ubuntu it’s a mere Accessory.
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Debian Family
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This has been several months since I didn’t use much my laptop, an Asus S5N: it was crippled by a short battery life and was hit by several bugs, most of them targeting the i855GME graphic chipset thanks to the use of GEM and KMS in the latest Xorg. I did not want to invest too much in a laptop and I have found a rebate from Lenovo for Thinkpad Edge series. Voilà, I have a Thinkpad Edge 11”.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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During UDS recently, Mark Shuttleworth talked about contributor agreements during his keynote. Mark compared contributing a patch to a project while refusing to sign a CLA, to giving someone a plant for their garden, while attaching the condition that they couldn’t sell the house without your permission.
This got me thinking. Is a patch really like a gift?
If you’re contributing a one line patch to a big corpus of code, there’s a good argument that this is insufficient to grant you any kind of authority in the project.
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Getting into the minds of the developers and designers help us understand the reasons why certain things end up the way they are and why certain decisions were made. Let’s try to reverse engineer the thought process that eventually led to these decisions.
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Businesses are becoming more confident about deploying open-source technology within the enterprise, instead of relegating it to the fringes or for experimental projects, according to a recent survey.
A significant majority of surveyed respondents, or 95 percent, said their organizations are using open-source technology to avoid vendor lock-in, according to the Future of Open Source Survey released May 16. In previous years, the chief reason driving open-source adoption was lowered software costs.
“Multiple factors are driving the increased adoption of open-source software, including freedom from vendor lock-in, greater flexibility and lower cost,” said Matt Aslett, senior analyst of enterprise software at The 451 Group.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has now started using WebP to store images for Google Instant Previews, which the company claims reduces their storage needs.
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Mozilla
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Firefox development has always been a bit on the slow side. The wait between versions isn’t as bad as Internet Explorer, but it’s a snail’s pace compared to Google who has nearly unlimited resources to throw into Chrome. Following the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla made a commitment to its users to move to a rapid release schedule. More aggressive timelines means more help is needed to help squash bugs, and today they released a new way for users to help out.
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BSD
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This blog is about Linux. I try different Operating systems based on Linux and share my opinion, whether it is good or not.
But is the Linux the only operating system in the world? Surely not! Shall I tell you few words about other systems? Why not?
I see your mouse pointer now rolling towards “close” icon on your window. You most likely think that this my post is about Windows or Mac. Stop, wait a moment. Of course not!
This my post is about BSD. BSD stands for “Berkeley Software Distribution”. This is open source operating system developed by University of California in Berkeley. It is UNIX-based, which makes it relative to Linux. By the way, BSD is also “parent” for Mac OS X.
[...]
I had previous experience with another “dead” project: BerliOS. That system did not start at all.
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Public Services/Government
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International standards bodies have raised an alarm over the UK’s game-changing techno-economic policy, breaking with protocol to fire warning shots at the Cabinet Office and calling for a reversal of the open source commitments it made the backbone of its ICT Strategy.
The policy has pitted competition honchos, invigorated by the reforming tide of networked ICT, against trade policy wonks, who preside over a system of international standardisation that encompasses intellectual property law, an immense bureaucracy of engineers, and age-old trade flows.
Back home it already threatens a rift between Cabinet Office and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills which usually sets standards policy. The British Standards Organisation, operating under BIS mandate, has taken the unprecedented step of warning government to scrap the offending policy or risk breaching its international obligations.
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When you find out that it wants to reboot when you intended to get some work done, that’s a damned annoyance. Being me, I then check to find out exactly why. Because that’s what I do after all, and my Linux boxes NEVER reboot.
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Science
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The Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb during World War II is the exemplar of modern Big Science. Numerous mostly unsuccessful modern scientific megaprojects have been promoted and justified by invoking the successful example of the Manhattan Project. Even sixty-six years after the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project continues to have a powerful influence on public policy, the practice of science and engineering, and public consciousness. This article argues that the Manhattan Project was atypical of technological breakthroughs, major inventions and discoveries, and atypical of the successful use of mathematics in breakthroughs. To achieve successful breakthroughs — life extension, cures for cancer, cheaper energy sources — and reduce the costs of these attempts, other models should be followed.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Communicators take a look at a new study that found brain chemistry becomes altered after 50 minutes of cell phone usage. The discussion features several perspectives from the medical field, academics and advocates on the implications of the study.
Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, describes the research process conducted by National Institutes of Health scientists and the Energy Department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. However, the study did not make conclusions about long-term effects of the altered brain activity.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Finance
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In July 2008, Florida lawyer Lynn Szymoniak received foreclosure papers on her home. Szymoniak had encountered financial difficulties after spending several years caring for her ailing mother while simultaneously fighting her own health problems, and failed to re-negotiate her adjustable-rate mortgage with her lender.
[...]
But big banks didn’t appreciate having their dirty laundry aired in front of a national audience. Deutsche Bank, which had a case pending against Szymoniak since June 2008, has now come after her graduate student son, suing him for foreclosure at his mother’s Palm Beach Gardens residence even though he hasn’t lived there in seven years.
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the United States is a major tax haven for affluent Latin Americans even as the IRS fights to stop American taxpayers from hiding money in Swiss banks and other offshore destinations. … [bankers claim that reporting interest will cause] Kidnappings in Latin America. Bank failures in Florida. Millions of jobs lost across the United States.
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Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., talks about Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s public relations and strategy. He speaks with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television’s “Bottom Line.”
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If you aren’t that cynical, call it a simple case of coincidence. Investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted in mid-April that oil and other commodities could soon plunge.
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expects to receive subpoenas soon from U.S. prosecutors seeking more information about the firm’s mortgage-related business, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
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Ocwen Financial Corp (OCN.N: Quote) is in the lead in an auction to buy Goldman Sachs Group’s (GS.N: Quote) mortgage servicing unit, Litton Loan Servicing, sources familiar with the situation said this week.
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Goldman Sachs (GS) may seem invincible, but a few attorneys believe federal prosecutors have a good shot of winning a case against the securities giant.
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Credit-default swaps on New York-based Goldman Sachs increased 6.7 basis points to 141.9 basis points, according to data provider CMA. The contracts have risen 30.6 basis points since a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’s report last month said the firm misled clients about its bets on mortgage-related investments. The panel’s findings were referred to the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Goldman Sachs executives expect federal prosecutors to demand to see internal documents, as the government ramps up its investigation into the way the firm handled mortgage products, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The subpoenas would come in response to the lengthy report on the financial crisis released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last month, the WSJ notes, citing sources. The report, which was referred to the Justice Department, alleges that Goldman executives deceived clients in order to profit at their expense, and then misled Congress when asked to explain their behavior.
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In November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed before television cameras to prosecute those responsible for the market collapse a year earlier, saying the U.S. would be “relentless” in pursuing corporate criminals.
In the 18 months since, no senior Wall Street executive has been criminally charged, and some lawmakers are questioning whether the U.S. Justice Department has been aggressive enough after declining to bring cases against officials at American International Group Inc. (AIG) and Countrywide Financial Corp.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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pharmaceutical companies, who stand to win or lose large amounts of money depending on the content of journal articles, have taken a firm grip on what gets written about their drugs. That grip was strong way back in 2004, when The Lancet’s chief editor Richard Horton lamented that “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” It may be even tighter now.
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if one looks behind the curtain at the foundations, non-profits, Political Action Committees (PAC) into the workings of the voucher movement, it’s apparent why it has gained strength in recent years. A tight-knit group of right-wing millionaires and billionaires, bankers, industrialists, lobby shops, and hardcore ideologues has been plotting this war on public education, quietly setting up front group after front group to promote the idea that the only way to save public education is to destroy it, disguising their movement with the innocent-sounding moniker of “school choice”
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Censorship
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If approved, there will be a virtual duopoly for mobile phone service — with AT&T and Verizon controlling 80% of the market. … AT&T has a history censoring content and blocking phone features it doesn’t like. The proposed takeover would lead to higher prices and stifle choice and innovation in the marketplace.
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Privacy
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Nominet have produced some useful figures about requests. The numbers involved are 2650 locks or suspensions so far. The requests are largely about counterfeit goods sites (83%), phishing (9.6%), drugs (6.3%) and fraud (0.8%). Complaints are put back to law enforcement who reexamine their request. Only 9 reinstatements have been made.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A paper Peter J. Huckfeldt and Christopher R. Knittel examining generic entry. Not a great advertisement for patents:
We study the effects of generic entry on prices and utilization using both event study models that exploit the differential timing of generic entry across drug molecules and cast studies. Our analysis examines drugs treating hypertension, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and depression using price and utilization data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. We find that utilization of drug molecules starts decreasing in the two years prior to generic entry and continues to decrease in the years following generic entry, despite decreases in prices offered by generic versions of a drug. This decrease coincides with the market entry and increased utilization of branded reformulations of a drug going off patent. [...]
