06.16.10
Posted in News Roundup at 10:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For a viable Linux virus to be written it would have to hack into the Linux system, escalate it’s privileges to root and then start infecting files.
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Linux gives you the freedom to deepen and assimilate as much information as possible, and when you understand things from the inside out that will change your way of seeing and working with her. To me there is no operating system provides this flexibility and control.
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Desktop
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Installing Software:
To install a piece of software on Windows you just follow a few easy steps. First you go to the store and buy the software, then you pop the CD into your disc drive, enter the CD key, wait for the software to install itself onto the hard drive, and you are good to go! Be sure to put the CD and key in a safe place in case you ever need to reinstall the software.
On Ubuntu to install a piece of software you open the software center. Type in the name of the software you are looking for (or browse by category), click install, and wait for the software to download and install.
Default Software:
Windows offers a fantastic default software install. Need to write a paper? No worries, Windows has the feature-rich Wordpad. Want to surf the net? Internet Explorer has always provided a safe webrowsing experience.
Ubuntu’s default software selection is somewhat disappointing. It has a full featured word processor, spreadsheet editor, and presentation creator. I know most people don’t use facebook or twitter, but just in case you do Ubuntu includes Gwibber, a software that fully integrates your social networking with your desktop. For webrowsing Ubuntu only has Firefox and if you want to instant message Ubuntu’s Empathy only supports facebook, AIM, yahoo, MSN, IRC…
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1. The Sky is Blue
And so is Heaven! BLUE! Why do you think the screen goes blue from time to time in your Windows system? That’s a reminder of what is to come and what is in store for you once Windows gets to be 8. A vertical infinity of BLUE SCREENS! Surely, you don’t want to miss it, do you?
2. Less Clutter Means SOMETHING
It means what? How would I know?? You have to meditate to get the answer! Windows XP gave you Explorer and Windows Movie Maker. Vista didn’t give you Movie Maker, but gave you a demon–stration of Office 2007! Windows 7 Starter didn’t give you anything! Meditate with me: Less is more, less is more, less is more…
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Audiocasts
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This week on a humongous episode of KDEMU I talk to Paul Adams, Mr. Green Eggs himself; we talk about KDE PIM, Kolab, Akademy and his love for braveheart.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Free and Open Source Video Editors for Linux: I’ve shared with you a list of free and open source video editing software before, and noticed that there are other excellent video editors for Linux that I failed to mention. So today, I would like to feature some more video editing software, which are all capable of handling video sequence editing and provide tools for trimming, colour manipulation, titling, visual effects, splicing, cutting and arranging clips across the timeline among others.
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Even when computers were first being introduced, engineers realized how useful they could be to teach children. There have been multiple games and even entire programming languages developed specifically for kids. Linux’s developer-friendly tendencies have made it an obvious choice as a platform to create software for children, and its security and stability leave little chance for them to break anything while learning. Today we’ve gathered together some of the best Linux software applications for kids, from simple games for toddlers to programming puzzles for the older kids.
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Another cool feature is that you can now choose from more than just flat and 3D bars. You now have the options: Flat, Edgy, 3D, Curved, and Floaty. In previous versions, I remember having to go into the configuration editor and manually set the bar to -1 in order to get a curve..Not anymore!!
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Proprietary
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I’m not sure how this happens, but I see more and more often FLOSS advocates that support Adobe, and in particular Flash, in almost any context out there, mostly because they are now appearing a lot like an underdog, with Microsoft and Apple picking on them.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Day 2 was a non event. I am beginning to generally dislike Gnome-Shell. It is not the optimum user interface. I am seriously beginning to have my doubts about Ubuntu switching to Gnome-Shell, let’s hope they have something up their sleeve to save Ubuntu from a clunky interface.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Celeste also gave a great talk about how KDE is EVERYWHERE! It focused on enlightening the Linux community about how we’re not only on the desktop, but are also spreading our technologies into mobile, netbook, and cloud based environments. She spent some time talking about how KDE is not just software but also a vibrant community including our developers and users. Finally she also covered some of the latest and greatest features of the 4.4 and 4.5 SC releases and introduced the new “Join the game” campaign.
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Now of course I shouldn’t dismiss the other people at the booth, I especially think Torsten Thelke (our KDE e.V. intern) did an amazing job, and so did Frederik in his sometimes-scary way. Yes, showing off Fluffy Bunny themed plasma desktops, then jumping some of your fellow booth mates for a hug could be off-putting.
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LinuxTag
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Chithanh participated in the distro contest for us and also was part of the team winning the hacking contest. I assume with his Gentoo shirt on in that moment. The hopefully complete list of current developers who I met on LinuxTag is: lu_zero, idl0r, polynomial-c, dertobi123, amne, rbu, hollow, chithanh, a3li, vorlon, hanno. Current Gentoo-GSoC student Andreas Nüsslein (rewriting webapp-config) also came by, Timo Antweiler said hello, too. Thanks for the chocolate to lu_zero, thanks to the helpful and friendly LinuxTag team (especially Jacqueline), thanks to everyone helping out, especially to Sebastian Dyroff for joining with setup on Tuesday evening. See you again next year!
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New Releases
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Parted Magic developer Patrick Verner has released version 4.11 of his open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.
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Red Hat Family
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But looking up today’s market cap shows Red Hat with a 5.9B market cap. Not too bad for a company that is doing 750 million in revenue.
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The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World team presented a preview into this year’s events during a one-hour Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in a Glimpse webinar offering. Four Red Hat presenters, including Red Hat’s global events strategy manager, JBoss product line director and two product marketing directors, detailed why customers, partners and community members attend the event, described the typical attendee and outlined highlights of the events from recurring session topics to the many networking opportunities.
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Frankly, it’s difficult to track everything that’s expected to occur at Red Hat Summit, because the open source company continues to diversify beyond its Linux heritage to promote JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Here’s how The VAR Guy expects the conference to unfold…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UNR, the netbook version, benefits most from the new theme and more efficient use of screen space, but we’re waiting for Canonical’s Unity and Gnome 3.0 for any real taste of revolution on the small screen.
What we’re left with is a division. If you’re not a current Linux user then Ubuntu offers the best Linux experience you can have. The desktop looks ultra-modern and the package manager is slick, expansive and easy to use.
But if you’re a Linux user looking for a spring break from your current distribution, this release doesn’t do enough to warrant the upgrade. While it looks nice, there’s no real innovation and nothing we can get too excited about.
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I’m again stuck with a full-blown Ubuntu desktop, full of goodies I don’t need and running much slower than I could make it run. But here’s the maddening part, it works. Right-click folder, share, adjusting smb.conf, done. Even worse, I can’t find any reference to my share in smb.conf ! If I knew where the right config is saved, I could simply copy/paste it to a leaner system, but now I can’t.
Curse you Ubuntu! Curse you for making my life so easy and so difficult at the same time!
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Android
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Not interested in waiting until the 23rd for Verizon’s big announcement? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered right now! The Motorola Droid X has probably been one of the worst kept smartphone secrets in recent memory, but after spending two hours with the phone we sort of see why. In short, it’s pretty awesome. Call it a superphone or a mega-smartphone, but the 4.4-inch handset is absolutely Verizon / Motorola’s answer to the HTC EVO 4G, and makes the Droid Incredible look like a bench warmer. What do we mean? We’ll let you see for yourself just after the break in a breakdown of exactly what this phone is all about — and in a video or three of it in action. Oh, and on your way down, make sure to feast your eyes on the gallery, too.
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All-volunteer, open source Appleseed project seeks to decentralize the social web, and turns to crowdsourcing website IndieGogo.com for funding.
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Treb Ryan is chief executive of OpSource, a company that specializes in enterprise cloud and managed hosting. In a recent interview with Forbes, Ryan explains his analysis of how the multi-tenant architecture used for most large software-as-a-service applications will become dominant and present a challenge to the relevance and importance of a large amount of open source software.
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Enter open-source WAN acceleration. Don’t expect to see open-source alternatives as mature as those in NMS, but projects like WANProxy and Squid can perform surprisingly well if you have some Linux talent on staff. WANProxy accelerates and compresses TCP and Squid does the brute-force work of caching; drop the software onto some spare servers and your staff can get a feel for the benefits of WAN optimization for short dollars.
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ForgeRock OpenAM, initially created by Sun Microsystems is an open source access management, entitlements and federation server platform.
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Mozilla
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Flock made its name as a Firefox remix that came loaded with custom add-ons for tightly integrating social networking with daily Web browsing. Just opened to the public, the Flock 3 beta keeps its social goals intact while replacing its Firefox base with Google-supported Chromium. The new Flock experience is vastly different than before, and is related to the old version in name only.
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Oracle
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He also attended the University of Chicago before finding his calling in software at the Ampex Corporation, where he created a database for the CIA called Oracle. It was up from there, and Oracle became a huge force in the enterprise software world. Ellison is known for his extravagant taste, and his home cost about $200 million.
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Healthcare
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At the Opensource.com Open Your World Forum on May 27, John D. Halamka, MD, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and CIO of Harvard Medical School, described where open source and open standards fit into the ARRA expectations for healthcare IT. The short answer is, everywhere.
“We run a data center with a couple of petabytes of healthcare data for three million patients and the entire infrastructure is run on Red Hat technologies,” Halamka said. “We have multiple data centers, multiple clusters of Linux servers and we haven’t had downtime in a couple of years. No CIO in healthcare is afraid of open source. In fact, the movement to Linux clusters that are highly reliable for healthcare is the way the back end in most healthcare data centers seem to be going.
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Government
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In Inc.’s January 2005 article Open Source: It’s Not Just for Geeks Anymore!, Al Canton wrote: “No one is quite sure how to define fire, but everyone knows what it is. Open source software is the same. Like fire, we know what open source does, we know what open source looks like, and we know it when we see it, but no one agrees on a definition.”
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India is a heavy user of open source. Sectors leveraging open source include software development outsourcing, business process outsourcing, government services, technical education as well as industries such as banking, insurance, manufacturing, oil and gas, defense and space. According to Wikipedia, India produces 2.5 million graduates every year from which only a small percentage, about 700,000 people are employed by India’s BPO industry. The BPO industry which has flourished on cheap, skilled labor has started to leverage open source software based automation to gain further cost advantages.
Brazil
Brazil has also been a hotbed of open source activity in recent years. Government agencies, private industry, universities have been teaching and implementing open source solutions to create local centers of knowledge and gain expertise around open source in the country. Seeing India’s success in IT outsourcing, Brazil has also declared an interest in using open source to gain leadership in the market of software development outsourcing.
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Licensing
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Software compliance isn’t exactly the sexiest topic we tackle at the Linux Foundation, but it’s one of the most important. While we focus *our* efforts on open source software, the vast majority of software compliance efforts are focused on proprietary licenses. Just ask a CIO of an enterprise who has been audited by one of their software suppliers recently, or look at the well funded efforts of the Business Software Alliance, an organization dedicated to stamping out piracy and keeping companies in compliance with their members.
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Openness/Sharing
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From these we can infer what books, authors, or authors who influenced the author or were being influenced at the time. From this, we can see the growth of the social graph into the cultural graph. Essentially it is the same notion as the social graph but the cultural graph links items like books, poems and events together. In itself it means nothing but linked to the social graph, it allows the user to discover who is being written to whilst a book was being written. Is the author talking to other authors or only to his agent about it?
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Transport For London (TfL) is making its data freely available to web and mobile application developers, in a move that leaves Britain’s overground trains trailing.
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Open Data
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John Wilbanks is Director of Science Commons and a co-author of the Panton Principles. He has responded to my concerns about access to climate change data, with the observation that Open data is not the major problem or solution. I’ll comment at the bottom. I agree with what he says, but I will argue why there is a role for Open Knowledge in this issue.
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Without all the data in hand, it’s hard to answer the question that Kepler was built to answer: How common are planets like Earth? Though we now know hundreds of exoplanets, most of them are big, hot Jupiters around very bright stars that could not sustain any kind of life that we recognize. It’s easy to detect the bigger planets that orbit close to their stars because their gravity makes the star “wobble” more noticeably and their size dims its light more. So, the data we’ve collected on extrasolar planets over the last two decades is muddied by observation bias.
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WebM
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Good news about open video formats. In March both our sister organisation the FSF and our associated organisation FFII asked Google to free the video codec vp8 and use it on YouTube. This month Google announced they will do so. From now on users will be able use Free Software to play and encode the new WebM format. “WebM is based on the Matroska container format — replacing Ogg — and the VP8 video codec which replaces Theora. Crucially, the Vorbis audio codec is part of the new WebM specification.”
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Mozilla has turned out a Firefox 4 prototype that includes Google’s newly open sourced WebM video format, while Opera has rolled the format into a developer build of its own.
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The Mozilla Developer Preview of Firefox 4.0 features several user interface changes, such as an updated Add-ons manager and Aero Glass support on Vista and Windows 7 systems, and adds support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project. Platform changes include an updated about:memory page that shows the amount of memory being consumed, Mac support for Cocoa event model for NPAPI plug-ins used by Flash 10.1 and the latest Apple Java plug-in, and support for ChromeWorkers with jscytupes.
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Cynthia Dunbar does not have a high regard for her local schools. She has called them unconstitutional, tyrannical and tools of perversion. The conservative Texas lawyer has even likened sending children to her state’s schools to “throwing them in to the enemy’s flames”. Her hostility runs so deep that she educated her own offspring at home and at private Christian establishments.
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Environment
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Gregor MacDonald is an independent energy analyst & investment consultant. He publishes public analysis to his website, Gregor.us and hosts the internet investment show, StockTwits.tv, with Howard Lindzon. He offers private consultancy and regular email newsletters on global energy trends & investment guidelines.
I asked him some questions about his background, the state of global energy, the BP disaster, and California’s dependency on oil…
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT has started calling for something it says is an “Internet of things”.
The “things” is stuff that combines electronic chips and Internet addresses.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The campaign to free the digital world from Digital Restrictions Management just got a new sticker. The old one is on my laptop’s screen represents the famous iPod silhouettes with white wires acting as shackles. It was a simple and powerful design. The new one is a the famous 1984 Apple ad, but I’m not sure its message is as clear as before. It also seems to give a sense of ‘victory’ for Apple fans: they now rule the digital world –with shackles, ok, but still winning.
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If the people who brought us television had played by the same rules that today’s wireless carriers impose — we’d probably all be listening to the radio.
Which is a nice way of saying the wireless industry — AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile — needs some ground rules that make clear they are common carriers that get the right to rent the airwaves by abiding by fair rules.
Right now, they play by their own rules.
Imagine if the wireless carriers controlled your wired broadband connection or your television set. You’d have to buy your television from your cable company, with a two-year contract, and when that ended, you’d have to ask them to unlock it so you could take it to another provider.
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Copyrights
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Who exactly is James Gannon representing? He claims, as does Barry Sookman, that what he publishes in his blog is his own opinion. But is it really? Your life experiences, including work are part of what colors your opinions. We know that he’s a lawyer. We don’t know who his clients are – and those clients and their interests will have had an effect on his opinions. But he refuses to say who they are.
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Anti-piracy campaigns come and go every other month – most of them are either endlessly boring or end up becoming an object of ridicule. A new one just launched takes the form of a site which appears to offer free downloads from top artists, but with a twist. Clicking to download results in various pop stars meeting a grisly end by a bullet to the head or a careless hand grenade.
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Keeping its promise to Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, the music industry has targeted the country’s second largest ISP, Vodafone. According to a new report, Vodafone is in talks with the Irish Recorded Music Association about issuing warnings and eventually disconnecting its file-sharing customers. Since its introduction last month, around 800 Eircom customers have already received their first strike.
Tony Whitmore on RSS: News, blogs and podcasts (2006)
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06.15.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux doesn’t have a CEO. Consequently, there’s no annual keynote hosted by a charismatic alpha male. But if it did, and if there were a conference covering the first half of this year, the first speech would start with three words: ‘Linux is winning’.
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I know it sounds crazy but the Linux Desktop isn’t dead, it’s just pining. It’s pining for the correct platform–a tablet computer. And, I’m not referring to some cheap imitation tablet that will merely satisfy a few observers and nerdlets who use Linux. I’m thinking of a tablet computer for hardcore Linux moguls. You know, the kind of Linux person who is so into Linux that he tries to carry an egg on his feet through the winter. The kind of Linux fan who carries a wallet-sized photo of Linus Torvalds in her wallet. Linux pines for a true tablet platform that will do Linux justice and vice versa. Does one exist? Not yet.
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I’ve been thinking lately that there are actually certain types of people out there that should be using Linux instead of Windows.
Types of people who should be using Linux
Geeks and people who enjoy tinkering with computers
If you enjoy psychically building computers, chances are you’ll like tinkering with the operating system once your machine is running. There is no better operating system to tinker with than Linux.
People who want easy security
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Finally, I realized that many mobile devices (cellphones, MP4s, etc.) and gaming consoles ALSO run Linux.
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As a result, “Linux needs to more effectively compete with Steve Jobs and the magic of Apple,” Zemlin added. “It’s important that open-source products add more value for users than simply being free. Open-source software also needs to be fabulous.”
Funny that Mark Shuttleworth was making similar comments about the desktop back in 2008!
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Desktop
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Stickfish, a leading specialist in VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technologies, introduces a new version of the multiplatform virtual desktop environment, Raydesk. It brings improvements in system functionality and a significantly better user experience. One of the new functions is, for example, the Menu Driven Desktop which enables users to drag & drop menu items to the desktop or to a designated area on the panel.
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This year, Lynn Bender; the organizer of Linux Against Poverty has arranged for some pretty cool prizes to be raffled off to equipment donors. First prize is a pass to next year’s SXSW Interactive event. Make sure you or your company registers for the drawing….
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Server
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The open source project TurnKey Linux has launched a private beta of the TurnKey Hub, a service that makes it easy to launch and manage the project’s Ubuntu-based virtual appliances in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
There are currently about 40 software bundles in Turkey Linux’s virtual library, including Joomla, WordPress, and Moodle. According to TurnKey Linux, these virtual appliances are optimized for easy deployment and maintenance. And as the name implies, launching an instance with one of the virtual appliances is very simple. Custom passwords and authentication, as well as automatic setup for EBS devices and Elastic IPs, are part of the setup process.
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Audiocasts
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In this podcast Mitchell Ashley and Alan Shimel are joined by Mike Murray and Aaron Cohen, of The Hacker Academy. The Hacker Academy is a continuing information security training and education program fostering a community of security professionals interested in keeping their skill sets up to date.
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Google
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Acer has long been wrapped up in rumor surrounding the forthcoming wave of Chrome OS tablets that are to be released this year. Recently implicated Dell and HP might just round off the first hardware partners that Google is planning to work with.
On the Chromium OS website, files were found that pointed to those three companies already having specific configurations for the operating system in place to allow for coding to meet those specifications. It could be nothing more than corporations covering their bases to allow for possible future work, but at the same time, this is just too much together to write it off as complete happenstance.
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Applications
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So which virtualization solution is best for the Ubuntu desktop? For the time being–and this is to say nothing of the various options which I’ve not discussed, such as VMware’s products and Xen–VirtualBox is probably the better choice for users who want a simple application for running mainstream operating systems without ever having to touch a configuration file or open a terminal.
For those interested in cutting-edge virtualization functionality, or who actually prefer the command-line, however, KVM has a lot to offer. At the least, although its developers are clearly focused on the enterprise, it should not be ruled out as a virtualization solution for normal desktop users, especially when it’s combined with GUI management tools.
Our advice: don’t apt-get remove VirtualBox from your Ubuntu desktop yet, but keep your eye on KVM as it continues to develop.
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Dock applications is really cool way to get quicker access to your installed applications, directories, or files, it’s fully customized with different desktop and window managers. you will find a lot of docks available to use with different features for extra plugins, docks applets, and themes. here will list 7 of the best docks available so far for linux desktops.
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Ubuntu’s Indicator Applets now work with the latest testing version of popular Dock AWN.
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Instructionals
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digiKam is an immensely powerful photo application, so learning all its features requires time and effort. But this capable photo management application also offers a few easy to use features which you can use to instantly improve your shots.
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Games
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Be sure to check back, as we will be having an in-depth look at the Steam on Linux client as soon as it is released.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat General Manager Max McLaren has told IT Brief that the company has the fastest growing operating system in the world.
“We are the fastest growing operating system in the world today,” he said during a recent company update.
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Bob Young is a self-confessed contrarian with a strong desire to change the world by allowing people to share and collaborate. The approach has served him well and has helped turn the Canadian into a multi-millionaire.
From the outset, his software company Red Hat bucked the trend set by the big players like Microsoft which stubbornly guarded every line of code and charged whopping fees to maintain it.
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When you put it that way Red Hat’s success becomes even more remarkable. No one has to pay an open source software company for its code. If a pure open source company is only one that depends on voluntary code payments for its bread, then getting $800 million of such payments a year is pretty amazing.
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Debian Family
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Welcome to this year’s fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Debian Community Poll
* Automatic installation of hardware-specific packages
* Desktop artwork and themes for Debian “Squeeze”
* Debian Installer string freeze coming up
* Provisional list of talks for DebConf10
* License usage in Debian
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s not just UbuntuOne, it’s the new SocialMe desktop, the switching window buttons, the ever-changing selection of default applications. Each new release of Ubuntu brings with it new tools, new ways of doing things and new challenges.
Change is necessary and one of the things I most value about Ubuntu is the ever-present push to innovate. UbuntuOne, SocialMe and others are great examples of how Ubuntu is innovating.
The thing is that as Ubuntu grows it begins to attract new users, and the quickest way to alienate new users is to make it hard for them to do what they want to do. Or worse, promise something but not do it. Users are more likely to stick with something that works well than something that mostly works but has lots of potential.
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Looking for a cheap DIY Linux robot? This is the Linux PC robot project.
The objective of LinuxPCRobot is to build a fully functional robotic development platform for $500 or less using linux, commonly available components, a little skill, and some good old fashioned scrounging.
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Android
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The answer is the first NEC Android tablet, despite it’s incredible similarity to the Nintendo DS. Pictured to the left is the NEC LifeTouch, and Android 2.1 based tablet with a 7 inch touch screen that will respond to both finger and stylus input.
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Google’s new Android treat has been named “Froyo” after frozen yogurt, and it’s nearly every bit as sweet as it sounds. I’ve been running a leaked Android 2.2 ROM on my Droid for a week now. Here’s a few impressions and what VARs, SMBs and anyone in general using Android phones has to look forward to with the upcoming update…
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Even though I’m running a leaked ROM, it’s very stable. I can only see this getting better. Whispers around the ‘net are that Google is going to slow down their releases of Android updates, and focus on some solid polish before unleashing 2.3 (Gingerbread) to the world. But coming from a Droid which once ran Android 2.0, with no multi-touch and an unresponsive home screen? Android 2.2 is a breath a fresh air, especially for those with iOS 4 envy.
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Sub-notebooks
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One Laptop Per Child announced an update to the XO-1.5 which enables both Sugar Labs’ Sugar Learning Platform and the GNOME free desktop. The Sugar Learning Platform has been featured on OLPC laptops since the original XO-1. The recent update introduces a more sophisticated interface for older students. Toggling between the two environments can be done with a single-click.
