02.07.12
Posted in Site News at 6:40 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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Science
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition
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sugar is toxic beyond its calories … At the levels consumed by most Americans, sugar changes metabolism, raises blood pressure, critically alters the signaling of hormones and causes significant damage to the liver … “We’re not talking prohibition,” Schmidt [PhD, MSW, MPH] said. “We’re not advocating a major imposition of the government into people’s lives. … What we want is to actually increase people’s choices by making foods that aren’t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.”
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Josh Fox tells us what happened here, “This was an act of civil disobedience, yes done in an impromptu fashion, but at the moment when they told me to turn off the cameras, I could not. I know my rights and I felt it was imperative to exercise them.”
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Keep up the pressure, it works.
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As a Member of the European Parliament, I very much welcome the increased attention the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has received in the past weeks. It has taken a while for massive outcry to emerge, but we are seeing protest voices getting louder and louder.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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In Michele Bachmann’s home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.
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There’s not one single state with a tax system that’s progressive. … in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent.
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Copyrights
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Price is just one part of scientists problem which is “easily-accessible distribution of their work.” If you are doing research and would like to publish it, Elsevier and other big publishers will make it hard to read. Please sign The Cost of Knoledge Petition
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Powerful people are used to violating copyright laws for advertisements with impunity but Republicans are now so odious that musicians sue for otherwise licensed public performance. Musician feel damaged when Republicans use their music and sue for false advertising when people think the musician has endorsed the candidate.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[Back next week]
Contents
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Facebook filed its IPO last week , which is big news in and of itself. However, what struck me most was the letter from Mark Zuckerberg to potential investors that puts an exclamation point on something that the Linux community has been practicing for years: first – don’t do it for the money, second maintain the hacker way. And, the money follows.
Zuckerberg points out that Facebook wasn’t started to become a company. It was a cause. It was an idea — to connect people. Linus Torvalds had a similar idea 20 years ago when he started Linux as a way to collectively develop software. Linus kicked off the project “just for fun” and has repeatedly stated that his motivation behind Linux is solving interesting problems with code.
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Desktop
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Userful Corporation, the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization, has released the next generation of it’s Userful MultiSeat™ solution which turns one Linux computer into multiple high performance independent computer stations using the HP t200 thin client. At $99 including the keyboard and mouse, the HP t200 is the worlds lowest cost thin client device. Userful MultiSeat enables schools and businesses to deploy more than twice as many computers for the same cost, while enabling multiple users to use different applications at the same time from one host computer, each with their own monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The HP t200 provides the capability to connect multiple stations to a single host PC such as the HP ms6200 directly over USB for close proximity computing environments without the need for a LAN, or install computer stations in multiple rooms using a single host PC with each station connected over Ethernet.
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Der Spiegel Online has an interesting article on usability of GNU/Linux for ordinary mortals. Unfortunately, it’s only in German, but Google Translate gives us the gist.
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Kernel Space
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After an extended delay, the Linux File System fsck testing results can now be presented. The test plan has changed slightly from our kickoff article previous article. We will review it at the beginning of the this article, followed by the actual results. Henry Newman will be reviewing the results and writing some observations in the next article in this series. As always we welcome reader feedback and comments.
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A vDSO (virtual dynamic shared object) is an alternative to the somewhat cycle-expensive system call interface that the GNU/Linux kernel provides. But, before I explain how to cook up your own vDSO, in this brief jaunt down operating system lane, I cover some basics of vDSOs, what they are and why they are useful. The main purpose of this article is to illustrate how to add a custom vDSO to a Linux kernel and then how to use the fruits of your labor. This is not intended to be a vDSO 101; if you would like more in-depth information, see the links in the Resources section of this article.
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The proper ASPM fix devised by Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett late in 2011 went into the Linux 3.3 kernel, which is still currently under active development. The ASPM fix has since been patched into the kernels of Ubuntu and Fedora, among other Linux distributions.
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Graphics Stack
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At the end of January was when NVIDIA put out a new driver, which was released as 295.17 beta. The only official changes for this driver is a GeForce 7 bug-fix where the internal LVDS panel didn’t work for some laptops and then adding support for the new video driver ABI as used by X.Org Server 1.12 RC1.
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There’s another big accomplishment within the open-source graphics camp: Nouveau developers now having an initial working OpenCL implementation for NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware on the driver that the Linux community developed themselves via reverse-engineering without NVIDIA’s support.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Xonotic 1.0 was talked about at FOSDEM 2012 this weekend in Belgium within the open-source game developers’ meeting room. Nexuiz was forked as Xonotic by the community in early 2010 following and their first development preview came more than two years ago. Xonotic did a new release a few months ago, but now this DarkPlaces-based game is working towards the stable 1.0 release.
