01.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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One of the main goals of LQ is to help members get questions about Linux answered. One way we help facilitate this is with the “Zero Reply” functionality, which allows you to easily find threads with no replies.
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Desktop
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Windows users have many reasons for wanting to download and check out the Linux operating system, whether it’s to get a more secure environment to use for online banking, for example, or to get a full-blown Windows replacement.
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Server
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Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY is expanding its high-performance computing capabilities with a new hybrid computing system from IBM for AIX and Linux applications.
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Kernel Space
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Microsoft has released extensive details on their next-generation ReFS file-system to be introduced with Windows Server 8. How though does the file-system compare to Btrfs and the Linux file-systems?
Unlike Microsoft’s exFAT file-system that’s designed just for flash memory cards and external storage mediums, ReFS is designed to be a real successor to Microsoft’s aging NTFS file-system that’s been widespread since the Windows 2000/XP days. ReFS is short for a Resilient File System and will be introduced as a production-ready file-system with Windows Server 8. The non-server Windows 8 won’t have ReFS support, but per typical Microsoft fashion, will come to the consumer operating system variants at a later date.
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The fun for the Linux 3.3 kernel merge window is not over quite yet; Intel this morning published 50 patches for integration into this next Linux kernel that affect ACPI and power management, primarily around ACPI 5.0 support for the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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It turns out that Intel’s recently-launched Medfield SoC for tablets and smart-phones will support VA-API for video acceleration.
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With the next GNOME 3.4 development release due out on Wednesday, several GNOME3 packages are being checked-in for release. In this latest round of updates, Clutter and Cogl have both been updated again to take better advantage of the Wayland Display Server.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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No Gravity (classic) is a space arcade game with 5 game modes and it has very nice graphics, it is inspired by Wing Commander, a famous game of a few years ago that made history for the space shooter.
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Desktop Environments
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As recently as a year ago, the Linux desktop was easy to describe. GNOME and KDE dominated, both offered an ecosystem of applications, and neither much different from Windows and OS X in their goals or design. Xfce was a distant third, with other desktop environments trailing even further behind.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Book is written in Docbook 4.5 (XML) and uses XSLT/FO for producing the book. The book started in german, so the most is done in the german part of the book. Today i’ve added all Topics from the german book to the english one. This Plasma Active Documentation is created and driven by open-slx.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME3 has actually become quite usable, but I was really annoiyed by the inability to disable actions on “critical low battery” (Additionally, there is no way to define what “critical low battery” is and with a big battery I assume this might well mean that you cannot use the machine anymore even though there is half an hour of juice left). Add to that bnc#738782 which leaves my screen unlocked after suspend and I decided it was time to use someting sane — like xfce4-power-manager — instead.
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The other day on the #opensuse-gnome IRC channel there was a debate about the MATE Desktop and openSUSE. While I like GNOME3, I still feel more comfortable with GNOME2 and this “MATE Desktop” is somehow interesting. Mariusz Fik, a Polish contributor for openSUSE is most likely taking the lead on this project, for which I’ve decided to give some help with the packaging.
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Most politicians probably don’t use Linux. After all, some of them have barely figured out computers at all. But since the American presidential campaigning season is once again upon us, I’ve been wondering to myself lately: If the candidates did run Linux, which distribution would they choose? At the risk of offending various groups of people, here are my answers, for better or for worse.
To be clear, and to temper some of the passionately loathsome comments that a post like this might inspire, I’ll preface these thoughts with an assurance that they are not intended as an endorsement of any candidate, party or ideology. Personally, I’d like to resurrect Rousseau’s state of nature, if only I thought it could endure. And there would be no Linux there, since everyone would be running around the forest. But that’s neither here nor there.
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A relative newcomer to the forensic and penetration testing live CD scene, Italian project BackBox is already turning heads as it hits version 2.01. Gareth Halfacree explains why…
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After nearly ten years of development and more than ten versions, the ArtistX 1.2 multimedia studio on a DVD is finally released. It’s an Ubuntu 11.10-based live DVD that turns a common computer into a full multimedia production studio.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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But Ubuntu the brand, and Canonical as a company, is seriously confusing to me. What exactly is it there for, outside of being the backing for the Ubuntu distro? Apparently they provide some sort of “enterprise consulting” and training. Apparently you can also buy support from Canonical as a regular consumer (just found this out on their website) for just over $100 (American). And of course there’s the deal with Dell (and others?) to act as an OEM for a few computer models. So they do have a business, but I don’t see how they have a profitable one.
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Phones
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Android
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“The Ice Cream Sandwich release brings even greater NFC functionality to the Android operating system, and INSIDE is making our latest version of Open NFC available to give connectivity chip vendors, smartphone and tablet manufacturers and software developers a head start in achieving NFC hardware independence,” said Charles Walton, COO for INSIDE Secure. “Once again, INSIDE is offering the Android community a complete, open-source NFC stack solution that can be used to greatly speed development and time to market, requiring only that the small hardware abstraction layer (HAL) portion be tailored for specific hardware.”
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The Samsung Galaxy Nexus features an impressive screen, a nice camera and the latest and greatest version of Android — Ice Cream Sandwich. Its voice control option is no Siri, but it gets the job done. However, the phone seems to guzzle power, significantly depleting the battery in just a few hours of moderate use.
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Yesterday Koushik Dutta, a member of the Cyanogenmod team, announced that the distribution had reached the one million installs milestone. Cyanogenmod is a community led distribution based on Google’s Android known for supporting many smartphones and tablets.
According to Cyanogenmod’s statistics, just under 24 per cent of Cyanogenmod users run 7.1. While detractors claim that Android is fragmented between several different vendors, Cyanogenmod’s statistics show that the vast majority of its users run Cyanogenmod 7.0 or above, near the latest bleeding edge of Android.
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Mobile, handheld computers are changing the way people do business. A new report from GIA says that open source operating systems such as Google’s Android are expected to dominate the market going forward, while single-source systems such as Apple’s iOS and RIM are going to lose market share.
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Inside Secure SA, a fabless supplier of near field communications (NFC) chips, has announced a free, open-source NFC protocol stack that it has made available for version 4.0 of the Google Android platform that is otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Softpedia is proud to introduce today a new Linux operating system based on the popular Ubuntu distribution, Ubuntu Secured Remix.
Ubuntu Secured Remix 11.10 is actually based on the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system and is a slightly modified version of the Ubuntu Desktop Live CD.
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The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the release of a new stable version of its widely deployed open-source management platform for enterprise data center virtualization. OpenNebula 3.2 is the first stable distribution produced by OpenNebula’s new release cycle aimed at faster delivery of new features and innovations to the community, based on their requirements and feedback, while also increasing technical quality.
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So, the year changed again and with it come quite often new decisions. Some swear to work out the superfluous kilos, pounds, or whatever standardized measure your country uses, gained too fast during the festivals. If it is your decision, it is for sure good for your body and I wish you success that goes beyond the act of subscribing to a local gym (and never appearing there after first month).