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What Chrome OS is not:
* It was never intended to be a replacement for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, or any of the Linux/UNIX -based distributions.
* It is not going to cater to everybody’s style in computing.
* It will not necessarily bring everything that you are looking for in an OS (see previous statement).
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Tablets
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In my last article on open source, I put together the reasons why shanzhai manufacturers favor open source platforms, and how they can enable them to initiate more legitimate business. The current technology trend of tablets makes me feel that 2010, the year of tablets is as much the year of open source, and the two combined may provide a breakthrough for shanzhai manufacturers.
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4. Legitimate business: Google Android is shaping up to be the first widely accepted open source operating system that doesn’t have a fringe element tag associated with it. It’s a legitimate business option. Whilst in the past the motivation of a shanzhai manufacturer in offering a Linux option was more about offering an option that didn’t include a pirated Microsoft product, now their choice of an open source OS is totally mainstream and acceptable … legitimate.
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In view of the fact that most computing services are shifting towards the cloud and with web-oriented handheld devices playing more of a role, light and resource efficient operating systems seem to be the future of the next generation of computing. Open source operating systems (especially Android) are becoming the prime choice of the shanzhai and I believe we’ll continue to see more in the future.
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This is the Q7, a very nice mobile Internet device available running ubuntu or android. It has 1080p HD video playback and that could make it a top gadget. Sadly it’s missing one important feature I really think is a no-go for a device like this.
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1) Find the people who bring ideas more often than opinions.
Whether on a mailing list, a conference call, or at a meeting or event, it is pretty easy to tell who is active in a community.
But activity is a red herring.
Simply because someone is an active participant does not mean they are a key influencer in the community. I tend to look not for the people who are talking or emailing the most, but for the people who are generating ideas.
In healthy communities, lots of folks are generating ideas. In unhealthy communities, a few people are generating ideas, and others are shooting them down.
In my favorite communities, those run the open source way, there is a meritocracy of ideas where the best ideas always have a chance to win. My good friend and business partner David Burney taught me that the best way to generate the best idea is to generate a lot of ideas.
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Ever since it launched in late 2008, Twilio has a knack for making cool products. Its core service is a telephony API offering a set of commands that make it easy for developers to integrate phone and SMS services into their web-enabled applications. And today they’re releasing an open source platform based on that technology that has the potential to disrupt business-oriented call routing services in a big way — Twilio is describing it as a sort of Google Voice for businesses, with more flexibility. It’s called OpenVBX.
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Movements
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FOSSFA’s advocacy programme has seen unprecedented success in the past year. The FOSSWAY project (FOSS Advocacy in West Africa and Beyond) saw enormous buy-in. It has launched open source clubs, a regional FOSS study, four university roadshows, its own publications, hands-on trainings for at least 1 000 people in the use and deployment of FOSS.
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To wrap up, we have Dana’s Tea Party Manifesto, Simon’s OSI reform campaign platform, and Neelie’s opening statement in the great EC Digital Agenda debate. Looks like a really interesting time in open source politics with many opportunities to get involved and a lot of horse-trading possibilities.
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Events
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This past weekend I didn’t watch baseball, World Cup soccer, or basketball; instead I sponsored a hallway table in a Marriott hotel in Spartanburg, SC to meet, discuss, and argue over all things open source at the SouthEast LinuxFest.
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As each new developmental cycle commences, there is an Ubuntu Developers Summit (UDS) – it’s a biannual event where many of the developers meet to plan, and create, the goals for the next release of Ubuntu. The attendees are a mixture of Canonical employees, community members (many sponsored by Canonical) and external project representatives.
The summit is always held in a different location, and usually switched between Europe and the USA each time. The latest one was held in La Hulpe (near Brussels), Belgium, to plan the next Ubuntu release Maverick Meerkat.
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Databases
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CUBRID plans to add the clustering support to its open source database by the end of this year, which will allow it to distribute the database across multiple servers and boost its reliability and availability.
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CMS
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Manatee County, Fla.’s IT team didn’t want to spend another year battling the arbitrary limits on the back end of the county’s website.
For five years, a patchwork mix of legacy systems turned simple Web IT tasks into time-consuming chores. With only 10 IT staff members working on the project, the county’s IT team had to create content and upload files to the content management system (CMS). But there were file size limitations so they had to hold files on a separate server. They couldn’t see front-end changes without publishing them, and sometimes edits just disappeared completely.
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Business
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Google can afford to give away Android and a huge (and growing) array of open-source software, without having to gate access to it through a compiler or contract, because Google doesn’t monetize open-source software directly. This, to me, is a far superior model, and one much more likely to lead to good community dynamics. Google is never in competition with its community, but rather can afford to be a full partner.
Make no mistake: Red Hat is an impressive company, run by people of quality, intelligence, and integrity. Just listening to how Red Hat uses Salesforce to optimize the sales process is impressive.
But Red Hat is the beginning, not the end, of the story on how to make $1 billion in open-source sales. Google offers far better clues as to where open-source entrepreneurs should look for inspiration, because Google reflects the reality of what “services” means in the Internet age. “Services,” in Google’s world, are far more scalable and potent than in Red Hat’s.
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Openness/Sharing
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Wikipedia will roll out the latest changes to its editing policy later tonight, called Pending Changes. The constant struggle to find a way to limit vandalism without a chilling effect on legitimate editing will take a more permissive turn with the change.
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Open Data
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As a result of the presentations and the discussions within the panel it seemed to me that there was a serious lack of Openness in the Climate Research community. It is important not to judge from just one meeting but given the enormous public reporting and discussion I was disappointed to find that there were still parochial and entrenched attitudes about ownership and use of data.
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The UK’s coalition government has followed up on its promises of a general Right To Public Data, with sweeping and fast-moving measures to open up whole sectors of public sector information, from the salaries of senior civil servants to spending by local councils.
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Open Access/Content
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OCWSearch, the search engine for OpenCourseWare classes, reached a milestone today, now indexing the OpenCourseWare content from ten major universities: the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, MIT, Notre Dame, The Open University UK, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, Delft University of Technology, University of Massachusets Boston, the University of Tokyo, and Yale University. These universities all offer courses online for free, under the OpenCourseWare Initiative.
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Programming
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Python 2.7, the last in the legacy Python 2.x dynamic language line, moved closer to general availability earlier this month when developers of the language put out a release candidate. The finished version of Python 2.7 is scheduled to be available July 3, after a second release candidate is offered on July 19, said Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundation.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 1.1, a backwards compatible update that boosts performance in the parallel programming standard. OpenCL 1.1 efficiently shares images and buffers by linking event objects and fence sync objects, features memory object destructor callbacks and now allows for OpenCL commands to be enqueued from additional hosts.
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The non-profit Charity Navigator Web site tracks such expenses via charities’ disclosure statements to the IRS to provide donors with an assessment of how well charities run themselves. Looking only at the supply side for the more than 5,500 charities that it tracks, the organization does not evaluate the impact on the recipients of funds, since that impact is often a subjective appraisal of “effectiveness.”
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Security/Aggression
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A strapping Idahoan, Brandon (who doesn’t want his full name used) enlisted as a teenager when he got his girlfriend pregnant and needed a stable job, stat. (She lost the baby and they split, but he’s still glad he signed up.) Unlike his friend, he doesn’t think the United Nations must be dismantled, although he does agree that it represents the New World Order, and he suspects that concentration camps are being readied in the off-limits section of Fort Drum. He sends 500 rounds of ammunition home to Idaho each month.
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Environment
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The BP oil spill is the first major national event where the bad guy in question is subject to lampooning not just from a satirical elite but by anyone with the material and the gumption to set up a Twitter account, or hell, create a funny hashtag. Democratizing the news was a step forward. Democratizing our skepticism towards all form of power is an even greater step.
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The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, says he welcomes “the development of a vigorous debate” on climate science.
In an article for the BBC’s Green Room series, he says those on the side of “consensus” must remember that debate drives the evolution of knowledge.
The panel and its chairman have been much criticised in recent months over errors in its landmark 2007 report.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The release of the Chinese government’s first-ever White Paper on the Internet in China provoked some head-scratching here in the Western world. Part Three of the six-part document is titled “Guaranteeing Citizens’ Freedom of Speech on the Internet.” I’ve heard from several journalists and policy analysts (not people based in China, for whom such cognitive dissonance is normal) who at first glance thought they were reading The Onion or some kind of parody site. How, people asked me, can a government that so blatantly censors the Internet claim with a straight face to be protecting and upholding freedom of speech on the Internet? The answer of course is that China’s netizens are free to do everything… except for the things they’re not free to do.
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Written declaration 2010/29 is a Written Declaration according to Rule 123 of the Rules of Procedure of the EU parliament, the stated aim an ‘early warning system’ for child sexual abuse. However, a thorough reading shows that it also includes a clause about extending the Data Retention Directive to cover search engines. This is not mentioned in any of the material given to MEPs, or even in the declaration itself. Instead, the DRD is only mentioned using its referral code of 2006/24/EC. This may very well be a sneaky way of getting the Parliament to take a strong stance on Data Retention where no such stance actually exists among the MEPs.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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People don’t like DRM in large part because it removes much of their control over things like e-books, music, and movies. Want to loan a DRMed song to a friend? You probably can’t, even though sharing a physical item like a CD remains trivial.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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“They were suing us for more than $50,000 if we didn’t change our name,” she says. “We are a small business, and we don’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t think there was a good reason to fight them.” Edith, whose mother had brought hundreds of jarritos when she moved from El Salvador, still decorates her taqueria with the jars- but the sign over the door now read El Jarro Azul. “We thought if they’re located in Texas, they should let people have their own name. But I guess not,” she gives a rueful laugh. “They’re thinking we’re going to steal their name and start making sodas or something like that.”
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Copyrights
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For those unfamiliar with the practice, e-reserves takes its name from the traditional library “reserve” model, where a professor makes a limited number of physical copies of articles or a book chapter available for students. Those copies were generally subject to permission, and proper reproduction fees were paid to the publishers.
In the digital world, that’s all changed. Rather than make multiple physical copies, faculty now scan or download chapters or articles, create a single copy, and place that copy on a server where students can access it (and in some cases print, download, or share). Since the practice relies on fair use (creating a single digital copy, usually from a resource already paid for, for educational purposes), permission generally isn’t sought, and thus permission fees aren’t paid, making the price right for students strapped by the high cost of tuition and textbooks, as well as for libraries with budgets stretched thinner every year.
Not surprisingly, e-reserves are widely used and are immensely popular. Students and instructors love the convenience, ease of use, and accessibility. They are efficient and fit with the way teachers teach and students learn in the digital age. In addition, e-reserves facilitate innovations, like distance learning and collaboration.
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In response to the country’s “3 strikes” Hadopi legislation, last week a French ISP began offering a service to block file-sharing on customer connections for ‘just’ 2 euros per month. It didn’t take long for awful vulnerabilities in the system to be found which breached not only the privacy of subscribers, but exposed them to new security threats.
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It is perhaps an indication of how times have changed that the content industries have won some decisive legal battles in court against Limewire, isoHunt and the PirateBay, yet these have not prompted the same level of scrutiny that previous cases have.
The reason for this is quite simple. Whoever thinks that the legal victories against these services will dent P2P usage is seriously deluded. Limewire for example belongs to an era long gone in file-sharing terms, it was the client-based model of P2P which provided a centralised home for infringement, and therefore it was an easy target for litigation. isoHunt and the Pirate Bay are where the file-sharing action is, but these services are not at all similar to clients such as Limewire.
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Well, this is nice. Fran Nevrkla, the CEO of PPL, the collection society for performance rights in the UK, recently gave a talk that shows the ridiculous extremes with which some folks in this industry view the very consumers they’re failing to serve. Last we checked in on PPL, it was trying to shake down charities for more money and had lost a massive ruling that said it had greatly overcharged multiple venues and owed them refunds. Towards the end of the talk, Nevrkla claims that he’s disappointed that capital punishment for file sharing isn’t available.
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ACTA
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Only two weeks of plenary in Strasbourg are left for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to have a chance to sign Written Declaration 12 (WD12) on ACTA. 150 signatures are still missing, mostly from Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland. Every EU citizen is encouraged to call Strasbourg offices of non-signatories MEPs until thursday, 12:00, to urge them to sign WD12.
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The European Parliament Written Declaration 12/2010 led by MEPs Françoise Castex, Zuzana Roithová, Alexander Alvaro, Stavros Lambrinidis receives backing from the Foundation of a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), a European group for public education and consumer protection in the digital environment.
The FFII analysed the current Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) draft and found many unintended consequences. For instance, sanctions against unauthorized “file sharing” in the digital environment would also stifle common electronic software distribution methods of operating systems and essential security updates. So far the Commission has not delivered an ‘impact assessment’ for these potential regulatory side effects.
Damian Brasher: Linux training and how to prepare (2006)
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Send this to a friend
06.14.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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And that’s not the only place where desktop Linux makes sense. If you get right down to it, there are many instances where the only requirements of the desktop are to act as a portal to a Web-based application and possibly run an email client. With the push toward Web-based internal apps, there’s little reason to require Windows at all. Heck, there’s almost no requirement for a desktop or the ability to run anything other than a compatible browser.
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The software store I describe is not science fiction. This is reality for Apple “App Store” for Ipad/Iphone, the “Ubuntu Software Center” for Canonical’s Linux-based desktop operating system, the Google “Android Market” for Android Linux-based phones, and Palm “PreWare” for WebOS Linux-based phones.
Ladies and Gentelmen, the platform-delivered software store is how distributed in the 21st century. Unfortunately for Microsoft, no such thing exists for Windows.
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Ballnux
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This distribution includes LAMP (LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) that is needed for developing or hosting PHP websites and all other major development tools. An award-winning Sugar desktop for children is also included in this media.
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More details about Samsung’s new tablet have emerged courtesy of Tinh te and from what it claims is a highly reliable source. This time around, the Vietnamese site is claiming that Samsung’s 7-inch Tab will be running Anroid 2.2 (Froyo) on an A8 processor clocked to a peppy 1.2GHz. It’s all powered by a 4,000mAH battery that contributes to the tablet’s 370-gram weight with 16GB of on-board storage and up to 32GB of microSD expansion.
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Kernel Space
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“I was asked to manage a number of Linux servers at work. I would like to use volume snapshots to improve my backup scripts and keep recent copies of data around for quick restore. I normally manage Windows servers and on those I would just use Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy for this. I tried Linux LVM snapshots, but most of the servers I manage run regular partitions with ext3 file systems, so LVM snapshots will not work. I found some versioning file systems out there like ext3cow and Tux3. Those look interesting, but I need something I can use on my existing ext3 file systems. I also found the R1Soft Hot Copy command-line utility, but it does not yet support my older 2.4 Linux servers. What are you using to make snapshots on Linux?”
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Applications
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Content control software, also commonly known as web filtering software, is software which is designed and optimised to determine what content can be viewed by the user. This software is particularly relevant to information supplied by a web browser.
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GIMP
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Along with the removal of the docking bars a while back, the result is that GIMP has gotten a cleaner and more space efficient UI. There’s a lot of things that could be further improved of course, but this is what I wanted to do for 2.8. And the single-window mode. Speaking of, I haven’t had much time for that lately either, but I’m sure it’ll all be fine eventually.
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Many of you already know that the free graph based library GEGL is still being integrated into GIMP currently. So what about some visions how GIMP could work or look like when integration is finished and new features are implemented?
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Proprietary
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It’s a rainy Saturday here in Oslo, so it’s a good opportunity to release a snapshot.
[...]
There’s good news for Linux users: Java should now work again!
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When it comes to surf the Internet, most people simply does not care for the browser, for example Internet Explorer 6, which until recently remained as one of the most frequently used browser, even appearing to security breaches and slowdown evident. While Microsoft continues its dominance in the world of browsers, competitors weight as Firefox, Opera and most recently the Google Chrome occupy increasingly users.
[...]
While in HTML5 test, Mozilla has obtained a score higher on tests that examine the program’s compatibility with navigation in pages that use the HTML 5 (139 points against 129 of Opera, for a total of 300 possible). In addition to the 10 points do not represent any difference, the HTML 5 is still not something widespread and most sites do not work with this system.
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Instructionals
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The program is open-source (and won’t cost you a dime). If you’re a Linux user who also happens to own an Apple mobile device, I highly urge you to check out libimobiledevice. Let us know how your experience goes.
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To get started get the minimal image here. Then burn the image to CD (USB method didn’t work for me). Make sure you are connected to the internet via a cable as this install will need to get some additional basic packages from the Ubuntu repository.
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Games
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The Butterfly Effect is an open source physics puzzle game about cause and effect, which the developers state is not entirely unlike “The Incredible Machine“. There are 30 now fully playable levels.
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AstroMenace is a modern 3D scrolling space shooter with ship upgrade possibilities. You can improve your ship configuration by installing new weapons, defensive systems, power stations and much more. To improve your ship, you must earn money by destroying throngs of enemies on every level.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Obviously, the move from beta 1 to beta 2 won’t bring any new features, however, as I continue to use the KDE SC 4.5 betas, I’m continuing to discover the small improvements that aren’t obvious at first blush. Whilst there aren’t a huge number of new features in this release, 4.5 is bringing a level of polish that will serve as a solid foundation for the next steps in the evolution of the KDE desktop.
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GNOME Desktop
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We have already talked about a web-based collaborative editing tool today, Etherpad. So, after that I started looking for some native linux applications which do the same thing and came across Gobby and a new collaboration plugin for Gedit. We can talk about Gobby sometime later, I am more interested to tell you about this new plugin in Gedit .
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Reviews
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There you have it, a close comparison between these three fabulous Linux distros, resulting in very evenly matched scores. I personally love all three, each having its own character, strengths, but also weaknesses. Having said so, looking strictly for which one offers the smoothest and most intuitive experience, I would probably have to say that Linux Mint 9 is the winner in my opinion.
Hopefully this comparison will help you make your choice based on your own needs and taste. I am pretty sure any of the choices is a sure winner.
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Recommendations – Pardus 2009.2 is a light-weight desktop distribution. Light-weight because it does not support disk encryption, boot-loader password protection, and LVM and RAID. If those are features you can live without, then Pardus is worth at least a try. It is just like Linux Mint, but with fewer applications in its repository.
What I’m looking forward to in the next release is for the network interface and the graphical firewall manager to be configured out of the box. I’ll also love to see 3D desktop configuration as a step in Kaptan.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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My friend ask to me to install linux to his notebook. And i install it with pclinuxos 2010 my custom remastered. The notebook is Acer Aspire 4730 ZG. This is the specification of Acer Aspire 4730 ZG (look at this pic).
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Fedora
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Fedora Linux has found its way back into my heart. It will work alongside Ubuntu as my top two Linux distributions. We’ll see just how they place (1 or 2) with the next iteration.
Bravo Fedora Linux. I tip my hat to you.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Finally! The much discussed about F-Spot vs Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much needed change and F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on a other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.
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“Finally! The much discussed about F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.”
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Word on the street is F-Spot is out and Shotwell is in for the next release of Ubuntu.
It’s always been obvious to me that the so-called “best-of-breed” Mono apps were anything but, and it’s nice to see that Team Apologista spin isn’t getting the job done any longer.
It’s always struck me as seventeen kinds of absurd that a simple note-taking application can justify bringing in a huge run-time framework – and the after-the-fact rationaliztion of adding more Mono apps “since we’ve already paid the price” was a PR dance worthy of Team Apologista’s Redmond Puppet Masters.
Of course, Mono infestation is not purely an Ubuntu problem – GNOME has deep shame staining its hands in this matter as well – but because Team Apologista has targeted Ubuntu so hard, it’s significant -and encouraging – to see their efforts fail.
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Today I and some hundred others on LinuxTag in Berlin attended a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth, the “head dreamer” of the ubuntu Linux distribution.
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Our favourite alternative to the main Ubuntu menu applet has received an update today which makes it easier to configure settings and also includes a new plugin to perform Google searches right from your desktop!
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The definition for ‘Informed’ is: “To supply (oneself) with knowledge of a matter or subject.” How do you do this without coming to a consensus with the community? I don’t care who makes the decisions in the end, but to be informed you must listen to the community. And to “fix” a problem you must first understand the problem and know the best solution, the users must not still have a problem, otherwise it’s not a proper solution and the “decisionmaker” was not “informed.”
Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t make good decisions. As for Jono, the community manager job is NOT to make excuses for bad decisions, it is to represent the community (just as we in the U.S. elect each person to represent us, this is democracy, and this is how good software is developed.)
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Last week an old discussion flared up once again when TildeHash published “Meritocracy vs. Democracy”, a long lament for.. the position of a few buttons!
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I didn’t get to see Jono Bacon’s post Ubuntu: meritocracy not democracy until today. Shame I missed it, I like reading this stuff.
[...]
Of course scale that up to 12 million users and you suddenly see why some people want to start having democracy or at least hierarchy. Users can’t reasonable expect to be listened to, even though their input is vital to drag Ubuntu out of the programmer paradise and into the mainstream.
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Android
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Motorola’s turning up the heat on the smartphone market — and this time, it’s not only casual consumers the company’s eyeing.
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Motorola’s poppin’ out Android phones Kate Gosselin-style this month. Just days after announcing its new Motorola Flipout, Moto has taken the wraps off the Milestone XT720, dubbed as “one of the most powerful phones” in the company’s current Android lineup.
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According to a statement from Sprint, Friday sales of the HTC EVO 4G topped the single day sales of any other phone in the company’s history — though the company didn’t give exact numbers. The previous record was held by both the Samsung Instinct and the Palm Pre.
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Looking to put a little more “Minority Report” in your life? Or maybe you’re just tired of smudging the screen on your Android device? eyeSight Mobile Technologies may have the answer: Touchless gesture control.
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Eyesight develops natural user interfaces for mobile phones. Its gesture technology allows Android devices to use the device’s built-in camera, advanced real-time image processing and machine vision algorithms to track the user’s hand motions and convert them into commands.
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It’s official. China and Taiwan have signed an agreement to promote a number of telecommunications technologies, including Google’s Android mobile software and networking technologies for wireless cities.
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Fresh off an announcement of a strategic investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, mobile payments platform Boku is taking its mobile strategy one step further by launching an in-app mobile billing library for Android.
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Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch may currently be the most popular mobile browsing devices in North America, but handsets using Google’s Android operating system are quickly eroding Apple’s lead. Over the past year, Android browser share on mobiles has increased 12.2 percent and is now used by one in five mobile web users in North America, according to Quantcast, a San Francisco-based web analytics firm. While browsing is down on nearly all other platforms, Apple’s drop is the steepest, down 8.1 percent in the last 12 months. But Android’s gain can really only take a bite out of Apple as everyone else is essentially sitting on the sidelines.
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Sub-notebooks
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We all know OLPC as an amazing educational tool for primary school children in the developing world. But is it appropriate for high school students? Will teenagers flock to the XO’s kid-friendly design and child-centric Sugar OS?
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OSI and FSF Ideals
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When I said recently that we still need the Open Source Initiative (OSI), it started a flood of comment. There’s no doubt that we need OSI – but we need a better OSI. The one we have now is just too small to be effective and too mired in past successes; a renaissance is needed. You can help.