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“Huggies” manufacturer Kimberly-Clark Worldwide must answer an allegation that it knowingly used invalid patents to monopolize the market for disposable baby diapers.
In March 2009, the company sued First Quality Baby Products, a “private label” diaper-seller producing Wal-Mart- and Walgreen’s-branded diapers, claiming First Quality’s products infringed on Kimberly-Clark’s patents.
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Trademarks
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When Apple trademarked the term “App Store” nobody thought much of it. Smartphone applications at the time were a niche market either highly targeted at small groups of professionals, or were tools used by handset makers/carriers to sell their devices. In months Apple transformed the mobile applications industry into a huge market that lured personal computer developers into the world of ultra-mobile computing. All of a sudden, the term “App Store” was a household name.
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App-store-like centralized software repositories have existed for nearly a decade. In 2002, Linspire’s Michael Robertson created the Click-n-Run software repository GUI, and since then Linux has sported such utilities such as Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) and Advanced Package Tool (APT), mainstays for network-based OS and application installation. Later, stores such as Handango sprung up to sell downloadable apps for the once rapidly growing pocket PC market.
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ORG is very encouraged that EcoLabs will now be able to get the advice they need, and defend themselves. The rights of small groups depend on their ability to fight, which requires both money and knowledge. Most importantly, other groups need to see these claims contested so they understand that they too can stand up to spurious claims
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Copyrights
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Righthaven, the Las Vegas company that brings infringement lawsuits on behalf of newspapers like the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post, has sued 57 people (including an Ars Technica writer) in Colorado over a Post photo of an airport security patdown. Its tactics have been hugely controversial, since it sends no warning before filing suit, demands that it be given control over the infringing site’s domain name, and threatens people with massive statutory damages unless they settle for a few thousand dollars. And Righthaven might not even control the copyrights over which it is suing.
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Tomorrow, the EU Commission will release its “intellectual property rights strategy”. Unsurprisingly, leaks show that the Commission will call for preventing copyright infringements on the Internet “at the source”, by forcing Internet companies such as hosters and access providers to obey the entertainment industries. In practice, turning these actors into a copyright police comes down to establishing a censorship regime, paving the way for dangerous breaches of fundamental rights.
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The Proposed Georgia State Model replaces DMCA fair use for schools with a surveillance state where all copy machines and computers are laced with spyware to enforce fees and block copy for all but an absurdly small fraction of any work.
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she takes a photo every day: 4.5 years
Credit: TinyOgg
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05.22.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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I’ll admit, I’m somewhat interested in Google’s Chromebook concept. The Chromebook is Google’s spin on the “netbook”. Announced in May last year, Chromebook goes on sale in mid-June.
The Chromebook runs Google’s Chrome OS, which is based on Gentoo Linux. While Linux has appeared on netbooks in the past (and were the only option on the very first netbooks) this is another example of the flexibility of Linux. You can use Linux as a base for almost any computing platform – it’s small, fast, and supports a variety of hardware.
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Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I’m still annoyed … had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold). But that is a digression. It turns out that the cause was related to something I had installed that was related to the system. This little problem has been solved, but it brings up another issue, which has also been addressed on the blog Linux in Exile. This is what I wanted to talk about.
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Myth 1: Linux is just for geeks
Linux is for everyone. While Linux based distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora are developed with the non-technical user in mind, Slackware and others appeal to the more geeky ones. Believe it or not, installing Ubuntu is actually easier than a Windows installation , and using it requires no special skills.
Myth 2 : Linux can’t handle Excel, Word, Powerpoint
Linux can handle all the major file formats when it comes to documents as it comes with a powerful opensource Office suite called Openoffice.org (soon to be replaced by Libreoffice). So, apart from doing all the spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing out of the box, Linux can do tasks like publishing, image editing using only free and open source applications.
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That didn’t take long. A manufacturer plans to release a small desktop PC with Chromium OS in July. It’s Xi3 and their modular PC. One of the modules will be a Chromium OS…
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Kernel Space
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My previous plea for help worked out very well. The resulting video of the talk can be seen here, with one of the highlights being the phrase, “It is cheaper to work upstream in the kernel” from Dirk Hohndel who works at Intel. There’s a summary of the talk on lwn.net over here if you don’t want to sit through the whole video.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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I hoped Ubuntu would do the right thing and start an official derivative featuring the GNOME 3 environment. That has not happened.
But there is a new project, the Ubuntu GNOME Remix, offering a PPA today and an ISO install image at some point in the near future.