But this could be also a nice time to take a decision that you were procrastinating with for too long. That one is good for your intellect and programming skills (even though you don’t consider yourself a programmer yet). What about starting to contribute to a Free and Open Source Software project (FOSS)?
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Big Switch Networks, a new vendor in the nascent, but growing field of OpenFlow-based networking, has introduced an open source controller for companies that want to build applications on top of the controller in an environment where the network intelligence is in the software-based controller rather than in the physical hardware of routers and switches. Big Switch, which also has a commercial controller offering in beta release, said it is offering the open source controller, called Floodlight, to stimulate development on the OpenFlow protocol.
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Events
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The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 10X is putting the final touches on the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America. Games? SCALE has them, as well as classes at SCALE U and the rapid-fire UpSCALE talks and more.
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A: My name is Alison Chaiken. For years I worked on cool technologies in the area of device physics and BioMEMS, but the projects I worked on always ended in cancellation and opportunities were diminishing. I’ve used Unix and Linux for almost 30 years on my personal systems. When the original Bug and Gumstix came out, suddenly I had the epiphany that by I could convert my hobby into a career with more positive impact on the world.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Nuxeo, the provider of an open source content management platform for business applications, today announced the opening of its U.S. headquarters in New York City. The company initially expanded into the United States in 2009, and already has offices in Boston and Silicon Valley.
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BSD
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One of the oldest open source operating systems is getting a new release. FreeBSD 9.0 was officially released this week, providing users with a boost in performance and capabilities over the FreeBSD 8.0 branch that was released in 2009.
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OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM FreeBSD has released FreeBSD 9.0, almost a year after its previous release, updating ZFS to pool version 28.
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Project Releases
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ForgeRock, the vendor behind the I3 Open Identity Platform, today announced OpenIDM 2.0, the next generation open source Identity Management (IDM) solution.
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Openness/Sharing
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What qualities make a city open source? Is it technology, government policies, or businesses? No. It’s the mindset of the people. It’s the philosophy and the culture.
About a year ago, I started trying to define an open source city. I’m very interested in seeing my own city (Raleigh, NC) become a hub for open source and a leader in open government. With Red Hat’s announcement to stay headquartered in Raleigh earlier this month, the City of Raleigh appears poised to “establish a growing ecosystem of partners and providers around the open source leader and to bolster Raleigh’s reputation as a leading open source community.”
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Open Data
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Someone hiding behind a range of Google IP addresses in India has been up to no good. Allegedly, the person or persons behind the range of Google IPs have been accessing the open-source map project called Open Street Map and using tools there to vandalize maps of major cities. The vandalism has included things that could get some users of the map into danger.
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Late last week, a story broke about how a Google contractor was apparently scraping info from a Kenyan crowd-sourced phone directory, Mocality, and then calling businesses pretending that there was a joint Google-Mocality venture for which businesses had to pay. Google responded that it was “mortified” by these actions, and are investigating them. However, ReadWriteWeb, is now reporting that the very same contractor has now been called out for vandalizing Open Street Maps, the more open alternative to Google Maps that has been getting a lot more attention lately. It appears the vandalism was deliberate, doing things that are hard to spot — like reversing the direction on one-way streets.
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Google has once again been accused of underhand business tactics, this time by OpenStreetMap. The not-for-profit organisation published a light-on-detail blog post alleging that Mountain View was “moving and abusing” the mapping outfit’s data.
However the very same post appears to have been completely debunked by an OSM sysadmin, who claims to have first uncovered the issue.
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Open Hardware
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“We decided to follow an open-source model, because if all of these labs have a common research platform for doing robotic surgery, the whole field will be able to advance more quickly,” said Jacob Rosen, associate professor of computer engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator on the project.
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Programming
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What I was really happy about, however, was the Microchip MPLAB X, which runs nicely under my OS of choice, Linux. I promised that this week I’d show you a little bit about MPLAB X under Linux, and I’m as good as my word.
The IDE is based on Netbeans (see the Figure) which is, of course, a Java program so it isn’t too surprising that it runs well under Linux. Netbeans is on par with other modern development environments — it interfaces with bug trackers, version control, and additional tools you expect to use while writing software.
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Kevin Drum asks: “Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that ‘don’t be evil’ stuff?”
Actually, yes. At a minimum, the people who work there do. When I spent a summer there in 2010, I found the idea of Google holding itself to a higher standard than other companies was widely shared by rank and file Google employees. And it shows up in their behavior.
Google’s decision to exit the Chinese market over human rights abuses reportedly sparked a fierce debate within Google’s triumvirate, with Sergey Brin pushing hard for pulling out based on his own experiences growing in the Soviet Union. Google does more than any other technology company I know of to bring transparency to takedown and surveillance efforts around the world.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Censorship
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India has long faced an uneasy tension between allowing free expression to its citizens and staunching sectarian violence among its people. It was one of the first countries to ban “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie. Lawsuits forced the Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain to live in exile during the last several years of his life. An academic book about the 17th-century warrior known as Shivaji was banned for fear of offending Shivaji’s modern-day fans, until the Supreme Court lifted the prohibition.
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Civil Rights
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One of the more unfortunate consequences of Moore’s Law is that technologies that erode privacy are becoming cheaper every year – and hence more attractive to governments eager to spy on their own populace. The latest to heed the siren call of mass surveillance is Argentina.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The most recent episode of On The Media explored this… and also talked about how most of King’s speeches were actually built off the works of others, but then (obviously) turned into something much more powerful through his detailed study and understanding of how to preach.
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Copyrights
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Now on the business side, all of the the vendors in my list above are also all infrastructure type players and all of them have large government contracts of some type, meaning it might be politically expedient for them to be on the sidelines (for the most part). At this point, thanks to regular people signing petitions and standing up against SOPA, it looks likely that this will never pass Congress. But it is still interesting to note where everyone stands.
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A growing number of web sites are planning online protests this month against the SOPA and PIPA legislation being introduced to the US House of Representatives and Senate. Wikipedia is the latest big-name site to join the cause.
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CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has spoken up to say that it does not support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation in the US Congress.
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THE FILESHARING Pirate Bay web site will no longer offer downloads of bittorrent files and will instead provide only ‘magnet links’ to users.
According to Torrent Freak, The Pirate Bay started replacing the current default bittorrent download links with magnet links on Friday. In a month, the internet’s largest bittorrent web site will stop serving bittorrent files indefinitely.
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DISGRACED SOLICITOR and former ACS:Law proprietor Andrew Crossley has been suspended at a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, banned from practising law for two years and ordered to pay £76,326.55 in costs.
Crossley figured prominently in a scandal that saw his firm and another called Mediacat target internet users with threatening letters accusing them of having committed copyright infringement.
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Among other provisions, the original version of PIPA would give the U.S. government the right to seek court orders demanding that U.S. Internet providers block access to certain websites. Many critics from the tech industry have said the bill would encourage Internet censorship and infringe on users’ freedoms.