Yesterday and Today
OSI was formed in 1998 to solve a pressing problem. The founders embraced the ideals of software freedom, but saw that businesses – being non-persons – lacked any way to embrace a philosophical principle. To advance software freedom, it needed to be pragmatically “projected” onto the surface of the computer industry of 1998, creating rules that could be followed without demanding ideological “purity”. The result was a focus on a certain kind of advocacy, plus an enormously valuable effort to analyse, categorise and selectively endorse copyright licenses. OSI was the pragmatic projection of software freedom onto the computer industry of 1998.
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Most of these questions are well understood within the free software community itself. But we generally communicate it poorly by focusing the discussion on license technicalities. I guess this is because we’re so used to working in this open manner that we take the it as a given. But users, especially in the public administration only see the licensing side of things because that is the only aspect we talk about and have definitions for.
A good exception for this is the Apache Software Foundation that has a well-defined set of rules that projects must follow before they can be adopted under the ASF umbrella. Maybe FSF and OSI should also publish some understandable guidelines and definitions for project openness?
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I suggest that instead of these scapegoat tactics and acting as if they solve any real issue, efforts should be focused on encouraging manufacturers to publish open specifications for their chips and open the source code for their firmware, whether it lives inside the hardware or gets loaded by the kernel. And let’s commend those manufacturers that allow their binary firmware to be conveniently distributed with the Linux kernel instead of punishing them by blacklisting their devices. That could be a first step toward improved communication with hardware manufacturers, which in turn might make truly free firmware more likely in the future.
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Business
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This is a suggestion that has come up before (Dave Neary’s post from 2008 springs to mind). As he stated: “Free software doesn’t get developed like proprietary software, why should the free software industry look like the proprietary software industry?”
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Openness/Sharing
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It seemed barely credible that London’s evening paper would succeed as a giveaway. But the power of old-fashioned print advertising revenue has moved it to the brink of profitability
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With digital technology and internet distribution, we are all producers. The outputs of our diverse cultural institutions are converging in the digital domain. Public funding policy needs to be reformed and converged to match.
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Last week, a new open protocol called OExchange was released with the aim of simplifying sharing. Right out of the door, it had names like Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn signed on. WebProNews spoke with Google’s Open Web advocate, Chris Messina about how the protocol could benefit businesses and site owners.
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Recently, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Cameron Neylon, probably the leading – and certainly most articulate – exponent of open science. Talking with him about peer review helped crystallise something that I have been trying to articulate: why peer review should go.
[...]
For me what’s particularly interesting is the fact that peer review is unnecessary for the same reason that copyright and patents are unnecessary nowadays: because the Internet liberates creativity massively and provides a means for bringing that flood to a wider audience without the need for official gatekeepers to bless and control it.
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Starting July 1st, Starbucks will finally begin to offer free and unrestricted Internet access over Wi-Fi in its stores. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made this announced at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference today. With this, Starbucks finally joins the ranks of neighborhood coffee stores all over the world that have long offered free and easy access to Wi-Fi. By Fall 2010, Starbucks also plans to give Internet users in its stores free access to paid sites, including the Wall Street Journal.
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Open Data
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The following guest post is by Stefano Costa and Federico Morando. Stefano Costa is a researcher at the University of Siena and Coordinator of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. Federico Morando is Managing Director & Research Fellow at the NEXA Center for Internet & Society and a member of the Working Group on EU Open Data.
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Open Access/Content
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The Open University’s Martin Weller looks at the Peer Review Survey 2009′s numbers on free participation by UK academics in the peer review process for commercial science journals and concludes that 10.4m hours spent on this amounts to a £209,976,000 subsidy from publicly funded universities to private, for-profit journals, who then charge small fortunes to the same institutions for access to the journals.
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Programming
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Hewlett-Packard has blades on the brain for both “industry standard” and “mission critical” servers, but IT managers in the United Kingdom seem to be more worried about the cost of their mission critical platforms, generally Unix boxes, according to a report released by Coleman Parkes Research.
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NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.
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Science
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Canadian boffins say they have discovered a strange form of microbe living in remote Arctic springs which would, if taken to some parts of Mars, be able to survive there.
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Security/Aggression
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A multi-million pound scheme to tackle passport fraud has been branded a failure after it was revealed that only eight people have been caught as a result of the project.
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My interest in the Gary McKinnon extradition case was based on a sense of mismatch.
The case as routinely portrayed in the media did not seem to relate to the case as set out in the relevant legal judgments.
Moreover, the discussion of the case in the media rarely, if ever, referred to the case as it would appear to someone who had read the judgments.
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The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
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I have been wondering for a while just what we — the west in general — are doing in Afghanistan.
Iraq was pretty obvious: oil. (Don’t listen to the mouth, watch the hands.) It wasn’t anything as crude as grabbing the oil — stealing around ten billion tons of anything is pretty much impossible — but about exerting control over the manner in which it is sold in order to maintain a competitive advantage (a choke-hold on energy supplies) over economic competitors such as Germany and China. That was the core vision of the Project for the New American Century think tank in the late 1990s, and those folks later formed the top tier of the previous administration.
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A botnet targeting Mexican surfers has been dismantled just weeks after it first appeared, apparently by the cybercrook who established it rather than by any action by the federales or ISPs.
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Somali militants have threatened football fans they will be publicly flogged – or worse – if they are caught watching the World Cup on TV.
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A new Pew Internet survey of 900 Internet experts leads with a headline finding that will surprise few: the experts largely agree that, by 2020, we’ll all be computing in the cloud. But an even more interesting notion is buried in one corner of the report, and it’s an idea that came up in two of the three cloud interviews I did in the wake of Wired/Ars Smart Salon. This notion is that, at some point, there will be a massive data breach—a kind of cloud version of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but pouring critical data out into the open instead of oil—and that this breach will cause everyone from private industry to government regulators to rethink what cloud computing can and cannot do.
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Environment
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The most intriguing part of his presentation was his exploration of ‘consumer emissions,’ which are not usually included in emissions reporting. His central question was, “Who’s responsible for emissions: the producers or the consumers?”
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By now it ought to be obvious to anyone – if we want bluefin tuna tomorrow we need to stop catching them today. But despite the clear scientific evidence and predictions of the bluefin’s demise – our activists faced a 2 hour confrontation at sea today when they took action to ensure fish for the future.
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A SUNDAY TIMES investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.
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James Cameron offered to help BP find a solution to their leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico but the company turned him down. Now the Academy Award-winning director is taking his suggestions directly to the media.
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President Barack Obama would have already fired BP CEO Tony Hayward if it were up to him.
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Walker was eventually able to go over to the tent after an intervention from an official in the sheriff’s office, but none of the workers would talk to him, since the security official was telling them that they didn’t have to say anything.
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More than 150,000 people get a few chuckles every day from @BPGlobalPR on Twitter, a satirical take on BP and the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. But BP, the company behind what has been called the biggest ecological disaster in U.S. history, isn’t laughing.
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BP has complained to Twitter about one of the very many parody feeds mocking its efforts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
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Supercomputers are good for more than just designing nuclear weapons or making doomsday predictions about climate change. They can depress us in other ways, like showing us the extent of the damage that could be done by BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore rig spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
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Congressional Democrats and the White House are toying with different ways to force BP to cover the costs of damages from the Gulf oil spill. But they face stiff opposition from industry…and it seems leading Republicans. In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he believes taxpayers should help pick up the tab for the clean up.
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Finance
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When the World Bank and International Finance Corporation started the Lighting Africa program in 2007, it was estimated that Africans spent $17 billion (€12.5 billion) a year on lighting sources such as kerosene lamps that are inefficient, polluting and hazardous, and that 250 million people in sub-Saharan Africa had no access to power.
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Congress’ final tinkering with Wall Street overhaul this month offers lobbyists a last-ditch shot to reshape the package on behalf of clients with billions at stake.
Even as the legislation gets tougher on banks by the week, agents of influence are hardly strangers on Capitol Hill. Many once worked for the lawmakers they’re lobbying.
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Mike Konczal (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the America’s Future Now conference) has written a report outlining his dream scenario for the Wall Street reform conference committee, coming up with the best of both the House and Senate bills. He has four topic headings:
Making Resolution Authority Credible
Getting Our Banks Capitalized
Bringing Derivatives Into the Sunlight
Audit the Fed
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Banks are likely to lose a key lobbying battle in the US over whether they will be forced to spin off their lucrative swaps desks, according to people familiar with financial reform negotiations in Congress.
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A great deal of discretion would remain with the regulators, and of course this is a potential danger. But the heightened public awareness of the idea that “bailouts are bad” at least increases the chances that management and directors would be replaced in a failing megabank. Whether creditors would face any losses remains a more open question – but at least the Kanjorski amendment, if applied properly, would put that possibility firmly on the table.
Brown-Kaufman was turned back on the Senate floor, but the Kanjorski amendment is an integral part of the financial reform bill that passed the House. And Congressman Paul Kanjorski is a formidable member of the House conference delegation.
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They are the sticking points that would gum up the Wall Street overhaul.
From big banks’ exotic trades to the plastic in people’s wallets, it only take a few of the most contentious issues to upend a careful political equilibrium as lawmakers try to blend House and Senate bills into a single rewrite of banking regulations.
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For the financial crisis, it has become clear that many chief executives and corporate directors were not aware of the risks taken by their trading desks and partners. Recent accusations against Goldman Sachs suggest the potential for conflicts of interest among banks, investors, hedge funds and rating agencies. And it is clear that regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency staffed primarily with lawyers, are not well positioned to monitor the arcane trading strategies that helped produce the crisis.
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Goldman Sachs (GS) has always had a reputation for being above the fray, aloof from the concerns of mere mortals. This reputation has served the bank splendidly as it fends off the pleas, hearings, and subpoenas of federal regulators. To the experienced (or simply jaded), it appeared that the 141-year-old Wall Street stalwart is just, well, being Goldman.
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Just because you can do something, does that mean you should? It’s a question that might have saved us a lot of pain in recent months if both Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum had asked it of themselves during the last decade.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Following up on an earlier post about the uncloaking and arrest of Army Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is believed to have leaked the “Collateral Murder” video to Wikileaks, Philip Shenon reports in the Daily Beast about anxiety over more sensitive material Manning may have downloaded and stored. At issue are some 260,000 diplomatic cables from government computer networks that, by some reports, he has admitted to have accessed and was planning to make public.
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American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.
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Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, has reportedly been held in Kuwait for almost two weeks on suspicion of leaking a video of a helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that killed civilians.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Ofcom is allowing the BBC to operate its Freeview HD multiplex in such a way that only TV receivers and set-top boxes with built-in digital rights management (DRM) can see programmes’ electronic programme guide (EPG) data.
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Rather interestingly, this “consultation” closed almost as soon as it opened: it was hard to resist the impression that it was being railroaded through. Fortunately, due in part to the prompt actions of Computerworld UK readers in submitting critical responses, Ofcom was forced to extend the consultation period, and then carry out a completely new consultation.
[..]
If the decision is not overturned (which seems unlikely), it will give the content industry control over what people can do with the content they watch on the BBC. Shame on Oftel – and double shame on the BBC for betraying in this way the audience that has faithfully funded it for all these years.
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Ofcom have today dealt a serious blow to UK consumers and licence-payers by allowing the BBC to impose DRM for HD broadcasts.
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When it comes to the unauthorized use of open Wi-Fi networks, the Finnish government may say: If you can’t beat them, join them.
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Copyrights
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One of the problems with the debate around copyright is that it is often fuelled more by feelings than facts. What is sorely lacking is a hard-nosed look at key areas like the economics of copyright. Enter “The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” [.pdf].
As you can tell from the rather tentative title, this is just a first step, but it is an important one, and the UK’s Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP) is to be congratulated on commissioning it. This is exactly the kind of thing that it should be doing – not simply taking political positions, but establishing the basis for rational debate before then moving on to the framing of appropriate legislation.
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Here’s Fran Nevrkla, Chairman and CEO of Phonographic Performance Ltd, a UK music industry association, addressing the group’s AGM.
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The US Copyright Group, a District-based venture backed by attorneys from Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, has sued in federal court at least 14,000 John Doe plaintiffs who allegedly downloaded independent movies from the peer-to-peer file-sharing site BitTorrent. The scope of the litigation, which if successful could generate upward of $20 million even if settled out of court, is expected to expand as action is taken on behalf of more film producers against additional groups of defendants.
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In the fall of last year The Pirate Bay took its tracker offline. Luckily, for the stability of the BitTorrent ecosystem several new trackers emerged to take its place. Time for us to provide an overview of the largest public BitTorrent trackers currently around.
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I don’t blame Google so much as I blame the Neanderthal book publishers who are breathing down Google’s neck. Or perhaps it’s Google’s wallet. Google will probably get to this kind of fine tuning eventually, but at the moment they are dealing with folks insisting on locking books up for fear non-payers will read them. But if you have a paper copy of the book, or go to the copyright page online, you’ll see that the book’s copyrighted by the editors, but it says right on the same page that the individual essays are licensed under a Creative Commons license, Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs 2.5. That means that everyone in the world is free to read my essay, for starters. It also means they are free in a noncommercial context to copy and redistribute it with attribution, as long as they reproduce it accurately and without changing anything or adding anything. That is my intent. But ironically, I can’t even reproduce it for you here unless I want to type it all out by hand, because it won’t let me even see all the pages, let alone copy them. I’m mentioning it because it’s my hope that Google Books, and other such services, will make a note and tell the computers to look for Creative Commons licenses, and loosen up.
[...]
I don’t think the process would work as well for a less, shall we say, inspiring case. Volunteers responded because they seriously cared about the outcome, not because they found learning to do legal research fascinating. I have gotten a lot of email about enjoying the learning, actually, but I also know that SCO was an inspiration. For some, watching an attack on Linux is like watching someone kick Dorothy’s dog, Toto: people get mad and want to do something about it. You don’t get the same response in all cases or by paying people. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay me for the amount of work I donated to Groklaw, the nights without sleep, the anxiety, or the jerks I had to deal with sometimes, if I may speak plainly.
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If you’re one of the 14,000+ US citizens targeted by the US Copyright Group for allegedly sharing movies with BitTorrent, a letter has already arrived or will do so shortly. That letter will contain a polite request: pay us around $1,500 within the next few weeks or run of the risk of a federal copyright lawsuit, where lawyers will demand the maximum $150,000 penalty.
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TorrentFreak asked independent film director Sam Bozzo to comment on his experiences having his two most recent films leaked to BitTorrent. The stories in both cases were different. The first film, Blue Gold: World Water Wars was released normally, and then leaked online. The second, his documentary Hackers Wanted was shelved after internal disputes — but has now leaked to BitTorrent. Originally it was an old cut that was leaked, but now Bozzo’s “directors’ cut” has been leaked, and Bozzo seems fine with it. In fact, he claims that if you make a good film, having it leaked to BitTorrent can only help. It’s only bad if your film isn’t very good:
In a nutshell, I believe the only films that are hurt by torrent sharing are mediocre and bad films. In contrast, the good films of any genre only benefit from file-sharing. Due to this, I feel the current file-sharing trend is a catalyst for a true evolution in filmmaking…
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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Only two weeks of plenary in Strasbourg are left for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to have a chance to sign Written Declaration 12 (WD12) on ACTA. 150 signatures are still missing, mostly from Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland. Every EU citizen is encouraged to call Strasbourg offices of non-signatories MEPs until thursday, 12:00, to urge them to sign WD12.
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Now, the Baltic sea neighbors Finland and Estonia have declared Internet access to be a legal right. So I’ve been wondering… What are the chances of Southeast European countries, for once, not being late to the show but actually leading the race? What do I mean by that? First of all, Croatia and its neighbours would be wise to take advantage of the situation. While the UK, for example, is being mired down with a disastrous “Digital Economy Act”, perhaps our country and maybe even our neighbors could go the other way.
Adrian Bridgett – Troubleshooting Tools (2006)
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06.13.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Google’s very own web browser Chrome has been gaining popularity for sometimes now among users. And with the recent rollout of Chrome version 5, they’re looking forward to gain users among Mac and Linux users.
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No. 1 in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. It might not be a slogan to attract an avalanche of American Internet users, but the Norwegian company that makes the fastest Web browser you’ve never heard of sees a major opportunity in the United States and the rest of the world.
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After three decades of bowing to Microsoft (MSFT.O) and its Windows juggernaut, PC and computing gadget makers are preparing for a new era that could offer the first real choice for the software that make their products tick.
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Android 2.2 Froyo arrived with much fanfare on May 20 at Google’s I/O conference. The new platform software for smartphones is chock full of new features, such as tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot services, faster performance, and Flash 10.1.
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The Adam tablet had a unique distinction uptill now, that of being the only known tablet PC to be using the Pixel Qi screen. But as per the latest slate pc news, Adam will soon have company as there are a plethora of tablets that will be wearing the innovative technology that makes a screen just as viewable out in the sun as it is indoors. In fact, quite a few of those tablets were there to be seen at the Pixel Qi booth at Computex and they indeed look promising. But of all those present, special mention has to be made of one that can make a difference and rise above the sea of tablets – the Innoversal Lattice.
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Saving the best for the last, Innoversal has said the tablet will make its debut by September and is likely to sport a price tag of around $530 to $550. Also, an interesting aspect of the tablet is there is the option of either Windows, Linux, or even Google Chrome as the default OS of the Lattice.
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The only template that I did not create is the Turabian template. I just downloaded it, and modified the properties, so that it would work with the templates web site.
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New Videos
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Environment
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A court Monday convicted seven former senior employees of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary of “death by negligence” for their roles in the 1984 leak of toxic gas that killed an estimated 15,000 people in the world’s worst industrial disaster.
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From Tony Hayward, BP CEO on the impact of the oil leak on May 18th:
“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.”
That’s minimizing of the event sounds all too familiar to the initial reaction we hear from companies right after they suffer a serious data breach. We hear minimizing such as “There hasn’t been any evidence that the data was abused,” or “The breach seems to have been a human mistake, rather than technical,” or “The amount of data compromised represents a small fraction of all of our customers.” As if any of that matters to those who have their personal information now in the wrong hands.
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A SUNDAY TIMES investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.
The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. An IWC meeting that will decide the fate of thousands of whales, including endangered species, begins this month in Morocco.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Chinese government has issued a white paper laying out current, and future, internet policy – and you might not recognise its view of internet use in that country.
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Rejecting the Justice Department’s plea that only limited evidence be dismissed, a federal judge in Arizona has sanctioned the government and thrown out the entire wiretap in the ongoing prosecution of former Rep. Rick Renzi.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Targeted at professional users, decision makers, developers, beginners and the Linux community in general, the event’s panel discussion is said to feature a topical discussion on whether recent mergers threaten innovative small and medium sized Linux businesses.
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The workshops are the first in a series of events to develop a network of Arab GNU/Linux trainers throughout the Middle East.
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I’m at Southeast LinuxFest right now, listening to Daniel Chen’s Linux audio talk. A bit over an hour ago, I finished my presentation on the Linux security myth. It’s meant to be accessible to normal users or to geeks needing to explain to normal users. I was asked afterward why I didn’t talk about buffer overflows. That’s easy: normal users can’t do anything about them.
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The others may or may not speak directly to the FOSS paradigm and philosophy, with the remote exception of Muhammad Ali’s chiling yet inspiring two sentences: “Speak your mind. Don’t back down.” I’m trying to find where the guitar player, the soccer player, the astronomer and the pilot fit in, but nevertheless, it seems that seven years ago, IBM did the Free/Open Source Software community a huge favor by producing this ad.
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Desktop
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I have been in this community long enough I am beginning to get repeat customers. The young lady with the Acer Aspire One now running Debian GNU/Linux dropped by. Her machine had been run by her pre-schooler and was missing a few keys… GNU/Linux was doing well. She had actually installed some packages and asked me to get the wireless working. It turned out that the driver had some problems and everyone was having problems with the wireless switch on that model.
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Providing wireless in each classroom and using open standards would get them a lot more IT for less. My thesis for many years has been that more IT is good for education and the lowest cost option does it best, GNU/Linux.
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It got me thinking about what kinds of things I would like to see in my Linux desktop in a number of years and now I want to know your thoughts as well. I have created a Poll, which you can see on the right, and the question is:
If you could manage development efforts for the Linux desktop, what would your Linux desktop have in four years time?
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If you’ve recently converted to Linux from Windows, or if you’re just giving Linux a shot, there are a few things you need to know right off the bat about how Linux works and where the major differences are when compared to Windows. Some of the fundamental components are different between the two operating systems, and the way things are done can be drastically different; you need to learn these differences to be able to use Linux effectively, and to avoid trying to force Windows metaphors onto a Linux system that doesn’t accept them.
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A German CAD (Computer Aided Design) company, CAD Schroer, has come up with a novel way to use no-cost software on GNU/Linux to make money. Their product, Medusa4 Personal, runs on that other OS, too, but they see a large and growing market of use on GNU/Linux (152 countries – a third are on GNU/Linux). The idea is to provide the use of professional-quality software to SMB (Small and Medium sized Business) free of charge. By making it available on GNU/Linux, they make the cost of entry even less.
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Server
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The IDSbox Mini is a paperback-sized Linux server with a single SFF SATA hard disk, which can be partnered by a second drive attached to one of its USB expansion ports. The unit itself acts as a heatsink and being fanless is completely silent.
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It’s not news that Linux powers most of the world’s fastest supercomputers, but have you ever actually seen the list? I was not aware that there was an organization set up to track all those supercomputers and publish the details, but today I found Top500 Supercomputer sites and its latest Top500 list for June 2010. BBC News has a very cool graphical representation of the list.
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Audiocasts
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This week on the show: WebM license conflict resolved, Linaro initiative announced, Google drops Windows company-wide, Apple drops the ball on the new iPhone, Fab tests MeeGo and much more…
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Topics for this podcast:
*Linaro reinforces traction for mobile and embedded Linux
*Open source strategy spotlights: Novell, HP
*Riptano makes commercial play with Apache Cassandra
*Linux still tops in Top500 Supercomputers
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In this episode: Fedora 13 is out. Google drops the Windows option for new staff and yet Windows is still doing well as a server. Discover how we fared with a minority distribution and we tout our ideas on how Linux devices can beat Apple’s iPad.
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Google
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Google has fixed a number of serious bugs in its Chrome browser, and has released new versions of the Chrome developer version and Chrome Frame, a plug-in that allows Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to access websites using the Chrome rendering engine.
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Google says that several major websites, including WordPress and Meebo, have already adopted the technology and use the markup that enables Chrome Frame. This allows them to provide a better experience for users who have the plugin installed.
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Another interesting option may come from some where like Codeweavers who run Windows applications in a Linux (ChromeOS is a Linux variant) environment. That wouldn’t necessarily be “inside the browser” but there is always wiggle room in defining the browser when it is the whole OS.
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Google Chrome OS will be with us before the end of 2010. You will be able to buy a new netbook running it instead of Windows. But what if you are worried about being able to use some apps that currently run on Windows after the switch? Apparently Google has you covered with something being referred to as Chromoting.
