11.07.10

^{Gemini version available ♊︎}

Links 7/11/2010: Linux at NASDAQ OMX, Linux 2.6.37 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 4:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers
Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

Server
- Linux at NASDAQ OMX
  
  One tends to think of “the NASDAQ” as a single exchange based in the US, but, in fact, NASDAQ OMX operates exchanges all over the world – and they run on Linux.
Kernel Space
- Main development phase for Linux kernel 2.6.37 concluded
  
  Ten days after releasing Linux 2.6.36, Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate of Linux kernel version 2.6.37. This concludes the kernel’s merge window – the first phase in the development of a new kernel version during which the kernel hackers integrate the majority of changes into the source code management system of the main development branch.
Applications
- Alarm Clock – Nice Simple App for Setting Reminders and Alarms in Ubuntu
  
  Alarm Clock is a simple reminder application which works exactly how you expect it to. Alarm Clock recently hit version 1.4.3. It is a very useful application especially if you are one of those who have this habit of regularly forgetting birthdays and other important events of your near and dear ones(yeah, me too).
- Instructionals/Technical
Distributions
- Reviews
  - Salix OS 13.1.2 “KDE” is released! Screenshots Tour
    
    Salix KDE edition is released. This is the very first official release of Salix KDE. this release includes the elegant KDE 4.4.3 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE centric software, all in the size of a CD-ROM sized image. The Konqueror web browser, KMail and Ktorrent are the main networking applications included in this release, followed by Akregator, an RSS reader for KDE, Kopete, the KDE instant messenger and more. Wicd is used for setting up your wired or wireless networking connections.
- Red Hat Family
  - Fedora
    - Fedora 14 Screenshots
    - Fedora 14 goes gold
      
      For users not that keen on the Gnome desktop, Fedora 14 also includes the KDE 4.5 desktop which was released in August.
Devices/Embedded
- Phones
  - Android
    - Google: 77% of Android devices running 2.1 or later
      
      Google has published an updated breakdown of the number of active devices running a given version of its Android mobile operating system. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, more than three out of four Android devices are now running version 2.1 (Eclair) or later – an increase of 3% compared to early October and nearly 13% over early August of this year. Android 1.5 and 1.6 devices now make up 7.9% and 15% of devices respectively, a decrease from 9.7% and 16.4% at the beginning of last month.
    - Android gains Google Instant search, plus Facebook and Twitter updates

Free Software/Open Source

Events
- One month remaining in the SCALE 9x Call for Papers
  
  In an effort to continue our efforts to promote and educate the public on Free/Open Source Software projects, the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 9x invites you to share your work with the rest of the FOSS community by submitting a talk for the first-of-the-year Linux expo.
- CeBIT Open Source 2011: Call for Projects
  
  or the third consecutive year, CeBIT Open Source invites projects to Hannover, Germany. The conference organizers and Linux Pro Magazine invite open source projects to apply for free exhibit space at CeBIT Open Source 2011.
Web Browsers
- Mozilla
  - Firefox 4 puts on brakes
    
    Despite growing anticipation for Firefox 4, developers have delayed its release until next year.
    
    In a move that will both disappoint fans and potentially undermine its claim on the browser market, the Mozilla Foundation has said it will delay the release of Firefox 4 until 2011.
SaaS
- Zend Updates PHP IDE, Framework for the Cloud
  
  PHP has long been used as one of the primary languages for the web. With the help of some new tools, commercial PHP backer Zend is now helping to position PHP for the cloud too.
  
  At the ZendCon conference in Santa Clara, California, Zend today announced the general availability of the Zend Studio 8.0 IDE (define) and the Zend Framework 1.11 PHP application framework. Both the IDE and framework include new cloud-focused features and are part of a new PHP Cloud Application Platform ecosystem that Zend is now building.
Oracle
- Oracle raises prices for MySQL
  
  In future, Oracle will offer three paid MySQLEditions at subscription fees of $2,000, $5,000 and $10,000 per year. The previous $600 “Basic” subscription has been dropped, in effect more than tripling the price for some customers. These subscriptions do not represent different levels of support, but rather different mixes of software. The free “Classic” edition provides only an embedded database with a MyISAM back end. The transactional InnoDB is available in the Standard, Enterprise and Carrier-Grade Editions, the Cluster NDB engine only in the Carrier-Grade Edition.
Business
- One on One with Eric Gries of Lucid Imagination
  
  The conventional wisdom is “It’s open source, it’s free, that’s the competitive advantage”. And true, “free” can be pretty compelling. But that’s not all there is to it. Getting “free” to be useful means getting the flexibility to adapt, and to scale economically. Scaling economically is an absolute necessity given that ongoing growth in the volume of data means search applications must grow and change to keep up. Many search technologies assume that search is a black-box problem; but if you need good results more than half the time, that model just doesn’t work. Search results are unique to each business and its set of users and data, so one size will not fit all, and the flexibility is really the key.
Programming
- ActiveState Launches Python Package Manager Index (PyPM Index)
  
  ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl, Python, and Tcl, has launched its Python Package Manager Index (PyPM Index) to give developers a more complete picture of Python build information and package availability across multiple platforms. PyPM Index shows developers instantly if Python packages they need are available for all the platforms they must deploy on, providing critical information to speed up the design phase of development. With PyPM Index, developers now have direct access via the web to search PyPM repositories (collections of ActivePython packages).

Leftovers

Finance
- IT’S OFFICIAL: America Is Now A Banana Republic
  
  One of the hallmarks of banana republics, says the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, is income inequality.
  
  In some countries, the wealthiest 1% of the population takes home 20% or more of the national income.
- Our Banana Republic
  
  The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
  
  C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
  
  That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.
- ‘Griftopia’: The Financial Crisis Easily Explained
  
  Meet The ‘Vampire Squid’ Of The Financial Crisis
  
  “What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers,” Taibbi says, “and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.”
  
  This wasn’t the worst of it, of course. While Goldman Sachs was selling these bundles, “they turned around and placed massive bets against the mortgage market knowing that it was going to collapse.”
  
  “They took suckers like AIG, and they placed massive bets that this stuff was going to fail, and AIG stupidly took the bet and that’s what ended up blowing them up,” Taibbi says.
  
  In Taibbi narrative, Goldman Sachs often plays the villain’s role. “They had an extraordinary amount of political influence that was over and above the other banks,” he says. “No other bank has the same record as Goldman Sachs does in terms of taking former executives and placing them in high-ranking positions in the government.”
  
  Or, as Taibbi put it in one of his early columns, “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
- The Generational Privacy Divide
  
  Many acknowledged that longstanding privacy norms are being increasingly challenged by the massive popularity of social networks that encourage users to share information that in a previous generation would have never been made publicly available for all the world to see. Moreover, rapid technological change and the continuous evolution of online sites and services create enormous difficulty for regulators unaccustomed to moving at Internet speed.