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On Saturday, Colorado Senator Mark Udall publicly opposed PIPA. I’ve been talking to Mark and his team for about a month about this and I’m incredibly proud of him for taking a stand on this issue. I’ve been a supporter of Mark’s for many years and his willingness to listen to his constituents, think about and understand the specific issues, speak his mind, and take a leadership role continues to impress me.
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Update: Commenters say that Dick Costolo was taken out of context by The Guardian; that he referred only to the idea of Twitter going dark as silly.
This is a fair point, and it encapsulates something important: it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to go dark for a day, and it’s not fair to think less of them if they choose not to.
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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), called Wikipedia’s plan to temporarily shut down on Wednesday to protest his bill a “publicity stunt.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Do you have what it takes for that Linux job with an HPC vendor you’ve got your eye on? Brent Welch, the director of software architecture at Panasas, talks about the role Linux plays in HPC at Panasas and the in-demand technical skills supercomputing suppliers need from job applicants.
Last year, Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage solutions for technical applications and big data workloads, moved into new corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and expanded its team by more than 50 percent in areas such as engineering and sales. Panasas hasn’t been the only supercomputing-focused company growing and hiring recently. In fact, high performance computing (HPC) vendors across the industry are hiring, but they are running up against a shortage of skilled talent.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Ubuntu TV announced, MPL 2.0 released, LiMux reports success, CouchDB gets forked, Mandriva seems to be really dying and much more including a lot of soundboard fun.
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Kernel Space
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Linux kernels 3.0.17, 3.1.9 and 3.2.1 fix a problem with the handling of IGMP packets that was introduced with updates in Linux 2.6.36. An IGMPv3 protocol packet being processed soon after the processing of an IGMPv2 packet could lead to a system crash caused by a kernel panic.
On 6 January, Simon McVittie reported strange crashes of his Linux notebook in the Debian bug database. Debian developer Ben Hutchings found that the problem was caused by a division by 0 that can occur with IGMP packets that have a Maximum Response Time of 0. As a result, Linux systems running a kernel version from 2.6.36 or later, up until the patched versions, can quite easily be crashed remotely using certain IGMP packets if a program has registered to receive multicast packets from the network. Typical examples for such programs include the avahi mDNS server or media players, such as VLC, that support RTP.
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Graphics Stack
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Patches finally arrived last week for 2D color tiling in the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver. The patches were then re-based this past weekend and benchmarked by Phoronix. Will the 2D color tiling patches, which affect the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, and xf86-video-ati DDX make the more recent Radeon graphics cards more competitive under open-source to the Catalyst driver?
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Applications
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When it comes to word processing, the program most people are familiar with is Microsoft Office, and for good reason: Microsoft has had a monopoly on commercial office software since 1996 (when Microsoft sabotaged Wordperfect), and OpenOffice (developed from the StarOffice code-base) didn’t achieve significant popularity until 2005.
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For some months gimpbrush.com is collecting brushes which you can use to greatly enhance GIMP for all kind of painting and image editing!
Meanwhile more than 80 brush packs have been collected from different sources, and most of them are really quality work! You’ll find commonly used ones (Floral Brushes, Grunge or Hearts) but there are also some uncommon brushes as well like Halftone- or Water-brushes. It’s a great website, so don’t miss it!
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Proprietary
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Opera Software’s chief technology officer Håkon Wium Lie was in India recently. Apart from working with Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, Lie was the one who proposed the concept of cascading style sheets (CSS) for the web. He spoke at length about his ideas. An excerpt:
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Once upon a time there was a window decoration which was KDE’s default decoration. But years ago it fell into a deep sleep. The world changed while the decoration slept. Compositing was added, decorations received shadows, Qt introduced the graphics system raster and many many more changes.
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KDE’s very own font is coming along nicely with its developer releasing an updated preview version for download.
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GNOME Desktop
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A recently launched web site is collecting extensions for the GNOME 3 interface. These extensions can be used to individually tailor the shell of the often criticised desktop environment and, for example, give it a GNOME 2 feel.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a powerful and versatile server virtualization platform that’s often overshadowed by vSphere and Hyper-V. Because the underlying KVM hypervisor is integrated into the Linux kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) can sometimes offer superior cost, security and performance than other virtualization offerings. But to get the most out of RHEV, you must understand how it’s architected.
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Commercial Linux and Java development tool distributor Red Hat has big aspirations in the server virtualization and cloud computing arenas, and it looks like the company is getting ready to bust out the 3.0 version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor – RHEV for short.
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Version 3.1 of the JBoss Seam Java EE web framework has been released. In the announcement, project lead Shane Bryzak mainly highlights the changes since version 3.0, which was released in April 2011. For example, the Solder module now includes the Seam Catch exception handling framework, the Seam Config XML configuration technology and Seam Servlet for servlet integration. Seam Transaction, formerly a part of Seam Persistence, is now available as a separate module that provides transaction-related features for POJO-based Java Beans.
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Fedora
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Recently one of the people I’ve deployed Linux for came to me and wanted to purchase a new PC to replace a spare Pentium 4 PC they had sitting around that was still running Windows 2000. They had started to use the Windows 2000 PC after having it sit for a couple years, and soon found that it was not able to keep up with today’s websites and other activities. Even Avast Antivirus refused to run (it would install, but would not perform a full scan). While the latest version of GNU/Linux can work on a Pentium 4 PC fairly well, it can become sluggish at times for heavy use. Eagerly to assist, I found them a refurbished HP desktop with the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM. Once it arrived, I verified that it came with the full Windows 7 media (which it did), and immediately wiped the drive and installed Fedora 16 Linux on it.
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Regular readers may recall that toward the end of 2011 I reviewed Fedora 16, the latest release from the Red Hat-sponsored project. Fedora’s latest did have some points in its favour — great hardware support, a smooth transition to systemd and an installer which, while having some issues, is still better than most Linux installers available. But I’m sorry to say that I also found several issues with the release: none of the graphical package managers were useful, Fedora shipped with the notorious plain GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment, the default install comes with a small selection of software and adding non-free repositories is a manual process. All in all the experience had its frustrations and so it was with cautious optimism I approached Kororaa Linux 16. Kororaa is based on Fedora and adds various extras and makes tweaks to the underlying system in much the same way Linux Mint makes adjustments to Ubuntu.
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The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) met again today and approved several more features for this first Fedora Linux release of 2012. It was only at the FESCo meeting one week ago where they approved a whole lot of features like the inclusion of the long-awaited GIMP 2.8, the GCC 4.7 compiler, the oVirt virtualization component, PHP 5.4, and various other new packages and configuration changes. This is in addition to many other changes previously talked about on Phoronix.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The latest Unity from BZR got two very interesting new features: shortcut hints overlay and new launcher switcher.
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Flavours and Variants
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I’m just mucking around, changing operating systems again.