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Google has bold plans for Chrome OS: it wants to build an operating system that relies solely on web applications. This strict requirement means that the only native app in Chrome OS is the Chrome browser itself. Even things like printing will be handled in the cloud. Still, there are plenty of desktop apps today that don’t have an equivalent in the cloud. It now looks like Google has an answer to that issue as well through a technology dubbed tentatively “chromoting.”
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Ballnux
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An XDA-Developers forum member known as Charnsingh_Online has coded a CyanogenMod patch that enables 720p recording on Google’s flagship Nexus One smartphone.
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Owners of older HTC Android smart phones will be happy to know that an update to version 2.1 of to open source mobile platform will be available later this June. The announcement comes right after the update was released in Taiwan.
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Kernel Space
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This week sees the launch of 2.6.35-rc2, plus other goodies, so let’s dive into it!
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So I’ve been hardnosed now for a week – perhaps overly so – and hopefully that means that 2.6.35-rc3 will be better than -rc2 was. Not only do we have a number of regressions handled, we don’t have that silly memory corruptor that bit so many people with -rc2 and confused people with its many varied forms of bugs it seemed to take, depending on just what random memory it happened to corrupt.
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NILFS2 is a different type of file system which is termed a log-structured file system. You can read a summary of it here. Rather than write to a tree structure such as a b-tree or an h-tree, either with or without a journal, a log-structured file system writes all data and metadata sequentially in a continuous stream that is called a log (actually it is a circular log). Because of this design it is very easy for NILFS2 to create snapshots and mount them along side the file system itself. But one of the more desirable features of NILFS2 is performance.
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Snapshots are stored in special, filesystem-sized sparse files and are created by moving deleted or overwritten data blocks into the sparse file. When accessing the sparse file, all files are available in the version they were in when the snapshot was created – any holes in the snapshot file will automatically be filled in with the unchanged data in the original filesystem. Find more details about Next3 in an article at LWN and a paper released by the developersPDF. Next3 is available under the GPL 2.
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Today we’re announcing Next3, a file system developed here at CTERA to provide efficient snapshot capabilities on our Cloud Attached Storage appliances. I wanted to elaborate a little on how and why this came to be, and what our considerations were in developing this.
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CTERA Networks is giving the Linux Ext3 file system additional data protection in the form of new snapshot capabilities.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s been a few revisions to the R500 3D documentation since the original February 2008 release and the most recent one has just come over the night.
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Applications
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I’m very happy to announce the release 1.0 of the Emacs identica-mode microblogging client. Its been a while since the last release, and its been for a good reason!
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Tor 0.2.1.26 addresses the recent connection and memory overload problems we’ve been seeing on relays, especially relays with their DirPort open. If your relay has been crashing, or you turned it off because it used too many resources, give this release a try.
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In the roughly five years that the Git distributed version control system has been around, it has gained quite a following. But at its core, Git is command-line oriented, which doesn’t necessarily suit all of its users. Along the way, various GUI interfaces to Git have been created, including two Tcl/Tk-based tools that come with Git. Giggle is a GUI front-end for Git that is based on GTK+, which released a 0.5 version in late April.
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Have you ever thought about how you really spend your time at work? If you’re wondering where the time goes, the GNOME Time Tracker is a great tool to help you keep an eye on which activities eat up your days.
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Adobe (Proprietary)
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Close on the heels of releasing Flash Player 10.1, Adobe announced the closure of the Labs program of Flash Player 64-bit for Linux. Adobe also set the Flash 64-bit for Linux forums on read-only mode, effectively quelling any and all means of discussion.
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Adobe has quietly closed its first and only 64-bit Flash beta for any operating system, and left the 64-bit future of Flash in limbo.
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Instructionals
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The GNU find utility is one of the most useful commands you’ll ever get to know. At first glance the options and syntax can seem arcane. But, with a little practice, you’ll be able to locate any file on your system with almost no trouble at all. To help you get started, we’ve got 10 ways you can use find to get what you’re looking for.
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Games
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The game has been in public alpha for the best part of eight years now, and is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. According to developers Guild Software the Android version is a 100 per cent port of the game.
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Desktop Environments
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Those who decide to test the Kontact suite can find details about how to integrate the repository and install the software on the project page.
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There’s a lot of community energy at a show like LinuxTag, which is why KDE e.V, the foundation dedicated to supporting the KDE interface, probably chose LinuxTag as the platform from which to launch their latest community membership drive.
Under the name “Join the Game,” KDE e.V. is inviting new individual supporting members to join the organization for 100 Euro/year, to help support their ongoing and expanding programs.
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Dear Friends, Child advocates, and Free / Open Source Software enthusiasts,
Four years ago I founded Kiddix Computing, a company dedicated to building safe and friendly computing environments for children. This mission has been embodied in our core product Kiddix, a family-friendly operating system and software stack for children. Since our 1.0 release of Kiddix three years ago we have gained users from all over the world, but have been developing inside a closed environment. This will now be changing…
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, a leading distributor of the free Linux operating system, is now pushing virtualization to another level.
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With Benchmark’s backing, Red Hat actually did have about a $5 billion market capitalization upon its IPO, and then that valuation settled down along with the rest of the market for technology companies. There will be open source-focused companies with multi-billion dollar market caps. There will be better times for technology companies. There will be inflated perceptions of technology stocks again. These things go in cycles, and my bet is that Whitehurst knows that his company stands a great chance of becoming a multi-billion dollar, public open source-focused leader.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, Lucid Lynx, builds on the major improvements introduced in last year’s breakthrough 9.10 Karmic Koala release (improved boot time, optimized kernel for better desktop performance, Grub2 bootloader and ext4 filesystem). New features therefore center mainly on two areas – a long overdue facelift and an assortment of new cloud-facing applications and features.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu UK Community are jointly hosting an event aimed at introducing Ubuntu direct to UK businesses.
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Canonical has a comparatively good track record with herding the user interface to suck less than most other Linux distributions. They take existing technology, and tweak it to make it less painful than Linux has traditionally been. I’m curious to see how well this Ubuntu Light will work, and exactly what hardware it will support.
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“As Ubuntu is increasingly becoming an option for many OEMs on many devices, we have been very pleased to extend the programme to better suit their growing requirements” said Chris Kenyon, VP OEM Services & Alliances, at Canonical. “The programme is simplified and will be more easily understood by the industry as they look to embrace and profit from Ubuntu as part of their product range”.
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Flavours and Variants
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Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux OS aimed at novice users who may be taking their first steps into the Linux world after having employed Windows all their lives. The latest release, Zorin OS 3, is the most polished version yet and comes with some interesting, new features. Top among these is the Zorin Look Changer, a tool that enables one to customize the way their desktop looks and acts depending on their preferences or what they’re used to.
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Summary: Lubuntu 10.04 provides a functional, fast desktop environment. It eschews glitz and eye-candy bloat in favor of speed and low use of system resources.
Rating: 4/5
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Tilera’s chips have the attributes of a general-purpose CPU, as they run the Linux OS and other applications commonly used to serve Web data. The chips are designed to run applications scalable across a large number of cores. Certain common Linux applications, such as the Apache Web server, MySQL database and Memcached caching software have been ported for use on Tilera’s chips.
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YOU MIGHT VERY well have used one of Linpus’ Linux distributions without even knowing about it, as the company specializes in custom Linux installations for a wide range of solutions, least not netbooks. The company has also made some customized versions of Moblin, but its latest project is something that looks extremely interesting, a version of Linux for ARM based PCTVs.
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As reported by FreeOS.com, the Linux watch was conceived at IBM’s T. J. Watson research center where different groups of researchers are continually exploring the numerous challenges that emerge in the field of user interface design, power management, input devices, wireless communication, sensors and models for co-existences for pervasive devices and wearables. A team of researchers with skills in hardware design, Operating Systems, displays, electronic and mechanical packaging, industrial design and user interface design, which was spread across multiple research IBM sites worked together to develop the wrist watch that would eventually run Linux and X11. They were led by Chandra Narayanaswami and worked persistently for about 18 months to achieve this feat.
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The Linux-ready testing framework combines a scalable test execution engine, an embedded device virtual lab manager, and dynamic software instrumentation technology, says Wind River. The software can be deployed as a stand-alone system or can be integrated via open interfaces with commercial tools, such as Wind River Linux, or with internally developed test environments, says the Intel subsidiary.
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If you are looking for a dual screen ebook reader/netbook which is available now, the enTourage eDge may be exactly what you need.
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Phones
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Microsoft has fallen by the wayside in the mobile market, leaving Linux the main challenger to Apple, according to one open-source leader.
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Nokia
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Lovely home except for those pesky leaks. This Nokia house built (circa 2010) upon on a foundation of Symbian with a MeeGo roof is also sporting an interesting looking S-series smokestack. Most of the building blocks we’ve already seen including the flagship N8. The N9 is almost certainly Nokia’s followup to the N900 and Espoo’s first handset to feature its new MeeGo OS.
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Nokia has issued a release candidate for version 1.0 of the Qt SDK and has published some details about the release roadmap. The SDK will be released with Qt Creator 2.0 and Qt 4.6.3.
Qt is an open source development toolkit that simplifies cross-platform application development. After obtaining Qt in a 2008 acquisition of Trolltech, Nokia relicensed the toolkit under the LPGL so that it could be used to develop proprietary applications at no cost. Nokia has largely focused on improving the toolkit’s suitability for rapid mobile development. It can be used to build applications that will run across all three major desktop operating systems and several mobile platforms, including Symbian and MeeGo.
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Now I am all for trying new distros and netbooks are a place where I feel Linux truly outshines all other operating systems, so when a new netbook focused distro comes to maturity I always like to take it for a test drive. MeeGo, the joint operating system between Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin, has been getting alot of hype recently in the Linux community and the world at large. I can understand why, personally I was very excited when MeeGo was first announced. Nokia and Intel are both very large names that bring substantial financial backing to the table, beyond this they are also allowing the Linux Foundation to manage the MeeGo project.
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Nokia known to make phones with the very popular symbian operating system tried to take another road with the new phone n900. The phone is the successor of the of the not so popolar nokia internet tablet n810. The phone runs the same OS as the nokia n810 i.e. the linux based OS maemo.
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Android
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The latest Android 2.2 update, codenamed Froyo, brings a number of new features, but a couple of them stand head and shoulders above the rest. While the latest version of Google’s open-source mobile operating system isn’t widely available on handsets at present, we’ve been testing it on a Nexus One, Google’s own brand smartphone.
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There are applications available that turn your android (or your Iphone) into a spying device, these apps upload phone data to a central server without the user noticing it.
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Sony did a press release about 3D tv’s and blue ray players and they anncounced a android BD remote app.I know not everybody is to happy with Sony but this is a nice movement. I would like many more manufacturers to release remote control apps for my favorite device.
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How many times is this damn device going to change names? The guys over at Phandroid just got a hold of some shots from what appears to be a Verizon marketing system. The shots all clearly state that our pal the Droid Xtreme, is actually the Droid X by Motorola.
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It seems that Sony Ericsson is really showing some Android love these days. According to various rumors, three new handsets from the famous manufacturer will be using Google’s open source operating system.
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Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha revealed to Reuters today that the company’s Android-powered mobile devices are selling faster than they can be manufactured. Verizon has had similar experiences with the Droid Incredible from HTC, an Android phone whose biggest problem has been that demand outstrips current supply.
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The firm which specialises in making “socially aware” mobile phones told Gigaom that it was moving away from Qualcomm’s operating system and going to join the ranks of HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson and load Google’s open source Android operating system on its devices.
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Arduino boards don’t run embedded Linux or any other operating system directly, but are available with Arduino libraries for desktop Linux. The libraries enable developers to control the devices and integrate other applications and devices. (See farther below for more on Arduino.)
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Acer is readying the Acer Aspire One D260, a dual-boot netbook running Windows 7 and Android on an Intel Atom N450 or new DDR3-ready N455, with a claimed eight hours of battery life. Acer also formally introduced its high-end Acer Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition, a smartphone that runs Android 2.1 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, offers a 3.5-inch screen, and — of course — is colored Ferrari F1 red.
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Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha announced that his company will release an Android smartphone equipped with a 2GHz processor by the end of the year, say industry reports. Also this week, Apple announced the iPhone 4, Sprint amended its sales estimate for the launch of the HTC Evo 4G, and the Samsung Galaxy S debuted in Asia, says eWEEK.
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Sub-notebooks
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Following my recent post about Six Linux Distributions on an HP 2133, I saw a comment saying that I had not tried Jolicloud.
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After the installation completes and you reboot, everything works. Everything. The big difference here from Ubuntu and Linux Mint is that rather than tell you that proprietary Broadcom WiFi drivers are available and prompt you to install them, Jolicloud installs them automatically, and then just notifies you after boot that new proprietary drivers are in use. The display resolution is correct for both the WSVGA (1024×600) and WXGA (1280×768) models. Sound, wired networking, and CPU speed stepping all work.
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OLPC
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Powered by Fedora 13, this latest version (codename Mirabelle) of Sugar Labs’ sweet and compact OS features improved stability and simplified customization, comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and is available both as a standalone download or within the Sugar Creation Kit, a DVD containing documentation and a library of Sugar Activities, fun and engaging programs for children taken from the Sugar Activity Library .
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Sugar Labs(R), nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform to over one and a half million children worldwide, has released Mirabelle, the third version of Sugar on a Stick, a collaborative learning environment that can be loaded onto any ordinary USB thumbdrive and used with a PC, netbook or Mac without touching the hard disk. It is available free for download at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick. Sugar runs natively on major GNU/Linux distributions and can also run in virtualization under Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X.
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Tablets
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There is not much information about this unit as far as specs go, we know from watching the video that it is running Android 1.5, but according to the rep it is going to be updated soon. The unit is the same size as the dell streak, so if you are looking for an idea of the size of that unit, make sure to check the video out.
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The last time that Canonical developed an edition of Ubuntu for mobile devices was in 2008 for mobile Internet devices, but it failed to take off. The version that’s being looked at for tablets is Ubuntu 10.04 for servers, PCs and netbooks.
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Ubuntu developer Canonical is currently working on a tablet-specific Ubuntu OS for future devices. The tablet operating system will feature a touch-friendly UI and will be built from a lightweight version of Linux, possible Ubuntu’s upcoming 10.10 version, which the company calls “Maverick Meerkat.”
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The outfit has had The Open Innovation Platform (OIP) in to look after its open source projects for a while. Now it says it wants the OIP to focus on electronic-system level design, virtual platforms and high-level synthesis.
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Academic research software is still unavailable in many African universities. Now, universities in Senegal, Mozambique, Cameroon, Madagascar and Equatorial Guinea work with partners in Catalonia to fill this gap.
A large number of African universities, plagued by small and sporadic budgets, have only basic IT networks that focus on applications such as email or financial management. However, information relating to academic research is mostly still processed inefficiently and by hand.
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The Symbian Foundation, together with Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., a member of the foundation and one of the most renowned text imaging-solution providers, has recently announced the official launch of the first open source font available for the Symbian platform. Monotype Yuppy, also known as the MYuppy Chinese font, will prove to be a very helpful tool, especially for manufacturers and developers aiming for the Chinese mobile-phone market, one of the largest in the world. MYuppy is now available, fully customizable, and can be downloaded from the developer’s site.
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One of the limitings factors in Amateur Radio experimen-tation with Digital Voice has been the lack of suitable Open Source Codecs.
David Rowe VK5DGR hopes to change that.
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A GIS visualisation and editing tool will allow you to read one or more spatial file formats and let you query and manipulate the data. You can even generate maps with custom colour schemes and labels.
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Eclipse
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Windows usage is declining, MySQL usage is gaining, and Enterprise JavaBeans and Spring usage are tied
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Events
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Sands is part of the quintet that’s organized the SouthEast LinuxFest 2010, the group’s second annual event that is expected to draw about 750 people to the Spartanburg Marriott at Renaissance Park this weekend.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla published a second release candidate for the next build of Thunderbird on Wednesday. Judging from the public bug list, only one critical bug kept Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 from becoming the final build of the current branch, code-named Lanikai.
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Thunderbird 3.1′s latest RC is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.
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SaaS
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Open-source middleware maker WSO2 has launched an open source cloud platform that should be of interest to enterprise Java developers. Called Stratos, it’s a fully hosted application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for building and deploying apps and services “with instant provisioning of enterprise servers, including the portal, enterprise service bus (ESB) and application server.”
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The documentation and code of Google Cloud Print is open source and HP is building upon that to Net-enable a new line of printers.
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HP on Monday unveiled its new ePrint platform that adds Google cloud capability to a new line of Web-enabled printers and allows on-demand printing from anywhere to anywhere without the need for specific printer drivers.
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Oracle
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Former Sun/Oracle exec Paul Hinz is now at Liferay and is helping the commercial company push forward both the open source project as well as its enterprise offshoots. This week Liferay announced a series of new initiatives including a collaboration platform called Liferay Live and a new enterprise social collaboration offering called Social Office Enterprise Edition.
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CMS
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We all know that Drupal can work with Varnish, a HTTP accelerator that caches pages in virtual memory. Well, now Varnish uses Drupal too! Varnish Software, the company behind Varnish, just relaunched its site using Pressflow, a Drupal distribution with performance and scalability improvements. The site was built by Kodamera.
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Semi-Open Source
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VMware, the company that took the hypervisor mainstream and still controls the virtualization of some 80 percent of servers worldwide, is indulging in some retail therapy as it seeks to change its image to one of concierge of the cloud through its higher-end software and services. Indeed, nowhere is its evolution and ambition more clear than in its recent acquisitions. Let’s take a look.
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To better support its growth and the services it offers customers, BowlingShirt.com is trying to strike a sweet spot on Magento Inc.’s open-source e-commerce platform. But the merchant’s launch on the Magento platform was interrupted, and it’s back for now on the in-house platform it built in the PHP framework.
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The platform also offers many of the other benefits associated with the SaaS model, including scalability, predictability of costs and flexibility.
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Big storage is still a big problem. But Gluster is hoping its open-source, commodity hardware-based NAS solution will entice developers to get more involved in their storage systems.
Gluster has been in development for three years.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The opportunity for change exists wherever there is storage that allows alteration. When a device’s program is software, the issues of software freedom are raised. The question becomes who has permission to make changes to that software? This is a question of permission not technical know-how, time, interest, or budget to change the software. If the software is free, the user can get a copy of the program’s source code and make their device behave as they wish. They can even help other users by sharing their improved code. If the developer is the only person who may modify the software, the developer subjugates the user. Developers who want to maintain this power over the user will not distribute free software for the device or complete documentation on how the device works.
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Project Releases
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Limited to 80 highly-experienced participants, the exclusive beta program offering includes imminent new features of Lightworks Open Source, including: project sharing, advanced 3D stereoscopic editing, Universal Media File support, native RED support, native 2K support, and integration with Avid and FCP.
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Government
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At the Open Forum European Summit, Neelie Kroes, the European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda, said that with improved interoperability comes improved competition, and, she added, competition is good for the European economy. However, she admitted that open source still has some way to go until it will be fully accepted.
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“I am still a big fan of open standards. I believe in openness, and I believe in practising what one preaches,” she said. “Some observers think ‘open standards’ is a tainted term that should not to be used in the absence of a generally recognised definition. Whatever the labels, what matters is the substance. I would urge all stakeholders to focus on the content of the package rather than the wrapping.”
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Earlier this week I talked to writer and open source advocate Marco Fioretti, who has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union. Fioretti is a long-time supporter of open source software, which he wrote about in a chapter of the O’Reilly book Open Government. Fioretti also held a seminar about open and prorietary formats at Pisa’s Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, a major European college in the field of economics.
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Openness/Sharing
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India’s Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project has drawn criticism from geneticists for not publishing its first results in a peer-reviewed journal. Researchers have also dismissed as hype some of the claims made by the project’s chief coordinator, Samir Brahmachari.
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Open Data
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New plans to open up library, archive and museum collections will make it easier for researchers and students to access resources, according to a taskforce announcing its vision today.
At the moment it can be difficult for researchers to access books and information held in different places because the data is incompatible with the web services they use to search the collections.
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Open Access/Content
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Oxford University Press Journals has issued a highly misleading press release — “Open Access Uptake: Five Years On,” not making it clear that it is not Open Access (OA) uptake that is declining, but merely the uptake of OUP’s pricey “Oxford Open (OO)” paid hybrid-Gold OA option.
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Texts for visually impaired college students are hard to come by. But a new agreement between Cambridge University Press and Bookshare, a nonprofit organization that converts books and journals into formats that blind people can read, may enlarge this library.
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Open Hardware
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Open source hardware hobbyists now have a chipset to play with that’s comparable to the powerful processors found in smartphones such as the Nexus One or HTC Incredible.
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The market for open source hardware is hotting up, with the top 13 companies in the space turning over nearly $50million last year – according to Phil Torrone, designer at Adafruit industries. Speaking with Adafruit’s founder Limor Fried at the O’Reilly Foo Camp East in the beginning of May, Torrone also claimed that there are now nearly 300 significant open source hardware projects in development and predicted that the market will grow to over $1billion by 2015.
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Science
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Top boffins in the States believe that they may be on the track of a way to place living human beings into suspended animation, allowing them to survive long periods effectively frozen before being “reanimated” with no ill effects.
Dr Mark Roth, based at a Seattle cancer laboratory, got interested in suspended animation after looking at several cases where this has occurred spontaneously in humans.
One well-known case is that of Canadian toddler Erica Nordby, who wandered outside in the winter of 2001 wearing only her nappy. In the bitter cold her heart stopped beating for two hours and her body temperature plunged to just 16°C* before she was rescued, warmed – and came miraculously back to life, despite having literally frozen to death.
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Spence loves to ham it up as Eyeborg, installing a red, laser-like LED light in one version of the prototype and pulling on a 1970s track suit to become Steve Austin (see the video below). But he’s serious about using his camera eye to get Internet users to view the world through his eye, and is developing an Eyeborg app that may feature augmented reality functions.
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Security/Aggression
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Your Youtube videos could soon be scanned and evaluated for terror threats, thanks to a new project funded by the U.S. intelligence community that’ll create a searchable warehouse of open-source clips.
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Environment
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A legal campaign by a pair of 13-year-old twins has forced police chiefs to admit carrying out unlawful stop and searches on thousands of climate change protesters.
The twins won a high court battle against the police after one of them was left “crying and shaking” and fearing that he would go to prison for having a sticker in his bag.
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The smell of the oil on the beach is so strong it burns your nostrils, and leaves you feeling dizzy and headachey even after a few minutes away from it.
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In a posting two weeks ago, US coast guards harass journalists covering BP’s oil spill, I detailed claims that reporters were being prevented freely from the beaches and in the air in the Gulf of Mexico.
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In the wake of every failed attempt to stem the gush of oil spewing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the one option that is almost unanimously recommended is the use of relief wells. But such a procedure has its own safety risks and has the potential to actually increase the impact of the spill, say scientists and researchers.
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While Barack Obama is lambasting BP for spreading muck in the Gulf of Mexico, he should perhaps pencil in a date with the people of Bhopal when he visits India later this year. While 11 men lost their lives on BP’s watch and the shrimps get coated with black stuff, the chemicals that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984 are still leaching into the ground water a quarter of a century after a poisonous, milky-white cloud settled over the city.