The project aims for a Canonical endorsement, as seen on its “about” page:
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So what’s the verdict? It certainly is relatively user-friendly, and much more so than Slackware. It’s stable, and it definitely minimizes package redundancy. That said, it isn’t as fast as advertised, and the French and Japanese issues were annoying, considering that I thought I was downloading an English live medium (and I thought there would be different live media for different languages). Those are minor issues, though, and while I wouldn’t recommend it for a newbie, I would recommend it for anyone who wants the stability of Slackware without the hassle. Zenwalk isn’t the only kid in town, though; other Slackware-based user-friendly distributions with Xfce include Wolvix, Salix OS, and Vector Linux, so please do check those out too. You can the download Zenwalk install CD from here or the live CD from here.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Have you ever installed a sound theme in Ubuntu? No? Well you wouldn’t be alone. Finding extra sound themes for Ubuntu is a task and half in and of itself, and that’s before the rather archaic installation process.
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Phones
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Android
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CyanogenMod is one of the biggest hacks to ever hit the Android mobile platform.
It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices.
Essentially, CyanogenMod is a tricked-out version of the software you’re already running on your Android phone.
Every Android-powered device comes running a version of the operating system, from 1.5 (Cupcake) all the way up to 3.1 (Honeycomb).
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Huang made very clear that he thinks Android tablets have to come in at lower price points, emphasizing Wi-Fi over 3G for connections. Meanwhile, there are also strong concerns being voiced over the marketing of Android tablets, or rather, the lack of any unified marketing for them.
That hasn’t stopped powerful new players from entering the Android tablet space, though. Dell has announced plans for an Android tablet, among several other hardware makers.
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The Android platform tops the list in sales of smartphone operating systems for the first quarter of 2011, according to a report by market researcher Gartner (NYSE: IT).
Total smartphone sales accounted for 23.6 percent of global handset units overall, and various phones sporting Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android OS took 36 percent of that market. They sold more than 36.3 million units in the quarter. Next in line was Symbian, taking 27.4 percent of the market share. Following were Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS platform with 16.8 percent and Research In Motion’s (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry platform at 12.9 percent.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As we showed you yesterday, recent prerelease builds of Chrome 13 have an experimental new user interface option that allows users to hide the navigation bar. But Google isn’t the only browser vendor trying to shed toolbar pixels. Mozilla Labs has published an add-on that brings a similarly svelte design to the Firefox Web browser.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Nobody really knows where all the water is going, but it can’t be anywhere good.
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“I really am horrified,” said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s quite staggering and it seems to be part of the pattern of the EPA trying to make sure that there are no measurements that could cause people to be concerned.”
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Coal Ash Index – mountains of unregulated toxic waste threaten lives, natural resources and property.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) mortgage traders tried to manipulate prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in May 2007 for their own benefit, according to a U.S. Senate report.
Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.
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Apparently, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi will not rest until some Goldman Sachs executives are behind bars. He will not rest until the tarnished company’s reputation lies in tatters on the floor. These goals are admirable. Give Taibbi an ‘A’ for effort. Unfortunately, these noble goals, as much as we might hope for their fulfillment, are unachievable.
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Got a chance to meet Josh Rosner (co-author, with Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson, of the new book Reckless Endangerment) last night during an appearance on Eliot Spitzer’s In the Arena. We were brought in to talk about the new investigation of the banks that apparently is being launched by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which looks like it might be the first for-real attempt at a prosecution of the systemic corruption that led to the financial crisis.
Schneiderman’s probe, news of which came out yesterday in this piece by Morgenson, reportedly targets the banks’ mortgage securitization process during the bubble years. Morgenson reported that Schneiderman is focused on at least three companies: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and old friend Goldman, Sachs.
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Civil Rights
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Hautala’s draft report on public access to documents for the years 2009-2010 has been published. The report concerns implementation of the regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 on public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.
Lisbon Treaty introduced a new constitutional framework of EU institutional transparency by establishing a firm fundamental right of access to documents of EU institutions. Now the Regulation does not only cover the Parliament, the Council and the Commission, but also all other EU institutions and agencies.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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shame on the newspapers for ruining everything. … Look what these newspapers want to charge you to read an article that didn’t cost even half that if anything at all at the time. … $2.95 to read one single article. Imagine you are some not exactly rich researcher and you are trying to find out what happened to write a book. You can’t afford to do it. … $359.95 for a year’s pass to read anything for 90 days. They call it Pay-per-View. And Google did the digitization for them.
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Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys’ representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron’s first party conference as leader. Given that, it’s only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.
GNU Parallel 20110522 (‘Pakistan’)
Credit: TinyOgg
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