My old laptop (running Linux Mint 11) headed toward slow death a month or two ago. I eBayed myself a newer ThinkPad and upgraded (or so I thought) to Mint 12.
I’ve been loving Linux Mint since version 8 or so, and I guess I’m not alone in that since it’s risen from nowhere to become one of the top Linuxes, if not the top Linux, for real people. Love its media friendliness!
But 11 had problems. Not the Mint team’s fault, but there were some new Ubuntu features they got stuck with (hidden slider bars that you can’t see until you’ve moused over them — and moused over them in just exactly the right way — was a very, very, very bad idea). (Okay, they’re scroll bars, as everybody in the comment section is reminding me very diplomatically. I don’t care what they’re called, as long as they work properly.)
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The Raspberry Pi project is almost a perfect example of open source engineering story. Well, it has started in popular fashion – a £20 Raspberry Pi computer sold for £3,500 on eBay last week, writes Steve Bush.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which intends to sell its educational computers directly, auctioned 10 of its beta production board on eBay.
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Looks like everyone is trying to build a smaller and cheaper Linux computer. FXI is bringing Cotton Candy for about $200, production for $25 Linux computer Raspberry Pi has already started and now Rhombus Tech is aiming to deliver a low cost $15 (estimate) Linux PC Allwinner A10.
Allwinner A10 will have fully GPL compliant hardware and is more powerful then Raspberry Pi. At least on paper now as the production has not started yet and there are no prototype builds. However, the development is going on rapidly and sooner or later they will deliver it.
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Google TV, despite being launched and relaunched with much pomp and expectations, has not quite managed to reach the market it intended to. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to proclaim that the foray of Internet on our television screens previously has been an utter failure. And this, you see, is despite the fact that there are giants like Apple and Google scampering for the top spot.
Last week, Ubuntu’s own little warrior came sauntering into this hallowed market, but only to deliver a nice big surprise. At CES, when the Unity-based Ubuntu TV was unveiled, even the most pious of Apple fanboys couldn’t help feeling a tinge of jealousy. The demo, which showcased a beautiful-yet-functional interface, left all the Unity-bashers a tad guilty.
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Phones
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Android
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A developer at Collabora has brought PulseAudio to Google’s Android operating system. In the process of this port he has closely compared the performance and features of the once-notorious PulseAudio stack to that of Google’s AudioFlinger.
AudioFlinger is Google’s audio stack equivalent to PulseAudio. AudioFlinger provides a single output path for PCM, a software mixer for various playback stream types, playback stream resampling, and a single input capture path. Collabora decided it would be interesting — and of potential interest to their customers — to bring the PulseAudio stack over to Android. Among the desired PulseAudio features mentioned to have on Android was its modular framework, power saving features, and flexible routing, among other traits.
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Besides the introduction of the Titan II for AT&T, HTC was fairly quiet at CES — no doubt reserving its best devices for either dedicated events or a Mobile World Congress debut next month. We’ve just learned that, somewhat unsurprisingly, T-Mobile will beging carrying the slim, Ice Cream Sandwich-powered HTC Ville this spring. We say somewhat unsurprisingly because on the one hand, T-Mobile has a history of carrying high-end HTC hardware, but on the other hand, the quad-core HTC Edge (Supreme?) is also waiting in the wings. Ville has been leaked as a 1.5GHz dual-core, sub-eight millimeter handset with a 4.3-inch qHD display and point-and-shoot quality camera.
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A couple of weeks ago, various websites have reported that Asus would want to launch a 3G version of its Transformer Prime Android tablet. But this doesn’t seem to be true.
According to FocusTaiwan, today Asus stated that “no such product exists on its current roadmap.” However, the company expects to introduce 3G versions of future high-end devices included in the Transformer series.
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Google Inc. (GOOG) is considering giving LG Electronics Inc. (066570) first access to the next version of its Google TV software so the Korean company can build a compatible set, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
The partnership would be similar to the arrangement Google has had with Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and HTC Corp. to create Nexus handsets for the Android operating system, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks aren’t public.
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On January 6, the US National Security Agency (NSA) released the first public release of the Security Enhanced (SE) Android Project, a program designed to find and plug security holes and risks in the Android flavor of Linux. SE Android is based on the NSA’s SELinux, first released in 2000.
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The National Security Agency’s SELinux Project has announced the first release of SE Android, a security enhanced version of Google’s Android operating system. SEAndroid is the name of both a project to identify, and find solutions for, critical gaps in Android security and of a reference implementation of a security enhanced Android. The project is currently focusing its efforts on enabling SELinux functionality in the hope that it can limit the damage done by malicious apps, but hopes to widen its scope in the future.
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Google is planning a new version of Google TV that will integrate personalized recommendations based on user preferences, says a report. Meanwhile, Google TV 2.0 received a review from DeviceGuru, which praised the Android 3.1-based interface and Chrome browser, but dinged the poor Flash performance and continuing lack of Android apps.
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The tipping point for Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora was when one of her friends was groped for the third time in a single year at a conference. “As I heard about it I knew I’d remember all the times I’d been groped as well, and insulted and harassed — and that was just too much,” Aurora says.
Aurora waited a month then emailed Mary Gardiner, who she knew from LinuxChix and Linux.conf.au. The result was the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organisation the two formed that aims to break down barriers women face when it comes to participation in open source, open technology and open culture more broadly.
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The iPhone is Australia’s most popular smartphone, and it’s very much in evidence at Linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat. But in the opening keynote for the conference, leading open source advocate Bruce Perens argued that the continued success of the iPhone threatens not just the potential success of open source, but the future of democracy
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Open source or free software is meant to remove the shackles of proprietary software binding users all over the world. This in itself is a very noble idea and goal. However, it’s also a very tough goal. Not because people are happy with their shackles but because most people don’t care about them. I see around myself people who want to do stuff and it doesn’t matter how they do it. Want to watch some TV show online? Pay Netflix, Hulu, whatever, to watch it. Even with all the hoopla about content piracy, people are signing up in droves for these services.
Computers are complex machines. Not everyone can or is willing to understand how they function. All many people want is to be able to fire up a browser and connect with friends/family using Facebook or to sign in to Hotmail every once in a while. They also want to be able to carry a phone that can play music, games, YouTube, etc.
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Events
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Attending Linux.conf.au is a great way to enhance my knowledge and scare me into presenting, but it’s an exhausting five days. It’s mentally exhausting because of all the new information to be acquired, and it’s physically exhausting because it’s the height of summer in Ballarat and the temperature is 32 degrees or more.
Today is the first day of “proper” conference, although there were plenty of good things to discover during the mini-conference sessions. Bruce Perens’ opening keynote discussed the threat the iPhone represents to open source software before examining a potential future led by open source hardware. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he certainly got people thinking. As one attendee commented: “The trouble with this event is it gives you all sorts of ideas for stuff to do.”