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Since BP began oil exploration and production in Casanare Colombia in the early 1990s, six thousand people have been assassinated and three thousand people disappeared. Every time there have been complaints or protests in opposition to BP’s interests, the community leaders concerned have been killed. This indicates an elimination strategy of violent social control. The agents have been the military and paramilitary groups, but BP as a corporation hás itself been complicit in the human rights violations.
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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning in Monsanto vs. Geertson Seed Farms, the first case involving GE crops to reach the high court. The case is not so much about the safety of the crop as it is about the legal merits of the injunction in place — which is keeping GE alfalfa seed on shelves and out of soil — while USDA completes its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
Although the case doesn’t dispute the previous ruling that USDA violated environmental laws, the decision could have far-reaching effects for future cases involving environmental protection since the justices are analyzing a lower court’s authority to issue an injunction under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The case has therefore attracted a lot of interest from environmental and consumer groups with no history of working on GE crop issues. If the ban on planting GE alfalfa is overturned, the precedent is almost certain to weaken NEPA. Farmers, food businesses, legal scholars, scientists,farm associations, environmental organizations, and three state attorneys general are represented in seven briefs filed in opposition to Monsanto’s case.
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The Asian Brown Cloud also contributes to localised climate changes by reducing photosynthesis, drastically effecting food production for Asia’s expanding populations. Recent studies indicate that stormwater run off from roads carries toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from truck and car exhausts, as well as heavy metals such as lead and zinc into waterways. Up to 4kg of zinc can be found in large truck tyres – and released when friction hits the road. Runoff finds it way into water courses and contaminates fish. In Asia, the poor are dependent on fish as the primary source of dietary protein. The implications should be apparent.
Mat Grove on User Mode Linux (2007)
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Send this to a friend
06.12.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Users of free software are nothing if not passionate. Most of them care deeply about the code they use, and will happily plunge into the flamewars that flare up regularly across the Web. The core focus of those arguments is well established by now: against Mac fans, it’s about the virtues of true openness and freedom; against Windows fans (do they still exist?) it’s about those, as well as security, speed, stability, etc. But there’s another aspect that rarely gets discussed, and yet it represents one of GNU/Linux’s greatest strengths: the breadth of hardware platforms supported.
Today, GNU/Linux runs on just about everything that has a processing chip, from the smallest embedded system, through smartphones, ARM-based netbooks, laptops, multiple desktop architectures, servers and mainframes to the mightiest supercomputer – 91% of the top 500 systems run some form of Linux. Recent additions to the Linux family include Android-based tablets, Internet radios and TVs (and not just from Google).
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Linux Advocate:
Someone who uses Linux because they feel it is a superior or more stable operating environment. Typically this is someone who knows their way around the computer a bit and isn’t afraid to post on a forum asking a question or get their hands dirty with a bit of terminal code to get their system up and running. While they love the power of FOSS they realize at the same time that the entire world does not work in this manner (although it would be great if it did). They are typically willing to use restricted codecs and closed source video drivers to get the performance and functionality they need out of their system. While it is not uncommon for them to recommend Linux to their family and friends, most times they will even help them get it setup, they realize that some people are happy with Windows and they acknowledge this.
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What about Linux? Coincidentally this device was getting plugged into and used only by a Fedora Linux system. Now I know that this would have worked (despite the package’s information) and not have any problems with ANY Linux and for the most part almost all UNIX -based operating systems. The device (as all other USB Flash Drives) are labeled with a FAT32 file system and Linux, like any other OS kernel can read a FAT32 labeled volume with no problems. On top of that, most mainstream distributions (if not all) enable automount and an auto open of USB storage devices. The user doesn’t need to do it themselves, similar to Windows and the Mac OS. So what is the problem? Why couldn’t the package say “Linux 2.6 and above” or something to that extent?
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Chrome OS is squarely positioned to feed traffic and users into Google’s lucrative search-and-ad ecosystem. That’s the main source of revenues over at Google, and it’s worth remembering how that influences all aspects of Google’s strategy.
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Ballnux
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The success of an Android smartphone launch in a week dominated by iPhone headlines underscores what may be a major selling point for devices running on the open source mobile OS: It has charisma. “People, especially younger people, like to own cool phones, and Android phones fall within this cool class,” remarked Allen Nogee, principal analyst with In-Stat.
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For a company who joined the Open Handset Alliance back in 2007, LG hasn’t done very much in terms of releasing Android phones. Aside from the LG Ally released last month, they have zero presence in the United States. Yes, there are phones like the Eve and Optimus trickling in around the globe but there’s no steady stream to speak of.
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Applications
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Where would we be today without social networking? I have heard many tales how a social tool has saved a life or joined two lives together. Just recently a friend of mine found our her son was wounded in war not by the Red Cross, but on Facebook. These tools have become an integral part of our lives. Because of this, they are becoming more and more important to the desktop operating system.
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Thank you people at SuperGrub, you saved my computer.
Yesterday, I wanted to update my kernel to 2.6.32 because the ASUS driver for sensors, i.e. CPU temperature etc had changed, from it87 to asus_atk0110.
Also, I needed to update udev, but the Debian package manager refused to update udev with the current running kernel.
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Anyone who has children will know that it doesn’t take them long to get the hang of using a computer and, as soon as they can read, they’re ready to hit the Internet with a vengeance. But while the Internet is an awesome place for kids to learn and play it is also full of undesirable content and unsavoury characters.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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GNOME Desktop
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With Gnome 3.0 scheduled for release later this year the developers are starting to make the tough decisions on what will be included in the release and what won’t.
The first big decisions have already been made and will see some of the major components of the refreshed desktop being held back.
Vincent Untz, release manager for the Gnome community, earlier this month outlined the modules that would be included in the first release of Gnome 3.0.
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A GTK theme created to fit in with the new Ubuntu 10.04’s colour scheme, SmartRadiance comprises a GTK theme, Metacity, Desktop wallpaper & panel background. It’s a subtle, pastel and unobtrusive affair that would look great on anyone’s desktop.
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Reviews
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And that’s it. Puppy 5 is a tremendous success. The boot sequence has been improved; it looks nicer, more polished and is more streamlined. The desktop is even more refined. You get tons of great programs. Then, there’s Quickpet. Everything works out of the box, including Wireless, Samba, multimedia playback. All of this in just 120MB.
What more could you ask for?
When it comes to being compact, practical, ultra-fast, and versatile, Puppy has no rival. It is by far the best lightweight distribution available. If you’re wondering what modern technology can do, then please download Puppy 5 and see for yourself.
Woof-woof! Puppy 5, excellent work!
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New Distro Releases
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New kernel, and a boatload of updates from Slackware. ALMOST replaced Firefox with Google-Chrome (which I am really liking…) but due to endless “upl;oad” bug , that keeps crashing Chrome when you try to upload a file, it’ll be in the CD2 directory for testing/playing.
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We are pleased to announce that we have released the new Syllable Server 0.4. This release focuses on maturing existing functionality, improving security, ongoing system restructuring, and making the system a suitable base for third-party package managers. Extensive work was done, so the full change log is quite long.
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The Zorin OS Team are very pleased to announce that Zorin OS 3 is now officially released. This is a groundbreaking new release. For those who have not used the Release Candidate some new features include the astonishing new Look Changer program which lets you switch easily between multiple user interfaces (Windows 7, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000 and Linux’s GNOME). Some other features include the new “Social from the Start” initiative which lets you connect with your social networks quickly from the desktop, iPod and iPhone support in the music player as well as the Ubuntu One Music Store, lots of redesigned artwork, an installer slideshow which lets you know more about Zorin OS while it is installing,
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Zenwalk Gnome 6.4 is out!
We are proud to announce the release of Zenwalk 6.4 Gnome Edition! As always, Zenwalk features the latest Linux technology, featuring Linux kernel 2.6.33.4 and the Gnome 2.28.2 Desktop Environment.
The Gnome 2.28.2 desktop includes a number of new features; Totem has an asynchronous parsing API now,
GNOME Power Manager now has support for laptops with multiple batteries and has added disk spindown support for DeviceKit disks and much more.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Yet, it would be relatively easy to prevent users’ frustrations by taking thoughtful steps: to clarify issues around file compatibility and reassure our users; to promote system transparency through ongoing feedback and put users in control; to simplify the language we use and make this language serve the concerns and goals of our users; to make our processes effortless.
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In the past, .exe files could be run simply by right-clicking and opening them with “Wine Windows Program Loader,” regardless of whether they had the Unix executable bit set. In Lucid, however, “Wine Windows Program Loader” doesn’t call the Windows emulator wine at all, but instead executes a utility named cautious-launcher, which presents this complaint when the .exe file lacks executable permissions…
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An update today brought lots of changes to the Ubuntu Software Center. The most notable are an animated “Featured applications” section, microblogging sharing of applications via Gwibber as well as a Launchpad login (now called Ubuntu login).
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With more companies being drawn to the possibilities offered by open source software, Ubuntu company Canonical and open source consultancy The Open Learning Centre have teamed up to offer a workshop on Linux within business.
There’s a growing interest in open source software, the new coalition government has made encouraging noises about the use of the technology and the companies are hoping to tap into that interest with the aid of some enthusiastic Linux devotees.
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Linux have a special place in Robotics. Many Robots built by multi billion organizations like NASA for advanced space exploration and other complicated tasks are powered by Linux. Robotics and automation is the key for human progress and it is good to know that Linux holds a special advantage when advanced Robotics is concerned. Here is a nicely compiled list of Robots powered by Linux from around the world.
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This network camera runs uClinux the smallest Linux distribution in the world. The network cameras build by Axis are intelligent and even have a shell scripting environment on board.
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Android
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Google’s official Android app store is getting some competition as upstart, independent challengers create their own app stores to lure users with the promise of more freedom, better access to apps and increased revenue.
But it’s all kosher because, unlike Apple, Google allows for multiple app stores to exist on the Android operating system.
A new Android app store called AndSpot plans to coax developers and users to try an alternative Android app store with better search and app-recommendation features.
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Well, here you go. This here, folks, is the Motorola Droid Xtreme, alive and well, posing for some pretty solid photos. There’s a few we’ve seen before, but quite a few that we haven’t. And, to be honest, there’s a lot to like here. We’ll quit with the narrative pretty quick here, and after the break you’ll see plenty more photos, plus the run down of the specs you can expect to see when it launches (hopefully in July).
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With Google TV units running a mixture of Android and Chrome elements, are we going to start seeing many different boxes being released with Google TV functionality? Will we see the same kind of fragmentation that we are seeing with mobile handsets?
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Well, hello there Motorola Droid 2. We would like to officially introduce you to the readers of Droid Life. We saw your activation screen just the other day, but we’ll admit that it’s nice to finally see the rest of you.
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Frank Meehan, chief executive officer of London-based social handset maker INQ Mobile, said at our Mobilize 09 conference last fall that his company would adopt Android as its main platform. Yesterday, Meehan told GigaOM that it will launch the first of its phones based on Google’s OS, a multitouch device, sometime in the fourth quarter.
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Tablets
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Japan’s consumer electronics giant, Sony has a plan to take on the Apple iPad, the company has confirmed in talks with the Wall Street Journal.
Sony Chief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda said Sony “has to develop a device similar to Apple’s iPad tablet computer, because it is a different product category than the company’s existing electronic-book reader.”
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Don’t let all of the Computex Wintel madness throw you off — there are a plenty of ARM-based, Android tablets around these parts, too. We stopped by VIA’s booth to check out some of its tablets, which we’re told are bound to ring up in the $100 to $200 range.
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The Android-powered tablet – pictured – was shown at the recent Computex show in Taipei and reportedly is based on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It has a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen display with 800 by 480 pixel resolution, and comes with Google Apps preloaded
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Geek.net, the parent company of SourceForge.net, Slashdot.org, ThinkGeek.com, Geek.com, freshmeat.net, and ohloh.net, has told employees that it will be closing freshmeat.net and ohloh.net. This information has not yet been released to the public, but we’ve heard it from more than one Geek.net employee.
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Mozilla
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Fennec probably isn’t due out for Android for a long while, but that doesn’t mean the folks at Mozilla are just sitting on their hands doing nothing. They’ve released the latest nightly build of Firefox’s mobile offspring yesterday, but their biggest change has to be that multitouch is now functional.
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South Africa
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Geeks love discussing new things. They love discussing new things over lunch even more. I had the pleasure of spending a very informative lunch with Karl Fischer recently. Here is a guy with a real passion for Open Source Software. A father of twins, he has a keen understanding of the FLOSS community in South Africa, and a passion for exposing more people to FLOSS in the country, especially youngsters.
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Footiefox Firefox addon
Yes you guessed right. There is an addon for that. Footiefox brings the action on the pitch to your browser status bar. You choose your configurations to your taste and Footiefox does the rest for you, displaying real time updates in your browser’s status bar as the action happens.
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The foundation backs the Bika Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) which is already in wide use in the water management, chemistry, wine and mining sectors. The software, which was originally developed in South Africa, has been downloaded more than 30 000 times and is available as free software.
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Business
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So when I met up again yesterday with the Brian Gentile, the head of JasperSoft, I put the same question to him, and received pretty much the same answer: that his company was concentrating on its core elements, rather than spreading itself more widely. The fact that both men independently gave me the same story probably explains why both have managed to do so well: they are pursuing quite different strategies and so avoid head-on confrontation and destructive rivalry.
As part of his company’s approach, Gentile told me JasperSoft was doing a lot of work with its reporting tools – going back to its roots, since JasperReports was the original open source code around which JasperSoft was formed. Interestingly, JasperReports is being used increasingly alongside other software by companies that want more sophisticated output from those applications, including things like allowing users to create personalised output on the fly.
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BSD
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Every now and then when browsing the web and hopping from one link to another you sometimes come across some interesting little projects.
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Nationality
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Am I totally satisfied with her speech? Of course not. There was no indication that the Commission would finally start to seriously migrate to Free Software, and use Open Standards. (I hear that instead, they’re busy setting up Microsoft SharePoint.) There was no clear commitment to a strong definition of Open Standards in EIFv2.
But I’m not only an idealist, I’m also a realist. And realistically, her speech was the best that we’ll hear from a European Commissioner any time soon.
So we at FSFE are taking Neelie Kroes very seriously when she says that “I expect interested parties to mostly turn to me to demand progress [on the Digital Agenda] – and rightly so.” This is an offer to get involved, and we’ll take her up on it.
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“Fifth, with my colleagues in the College I will seriously explore all options to ensure that significant market players cannot just choose to deny interoperability with their product. You no doubt remember that I have some experience with reticent high-tech companies: I had to fight hard and for several years until Microsoft began to license missing interoperability information. Complex anti-trust investigations followed by court proceedings are perhaps not the only way to increase interoperability. The Commission should not need to run an epic antitrust case every time software lacks interoperability. Wouldn’t it be nice to solve all such problems in one go?”
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The government of Brazil is widely promoting FLOSS. For the army, reasons given include:
* 1) Cost savings in the medium and long term with proprietary software.
* 2) Major security, stability and availability offered by SL.
* 3) Elimination of mandatory changes that closed models require periodically its users, due to the discontinuity of supported versions.
* 4) Technological independence.
* 5) Development of local knowledge.
* 6) Chance of auditability of the systems.
* 7) Independence from a single supplier
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Licensing
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The Mozilla Foundation has started the process of revising the Mozilla Public License (“MPL”) and has published the first drafts in the process. You can read the proposed changes to definitions and licenses and comment on them. https://mpl.co-ment.com/text/KVR6Y3hsirl/view/. I am very familiar with the MPL because we used it as the base for the CDDL which I drafted with Sun’s lawyers for the open sourcing of the Solaris operating system.
[...]
I congratulate the Mozilla Foundation for taking the initiative and hope that the result will be a more attactive alternative between GPL and Apache. I encourage the community to participate actively in the revision to make the new version of the MPL as valuable as possible!
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Openness/Sharing
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Wealth. Well-being. Happiness: the words have a well-rounded, easeful feel to them, while “sustainability”, though a great concept, has an implication of discipline and scrimping that can be taken as negative.
Author Juliet Schor argues that seeing the world through a framework of abundance as opposed to a fight over scarcity is the essential shift that needs to take place for healthier, happier societies.
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Open Data
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Today I have participated to an international meeting in Madrid on the reuse of Public Sector Information. I came to gather as much information and food for thought as possible for my new research on Open Data for an Open Society and wasn’t deluded.
Public Sector Information, or PSI for short, is very easy to define in a few words (even if managing it in the right way may be one of the most difficult things in the world): this terms defines all the information and documents that any Public Administration (PA) produces and uses during its ordinary tasks: everything from digital maps and weather forecast to city budgets, tenders and management of public utilities like water or energy.
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Depending on the details, this may be disastrous for the nascent personal genomics industry and its customers – excessive regulation would negatively impact on innovation in the field by increasing the barrier to entry for new products, as well as increasing costs for consumers.
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A small publishing company is under fire after putting warning labels on copies of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and other historical documents.
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With plenty of scrutiny still facing the proposed merger between NBC and Comcast, Representative Maxine Waters strongly suggested that someone from the company tried to bribe her to get her to support the merger:
During a House Judiciary Committee that took place in L.A. on Monday, Representative Maxine Waters stated that she had received a call from “somebody at Comcast asking, ‘What do you want?’”
Waters, who has been grilling the cable giant on issues of ethnic diversity, claims she replied by explaining the need for greater diversity in media. However, Waters says the Comcast caller responded by saying, “I’m talking about what do you want?”
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Science
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A breakthrough in small, high-powered magnets could lead to handheld magnetic resonance scanners with similar capabilities to those of today’s room-sized medical and scientific instruments.
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GMO Monopoly
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France said on Friday it would not support draft proposals to allow European Union governments to grow or ban genetically modified (GM) crops before a complete review of the bloc’s GM approval system.
The EU’s executive, the European Commission, argues that giving member states the option of banning GM cultivation will remove their current opposition to approving new varieties, and plans in July to table proposals seen by Reuters.
But France’s Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said the proposals did not address the demand for a complete review of the bloc’s assessment system for GM crops, made by all 27 EU nations in December 2008.
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An estimated 10,000 peasants gathered for a massive march in Central Haiti on June 4, 2010, to protest what has been described as “the next earthquake for Haiti” – a donation of 475 tons of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds by the US-based agribusiness giant Monsanto, in partnership with USAID. While this move comes at a time of dire need in Haiti, many feel it will undermine rather than bolster the country’s food security.
According to Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, leader of the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) and spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papaye (MPNKP), the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti is “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds… and on what is left our environment in Haiti.”
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Security/Aggression
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Nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, we still have not settled the question of how to deal with terrorism suspects. Should they be in military or civilian custody? Should they receive trials, and if so what kind? After years of acrimonious debate, President Obama is offering a way to settle this argument once and for all: Why not just kill them?
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Free whitepaper – Seven Important Tips for Better Email Security
An employee in one of Bank of America’s customer call centers has admitted he stole sensitive account information and tried to sell it for cash.
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A federal judge has ruled that border agents cannot seize a traveler’s laptop, keep it locked up for months, and examine it for contraband files without a warrant half a year later.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in the Northern District of California rejected the Obama administration’s argument that no warrant was necessary to look through the electronic files of an American citizen who was returning home from a trip to South Korea.
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A simple educated guess that a motorist is speeding is all the evidence a police officer needs to write an ironclad speeding ticket, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.
In a 5-to-1 ruling, the court said an officer’s “unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed” is strong enough to support a ticket and conviction. A radar speed detector, commonly used by patrolmen, is not needed, the court concluded.
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New York’s attorney general Andrew Cuomo accused the social networking site Tagged.com on Thursday of not responding to user reports of child pornography and sexual solicitation of minors, which has allowed the popular site to become a place where sexual predators can exploit children.
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As we uncovered in the research for our report, there has been an explosion in the number of snooping bin chips. We found that there are microchips in the bins of 2.6 million households: none of them were asked if they agreed to having the chips in place, and none of them (with the honourable exception of those in the Royal Borough) were even told that it was happening.
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Today at Prime Minister’s Questions, the Leader of the Opposition, Harriet Harman, took on the new Prime Minister on the issue of CCTV.
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Dog owners are facing £1,000 fines if they take their pets to the park on long leads.
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A motorist has been taken to court and fined – for having a Scooby Doo logo on his number plate.
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The gallery said the “comedy bomb” was strapped to a step ladder and featured “Western-style bunches of dynamite” and an alarm.
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Environment
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Oil and gas may be leaking from the seabed surrounding the BP Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida told Andrea Mitchell today on MSNBC. Nelson, one of the most informed and diligent Congressmen on the BP gulf oil spill issue, has received reports of leaks in the well, located in the Mississippi Canyon sector. This is potentially huge and devastating news.
[...]
It also means, of course, that BP and the Obama Administrations continue to give the American public short shrift in the truth and honesty departments. How surprising.
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Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP’s 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005. Under the heading “sensitive biological resources,” the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.
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One of the first things BP did after oil started gushing into the Gulf was to spray more than 1.1 million gallons of a dispersant with the optimistic name “Corexit” onto the oil. Then BP hired Louisiana fishermen and others to help with cleanup and containment operations. About two weeks later, over seventy workers fell sick, complaining of irritated throats, coughing, shortness of breath and nausea. Seven workers were hospitalized on May 26. Workers were engaged in a variety of different tasks in different places when they got sick: breaking up oil sheen, doing offshore work, burning oil and deploying boom. BP officials speculated that their illnesses were due to food poisoning or other, unrelated reasons, but others pointed out how unlikely these other causes were, since the sick workers were assigned to different locations.
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Finance
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In summary, there are no substitutes for section 716 – no provisions that will accomplish what it does in terms of removing the subsidy enjoyed by (literally) a handful of institutions and ending the ongoing threat to the taxpayer that the guarantee of their derivatives business poses. Ignoring that threat would undermine all the other contributions to reform that the House and Senate bills provide.
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Negotiators from the House and Senate gathered on Thursday to merge two bills representing the most comprehensive changes to financial regulation since the Depression, but the script they acted out was largely being written elsewhere.
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Last month’s market volatility and concerns over unfair trading may require new controls on electronic trading systems, Mary L. Schapiro, the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said on Thursday.
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Some forecasters expect that fast-growing developing countries such as China and Brazil will power the global recovery and spur a rise in U.S. exports. Others warn that fiscal austerity and slow growth in Europe threaten the recovery.
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A $238 million basketball arena is rising on Main Street, financed through a bond deal underwritten by Goldman Sachs.
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The labor movement is lobbying in Washington and overseas to win support for a financial transactions tax at the upcoming G-20 summit in Toronto.
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After the meeting ended Wednesday, Dodd said the committee had not yet decided how to deal with a controversial provision by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), requiring banks to spin off their derivatives operations – a proposal that could cost Wall Street billions of dollars in annual revenue.
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To get a bit less abstract about deficits, the basic thing you worry about in a period of high deficits is inflation. But as the Wall Street Journal reports today, the major danger facing the economy is actually deflation caused by weak economic demand.
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But is Goldman really engaged in a cover-up, or is this subpoena more a reflection of how the commission has been hamstrung by its limited resources and a rapidly expiring mandate to complete its report to Congress?