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Desktop Environments
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But until recent years virtually all mainstream distributions shipped with GNOME or KDE by default. Unless you were a power user interested in trying out obscure alternatives, GNOME or KDE was what you got when you decided to install Linux.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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I liked the everything on one page approach to the installer, but I wasn’t crazy about having to reboot an extra time to complete the setup. Synaptic is a good package manager and Debian provides a good base, but I missed having update notifications. And I found it strange that the developers went with the software they did. Why use Foxit when there are so many good open source PDF viewers? Why use SoftMaker office software rather than a more common suite like OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice? Given my brief exposure to the included software I found it worked much the same, but being greeted with requests for registration isn’t something I welcome in an open-source operating system. In short, Dreamlinux supported my hardware well and comes with Debian’s large repository of software, but it could use a 5.1 release to round out the interface and add a different office suite.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.4
· Announced Distro: Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-10
· Announced Distro: DEFT Linux 7
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 12 KDE
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Red Hat Latest from The Business Journals Former Delta COO: American will remain a standalone carrier New Red Hat HQ to be called ‘Red Hat Tower’Hortonworks adds Cormier to board Follow this company CEO Jim Whitehurst knows how to control a crowd.
And that’s exactly what he did when he answered my questions at our annual Business Person of the Year dinner event on Feb. 3 at the Cardinal Club in Raleigh.
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced nominations are open for its sixth annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, which will be presented at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, taking place June 26-29, 2012 in Boston.
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Debian Family
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Last week I wrote about Fedora 16 LXDE. That post was intended to complete the cycle of reviews of different Fedora 16 spins.
Apart from Fedora, I had posted another “almost full” cycle, which missed only one element. Coincidentally, that missing element is also an LXDE system.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A lot of people, including me, have hassled Canonical over the design choices made in Unity. But recently I have come to the conclusion that Unity may actually represent the best chance for a commercially successful Linux desktop.
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Jonathan Riddell, the lead developer of the Kubuntu project, announced today that his work on the KDE-based Ubuntu variant will no longer be funded by Canonical after the upcoming 12.04 release. Kubuntu will be developed entirely by volunteers, much like other community-maintained variants of Ubuntu.
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Canonical appears to be streamlining its focus on the desktop by cutting funding for Kubuntu work after the release of the upcoming 12.04 releases this April.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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The Android operating system is an indisputable success. A few weeks ago, it was with an average of 400,000 activations per week.
But not only that: Tablets, E-readers, portable gaming devices, everything seems to go in the direction of Android (and ARM).
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Debian is one of the most popular GNU/Linux based distributions. It is the base of popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint and is even more popular on servers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Chinese tablet maker Zenithink is making Google Android 4.0 available for most of the company’s recent 7 and 10 inch tablets. That includes the Zenithink C71 which gained a bit of attention recently when developer Aaron Seigo announced that it would be the basis of the new Spark tablet with KDE Plasma Active Linux software.
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Arthur C. Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And it’s still magical when you understand how it works. 3D printers are here, they’re cool, and there is a large and enthusiastic open source 3D printer movement.
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Three more additions from the Apache family this week! The Commons validator helps in both client and server side data validation. The Commons configuration software library offers an empirical configuration interface which enables an application to read configuration data from several sources. And Apache Hive data warehouse software helps in querying and managing large sets of data that resides in distributed storage.Find out what the the 3 latest releases have in store for you!!!
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I think you’ve heard about the piracy happening in the waters surrounding Somalia. Entire ships are captured, and their passengers are often hurt and sometimes even killed.
Interestingly enough, the term often associated with this kind of kidnapping and killing is also frequently used in computing terms for something quite different. Copying something and giving it away for free, without any motive for profit and without taking anything away from the original.
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EclipseSource, a developer of commercial solutions based on open source Eclipse technologies, has just unveiled RAP mobile, an alternative for developing apps in Java based on the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP).
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OSI is changing, and you can help! I spoke at FOSDEM in Brussels on Saturday, on behalf of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) where I serve as a director. My noon keynote covered a little of the rationale behind OSI and a quick synopsis of its last decade from my own perspective and then announcements on OSI’s behalf about the work we’re doing to make OSI strong and relevant for a new decade.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The upcoming Mozilla Firefox 11.0 web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 11.0 email client just landed in the daily builds of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 (Precise Pangolin) operating system.
Though it will not be the default web browser, as there will be more releases of it until Ubuntu 12.04 LTS reaches maturity on April 2012, Firefox 11.0 will bring the ability to migrate bookmarks, cookies and history from the Google Chrome web browser.
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Mozilla is taking a page from Google’s Chrome development and is gearing up to implement a new protocol to help accelerate the Firefox web browser. The open source Firefox 11 browser, which is now in beta, will include the SPDY protocol. The current stable release of Firefox is version 10, which was released last week.