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Last night I arrived in Ballarat after catching a train from the bustling city of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. Ballarat is the small town venue for Linux.conf.au 2012, the largest annual Linux conference in the southern hemisphere.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has some big plans up its sleeve in 2012. The non-profit open source foundation is planning some features for its Firefox Web browser and beyond that will require greater access to user data. In a blog post, the organization explains exactly how it intends to use and handle that data. In short, very carefully.
Some of Mozilla’s initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.
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SaaS
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OpenNebula 3.2 is the most feature-rich enterprise-class open-source software for comprehensive management of virtualized data centers based on Xen, KVM and VMware.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced the release of version 3.4.5 of LibreOffice, a maintenance update for the 3.4.x branch of the open source office suite. The new version addresses almost 30 bugs found in the previous release, improving the program’s overall stability.
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A few minutes ago, January 16th, The Document Foundation company proudly announced the fifth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.4 open source office suite software for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes and improvements.
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CMS
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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BonitaSoft, the leader in open source business process management (BPM), today announced corporate growth for 2011. The company achieved a record year, tripling its customer base to more than 300 and growing total revenue by 350 percent. The company added more than 200 new customers in 2011, including Stanford University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, SNCF, Portugal Telecom, Australian Department of Sustainability and Environment, Galapagos Province, and Sammons Financial Services.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Mostly, I prefer using a command line for system administration. However, I’m willing to rethink this preference in the case of the GRUB 2 Editor for KDE.
Not too long ago, editing the GRUB boot manager was a straightforward task. You edited a text file directly, and, if in the long intervals between changes you forgot the structure of a boot entry, you could usually figure out what to do from existing entries. About the hardest thing to remember if you didn’t have an example to crib from was how to boot an unsupported operating system like Windows.
However, in distributions like Ubuntu in which GRUB 2 has replaced Legacy GRUB, editing has become more complicated. Not only has the basic configuration file changed its name from menu.lst to grub.cfg, but you’re not supposed to edit it directly. Although you can edit directly if you know what you are doing, the fact that basic concepts have been renamed still complicates everything. Moreover, after making changes or setting up a kernel that isn’t packaged, you need to run the command update-grub.
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Project Releases
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Nide, an IDE for Node.js written using Node.js and accessible through a web browser, has been updated to version 0.2. The new release makes the IDE available as a native Mac OS X application, though this edition is “still at an early development stage”. Originally developed as part of the Node Knockout 48-hour coding competition, the developers have continued to enhance the MIT-licensed project.
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Public Services/Government
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At a meeting this evening, a lobbyist confided in me: “Open source is bad for German software vendors!” I gasped. He couldn’t be further from the truth. If this was mechanical engineering or electrical engineering, he’d be right. ME? EE? Germany is top. Software? Not so.
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Openness/Sharing
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Free public Wi-Fi is still a relative rarity in Australia’s major cities, so how is it possible to make it viable in a town with less than 400 people? Newstead offers some interesting lessons about Wi-Fi, the National Broadband Network (NBN), open source and how to manage community projects.
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Open Hardware
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Sick of going to shops and buying plastic toys like a chump? That woeful life could be behind you thanks to the MakerBot Replicator — a 3D printer that prints plastic goodies. We’ve gone hands-on with the Replicator at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, so check out our video above to learn how this mechanical marvel works.
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Making good home espresso is possible, but the machines tend to cost a small fortune. ZPM Espresso, a startup in Atlanta, is hoping to change that with its open-source espresso machine.
If the company succeeds, it could have a nice market for itself, as the espresso and specialty coffee market have been growing quickly around the world. (Can you tell based on how many Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee places there are?).
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Programming
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Multi-threading in LLVM has been brought up and it looks like some developers may finally be taking on the challenge of bringing OpenMP support to this growing open-source compiler infrastructure.
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We finally published a video about Maliit – an input method framework including a virtual keyboard – and 3rd party plugins. Kudos goes to Jon for making time for that.
This video highlights one of Maliit’s key features: pluggable input methods which come with their very own user interfaces. The Chinese input methods show how Maliit offers support for composed characters. The video is proof that 3rd party development for Maliit (open-source and proprietary) is not only possible but also happening.
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This one is a little bizarre. David Seaman, a contributor to Business Insider, claims that he lost his contributor status at the site following a dispute he had with an NBCUniversal employee, Anthony Quintano, concerning NBC’s coverage of both SOPA/PIPA and NDAA. The details are a bit complex, but I’ve emailed with David a few times.
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In the last week we reported how the Itanium Solutions page, hosted by Intel has been disappeared with virtually no traces left. The ISA, launched to fanfare in 2005 – had as members Intel, HP, NEC, SGI, Unisys, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, SAP and SAS – as reported by ZD Net here. All of these competitors working together in perfect harmony. Right.
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Finance
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If there was ever a news story that crystalized the moral dementia of modern Wall Street in one little vignette, this is it.
Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon.
Why? Because a local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.
The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a “nice family,” but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs.
At first, I couldn’t remember how I knew that name. But then I looked it up and saw an explosive Atlantic magazine story, published last year, called, “E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out Of Millions.” And then I remembered that piece, and it hit me: Jeffrey Verschleiser is one of the biggest assholes in the entire world!
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Censorship
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Websites accused of copyright infringement could be blocked within 10 days of a complaint, under legislation approved by Spain’s recently elected government.
The Sinde Law, named after the former Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde, establishes a new intellectual property commission to evaluate complaints about allegedly infringing websites. Complaints deemed valid will be passed to a judge who will determine whether or not to close down the site. It is not clear what technical means will be used, but the law’s proponents law claim that the process could take as little as 10 days.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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We’ve seen some pathetic trademark lawsuits this year (SUE MOAR KALE, anyone?), but I’ll nominate this long-running litigation money-sink (going over 3.5 years) as the saddest trademark case of 2011.
Fancaster registered its mark in 1989 for broadcasting services, and over the years it’s been used in connection with a range of services, “including selling Fancaster branded radios, charging customers to watch closed circuit boxing matches, producing karaoke shows, transmitting sponsored news messages to wireless pagers and cell phones, and conducting live demonstrations of FANCASTER broadcast services” (cites omitted).
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Copyrights
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Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.
At issue are two related bills: the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the even more offensive Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, both of which are generated intense opposition from tech giants and First Amendment advocates. The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.
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The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada’s entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations (I have posted here, here, and here about the implications of the TPP for Canada based on a leaked chapter of the intellectual property provisions). The Canadian government submitted a brief one-pager, pointing to Bill C-11, ACTA, the dismantling of Canadian Wheat Board, and forthcoming procurement concessions to Europe as evidence that it is ready to negotiate the TPP.
While most submissions support the entry of Canada into the negotiations, it is worth noting that the major intellectual property lobby groups want to keep Canada out of the deal until we cave to the current U.S. copyright demands. The IIPA, which represents the major movie, music, and software lobby associations, points to copyright reform and new border measures as evidence of the need for Canadian reforms and states “we urge the U.S. government to use Canada’s expression of interest in the TPP negotiations as an opportunity to resolve these longstanding concerns about IPR standards and enforcement.”