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The latest shoe to drop on the Goldman front is the report on Wednesday that the SEC was investigating yet another one of its synthetic CDOs, this one a $2 billion confection called Hudson. It isn’t clear whether the SEC will file charges, but this one has the potential to be particularly damaging in the court of public opinion, since this CDO was created solely as a proprietary trading position to help the firm get short subprime risk in late 2006, when the market was clearly on its last legs.
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You heard that right. The uber-wealthy swashbucklers of finance wish that they had themselves a pair of modest green eyeshades. This is clearly schizophrenia of the highest order.
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The Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission is pretty pissed at Goldman Sachs. Actually, make that really pissed. “We’re not going to let the American people be played for chumps here,” said co-chair Phil Angelides. His colleague Bill Thomas added that Goldman is attempting a “very deliberate effort to run out the clock.”
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Reckless swaps and derivatives trading played a critical role in the financial crisis, inflating the domestic housing bubble and turning it into a global economic catastrophe.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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BP has a message for the oil-soaked wildlife off the Gulf Coast: we’re just here to protect you!
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If you’d like another perspective on factory hog farms, check out the film Pig Business, and check out how the pork industry tried to keep people from seeing it.
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The narrative the media is feeding the country this election season is that voters are enraged, and an anti-incumbent wave is sweeping across the country, striking terror in incumbents’ hearts. But if that’s really the case, then why were so many incumbents voted back into office in last Tuesday’s election? A New York Times headline reported, “Anti-Incumbent Rage Bypasses Arkansas.” A Reuters headline screamed “Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln survives anti-incumbent wave.” But maybe there really isn’t any anti-incumbent rage.
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Incumbents must be some kind of endangered species, with the Beltway media continually telling us that voters are enraged and will throw all the sitting senators and representatives and governors out. This is the age of the Tea Party change after all.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The state has fined five California hospitals a total of $675,000 for failing to prevent unauthorized access to confidential patient medical files.
Community Hospital of San Bernardino was issued two fines: $250,000 after an employee wrongly accessed 204 patient records and $75,000 for an employee who accessed three records.
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On its Web site the company boasts access to the best programmers in Pyongyang.
“You find experts in all major programming languages, 3D software development, 3D modelling and design, various kind of server technologies, Linux, Windows and Mac,” he said.
Nosotek’s main work revolves around development of Flash games and games for mobile phones. It’s had some success and claims that one iPhone title made the Apple Store Germany’s top 10 for at least a week, though it wouldn’t say which one.
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The Turkish president has used his Twitter account to condemn the country’s ban on YouTube and some Google services.
In separate tweets, Abdullah Gul said he did not approve of the bans and had instructed officials to examine legal ways of reopening access.
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Turkey has until further notice blocked several of Google’s services for their online citizens. This is allegedly due to “legal reasons” and means that neither the translation service Google Translate, the cooperation tool Docs, Maps, Analytics, Groups and Youtube among other services are accessible in a useful way from within Turkey.
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Given the number of folks in Australia who have been submitting this video of Australian Minister for Broadband, Stephen Conroy (the guy who wants to censor the internet in Australia), it appears that many down under feel that Conroy has had his “series of tubes” moment by talking about how computer users are getting “infected by these spams, or scams, that come through, the portal”
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GOOGLE has denied suggestions by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that its Street Viewcars inadvertently captured people’s personal banking details.
[...]
“The way it works is that the equipment we use (which we bought from a third party) and our software will recognise encrypted transmissions, but immediately discards that encrypted data.
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Apotekaren writes “The Finnish Ministry of Justice has started preparing changes to a current law that criminalizes using unsecured wireless hot spots (Google translation; Finnish original). The reasoning includes the impossibility of tracking unlawful use, the ease of securing networks, and the lack of real damage done by this activity. It is also hard for a user to know if an unsecured network is intended for public use or not. The increased ubiquity of legal, open networks in parks, airports, and other public places has also influenced this move by the Ministry of Justice.”
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It appears that virtually the entire plaintiff’s bar saw Google’s blog post that it captured wi-fi payload data as part of its data collection for Google Street View.
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A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association does not violate the constitutional rights of newspapers and other media by barring them from streaming high school sporting events over the Internet.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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As we ponder the messed-up corporate ethics of BP, let’s not forget about Massey Energy. Former miner Ricky Lee Campbell complained to his supervisors about unsafe conditions at two Massey coal mines—including the Upper Big Branch, where an explosion killed 29 miners on April 5.
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ORG and people concerned with the BBC’s gradual locking up of content, with its consequent lock down on competition, innovation and usability, are still waiting for Ofcom’s response to their consultation on BBC HD.
Ofcom said they were “minded” to allow the BBC to introduce backdoor DRM on HD broadcasts, which would hit disabled users and open source developers particularly hard.
Many ORG supporters then wrote to the European Commission, as a unique UK system of DRM would create trade barriers: HD television devices made for the rest of Europe would not necessarily work in the UK.
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Publishing
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Last week a letter was sent to UC faculty by librarians from the 10 UC campuses describing a 400% increase in the cost of access to the 67 journals published by Nature Publishing Group (including the prestigious research journal Nature). The letter also described plans being set in motion by some prominent faculty to organize a boycott of NPG journals, in which faculty would no longer publish in or volunteer their time for any NPG journals until they backed off of their exorbitant demands.
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In talking about the recent decision by Rupert Murdoch to lock up the entire website of The Times behind a paywall, we noted that one of its editors, Danny Finkelstein, claimed he was still going to post links to stories at The Times on his Twitter account, even though people wouldn’t be able to read them without paying. We pointed out that, in our experience, even linking to registration required sites annoyed the hell out of people, and Finkelstein might want to think twice about engaging in social media by sending people to a paywall. Finkestein responded with a bit of snark:
First, I won’t be tweeting stories that followers can’t read. I will be tweeting stories that followers have to pay for if they wish to read. That is an entirely different thing.
It’s not that different. Most people won’t pay, so the vast majority of people who follow your links are going to get frustrated. It’s not a good consumer experience at all — especially when you’re talking about using Twitter or other social media platforms where sharing and link passing are encouraged.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It’s really not something that I had thought about, but Stephan Kinsella points us to a recent talk given by David Koepsell, who not so long ago wrote a book, Who Owns You?, all about the serious problems in patenting genes. I’ve actually had a few email conversations with Koepsell over the past few months, and it’s worth paying attention to what he has to say. He’s very deliberate and careful in his work, supporting his positions with deep levels of analysis and evidence. This talk appears to be a new area that he’s taking on, trying to make the case that all intellectual property is, by its very nature, unethical…
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Amazon.com has run afoul of a candy maker. Ce De Candy, maker of Smarties, is suing the online retail giant, alleging trademark infringement, unfair competition and false advertising.
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Copyrights
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# Once again, it’s important to point out that the chart above is not the entire music industry, but a limited segment of it: the RIAA record labels, mainly comprised of the big four record labels. It doesn’t take into account all of the other aspects of the music business — nearly every single one of which has been growing during this same period. It also doesn’t take into account the vast success stories of independent artists and labels doing creative business models and routing around the legacy gatekeepers.
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She does a final check of her belongings as she drags them to the door and then to the awaiting cab. Her frail frame is soaked as the rain falls through the blackest of nights. They must not capture her, no…it is not an option. She would rather die, have her heart stop in mid-beat before she would give herself over to them….she shudders as she dares even to think their name.
The RIAA.
One of the truly extraordinary experiences in my “career” as a Linux Advocate, has been donating my time to our senior citizens. In a nutshell, myself and two other volunteers visit Senior Citizen Assisted Living Centers and help them with their computer problems.
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Producers of “The Hurt Locker” have asked a federal court to order Internet service providers to reveal the names of customers who they accuse of illegally sharing copies of the film via the Web.
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The same folks who produce, distribute and broadcast Glee are the folks who insist copyright is property and that the current laws are just and good. But, even they must know, conceptually, that there’s a mismatch between what the law says today and what people actually do.
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I was considering skipping posting about it altogether, given that it’s really just the same old thing, but Dark Helmet sent in a nice starter list on why this study is completely bogus:
1. Every infringing download is counted as a lost sale
2. CESA took the numbers for Japanese handheld game piracy and multiplied it by four to get the worldwide numbers, because CESA “believes” Japan represents 1/4 of the market
3. Deviations in piracy levels in different world regions were not taken into account
4. Pricing for games per unauthorized copies were ALL based on the initial release price, not taking into account pricing fluctuations of games over time
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Let’s say it right up front: some large percentage of those targeted in the recent wave of P2P movie lawsuits are no doubt liable for their piratical behavior. But those who “didn’t do it” face an agonizing choice—pay $1,500 to $2,500 to settle the lawsuits brought by Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, or pay even more money for a lawyer to plead their innocence.
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The school system will be paid $2.25 million to develop an elementary school curriculum that an education company will augment and sell around the world. The school system will also receive a small percentage of sales revenue once the curriculum is completed.
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Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has warned budding music stars to abandon any dreams of signing with a major label, claiming the mainstream recording industry is dying.
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The threatening letters started arriving in early 2009, a few months after Jim Whitney opened J Dubs Coffee, a tiny storefront coffee shop in a Manchester, N.H., strip mall. Fifteen came over a few months, right around the time Anthony Demings, owner of the Brooklyn Coffee and Tea House in Providence, was receiving his own string of letters, and Lorraine Carboni, proprietor of Somethin’s Brewin’ Book Cafe in Lakeville, began getting calls and then lunch hour visits from a brusque man.
[...]
Copyright law requires that any venue where music is performed publicly, from cheerleading competitions and mortuaries to nightclubs and stadiums, have a performance license. Recorded music is subject to license fees as well. The three US-based PROs — ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC — collect the fees and distribute them to their members.
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If you’re thinking of a safe haven from which to practise the non-so-subtle arts of copyright infringement and have been checking the prices of luxury apartments in Armenia, think again. A news item from Eastern Europe and Caucasus-focused IP practice Petosevic, “Bill Tightening Penalties for Copyright Violation Introduced in Armenian Parliament”, warns that things are only likely to get tougher for infringers there.
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This is despite the fact that Canada already has numerous draconian copyright provisions, extremely limited exceptions and a blank media tax that already assumes most Canadians are criminals.
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ACTA
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On Saturday the online Official Journal of the European Union carried the Opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) on the current negotiations by the European Union of an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which you can read in full here. The EDPS isn’t interested in intellectual property, counterfeiting or any of the other things that concern the IP community — but he is highly concerned about anything to do with information. Issues such as transparency and the extent to which personal data can be stored, shared and used are very much on his mind.
Andy Ransom on Scheduling and Background tasks
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.11.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This conclusion was delivered after some gems, referring to “7″, like
* It’s not XP
* Compatibility is always an issue
* It’s the same old
* Productivity will slip in the short-term
On the pro side of “7″ the authour mentions improved security over XP or Vista but totally neglects to mention that GNU/Linux had better security than XP nine years ago and it is getting better.
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Inspired by a comment I received yesterday explaining the problems with non-programmers getting involved in helping Linux projects, I have decided to give a little guidance on how to help out if you are not the code monkey type.
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I refuse to review a distro and say “ooh a nice distro that I really liked and looks nice and you should try it…” without making sure that I compare it to the best out there. The teams behind each and every Linux distribution deserves our respect, and by comparing them with the best we show that we admire their effort enough to expect the best from them.
But… Don’t We Get What we Pay For?
We get more. Over the past years Linux has come along in leaps and bounds. And it has been hard going. Only within the last five years have Linux become really mainstream. Sure you could have yourself a desktop OS with minimal fiddle since the days of Mandrake Linux that came in those blue boxes, and who featured the venerable Drake the Wizard to help you through the new experience.
Now you get the most full featured and best operating systems around only a download away. You get the best desktop compositing that money will not buy, you get the most stable kernel that is used on high end servers across the world running your netbook. You get security, features, stability, looks, compatibility and speed – at no cost.
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While Linux is taking the world by storm, I often get asked what the best version of Linux is for enterprises of all sizes. Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu are always top notch distributions but then so are Fedora, CentOS, Mint, OpenSuse, and SlackWare. Which distro is the best depends largely on what software you will be running on your Linux installation. For most companies, standardizing on a distribution seems like it should be the final goal. As with most things we discuss, the answer is maybe as well as it depends. We are going to limit our scope in this CTO Brief to three of the top Business/Enterprise backed distributions.
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Desktop
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Maybe the answer for local schools facing daunting technology challenges lies with the penguins.
You know, penguins — those who worship free and open-source software, including Linux and the operating system’s mascot, a penguin named Tux.
I’ve been hearing from the penguins since I wrote recently that if Silicon Valley CEOs want the state to improve K-12 education, then they should take a bigger role in helping those schools deploy classroom technology from this century.
“One viable solution to getting the old computers working again is to install Linux on them,” Peter Perpich, a San Jose Web application engineer, wrote in an e-mail. “Linux needs significantly less processing power than Windows and is free. There is also a wealth of free open-source software for the platform.”
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To donate a computer, check out the specs here and the drop off locations around town where you can leave your old machine and pick up a tax receipt. If you have five or more computers to donate, Linux Against Poverty can make arrangements to pick them up.
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Audiocasts
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News: Mostly Maverick Development.
Games: Ed’s been reviewing Osmos, but playing on an X-Box; Dave reviews a Nexus One Android phone.
Opinion: Why we need Lubuntu
Interview: Part I of the Lubuntu Project
Opinion: What services do we want in UbuntuOne
Keynote: Part II of Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote from UDS
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In this episode: Fedora 13 is out. Google drops the Windows option for new staff and yet Windows is still doing well as a server. Discover how we fared with a minority distribution and we tout our ideas on how Linux devices can beat Apple’s iPad.
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Create dynamic learning environments, collaborative business applications, or interactive, multi-user simulations in Open Wonderland.
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Google
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Sorry, I just could not resist a really lame title like that. For those of you who do not already know we will describe what Chromoting is. Not a whole lot of information has been released about Chromoting and it is still in development. But so far what we know is that Chromoting is a feature that is being developed for Chrome OS, Google’s spin of the Linux operating system. What it will do is enable
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Ballnux
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Applications
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When it comes to personal financial software choices, the Windows folks have historically had plenty of choices… with a few major ones that seemed obvious. However, the fine folks over on the Linux side of the wall have not had the same corporate weight thrown into its available products, making it a bit harder to choose a decent package.
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Proprietary
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Today I’m thrilled to announce that Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. You can get it now. Flash Player 10.1 for Android will be coming later this month – the beta release is currently available in the Android market.
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Instructionals
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Games
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The Parallel Realities website offers a collection of simple, mostly SDL based action games. They’re all fairly lightweight and might make good boredom beaters on a less powerful machine, or failing that, a handy distraction while waiting for something to complete in the background. If amazing graphics are your thing, be warned that the retro styling of all of these games leans more towards nostalgic appeal than an attempt to wow.
The games all worked well when operating in a window, something I prefer when playing a game under Linux. They could all be played via the keyboard, but worked best when used with a dedicated USB game controller.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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KDE: A Thriving Community Based on Participation
KDE thrives in direct relationship to the health and vibrancy of its community. The most obvious manifestation of this is when people contribute software development time to the various projects KDE undertakes. In fact, when KDE was founded 15 years ago that was pretty much the only way to get invovled. Since then the number of ways one can participate within KDE has exploded and the KDE community has grown to include groups of people working on translation and internationalization, art and graphic design, usability, documentation, communication, project management and more.
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Two and a half years after the KDE 4 series of releases began, many users are still using KDE 3. A preference for the familiar seems to motivate some; while others seem influenced by the rumors that began with the botched 4.0 release. Still others want a feature that the KDE 4 series has yet to implement — or, sometimes, a feature they have been unable to find because of reorganization.
For whatever the reasons, several distributions continue to cater to the preference, including aLinux, Knoppix and MEPIS, all of which offer GNU/Linux with KDE 3.0 as the desktop.
This raises the question: How do the two series of KDE releases compare? The answer is not nearly as simple as you might assume.
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KOffice 2.2 was recently released and can be “used for real work”. Conveniently, just after 2.2 was released, I found myself needing to put together a presentation for Akademy – so what to use?
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rekonq is a relatively new project aimed at creating a native KDE browser that addresses some of the perceived shortcomings in Konqueror, which has served as KDE’s main file browser–and sometime-file browser–for many years.
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Today a prototype version of mobile variants of the KDE PIM suite was demoed at LinuxTag (expect more information some time next week). These applications along with GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows versions of Kontact accessing a Kolab Server will be on show for the duration of LinuxTag. The application packages themselves can be downloaded by anyone willing to test them out. Since the last update about KDE PIM Mobile, there have been many visual and functional improvements to the applications.
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GNOME
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Finally! Here’s what were eagerly waiting in the last few days! The GNOME 2.31.3 release! It took a longer to do it due to an epic battle between the release team mob, GTK+, and Evolution (with some participation from gnome-settings-daemon and libgnomekbd). Everything is alright now, don’t worry!
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If you want to use GnoMenu, all you have to do is follow the installation instructions in HERE. Once installed, simply follow the usual steps to add widgets and choose the GnoMenu one.
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GNOME Journal
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Gentoo
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Since composite becomes famous the desktop-cube was one of the top showcase-effects.
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Red Hat Family
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Oxilion, a hosting provider located in Enschede, in the Netherlands near the German border, that is morphing (as many are) into a virtual infrastructure public cloud provider, has tapped Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization, the enterprise-grade implementation of the KVM hypervisor, as the foundation for the pay-as-you-use Virtual Data Center cloud launched today.
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Earlier this year, Red Hat launched opensource.com as a way to shine a light on the places where the open source way is multiplying ideas and effort beyond technology. The open source way is more than a development model; it defines the characteristics of a culture. Openness. Transparency. Collaboration. Diversity. Rapid prototyping.
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Fedora
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I could continue on forever and a day about how Fedora 13 brings a world of improvement to the Fedora/Linux experience. But the best thing I can say is that Ubuntu better watch out or Fedora might well usurp it as the king of Linux for new users. And since Fedora is already one of the most popular distributions with experienced users…you get the picture.
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Starting with the most recent release of Mirabelle, Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora Spin [1]. While this may sound strange at first, it contributes essentially to our goal of achieving both sustainable development and stable releases — it allows both Sugar Labs and the Fedora Project to leverage the mutual work and results in a great upstream / downstream relationship: Fedora benefits from an easily deployable implementation of the most recent version of the Sugar Learning Platform, while Sugar on a Stick gains access to Fedora’s extensive resources in terms of engineering and testing, with automated nightly builds containing the latest components just being one example.
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The FICLA, which has been used for a number of years, is based closely on the Apache Software Foundation’s Individual CLA, with some minor changes. So far as I can tell, the Apache CLA has worked well for ASF projects in the several years since its adoption, and Fedora is not the only project to reuse its text. It is not difficult to see why the Apache CLA was originally assumed to be a good model for Fedora. On the assumption, which can be questioned, that some sort of formal contribution agreement was advisable at all, there were, and are, few other models with a genuine free software pedigree.
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Debian Family
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In Debian GNU/Linux there are packaging policies in place to prevent one package from fiddling with the configuration of another. Simple. That other OS makes things difficult for everyone but they keep on doing the same stupid things for “backwards compatibility” meaning “we messed up and we are not going to fix it”.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Andalusian Regional Government, Spain, wanted to improve access to IT in schools throughout the region. It asked IT services company infrastructure to connect 2,000 schools in Andalusia. Isotrol implemented 220,000 Ubuntu-based workstations in more than 2,000 schools throughout the region. Now, technology plays an integral role in delivering a more dynamic learning experience in schools across Andalusia. Teachers and students can share information quickly and easily, while each school receives dedicated support from a centralised support service.
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So there you have it: Ubuntu: It Just Works. Install it, spend two weeks wondering where the cutlery drawer is, watch it disappear. Thereafter, only notice it when it does something amazing, like flawless OS updates or very simple transfers to new machines.
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I followed the news-feed links to the latest post at OMG! Ubuntu! (LOLOMGWTF!!!!111eleventy-one) and as soon as I saw the opening sentence thunder that Ubuntu was “a steaming pile of mediocrity,” I said to myself, “Gee, I wonder if this is going to be a fair, balanced evaluation?”
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In a brief but bold statement, Dell’s U.S. website suggests that Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft Windows, especially for customers looking to avoid viruses. The statement, spotted by TheVARguy.com, also suggests that Dell will begin shipping Ubuntu 10.04 on selected U.S. systems sometime in mid-2010. Here’s an update.
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10.10
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Google’s Chromium browser will be the new default browser for the 10.10 release of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), replacing Firefox.
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A great update so early on in the development of the software store this cycle – lets hope there are no issues so it remains for all to gawp at come October.
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Phoenix claims to have over 200 patents awarded or pending. Its firmware has shipped in over one billion computers.
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Hewlett-Packard will buy Linux-based quick-boot OS and client virtualization assets from Phoenix Technologies for US$12 million, Phoenix said on Thursday.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Intel and Nokia have released version 1.0 of the MeeGo Core Software Platform and the MeeGo Netbook User Experience. This release provides developers with a stable core foundation for application development and a rich user experience for Netbooks.
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Android
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VoIP and Convergence company HelloSoft has announced that they are releasing a 4G tri-band “reference” phone for deployment in WiMAX markets. A $100 4G Android phone? Hard to believe, right? But wait, there’s more: this handset is going to be fully VoIP ready! Read on after the break.
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Because TV matters in a way that nothing else does. Each year, the TV drives roughly $70 billion in advertising and an equal amount in cable and satellite fees, and another $25 billion in consumer-electronics sales. Plus, viewers spend 4.5 hours a day with it—which is, mind you, the equivalent of a full-time job in some socialist-leaning countries (I’ll refrain from naming names).
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And don’t even get me started on the fact that the Android code is already starting to appear in totally new segments, bringing yet more innovation, yet more players….
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Video of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child, talking on the successes and lessons of the project.
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If any Linux company comes close to appreciating Apple’s appeal to average users with its focus on making the interface a pleasure to use, it’s Canonical. After all, it was Canonical’s founder and Ubuntu’s guiding light, Mark Shuttleworth, who said Ubuntu’s goal was to deliver “a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years.”
Shuttleworth was talking about the desktop. Today, it’s all about competing on devices. The day of the PC is fading into the afternoon. With Apple making enemies of one-time partners and closing its software circle ever tighter, now is the time for Linux not only to push forward with its historical advantages of lower prices and open software and standards, but to show the world that Linux devices can be every bit as attractive and user-friendly as its Apple competition.
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2020FLOSSRoadmap.org is an open collaborative site designed to discuss, comment and update the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap published in 2008 at Open World Forum. This site is supported by the 2 Paris Region’s Competitiveness Clusters. 2020 FLOSS Roadmap is divided in one synthesis and several themes each under the responsibility of a different director who were responsible to take the comments into account to produce the updated 2009 version.
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We were extremely fortunate to have Dr. David Upton, chair in Operations Management at Oxford University, kick off our first ever Open Your World forum. Dr. Upton’s presentation, entitled “Radically Simple IT … or, a Strategic Argument for Open Source in Business” was a highly relevant and insightful commentary on how open source principles can help business leaders transform how they approach and engage the more traditional strategic planning process.