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Ayala spoke at FOSDEM about developing Firefox in 2012, and new approaches that Mozilla is taking to try to reduce time and effort required for contributing to the browser.
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SaaS
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Alfresco are an interesting company who grew out of the original web open source movement. Founded in 2005 by ex Business Objects exec John Powell and ex Documentum founder John Newton, Alfresco’s birth dna is as a full, open source Enterprise Content Management System (’ECM’), complete with rich metadata tools and deep standards compliance.
It’s been an interesting journey for a company that was funded by blue chip VC’s to disrupt the sleepy ECM marketplace – presumably the name ‘Alfresco’ was chosen to define their ‘outsider’ status to competitors such as Sharepoint and Documentum (owned by EMC since 2003).
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Exhorting students to fight against proprietary software that stifled the freedom of users, software freedom activist from the United States, Richard Stallman, on Monday said that all such programs were malicious in nature and pushed the users into the “grip” of the developers.
Addressing a packed hall at IIT Madras, the founder of GNU project said that by using such “non-free” software, people were in danger of being entrapped in a moral dilemma as they are forced to comply with the end-user agreements.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content/Education
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If ramen noodle sales spike at the start of every semester, here’s one possible reason: textbooks can cost as much as a class itself; materials for an introductory physics course can easily top $300.
Cost-conscious students can of course save money with used or online books and recoup some of their cash come buyback time. Still, it’s a steep price for most 18-year-olds.
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In response to requests for reuse of its content, like guides and how-to information, the University of California Santa Cruz library has adopted a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license for all of its content.
“Many of us like to use Creative Commons licensed material in our own writing and teaching, so it made sense for us to do this,” says Katie Fortney, the Library’s Scholarly Communications Officer. “Here at the Library – at most libraries – we’re paying a lot of attention to copyright and technology issues, and we want people to know that.”
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Open Hardware
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Open source hardware is increasingly making the news, as Ford partners with Bug Labs to “advance in-car connectivity innovation”, thousands of US Radio Shack stores start stocking Arduino, and Facebook releases the plans for energy-efficient data centre technology via Open Compute. But could it change the world? Andrew Back takes a look at five projects which just might.
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Some of my die-hard Windows friends are very excited by Windows 8 arrival later this year. Others fear that Windows 8 will be a repeat of Microsoft’s Vista disaster. Me? I know Windows 8 will be a Vista-sized fiasco.
Before jumping into why I think far most PC users will still be running Windows 7 in 2016 than Windows 8, let me explain that while I prefer Linux as my desktop operating system, I don’t see Windows 8 charge into a brick wall as being a pro-Linux or anti-Microsoft issue.
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The war of operating systems started decades ago, and the first mainstream desktop OS war took place between the Macintosh and Windows operating system. Operating systems are the first bit of software that go into our computer. As PCs dominated the market, Windows became the most used and most popular operating systems ever. It’s stayed that way for close to two decades.
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Security
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People often think that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks-you know like the ones that knocked the Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music recently–require hundreds of attackers generating gigabytes of traffic per second to pound a Website down into the ground. Ah, no they don’t.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein revealed Wednesday that he too is feeling the pinch of the weak economy as his company announced a 47-percent plummet in earnings, the most severe drop since 2008. As a result, the financial group decreased Blankfein’s annual bonus, seemingly in tandem, by nearly 44 percent. Blankfein, who was raised in a Bronx housing project, said the dramatic reduction in pay evoked memories of his humble origins. After being awarded a paltry $7 million — down from $12.6 million the previous year — Blankfein put on a brave face and told reporters: “Sure, it’s hard. I’m like so many Americans who’ve had their compensation shredded to a questionable living wage. And, you know, it’s easy to complain — to say, ‘why they’d even bother,’ or to think of the stipend as a hollow gesture in the face of horrendous morale. But then I take a look around and consider myself lucky that I’m even employed. The bank already fired 2,400 people. Unlike Mitt Romney, they didn’t seem to enjoy it. I’m grateful, actually.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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While the popular understanding of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is that it opened the door to unlimited corporate spending, last week’s FEC filings showed that many of the millions that Super PACs received in 2011 came not from corporations, but from deep-pocketed individuals and corporate CEOs. What remains unknown is just how much corporate money is secretly flowing through another vehicle being used to influence political outcomes, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit.
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The influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Ohio runs deep, according to a new report released by Progress Ohio, together with the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), People for the American Way, and Common Cause. The report shows how Ohio’s legislators are working in tandem with corporate leaders to deregulate key industries, privatize education and dismantle unions.
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Privacy
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Intellectual Monopolies
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