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According to a prominent U.S. Congressman, SOPA will not come up for a vote and is, thus, effectively dead, but PIPA remains active in the Senate.
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Over the weekend, the White House released a strongly-worded opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The President has threatened to veto any legislation that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” which includes SOPA and PIPA. Just hours after this, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa said that SOPA had now been shelved indefinitely by the House of Representatives. It will not be voted on when the 112th Congress reconvenes for its 2012 session. The internet has won.
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Marking the victory of freedom and American way of life representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) has announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, the examiner reports. We are still trying to verify the information as they is no credible source for the story.
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In a short appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, Senate leader Harry Reid continued to insist that the Senate intended to move forward with PIPA, despite the widespread concerns, despite the White House’s statement against the bill, and despite multiple Senators — including bill co-sponsors — asking him to hold off putting the bill to a vote.
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It’s been kind of funny to see that the various “public service announcement” videos that have been created and/or used by the government lately (see here and here for example) show people selling counterfeit DVDs on the street. There’s a reason for this, of course. The one study that suggests any kind of link between movie infringement and organized crime/terrorism was based on some really out-of-date reports of connections between… counterfeit street vendors. But that was all from over a decade ago. Of course, as we noted many, many years ago, there’s no significant business in selling counterfeit DVDs and CDs any more, because of competition from free file sharing sites.
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Kudos to Kevin Zelnio, who shoots down the self-serving rationales behind the so-called Research Works Act recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney. This piece of legislation would reverse the National Institute of Health’s open access policy, which requires that all tax-payer funded research be available to the public for free. Kevin’s piece appears in Scientific American’s blog, and is well worth the read.
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Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
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Chris Hayes, over on MSNBC, decided to be the first to seriously break the mainstream cable news’ boycott over SOPA/PIPA with a big debate on the bill — mainly between NBCUniversal’s top lawyer, Rick Cotton, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Chris’s opening discussion is quite good, and suggests he’s certainly sympathetic to all of us who are vehemently opposed to the bill.
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Seeking to “send Washington a BIG message,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that the English version of Wikipedia will go dark on Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, anti-piracy bills now being considered by Congress.
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On October 26th, I was flying from San Francisco to Washington DC to meet with folks in the House of Representatives to explain why they should be careful about making the same mistakes as the Senate with its anti-piracy bill, PROTECT IP (PIPA). We had been assured by Rep. Bob Goodlatte that Congress had heard the myriad complaints about PIPA and that the House version would take them into account. Instead, as the plane I was on flew over the Rocky Mountains, I started getting a flood of emails from people sending me the first release of the House’s version of the bill, now known as SOPA (originally, the E-PARASITE bill, a name they dropped immediately when everyone started mocking it). Thanks to the wonderful innovation of WiFi-in-the-sky, I was able to sit in my cramped seat, read the bill, and write up my horrified post explaining just how much worse SOPA was than PIPA (an already disastrous bill).
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Send this to a friend
01.16.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Btrfs isn’t the only file-system to take advantage of Google’s Snappy compression as a speedy means of transparent file compression, but the LessFS file-system has also supported Snappy for the past few months. This open-source file-system also has de-duplication support.
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Graphics Stack
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VMware’s overhauled Linux graphics driver stack is shaping up and coming together nicely in time for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which will allow for 2D/3D guest acceleration within virtualized guest machines.
VMware’s graphics stack for use on their virtualization platform has been a long time coming. Back in 2009 they introduced their Gallium3D driver and the adjoining Linux kernel DRM, but up until now both have been considered experimental / staging and not built by default. With Mesa 8.0 and the Linux 3.2 kernel that has changed with both being considered stable and good enough for default use by its customers. Their mainline DRM driver also does kernel mode-setting for its virtual “SVGA II” graphics adapter.
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DirectFB 1.6 is about to be released this month and it will bring new features to the Direct Frame-Buffer project.
The DirectFB road-map for a while has long cited “The release of 1.6.0 is planned for end of January 2012.” Earlier this month on the mailing list it was then confirmed by Denis Oliver Kropp that the release is coming this month. “Correct, we’ve been too busy with other things, but this month we should see 1.6.0 :)”
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On Sunday morning there were a number of video-related commits to Mesa for H.264 Gallium3D by AMD’s Christian König.
While not yet a complete implementation, Christian König did land the H.264 infrastructure inside the VDPAU Gallium3D state tracker. This was only about 100 lines of code (commit) while several other commits pushed this morning also furthered the video support (commits by König).
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On Sunday morning there were a number of video-related commits to Mesa for H.264 Gallium3D by AMD’s Christian König.
While not yet a complete implementation, Christian König did land the H.264 infrastructure inside the VDPAU Gallium3D state tracker. This was only about 100 lines of code (commit) while several other commits pushed this morning also furthered the video support (commits by König).
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After looking last week at the ATI/AMD Radeon Gallium3D performance under Mesa 8.0 and comparing its performance to Mesa 7.11 and the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver, along with the LLVMpipe driver performance, we’re now focusing upon the Nouveau Gallium3D implementation that seeks to provide open-source NVIDIA hardware support. This comparison is pitting Nouveau in Mesa 8.0 against Mesa 7.11 and the official NVIDIA Linux driver.
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On Sunday there was a new RFC patch-set by Tom Stellard of AMD with a new TGSI to LLVM conversion interface. The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver with its LLVM shader back-end was also updated, which is a prerequisite to OpenCL support.
Sunday began by Christian König making progress with H.264 VDPAU support in Gallium3D, which is one of AMD’s top three priorities for their open-source Linux driver. Tom Stellard meanwhile has been working on one of the other priority projects: enabling OpenCL in the open-source driver.
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Applications
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The OpenShot video editor was the easiest to get in Ubuntu Studio’s “Oneric Ocelot” release, so we had a chance to try it out recently. It’s pretty good — much more capable than Kino. It provides similar capabilities to Blender’s VSE, but without the burden of learning Blender. In fact, the learning curve is very gentle, because the interface is clean and simple.
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In my previous article about GNUMeric , entering data with a leading apostrophe, as in ’12/3, ensures that the 12/3 will be interpreted by Gnumeric as text, even when the cell is formatted ‘General’.
But Gnumeric displays the 12/3 without the apostrophe. It’s hidden. This can lead to unpleasant little surprises when sorting groups of cells, some of which contain hidden apostrophes and some of which don’t.
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Hard disks break. Really, they do. When it happens, most people are sadly unprepared: even the most experienced computer person ony recovers a (big?) portion of their data. Even today, with cloud computing. The reason? Backing up is tricky. If you use GNU/Linux or Ubuntu, it’s easy enough to make an incremental backup using rsync and gpg. If you have no idea what this means, don’t worry: welcome to Déjà Dup, the best backup gem I have ever seen.