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Mozilla
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Thomas Frieden and Hans-Joerg took their passion and talent to work and have come up with an elusive and several times tried before goal: produce an alpha version of Firefox that runs on their beloved operating system Amiga OS 4.1 Update2.
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Today I landed Firefox’s WebM support on mozilla-central, our Firefox development branch. It should appear in nightly builds from tonight onwards.
Credits to the development effort go to Chris Double for writing the decoder backend, Matthew Gregan for writing the ISC style licensed libnestegg WebM demuxer, and myself for integrating all the moving parts into the Mozilla tree and build system. Also thanks need to go to the releng team which promptly installed YASM on the Mozilla Linux and Mac build machines, and to Roc, Shaver and many others for cracking the whip and working behind the scenes.
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SaaS
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2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold. Despite a widespread interest in cloud computing there may be some pitfalls including cloud lock-in.
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Databases
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PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 2 just got released this week. We may see another beta before 9.0 is finally released, but it looks like PostgreSQL 9.0 will be here probably sometime this month. Robert Treat has a great slide presentation showcasing all the new features.
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CMS
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The South African Government is using Drupal for their official 2010 FIFA World Cup website at http://www.sa2010.gov.za. With the start of the 2010 World Cup just hours away, this is a timely discovery and a nice win for Drupal. The site was built by eConsultant.
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Business
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Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will “fail” in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won’t be possible in most markets. Red Hat stands a chance because it has (wisely) colonised the biggest sector, that of enterprise infrastructural products – “we are plumbers”, as Whitehurst put it with brutal frankness.
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BSD
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I’m happy to announce a great new subproject of LLVM: LLDB. LLDB is a modern debugger infrastructure which is built (like the rest of LLVM) as a series of modular and reusable libraries. LLDB builds on existing LLVM technologies like the enhanced disassembler APIs, the Clang ASTs and expression parser, the LLVM code generator and JIT compiler.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I personally very much support the action the FSF has taken. Anyone involved in distribution of copyrighted material is required to do due diligence on checking that he actually has a license to do so. This is not really related to the GPL.
Yes, this means that I can take GPL enforcement action to a retail store that is selling/distributing infringing products, and I can make them provide a declaration to cease and desist from further infringements. Of course, that declaration would only be valid for this single retail store. This is why in our gpl-violations.org work, we always try to go after whatever entity is responsible for the majority or all of those infringements, rather than after a single store owner.
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Government
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European Commission digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has furthered her backing of open standards.
In a speech to the Open Forum Europe summit, Kroes said that new standards for information and communication standards are more open to third parties and easier to share across multiple platforms.
“When the Commission mandates standards bodies to draw up a standard it should have the right to be more demanding on the standardisation process, to ensure that standards are less demanding when it comes to their adoption,” she said.
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The European Union’s top Internet official took aim at Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, warning that governments can accidentally lock themselves into one company’s software for decades by setting it as a standard for their technology systems.
EU Internet Commissioner Neelie Kroes, in her previous post as EU antitrust chief, fined Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in a lengthy row over the company’s refusal to share some data with rivals and the tying of a Web browser to a best-selling operating system.
She now says she wants to draw up detailed guidelines for European governments to encourage them to require other software, especially programs based on open source code that is freely shared between developers.
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Work is underway on the future options for desktop computers that will include testing of open source and will provide guidance and sourcing options for boards. This is part of wider review activity aimed at developing sustainable approaches to IT enabled improvements in patient care.
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Openness/Sharing
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Carsharing just took a step forward on June 3rd in California when AB1871 passed the Assembly with zero opposition. The bill now goes to the Senate and could become law before the year is out. We talked about the potential for this bill to accelerate the already fast growing carsharing industry here.
Below is the press release by California Assemblymember Dave Jones who is spearheading the bill. You can voice your support for the bill at peer-to-peer carsharing startup Spride Share’s petition page here.
Personally, I live in California and can’t wait for the bill to pass. We’ve just gone to a one car family. I’d love to have the flexibility to rent a neighbor’s car.
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Clay Shirky’s second book, The Cognitive Surplus, picks up where his stellar debut, Here Comes Everybody left off: explaining how the net’s lowered costs for group activity allow us to be creative and even generous in ways that we never anticipated and haven’t yet fully taken account of.
Shirky’s hypothesis is that a lot of the 20th century stuff we used to take for granted — most people didn’t want to create media, people didn’t value homemade and amateur productions, no one would pitch in to create something for others to enjoy unless they were being paid — weren’t immutable laws of nature, but accidents of history. The Internet has undone those accidents, by making it possible for more people to make and do cool stuff, especially together.
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Open Data
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Hopefully most of you have seen the official launch of the Australian v3.0 licences earlier today.
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Over a swift half at the end of the rather wonderful Liver’n’Mash, Mike Nolan chatted through some of his thoughts around his presentation on data.ac.uk that I hadn’t been able to get to see.
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Yesterday, in a brilliant article on The Guardian website, Charles Arthur argued that a global flood of government data is being opened up to the public (sadly, not in Canada) and that we are going to need an army of people to make it understandable.
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Open Access/Content
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Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA), the only national non-profit dedicated to providing support and advocacy for those living with or at risk for lung cancer, announced today the launching of the first open access website for CT scans and clinical data donated by patients, called Give a Scan, that will increase and accelerate research for lung cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment and drug development.
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The Open Clip Art Library has seen tremendous growth and change during the initial half of the year. Today, the platform continues it’s evolution with the Spring 2010 Release!
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Standards/Consortia
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Will the smart grid eventually follow the path of the Internet with truly open standards? Several up-and-coming companies are betting that the answer will be a resounding “yes” and are in the process of looking to sign up utilities and customers that want to embrace the open-standards smart grid vision. Among them is newcomer Arch Rock, which has been selling wireless network products for data centers and buildings for the past five years, and on Monday morning plans to announce its first smart grid wireless network product based completely on open standards.
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On Monday I wrote about the crisis facing the British Computer Society (BCS) as its current leadership tries to jettison the old name. I found out about the move in an expensively-produced glossy mailing I received on the subject. Just a few days later, the actual voting papers arrived. They contain an ill-considered Quick Vote option that BCS Professional Members need to carefully avoid.
I mentioned Monday that the resolutions for the EGM of the BCS include a resolution that effectively takes away the right of Members to call an EGM again. The current EGM was hard to call, since it turned out that the ‘requisition’ needed the physical signatures of fifty Professional Members and not just their clear consent provided electronically. Despite being a member for many years I’ve rarely been to a BCS meeting with that many people present, and collecting 50 signatures thus forms an effective barrier against frivolous meetings. The people calling the EGM make a good case for this mechanism. Regardless of what you may think about the other resolutions, the final resolution is a bad idea that reduces the accountability of the BCS leadership.
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An Australian restaurateur fed up with the waste left by diners has ordered her customers to eat everything on their plates for their sake of the earth or pay a penalty and not return.
Chef Yukako Ichikawa has introduced a 30 percent discount for diners who eat all the food they have ordered at Wafu, her 30-seat restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, that describes itself as “guilty free Japanese cuisine.”
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Science
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Dr Dominic Micklewright (left) from the University of Essex has been testing elite computer gamers to compare how they match up to professional athletes.
[...]
Micklewright said: “Someone of this age should be much fitter but perhaps this is the occupational hazard of the professional gamer who can spend around 10 hours per day in front of a computer screen practicing.”
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Last month, Costa Rica’s health ministry halted treatments at the country’s largest stem cell clinic, arguing that the treatments are unproven and possibly unsafe.
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Security/Aggression
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The group says such illegal activity would violate the Nuremburg Code, and could open the door to prosecutions. Their report is based on publicly available documents, and explores the participation of medical professionals in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.”
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OVER the past four years, some 3,000 officers in America’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been specially trained to spot potential terrorists at airports. The programme, known as SPOT, for “Screening Passengers by Observation Technique,” is intended to allow airport security officers to use tiny facial cues to identify people who are acting suspiciously. The British government is currently launching a new screening regime modelled on the Americans’ SPOT. There’s just one problem with all this: there’s no evidence that SPOT is actually effective.
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The 14 forces are trying to contact tens of thousands who were unlawfully searched on the streets in operations going back to 2001, when the powers were introduced. Home Office figures show that searches under these powers were carried out 148,798 times last year.
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Brian McCrary found the perfect venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City Police Department’s website, saw that its domain name was about to expire, and bought it right out from under the city’s nose.
Now that McCrary is the proud owner of the site, http://www.bluffcitypd.com, the Gray, Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about speed cameras – like the one on U.S. Highway 11E that caught him – and how people don’t like them.
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Gary McKinnon, still suffering from Asperger’s, has one last chance to avoid extradition to the US to face charges of hacking into Nasa and Pentagon computers. Will the new government keep its word and help him avoid a savage punishment?
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Environment
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The answer, as hinted in this NYTimes piece, is Exxon, which sees a once-in-a-lifetime chance to exterminate a commercial rival.
The idea that BP might one day file for bankruptcy, particularly as part of a merger that would enable it to cordon off its liabilities from the spill, is starting to percolate on Wall Street. Bankers and lawyers are already sizing up potential deals (and counting their potential fees).
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Getting statistics on worker illness related to the Gulf oil spill is proving to be difficult, as federal agencies continually refer requests either to another federal agency or to BP.
When we asked for statistics on health complaints related to the Gulf spill, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us to ask the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA has told us to ask BP. The Environmental Protection Agency recommended via e-mail that we contact someone at the Department of Homeland Security. When we called the EPA back to confirm that the agency is not itself keeping these statistics, the same spokeswoman who told us to ask elsewhere said, “I’d have to clarify on that. Let me check on that.”
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As the BP oil disaster drags on, the public’s desire for clean energy investments and increased oversight of corporate polluters has greatly intensified. CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and intern Ariel Powell have the important data and charts from a major new poll.
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The giant deepwater plumes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico have been confirmed by the government, but one thing the testing couldn’t confirm was that the oil below the surface is definitively from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (The other possibility is the plumes are the result of natural seepage.)
According to a lead scientist involved in the testing, an oil sample from the BP well would have helped ID the origin of the plumes, but BP refused to provide any samples, reported the St. Petersburg Times. “I was just taken aback by it,” said the scientist, David Hollander, who’s a professor of chemical oceanography at the University of South Florida. “It was a little unsettling.”
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This is really horrifying news. If oil industry expert Matthew Simmons that appeared on the Dylan Ratigan show and Sen. Ben Nelson’s worst case scenarios turn out to be true the situation in the Gulf truly looks dire. Simmons said that they have grossly underestimated the size of the disaster and that it appears to be the result of the biggest blowout in the world and that most of the oil is not coming from the leak the BP cameras are showing, but instead “an open hole with no casing in it which sits about seven miles away from where BP had been trying to fix these little tiny leaks in the drilling riser”.
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Researchers aboard the F.G. Walton Smith vessel briefed reporters on a two-week cruise in which they traced an underwater oil plum 15 miles wide, 3 miles long and about 600 feet thick. The plume’s core is 1,100 to 1,300 meters below the surface, they said.
“It’s an infusion of oil and gas unlike anything else that has ever been seen anywhere, certainly in human history,” said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, the expedition leader.
Bacteria are breaking down the oil’s hydrocarbons in a massive, microorganism feeding frenzy that has sent oxygen levels plunging close to what is considered “dead zone” conditions, at which most marine life are smothered for a lack of dissolved oxygen.
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Goldman Sachs or BP, the politicians’ reaction remains the same. Screw whoever’s not in your circle, and use (your power over) their money to pay off who is. Corporations rule this planet, not the people that live on it.
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As BP sweats to clean up the oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, it is simultaneously waging a public relations (PR) war, trying to fend a wave of negative attention, by buying search phrases like “oil spill” on Google and Yahoo.
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In response to the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a University of Pittsburgh engineering professor has developed a technique for separating oil from water via a cotton filter coated in a chemical polymer that blocks oil while allowing water to pass through. The researcher reports that the filter was successfully tested off the coast of Louisiana and shown to simultaneously clean water and preserve the oil.
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Our energy subsidy from the stored sunlight in fossil fuels is gigantic. The chemical and kinetic energy embodied in the thick gooey condensed organic matter from past eons is, for all human intents and purposes, indistinguishable from magic. Once in a while, like now, we see the downsides to our dependency on this elixir, in this case the ecological degradation of increasing areas of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems, and collateral damage to other species.
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An underwater three-dimensional map of the oil spill is closer to becoming a reality, now that the U.S. has for the first time confirmed the discovery of a subsurface oil plume resulting from the ruptured BP well.
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WHEN BP’s Macondo well began spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the firm was in the midst of an effort to persuade Canada’s energy regulator that safety standards for offshore drilling in the Canadian Arctic were expensive, impractical and should be relaxed. Hearings on the subject were promptly suspended and the regulator declared that no new drilling permits would be issued pending a review of existing rules. “We have a duty to pause, to take stock of the incident,” says Gaétan Caron, head of the National Energy Board.
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So how does this economic explanation square with the clear and present biological crisis that Eric Olson faces on the ground in Yakima, Washington? “We are not denying that there are serious biological problems, like in the U.S. with colony collapse disorder, et cetera,” Harder said. “But our argument is that this sort of thing is a short-term episode in a much-longer declining trend that’s probably more related to the economics of the honey industry.”
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The most intriguing part of his presentation was his exploration of ‘consumer emissions,’ which are not usually included in emissions reporting. His central question was, “Who’s responsible for emissions: the producers or the consumers?”
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“Dear friends! This year turned out to be successful for the animals in the environmental center. We expect the number of gazelles to grow to 1200, kulan – to 80, horses of Przhevalskiy – to 24. This is just splendid. However, we face serious challenges, rescuing them. Why?
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Cinemas in Japan have cancelled plans to show an Oscar-winning film about the country’s annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins after far-right campaigners threatened to disrupt the screenings.
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In the wake of huge depletion in stocks of bluefin tuna, EU Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki decided yesterday (9 June) to ban large-scale bluefin tuna fishing in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. The ban has already come into effect.
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Finance
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This essay shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and its units (like the Goldman-Robert Rubin-funded Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution) in the Obama government. These names are in addition to those compiled on an older such list and published here at FDL. In the future, I will combine the names here and those on the earlier article but I urge readers to look at the earlier list too (links below). Combined, this is the largest and most comprehensive list of such ties yet published.
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Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wants the financial regulatory bill to bar financial firms that give up their government-backed bank charters from ever being able to seek government assistance again.
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So, How Many Banks and Analysts Were Bearish On Goldman Before Today? and Is the Threat to the Banks Over? Implied Volatility Says So. Some may ask why I’m being so generous in regards to the extent of this quarter’s earning review. Well… A European institutional subscriber recently stated he was able to get the same content found in my offerings from his investment bank research.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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MEPS are being deceived into signing a Written Declaration which they believe is a statement on child abuse and sexual violence against women. In fact, it is a Trojan Horse for extending the Data Retention Directive. It reflects gutter-lobbying of the worst kind.
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Labour/Asia
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Foxconn – the massive Taiwan-based contract manufacturer whose clients include Apple, Dell, HP, Intel, Sony, and others – will shutter its mainland China operations in a restructuring that could move as many as 800,000 workers into the ranks of the unemployed.
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Coastal factories are increasing hourly payments to workers. Local governments are raising minimum wage standards. And if China allows its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate against the United States dollar later this year, as many economists are predicting, the relative cost of manufacturing in China will almost certainly rise.
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Beijing’s plan to ban exports of key raw materials called ‘rare earths’ as of 2015 should cause concern among manufacturers of high-tech products ranging from computers to electric car batteries and wind turbines, experts warned.
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The World Bank, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretariat recently presented seven “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment.” The principles seek to ensure that large-scale land investments result in “win-win” situations, benefiting investors and directly affected communities alike. But, though well-intended, the principles are woefully inadequate.
It has been several years since private investors and states began buying and leasing millions of hectares of farmland worldwide in order to secure their domestic supply of food, raw commodities, and biofuels, or to get subsidies for carbon storage through plantations. Western investors, including Wall Street banks and hedge funds, now view direct investments in land as a safe haven in an otherwise turbulent financial climate.
The scope of the phenomenon is enormous. Since 2006, between 15 and 20 million hectares of farmland, the equivalent of the total arable surface of France, have been the subject of negotiations by foreign investors.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A new EU-US anti-terror agreement still infringes the European Union’s laws on data protection and civil liberties, say MEPs who, following talks with the European Commission today (10 June), plan to vote against the accord.
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Vietnam is continuing its steep fall down a slippery slope of Internet censorship and filtration and is raising more concerns over its new cyber-technology implementation.
Internet censorship is nothing new to Vietnam, yet its policies have remained very much out of the public spotlight in other parts of the world. The Communist government of Vietnam has taken many opaque technological and regulatory steps to control its citizens’ access to Internet content. With an above average Internet penetration rate of 25.7%, and a relatively high literacy rate for the adult population, the Internet would be potentially poised to allow substantial free expression that may oppose the government regime.
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China has defended its right to censor the internet in a document laying out the government’s attitude towards the web.
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Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell has apologised for joking that he would like to have killed Margaret Thatcher and hinted that he might stand down from the race to give fellow leftwinger Diane Abbott a chance of getting on to the ballot.
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While I agree that Kim’s asserted facts are true, I disagree with his conclusion.
* I don’t believe Google did anything wrong in collecting SSIDs and MAC addresses (capturing data, perhaps). The SSIDs were configured to *broadcast* (to make something known widely). However, SSIDs and MAC addresses are local identifiers more like house numbers. They identify entities within the local wireless network and are generally not re-transmitted beyond that wireless network.
[...]
Your house number is used – by anyone in the world who wants to find it – to get to your house. Your house was given a number for that purpose. The people who live in the houses like this. They actually run out and buy little house number things, and nail them up on the side of their houses, to advertise clearly what number they are.
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There are many who have assumed Google’s WiFi snooping was “limited” to mapping of routers. However an article in Computerworld reporting on new developments in an Oregon class action law suit links to a patent application that speaks volumes about what is at stake here. The abstract begins (emphasis is mine):
“The invention pertains to location approximation of devices, e.g., wireless access points and client devices in a wireless network. “
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So it is with the repeal of the ID Card Act and the abolition of the National Identity Register by the Identity Documents Bill 2010-11, which has its second reading today. We all know that from their respective manifestos, both Lib-Con coalition partners wanted to scrap ID Cards and strengthen the penalties in the Data Protection Act. We know that the previous government had draft legislation on the stocks which provided for custodial penalties for misuse of personal data under the Data Protection Act.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Yes. It is hypocritical to say “don’t copy” when everybody I know is a copyist. I’m certainly on the wrong side of copyright law at least once a day for things like pasting articles into emails. I’ve been an avid copyist all my life, if it wasn’t for mix tapes, my entire adolescence would have been celibate! I can’t do my job unless I have the source material around so I scan records and photocopy library books I can’t take out. It’s how we all learn to do stuff. That’s how we are, we are descendents of molecules formed a million years ago because they figured out how to replicate themselves. We have a name for things that don’t copy themselves: dead.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As part of the its Development Agenda, the World Intellectual Property Organisation has published a report entitled “Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain” by the always wonderful Séverine Dussolier. In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to point out that I was consulted about Costa Rican law, so you may want to ignore my enthusiasm for this work and examine it yourself. This is a thorough and comprehensive study.
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MegaUpload is one of the most prominent file-hosting services on the Internet. It is owned by an unbelievably colorful individual who is probably better known for his multiple convictions for computer fraud, embezzlement and insider trading. He owns several luxury cars, for which he is currently under investigation, and has just acquired New Zealand’s most expensive house – a snip at just over $20m.
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When we reported from a lecture James Murdoch delivered a couple of weeks back (full transcript), he had criticised a British Library plan to digitise 40 million old newspaper pages.
Murdoch said: “This is not simply being done for posterity, nor to make free access for library users easier, but also for commercial gain via a paid‐for website. The move is strongly opposed by major publishers. If it goes ahead, free content would not only be a justification for more funding, but actually become a source of funds for a public body.”
But Patrick Fleming, a British Library associate director, quoted on Guardian.co.uk, says the accusation is “patently not true”…
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There’s basically zero popular support for several already unlikely initiatives the FTC is looking into in order to support the “reinvention of journalism.” Rasmussen Reports polled 1,000 people on whether they would support proposals—like a tax on consumer electronics to help news organizations or a taxpayer-funded program to support young journalists through AmeriCorps—and the answer was a decisive no. A monthly tax on cell phone bills? 90 percent no! A tax on consumer electronic devices? 84 percent no! The young reporter program? 70 percent no! A White House commission to help save journalism jobs? 55 percent no! (Via MediaPost)
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Copyrights
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A law firm which previously sent threatening letters to alleged file-sharers in order to receive cash settlements has complained to WordPress over a hosted blog. According to the complaint, Automattic Inc. can be held liable for copyright infringement and defamation due to the fact it hosted a FaceBook-sourced picture of one of the firm’s lawyers which had been Photoshopped into a ‘Wanted’ poster.
British law firm Tilly Bailey & Irvine (TBI) which began a file-sharing settlement letters scheme earlier this year, later withdrew from the business due to masses of bad publicity. A staff member from the company later tried to rewrite history on its Wikipedia page by removing any references which showed its connection to this work.
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If you go back to the original intent of copyright law, it was to improve learning and knowledge. “Promoting the progress of science” really mean “knowledge” at the time it was written. But, these days, we’ve lost pretty much all touch with that original intention. Last year, we noted that there was a growing battle over whether or not teachers could sell their lesson plans, with some districts claiming copyright over all teacher curricula and lesson plans to make sure that only they could determine how those plans were used. Of course, in the past (and, for many, the present) teachers often freely shared curricula and lesson plans with each other, in an effort to spread the knowledge and help each other out.
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Federal judge Rosemary Collyer sits on the DC District Court, where several of the recent US Copyright Group lawsuits against alleged P2P users have been filed. A few of those lawsuits ended up on Judge Collyer’s calendar, one of them filed against over 4,000 anonymous “John Does” at once.
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A federal judge has ordered attorneys representing movie studios to explain why they lumped thousands of alleged copyright violators into just two lawsuits, an indication she is seriously considering claims by ISP Time Warner and civil liberties advocates that the actions violate well-established court procedures.
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Microsoft’s WAT component for Windows 7 validates a user’s computer, every 90 days, against its constantly updated database. The motivation looks innocent — it’s just a technical measure deployed against potential piracy. After all, people who respect Microsoft’s copyright have no need to worry, right? Yet Microsoft’s track record of disrespecting users’ fair use right (g: “fairuse4wm controversy”) and disrespecting users’ will not to upgrade (g: “windows stealthy update”) indeed provide reasons for us to be worried. Imagine that a world-wide government installs tiny robots at everybody’s home, constantly watching for wrong-doings of your family. And the software of the robots can be remotely upgraded by the government whether you like it or not. If we can accept WAT, we can certainly also accept such invasion of human right and privacy by the government.
