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Links 31/8/2011: RHEL 7, LibreOffice 3.4.3





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Web Browsers



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.3
      The Internet, August 31, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) maintains the speedy pace of LibreOffice development with the announcement of version 3.4.3, intended for enterprise deployments. The new release arrives two weeks after version 3.3.4 (intended for more-conservative users) and one month after the previous release of the 3.4 family, which provides a larger feature set based on cleaner and leaner code.


    • LibreOffice 3.4.3 Is Now Available for Download




  • CMS

    • Jekyll and other static site generators are, currently, harmful to the free, open source software movement
      My blog is powered by WordPress. WordPress remains at its core a monstrous amalgamation of PHP spaghetti code. Thus, despite the fact that WordPress is free (beer+speech), easy to use, well supported, well documented, and all that jazz… it still pains my hacker sensibilities to use it. For similar reasons, a lot of hacker types are moving away from WordPress and similar blog software to static site generators like jekyll.




  • Healthcare

    • VA Open Source Health Software Site is Open for Business
      The Veterans Affairs Department open source electronic health record software website went live today with a pitch that it will serve as the nexus for an "open source community designed to unleash innovation in electronic health record software."


    • VA open source agent set to go live
      The Veterans Affairs Department is set to make its open source agent operational tomorrow and make available the software code of various applications in the electronic health records of VA and the Defense Department.

      Users of the applications will also have a method to report back to the open source agent changes to the software.






  • Semi-Open Source

    • Open source: Driving change in the software industry
      The subsequent development of automotive technology was rapid, due in part to the hundreds of small manufacturers competing to gain the world’s attention. What we saw was the start of an international, industrial revolution as well as a struggle between automobile manufacturers for commercial dominance that is still fought today. As a result of greater competition for customers, and customers’ greater demand for innovation, car buyers now have an infinite number of brands, makes, models and pricing options to choose from to meet their individual needs.




  • Funding

    • MapR makes friends of Hadoop and the enterprise, raises $20M
      Hadoop is open source software that allows companies to store data on clusters of cheaper servers and run software very quickly on top of those clusters. It organizes and prioritizes data, so often-used data is pushed to the top of the stack for easy access. Along with the organization, Hadoop uses a graphical user interface and heat maps to help data managers monitor usage and locate problems. The software also offers analytics for companies that want to watch their data to spot emerging trends.




  • Project Releases



  • Programming





Leftovers

  • It's Most Certainly Not The End of the OS


  • Asus Tech - You will NOT fool me Twice


  • This USB 3.0 Flash Drive Has 2 TB of Storage


  • Google and OpenDNS join forces to speed up DNS


  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • WikiLeaks reveals Atrocities by US forces
      US forces had committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, four children, and one infant were summarily executed, a State Department diplomatic cable released last week by WikiLeaks revealed.

      The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

      American troops had approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March 2006.

      “It would appear that when the MNF (Multinational Forces) approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued.” Afterwards, “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (age 23) were killed during the raid.

      Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”




  • Cablegate

    • WikiLeaks cable: US expected Congress bribes in TransCo deal
      The US embassy expected money to change hands in Philippine Congress before it granted a franchise to a consortium in 2007 to operate the Philippine National Transmission Company (TransCo), a cable published by whistleblower group WikiLeaks said.






  • Finance

    • Big Reason to Shut SEC, Start Over: William D. Cohan
      Thanks to Darcy Flynn, a longtime attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, we now have all the ammunition we need to do what should have been done years ago: terminate the SEC, with extreme prejudice, and in its place construct a new regulatory watchdog for Wall Street free of obvious conflicts of interest.

      Flynn’s courage has almost been lost in all the recent apocalyptic talk of earthquakes and hurricanes, but a few weeks back he did something remarkable. After raising concerns internally at the SEC last year -- and getting nowhere -- Flynn went public and alleged in a formal whistleblower complaint that for at least 17 years the SEC “followed a policy of systematically destroying documents” related to what are known as Matters Under Investigation, or MUIs, most of which were focused on possibly illicit or illegal behavior at Wall Street firms. MUIs are the first step in investigating a case that may lead to a formal SEC inquiry.


    • Matt Taibbi on the SEC and Wall Street
      For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed.


    • Citigroup, Goldman Big 'Super Committee' Donors
      Goldman Sachs(GS), Citigroup(C), JPMorgan Chase(JPM), Bank of America(BAC) and General Electric(GE) all rank in the top 10 organizations in terms of their campaign contributions to a special Congressional committee charged with finding ways to reduce the deficit, according to MapLight.org a nonpartisan organization that studies the relationship between money and politics.


    • Panel tallies massive waste and fraud in wartime U.S. contracts






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