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Instructionals/Technical
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So Alex from Kot-In-Action has finally given us a sort of demo trailer for some gameplay of what will become Tomes of Mephistopheles. It looks interesting and as usual from Kot-In-Action the graphics are already looking rather good.
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Games
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Desura one of our favourite clients to get games for Linux has added a couple of free downloadable adventure games.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Always on the lookout for something interesting I found three more esoteric spins of major distributions and set out to give them a quick test run.
This was helped by a streak of bad luck recently which resulted in me suddenly having two partitions available.
To give you a quick run down on the string of events, I set out to upgrade my Fedora 14 LXDE (i686) install I intended to use for gaming. There’s a well documented but unsupported procedure for Fedora called Preupgrade which allows to skip one release, in my part straight to F16. The software will then inspect your system, determine the packages that need to be upgraded, and download them into an archive that is installed at next reboot. You are warned that you need a wired connection if you just download the installer (Method 2), but that it’s ok to interrupt package download to resume at a later time. I did just that half way through to attend some business, but found out later that somehow even initiating the download of updates without installing them had already corrupted or removed wireless drivers.
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New Releases
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Summary:
· Announced Distro: Fuduntu 2012.1
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 12 KDE Release Candidate
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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So, today is January 15. Tomorrow, we will know if Mandriva Linux, a distro that has been around since 1998, is gone. One can but find a resemblance between this date and the prophecy that the soothsayer gave to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
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Debian Family
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I’ve burned hundreds of Linux and BSD discs since I figured out what to do with an ISO sometime in late 2006/early 2007. I’ve saved many and gotten rid of many as well.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.
As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.
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Flavours and Variants
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Peppermint OS is a distribution that is based on LUbuntu 11.04 (LXDE Desktop) and is geared to use more cloud applications. It’s sleek and simple desktop reminds us that a desktop doesn’t have to be cluttered to be useful.
Peppermint can still allows you to add applications like any other distribution and note that it can easily be used on older machines.
The software that is found on Peppermint OS has been carefully selected to make sure that resources are not over-utilized causing your system to slow down. Granted that this distribution is geared more towards cloud use, broadband internet would be of the utmost importance.
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Trisquel is a GNU/Linux distribution with geographical roots in Spain. The project started off as localization of Linux for the Galician language, and later became more than just a local Linux distribution.
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Allure Energy has been turning the temperature up at CES 2012, with it’s new Linux-based EverSense, a tablet/ thermostat. Or as the company like to call it, “A home environment and energy management product.”
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Phones
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Samsung has announced it plans on fusing its home-grown Bada operating system into the Linux based Tizen.
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Samsung has announced plans to merge its homegrown bada smartphone platform with open-source Tizen, a collaborative OS integrating Nokia-reject MeeGo, with the first Samsung Tizen devices tipped for release this year. ”We have an effort that will merge bada and Tizen” Tae-Jin Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team told Forbes at CES 2012 last week. Tizen will show up on “at least one to two” Samsung phones in 2012, Kang confirmed; earlier this month, details leaked on the Samsung I9500, believed to run the new platform.
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Android
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Just a little over a year ago, I detailed why I opted for Nokia’s Maemo powered N900 instead of an Android device. To be precise, I purchased my Nokia N900 on the 4th of Jan 2011, and wow, what an excitement it was to hold such an incredible device. A full blown, Debian based GNU/Linux OS in my pocket.
However, it was not long to be before the groundbreaking, expertly leaked burning platform memo to Engadget and the subsequent Elopcalypse of Feb 11 2011. For long time Nokia loyalists like yours truly, it was like a dream shattered. We’d always dreamed of having MeeGo as the third force in a fiercely competitive arena dominated by the two tech giants of North America: Google with their Android offering and Apple with iOS.
But the all knowing Nokia board knew better. To salvage Nokia from its not so desperate situation, they had to bring in a former Microsoft employee to head a company that was at the forefront of pushing GNU/Linux to millions of people around the world. And as was expected, the inevitable happened: the bringing to its knees of one of the most powerful and recognized technology companies on Earth.
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Intel has been trying to get into the smartphone segment for a long time now but they have finally managed to do it with the Lenovo K800, which will be the first smartphone to hit the market running on Intel’s 32nm Medfield platform.
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The latest from startlingly prolific smart phone manufacturer HTC won’t be top of the list for mobile aficionados. It’s a basic entry-level Android with middling specs though these are still probably a cut above its bog-standard price. But for smartphone newbies, what it offers may prove to be more than enough.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The foot in the mouth minister Kapil Sibal who bear the credit of launching half baked products and call for Internet censorship may pull plugs off yet another of his projects — this time its Android based Aakash Tablet.
According to reports India’s Union human resource development (HRD) ministry may not extend the letter of credit (LC) to DataWind, the maker of Aakash.
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There has been an impressive change in tools and techniques which writers can use for the good. It is easy to locate one (or more) for individual needs. Whether it is writing a novel, graphics applications or tutorials, these writing tools can serve multipurpose. Writing skills can gain unmatched dimensions on integrating with these advanced techniques. Your love for writing can potentially experience a boost by adapting with the modern applications. You can search one and get many on the internet.
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AURA Equipments today launched iAMP Server, a free collection of software for running PHP workloads on the IBM i server. iAMP is composed of binaries for several products, including PHP, the standard Apache Web server, and the MySQL database. AURA says it developed iAMP, which runs primarily in the PASE AIX runtime, to provide IBM i shops with a standards-based alternative to Zend Technologies’ PHP solutions for the platform.
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“MathJax is an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers. No more setup for readers. No more browser plugins. No more font installations… It just works.”
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Events
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This is a call for talks and presentations that will take place in the Security devroom at FOSDEM 2012. Do you develop software that can do HTTPS queries? Can it use keys and certificates on a smart card? Does your service use RSA keys for signing? Can it work with hardware keys? Are you interested in protecting your private keys like Three Letter Organizations or do you want to roll your own proper PKI with a smaller than five or six digit budget? How can we make cryptographic hardware Just Work with any application that uses crypto? The devroom is the place to share experiences and learn.
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SaaS
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The ownCloud project recently announce its evolution as a company. We reached out to the ownCloud team to understand the evolution of the project into a company. Here is an exclusive interview with Markus Rex, the new CEO, CTO of ownCloud and Frank Karlitschek the founder of ownCloud.
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Semi-Open Source
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Jaspersoft says it is working closely with Red Hat to leverage its cloud application life cycle management tools. Jaspersoft’s reporting capabilities can be deployed on-premises, as well as public, private, or in a hybrid cloud environment.
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BSD
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Project Releases
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Version 1.2.0 of the open source Skrooge personal finance manager has been released. The new version includes updates to the Search & Process plugin and adds the ability to Import & Export of non-local files.
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But has word processing changed the way we write? There have been lots of inconclusive or unconvincing studies of how the technology has affected, say, the quality of student essays – how it facilitates plagiarism. The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers “spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing”.