Apple’s customers cannot exercise their rights over their own physical properties — the iPhones for which they have paid Apple. Apple forbids its customers to install software programs other than those provided by Apple’s iTunes App Store. (g: “eff jailbreak”) Imagine buying a house and being forbidden to put any furniture into it except those explicitly allowed by the construction company. If we can accept Apple’s control over its customers, we can certainly also accept such invasion of human right by the construction company.
Amazon’s Kindle e-book has a piece of software that not only sends user’s information back to Amazon but also sends Amazon’s commands to Kindle whenever the user connects to its online bookstore WhisperNet. What commands have been sent? Instructions to delete books (with a corresponding refund), for example, in the name of Amazon’s respect for the publisher’s copyright. (g: “kindle Orwell”) Imagine that the Big Brother collects everyone’s reading habits and notes as well as deleting any books/articles/forwarded emails that he deems “ungood” and harmful to the society. If we can accept Kindle’s remote removal of already-purchased books, we can certainly also accept such invasion of human right and privacy by the Big Brother. Speaking of Big Brother, the books deleted happen to be George Orwell’s “1984″ and “Animal Farms”.
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After raids in 2005, Spanish police arrested four people and dismantled a popular file-sharing site. The case has been dragging on ever since but now has finally been closed. Three judges decided that no offense had been committed and likened file-sharing to the ancient practice of sharing books.
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The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.
[...]
These worlds don’t match. Both Glee and the RIAA can’t be right. It’s hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can’t do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue’s Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.
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Mulligan’s conceit is that if a “real” glee club tried to get away with creating, say, “a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video,” it could be liable for huge fines — as much as $150,000, or worse, if those reckless teenagers posted their work online. Don’t scoff — as Mulligan notes, “In the 1990s, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) asked members of the American Camping Association, including Girl Scout troops, to pay royalties for singing copyrighted songs at camp.”
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Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per.
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Cost
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The University of California system has said “enough” to the Nature Publishing Group, one of the leading commercial scientific publishers, over a big proposed jump in the cost of the group’s journals.
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In short, the 48 Hour crew comes to your town and runs a contest that gives you two days to complete a four- to seven-minute film from script to screen. Some of the films are surprisingly watchable and engaging in a DIY-meets-media-culture kind of way.
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ACTA
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This short paper, prepared for a workshop on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the Public Interest at American University’s Washington College of Law, considers the draft Internet provisions of ACTA in the context of concerns raised in the media that the treaty will require signatories to mandate graduated response regimes (à la France’s controversial HADOPI system) for online copyright enforcement. Although the Consolidated Text of ACTA, released in late April, confirms that mandatory graduated response is off the table for the treaty’s negotiators, the treaty in its current form both accommodates and promotes the adoption of graduated response. Moreover, opponents of graduated response should be wary of the fact that public law mechanisms – be they domestic or international – are not the only means by which graduated response can effectively become the law for Internet users. The United States and Ireland provide examples of the trend toward private ordering in the project of online copyright enforcement.
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The Government of India came out forcefully against ACTA this week in an intervention at the World Trade Organization. The India position, which may well reflect the views of other ACTA-excluded countries, demonstrates that ACTA is emerging as a contentious political issue that extends well beyond civil society and business groups concerned with the agreement. Countries excluded from the ACTA process have to come to recognize the serious threat it represents both substantively as well as for the future of multilateral organizations.
This growing concern from countries such as India represents a major new pressure point on the ACTA discussions. The notion that ACTA countries could negotiate an agreement that would ultimately be used to pressure non-ACTA countries to conform without attracting opposition from those very countries was always unrealistic. If the April ACTA round of talks was marked by the mounting pressure for greater transparency, the late June ACTA round of talks will undoubtedly have developing country opposition as its core concern.
Alan Pope on Wikis
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06.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Still, many people use multiple operating systems now, and so few use Linux as one of their choices. Among other reasons why Linux can function as a great sidekick to the more prevalent operating systems is that it’s more secure. If you’re going to jump into, say, an online banking app, why not do it in Linux, where the hackers and script kiddies aren’t?
Additionally, many Linux distros instantly get you going on tasks instead of staring at hourglasses and are streamlined for quick results. It has long been a presumption in the Linux community that for it to really succeed, it has to be the sole OS on everyone’s desktop. Why does it? The answer is that it doesn’t have to do that.
I’m already contemplating adding a Linux distro to the VMware-based system I’m running, and evaluating which one to use. It makes lots of sense.
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The 451 Group has published another open source strategy Spotlight report, this time turning our attention to longtime Linux server vendor Hewlett-Packard, which continues to dedicate resources to Linux and other open source software communities, but which also has a lower profile than others known for their open source contributions.
HP has long been a big supporter of Linux and other open source software, particularly through its testing, certification and support of Linux on its ProLiant x86 and now Integrity IA-64-based servers. But despite its top market position, the company has also historically been overshadowed by others similarly supporting Linux and open source.
[...]
HP recognizes that users and customers – in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, and among other early adopters – no longer need to be convinced on Linux. What they need now is guidance on adapting their strategy and effectively incorporating Linux and other open source software.
More is available in the HP Spotlight report, which is available to existing 451 Group clients. Non-clients, as always, may apply for trial access via the same link.
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Desktop
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Even as Dell ships millions of Windows 7 systems, the PC giant is making a bold statement on its web site. Indeed, if you look hard enough you’ll find Dell stating that “Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft Windows.” Moreover, Dell quietly says it plans to ship Ubuntu 10.04 systems in mid-2010. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
Visit Dell.com/ubuntu and you’ll find a “Top Ten” list of “things you should know about Ubuntu.” Item number 6 on Dell’s list states:
* “6) Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows® The vast majority of viruses and spyware written by hackers are not designed to target and attack Linux.”
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Audiocasts
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Karen, Bradley and Aaron talk about SFLC’s motion for default judgment against Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a defendant in the ongoing lawsuit concerning GPL violations of BusyBox.
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This week on KDEMU I talk to Nuno Pinheiro the overload of the Oxygen effort (not the element), we talk about Oxygen, Plasma and the KDE-Artists wallpaper contest!
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In this special episode of Linux Outlaws, we review the Google Nexus One phone and pit it against the Motorola Milestone and Samsung Galaxy and as a bonus Fab also gives you a big list of his favourite Android apps.
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Linux Foundation
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Linux, by being truly open, lets hardware vendors and network operators offer an attractive code base that they can build their own applications and services on top of to more equally balance profits. Those include app stores, online music services, and add-on hardware.
Does Linux have a shot at challenging Apple’s dominance? We’ve seen this movie before. There was an Apple of the business computing market not so long ago. Sun Microsystems’ high-end servers made the company a darling of information technology departments, Internet startups, and Wall Street investors in the late ’90s and 2000. Linux was the underdog. A decade later, Sun no longer exists and Linux and Windows rule the data center.
The control and flexibility that hardware vendors and network operators gain with Linux, plus the ability to share research and development costs and move faster, make Linux a powerful choice for mobile computing development. The computer industry is seeing a seismic shift wherein longtime Microsoft partners such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard are making huge bets on Linux, relegating Windows to a lesser role. This was inconceivable a decade ago.
Apple has set a high bar, no doubt. But if you don’t believe Linux can beat an entrenched market leader, just ask the folks who used to run Sun.
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Bentley: Your study found that it would cost $1.4 billion for a company to build the Linux kernel from scratch today, and $10.8 billion to build an entire Linux distribution similar to Fedora 9. Can you explain how you reached those figures?
McPherson: The conclusions were reached by using David Wheeler’s well-known SLOC tool, SLOCCount, which makes use of the industry standard COnstructive COst MOdel (COCOMO). This methodology takes into account lines of code written, the appropriate number of labor years, and salary adjustments for inflation. We wanted to come up with a real number based on the one thing you can quantify in open source — code. We used a well-regarded methodology and tool that had been used before. Instead of making random projects, we thought this was the best way to approach it.
Bentley: Why the Fedora community distribution and not another?
McPherson: Fedora is the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which represents a large percentage of the Linux market. This provided us with a very relevant model to assess. Also, David A. Wheeler had used Red Hat for his study in 2002. OpenSuse and Debian/Ubuntu would, of course, also be great targets for this study. We may do that at a later date. We also would like to use an embedded distribution.
[...]
Bentley: Do the findings have added significance in light of the current economic climate?
McPherson: I think so. Linux has always been a lower-cost alternative to Windows, but this report illustrates its economic impact on technology innovation. It’s exciting to see how the collaborative development model is fueling a new category of devices and technologies that would be at least a decade into the future if it weren’t for Linux. Let’s remember that in software, time is money; oftentimes time is more important than money. For a company like Google or Intel to be able to make use of this code that has taken years to develop, drives innovation and keeps costs low for consumers.
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Kernel Space
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For testing we used a ZaReason Verix notebook that we are currently reviewing. This notebook that is based upon an MSI MS-1656 has an Intel Core i7 Q720 processor, 6GB of system memory, an 80GB Intel SSDSA2MH08 SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M GPU. We loaded Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on this powerful notebook with the Linux 2.6.35-rc1 kernel while continuing to use X.Org Server 1.7.6, GCC 4.4.3, and the GNOME 2.30.0 desktop.
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Applications
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TestDisk is a great tool for recovering files from a broken disk. My wife’s hard drive crashed yesterday and it turned out to be a corrupt boot sector. I booted to a Kubuntu Live USB and was able to use TestDisk to recover the MBR from the backup (it was NTFS which keeps a backup at a different part of the drive) and copy the files I needed to a USB key.
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OpenOffice.org is a full-featured office productivity suite that provide a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft(R) Office.
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Desktop publishing applications are different from word processing programs. Desktop publishing isn’t a sit-and-start-typing task; it requires more input from the user in terms of page layout, spacing and how elements are arranged. This might require a little more learning on the user’s part, but if you’re on Linux and desktop publishing is your thing, Scribus provides a robust set of options.
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Backups are a crucial aspect of any PC users work. No matter if you are a home user who uses the PC for home banking or a data center administrator who depends upon backups as the go-to failsafe for petabytes of company data, without a backup you could find yourself dead in the water.
[...]
If your Linux machines need a solid, GUI-based backup, you need to look at LuckyBackUp. Its flexibility and ease of use cannot be matched in any GUI-based Linux application. And just because LuckyBackUp is geared toward ease of use, doesn’t mean it can’t handle larger jobs. If your server has a GUI, LuckyBackUp can easily take care of that as well.
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Instructionals
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Games
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To begin with, let us highlight the key functions within the game. Every time you run a game, a piece of software that is called the game engine loads itself into the memory. The game engine is like a kernel for the game. It will manage all resources, levels and your in-game progression. Everything that you see, hear or do, is managed by the engine. The engine itself is a collection of services that provide these capabilities.
Once the engine is loaded, it uses the rendering subsystem to set your screen and start the game interface—legal screens, intros and menu systems. Using this rendering and the game logic through the game engine, you begin your gaming session.Every thing that you see is taken care of by the rendering engine. So, we will look at a rendering engine—OGRE 3D to be specific.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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This morning KDE e.V., the legal organization backing the KDE community, launched its Supporting Membership programme under the slogan “Join the Game”. The Join the Game programme strengthens the bonds between KDE e.V. and the wider community and provides a more sustainable and independent source of income for KDE activties. By becoming part of KDE e.V. as a Supporting Member you can help to keep the KDE servers running, fund developer meetings, let developers organize and attend conferences and trade shows and protect the legal interests of the KDE community — this is all handled by the KDE e.V. in support of the KDE community.
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Today, KDE has released the second beta version of what is to become KDE SC 4.5.0 in August 2010. KDE SC 4.5 Beta2 is targeted at testers and those that would like to have an early look at what’s coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer. KDE is now firmly in beta mode, meaning that the primary focus is on fixing bugs and preparing the stable release of the software compilation this summer. Over the last two weeks, roughly since the first beta, 1459 new bugs have been reported, and 1643 bugs have been closed, so we’re witnessing a lot of stabilization activity right now. More testing is in place, however, while the restless developers continue to create a rock-stable 4.5.0.
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I only used Amarok lightly on KDE 3, so I am not equipped to answer claims that the recent releases still lag behind the 1.x releases (although I might some day investigate by looking at Pana, a project whose purpose is continue the development of Amarok’s first version.
However, with five releases, Amarok’s second series is approaching maturity in its own right. Although some of the newest features are less than perfect I appreciate the Amarok team’s constant efforts to improve the application, and to accommodate a variety of user styles. Despite a few imperfections, it remains my music player of choice — and the 2.3.1 release simply reinforces my preference.
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GNOME Desktop
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Following some lengthy discussions within the GNOME community, release manager Vincent Untz has published a summary of the new modules to be included in the next major release of the GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix. GNOME 3.0, scheduled to arrive in September of this year, will not include the GNOME Activity Journal, formerly known as GNOME Zeitgeist. The Activity Journal allows users to locate documents chronologically and supports tagging and relationships between groups of files. According to Untz, it will not be included because it “needs more integration with the rest of the desktop and the overall GNOME design; right now, it feels too much like a stand alone application.”
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Gentoo
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The mail below reached the PR team today. I felt like sharing it with you.
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I’m pretty excited because I got my first BD-ROM drive last night from NewEgg, a LITE-ON iHOS104-06. That means I can do some real testing, ripping and playing around.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I know I said I would review Xubuntu next, and keep PCLOS Gnome for the July edition of SaGeek MAG, but I wanted something other than a Gnome Distro to review for the MAG, and I only had the 10.04 RC available of Xubuntu, not the final release. Hence PCLOS 2010 Gnome it is for tonights review.
Well how did it perform?
[...]
PCLinuxOS is good, but not good enough. The Gnome edition especially needs some sanding on the edges, and then some polish on top of that. I would recommend the KDE edition over the Gnome edition any day, but as far as Gnome based distros goes it loses out to some really serious competitors, and this is reflected in my comparative scoring.
There are many little touches that give me hope for the future of PCLOS, help menus, auto installer for OpenOffice – little things that might just make this the next best Gnome distro to arrive. Right now it just falls short of Ubuntu’s 3/5 Q-rating.
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Fedora
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I must say I’m impressed with the latest Fedora. I haven’t met any deal-breakers for me yet, but then again, I’ve only used it for a week. Still, there’s much to like.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Power management in Ubuntu is a largely poor effort – particularly as Ubuntu stretches it’s leg in the field of mobile computing devices; users need a more coherent and accessible way to control power settings. Users currently need to use 3 (!) applets in-order to manage the oft-most power-related used features of screen brightness, CPU performance and battery life indication.
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Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, a company executive said.
Tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011, said Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice president of OEM services. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface.
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10.10
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Firefox will surely remain available in the repositories, so there will be an open door for everyone who, like me, is more comfortable using it. My concern is that Canonical is apparently sacrificing some of its original values, like security and reliability, in favor of the “flavor of the month”. I didn’t understand the excessive push on social interaction tools and now I don’t understand getting rid of an Internet browser which has been their flagship for so long, which is also an industry standard. Do they think popular is better? Hard to tell, but with all the bugs pending fixing, I find it funny that they actually waste a second thinking of replacing the Internet browser.
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It really sounds great when canonical announces new Version of Ubuntu . Personally i always look forward for new things and changes . In this post i am going to discuss about new changes in Ubuntu 10.10 which is going to happen .Till now only alpha-I version have been released .
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OMG, what? My refrigerator, that thingie that keeps all them foods and whatnot cool and edible can run Linux? Well, definitely. And in this article, I will show you how.
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These days it’s hard to get excited about anything short of the most innovative solutions. Still, it takes time and effort to stay on top of it all and then be prepared to sell it internally to your organization. Linux, largely due to its roots in the open source community, consistently leads the market with rapid innovation and feature-rich development.
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Sure, FOSS is fun, but is it profitable? Or is it just a spare-time hobby? There are actually two sides to FOSS: FOSS as free and open source software for a set of tools and platforms; and FOSS as a methodology for the development of software. One cannot exist without the other. And the reason for the superiority of FOSS tools is precisely because they are the result of FOSS methodology.
The FOSS software development/deployment methodology — a child of the Internet, and which is based on openness, sharing and collaboration — is also a powerful tool to develop ‘soft skills’ like the ability to communicate, search for and find solutions, and to think out-of-the-box. Over a long time, I have noticed that people who actually participate in projects following the FOSS methodology are eminently better programmers and far better at communicating, solving problems and collaborating, than people who follow the ‘closed methodology’.
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So you’ve decided to use some open source code in your organization, company, or enterprise. What’s the same or different about maintaining open source versus traditional software. Here are ten things to consider:
1. The term “maintenance” can be considered one component of “subscription, support, and maintenance” or it can be used more generally to mean “now that’ve I’ve installed this software, how do I make it do what I want, patched, and updated?”.
[...]
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Earlier this month, the OSI board held elections for the organization’s committees. Board members interested in working on OSI initiatives such as membership, education, policy and economic development, outreach submitted their candidacy to the board. Based on the slate of candidates, the board voted the following chairpersons to lead each OSI initiative for the next year.
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Going back 5 or 6 years, Brazil tried to free itself of Microsoft’s stranglehold on the software it used. It put a big push into supporting, using and lead development in open source software technology.
Much the same way it supported the use of bio-fuels like ethanol, this has led to Brazil being less dependent on Microsoft and other closed source software. Additionally, a booming open source development community has been fostered and cultivated.
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Ingres have made Ingres VectorWise generally available to download for free evaluation or commercially licence and say that an open source release for the accelerated database technology should be expected by the end of the year.
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It became obvious that like any social network, open source has its own code of conduct that needs to be adhered to. Whether you think of it as business environment or community process, people that are part of a particular social network do not appreciate individuals (or companies) that diverge from these agreed-upon “rules.”
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Award-winning editor Chris Gill utilized Lightworks to edit Neil Marshall’s latest adrenaline-fused thriller, Centurion.
Building upon blockbuster buzz, including Centurion, EditShare recently announced plans to make Lightworks into the most advanced Open Source editing solution available in the industry. Beginning in Q3 of this year, a free Lightworks download will be made available to all users.
Customers will be able to familiarize themselves with the Lightworks editing system and its multitude of features including: true shared projects, instant save, 3D editorial functionality, Universal Media File support, native RED editing, native 2K support with DPX and RED, dual outputs, and a format-independent timeline.
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Government
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The European Union’s top Internet official took aim at Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, warning that governments can accidentally lock themselves into one company’s software for decades by setting it as a standard for their technology systems.
EU Internet Commissioner Neelie Kroes, in her previous post as EU antitrust chief, fined Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in a lengthy row over the company’s refusal to share some data with rivals and the tying of a Web browser to a best-selling operating system.
She now says she wants to draw up detailed guidelines for European governments to encourage them to require other software, especially programs based on open source code that is freely shared between developers.
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Malta’s public administration wants its institutions to increase their use of open source software. In a directive published early last week, the government says it also wants to share more of its own applications by publishing them using the European Union’s open source licence (EUPL).
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Environment
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Today on Capitol Hill, Americans for Prosperity, the corporate front group founded and funded by David Koch of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries, hosted an event to urge the passage of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution to gut the Clean Air Act’s power to regulate carbon emissions. Several Republican Senators came to the AFP event to encourage support for the resolution, which was drafted by lobbyists from the coal and oil industry.
After the event, ThinkProgress spoke to one of the speakers, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), about his support for Carly Fiorina (R-CA), the U.S. Senate candidate to emerge from the primary last night. Inhofe gave Fiorina an early endorsement, and his nephew, Fred Davis, created the infamous “demon sheep” ads for Fiorina’s campaign.
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Finance
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It took Jérôme Kerviel, the celebrity rogue trader who stands accused of losing billions of euros at the French bank Société Générale, 10 minutes to make it through the scrum of microphones and journalists outside a courtroom Tuesday.
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As disclosed earlier, Australia’s Basis Yield Alpha sued Goldman today for failing to “disclose material information knowing that, by this omission, information that they did disclose was rendered misleading.” That lawsuit opens the way for every single investor who ever bought a CDO from Goldman as a primary issuer (not in the secondary market). As we have pointed out previously, Goldman and BP will soon be competing over which firm has more active lawsuits against it. On the other hand, Goldman may offset some costs by IPOing the largest corporate litigation firms, as their partners will soon be rolling in the dough. While completely impossible, the mutual conflicts of interest in the risk factors of such a prospectus would make for a comic book all on its own.
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Disbarred attorney Scott Rothstein, whose seemingly unlimited wealth bought palatial homes, exotic cars and mega-yachts, was sentenced Wednesday to 50 years in prison for operating a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme using faked legal settlements.
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In addition to generating some laughs and populist outrage during a contentious Senate hearing in April, Goldman Sachs’s infamous “shitty deal” is also turning into a major headache for the embattled firm.
Today, Goldman was sued for securities fraud by an Australian hedge fund, which claims that it was suckered into buying $81 million of toxic subprime mortgage securities, which led to the collapse of the fund, according to a lawsuit obtained by Huffington Post.
Basis Yield Alpha Fund claims that Goldman engaged in a “series of fraudulent and deceitful acts or practices” and “put profits before integrity,” according to its complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. The fund is seeking to recover more than $1 billion in total damages.
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Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months are much more likely to report having emotional distress than people who have been unemployed for a shorter period, according to new Gallup survey data.
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The nation’s largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting can take place on a systematic level for years without being stopped, even after it begins to affect the modern-day equivalents of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. What 10 years ago was a cheap stock-fraud scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn has become a major profit center for Wall Street. Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them.
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The fee issue is emerging as one of the biggest battles in the issue as House and Senate lawmakers look this month toward a conference agreement to resolve scores of differences in the legislation. Congress is planning to approve the overhaul package, stretching more than 1,500 pages, before the Fourth of July recess.
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Sen. Blanche Lincoln beat back a ferocious Democratic challenge from Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in Tuesday’s Arkansas runoff, holding off the hard-charging lieutenant governor whose campaign became a priority for unions and the progressive movement.
Lincoln’s victory presented a stinging rebuke to organized labor, including the Service Employees International Union and to progressive groups such as MoveOn.org and Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which poured millions of dollars into television ads, phone calls and ground troops in an attempt to upend the two-term incumbent.
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The career path for congressional aides with an eye for big money used to be clear: Toil in anonymity for years in a Hill office before cashing in with a lobbying gig or heading to a Wall Street powerhouse for a consulting job.
Now it’s the revolving door in reverse.
Capitol Hill has become a magnet for some former financial industry executives, who have traded high-flying jobs for the grind of congressional hearings and committee markups. Some are taking Hill salaries that would have been a mere Christmas bonus on Wall Street. One former Lehman Brothers analyst still calls his buddies in the trading pit in New York. Another who did work for the defunct investment giant landed a spot in a congressional office — as an unpaid intern.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In this week’s feature interview we chat with Adrian Lamo. Best known as the “homeless hacker,” Lamo is in the news again over his decision to inform on US Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of the so-called “Collateral Murder” video published by Wikileaks in April.
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Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, discusses Specialist Bradley Manning’s arrest for passing classified information to Wikileaks, the unfortunate negative connotations of the “whistleblower” moniker, how Obama has decriminalized torture, 260,000 possible sources of embarrassment for the State Department and the Obama administration’s eager prosecution of whistleblowers.
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Imran Chaudhry on Meet the MySQL Database (2006)
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