My hunch is that using a word processor makes writing more like sculpting in clay. Because it’s so easy to revise, one begins by hacking out a rough draft which is then iteratively reshaped – cutting bits out here, adding bits there, gradually licking the thing into some kind of shape.
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The Internet Systems Consortium is looking for a few more good programmers to bring the next generation of its open source BIND DNS server software to fruition.
“The goal is to move away from having BIND a heavily sponsored corporate product,” said Shane Kerr, ISC’s BIND 10 engineering manager. “ISC will always maintain ownership of the code, but we would like there to be more of a community around it.”
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Security
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Chinese hackers have deployed a new cyber weapon that is aimed at the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and potentially a number of other United States government agencies and businesses, security researchers say.
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Finance
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We continue to witness remarkable developments in the intersection of the related fields of economics, finance, ethics, law, and regulation. Each of these five fields ignores a sixth related field – white-collar criminology. The six fields share a renewed interest in trust. The key questions are why we trust (some) others, when that trust is well-placed, and when that trust is harmful. Only white-collar criminologists study and write extensively about the last question. The primary answer that the five fields give to the first question is reputation. The five fields almost invariably see reputation as positive and singular. This is dangerously naïve. Criminals often find it desirable to develop multiple, complex reputations and the best way for many CEOs to develop a sterling reputation is to lead a control fraud. Those are subjects for future columns.
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It is official. Two months and a half after I claimed all these “last chance” european summits would amount to nothing really important and would not change the course of the present events, France lost its “sacred” triple A ratings. Given that many people explained how unreliable these rating agencies are -after all the very same agencies did claim Greece had solid finances and Goldman Sachs was doing things right four years ago- it should not be a serious thing. Yet, the consequences of the loss of the AAA rating will be real, and will probably have a snowballing effect in Europe (another one).
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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It has been a tough holiday season for Scott Walker. The state lost 14,600 jobs in November and a new government report indicates that Wisconsin leads the nation in killing public sector jobs. A November poll has support for the recall of the governor at 58 percent, up from 47 percent in the spring, and next week Wisconsin residents are preparing to file over 500,000 recall petitions to trigger a gubernatorial recall. Is it any wonder that Wisconsin’s governor decided to fly to Texas to find a friendlier crowd?
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When organizational crises occur, such as plane crashes or automobile recalls, public relations practitioners develop strategies for substantive action and effective communication. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that the way in which news coverage of a crisis is framed affects the public’s emotional response toward the company involved.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Even without a leg-up from regulators, Canadian content is just as likely to be watched as American programming — online, anyway.
Despite not being held to the same “Cancon” carriage rules as traditional broadcasters, YouTube reports that Canadian videos are being sought-out and viewed at a rate roughly on par with those originating in the U.S. And the sheer amount of content is staggering.
Analysts say there are so many uploads from this country, it would take half a lifetime to watch just one year’s worth — and that’s if you never left the computer to sleep. Annually, in fact, they calculate that the site features more original Canadian content than has ever been broadcast during prime time on CBC (English and French) and CTV combined.
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Complaints against Internet providers deliberately slowing down online traffic are way up in Canada, according to the telecommunications regulator.
Fifty-two complaints have been filed since last fall, when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission issued a public reminder to Internet service providers about the rules on controlling the flow of traffic on their networks.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The White House has responded to the petition agains ant-freedom bills SOPA, PIPA and OPEN (Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act).
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As was the DMCA
As was The Patriot Act
As was The NDAA.
And so it will be for SOPA/PIPA.
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Richard O’Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student who operated the TVShack link site, can be extradited to the United States, ruled Judge Quentin Purdy of the Westminster Magistrates Court today. O’Dwyer’s attorney says he will appeal the ruling.
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A trip to CES is a combination of candy store window shopping and a trip to some nightmarish, dystopian future with thirteen-dollar-an-hour WiFi. Beneath all of the shiny gadgets, desperate marketing pitches, bizarre keynotes and sleep deprivation, there were a number of themes emerging at CES as the manufacturers of all these shiny toys tried to latch onto something to pull themselves out of the doldrums that hung over the last year. One was the lengths device-makers will go to for content; another was the anointment of “cloud” as a critical feature check-box.
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Send this to a friend
01.15.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Samsung, one of the companies that first jumped on board to produce ChromeBooks, is improving on its design and also launching something completely different: the ChromeBox. Are there channel implications? Oh, yeah.
Both Engadget and 9to5Google noticed that Samsung had a bevy of Chrome-based devices on display at CES 2012. The new Series 5 ChromeBook isn’t anything remarkably special beyond a speed bump (2GB of RAM, 16GB SSD and a faster Celeron-based CPU) and a new matte aluminum shell. But the ChromeBox, a device few remember Google teased us with in 2011, has finally arrived.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced last evening, January 12th, that the first maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and all users should upgrade to it.
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While the Frontswap patches with Cleancache have been available for several Linux kernel release cycles, the Frontswap support still hasn’t been merged. Another Oracle developer is now taking over maintenance of Cleancache and getting Frontswap finally ready for merging, but it’s too late for the Linux 3.3 kernel.
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New patches have been published for the Btrfs file-system that implement support for Google’s Snappy compression algorithm, which promises to deliver better performance beyond LZO compression.
Andi Kleen of Intel has posted his updated Btrfs snappy compression patches, which he says are now ready for merging. “Here’s a slightly updated version of the BTRFS snappy interface. snappy is a faster compression algorithm that provides similar compression as LZO, but generally better performance.”
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Graphics Stack
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Continuing in the coverage of the soon-to-be-out Mesa 8.0, here are some benchmarks of the CPU-based LLVMpipe software driver for Gallium3D.
LLVMpipe is the CPU-based software rasterizer driver that is faster than the standard Gallium3D “Softpipe” since it leverages LLVM for taking advantage of more of the CPU — especially on modern hardware with SSE3/SSE4, multiple cores, etc. See LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU and Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme for just a small portion of the Phoronix coverage of this unique software driver.
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Back in November I reported on Enlightenment E17 coming to Wayland and shared the first screenshot. That first screenshot was very early and didn’t show EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) doing too much under Wayland, but in the past two months there has been much more progress.
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Applications
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The following offers a description–prefaced by a narrative about whence came my inspiration–of a rather kludgy GNU/Linux solution I cobbled together for enhancing my on-line lectures with a video element. I am far from being technically adept as a GNU/Linux user, having only lately in my 11 years of GNU/Linux use become reasonably proficient at administering my own small stock of GNU/Linux machines and my small LAN. Despite a lack of anything that could really pass as expertise in this field, I want to offer this description for two reasons: 1) it may be of help to others who are equally inexpert as I am and who wish to do something like what I’ve done; and 2) perhaps those who are more technically adept will weigh in and offer corrections, point out alternative applications, make suggestions for improving what I’ve come up with, or all of the above. It is with these caveats that I offer a description of my humble and rather unsophisticated attempts.
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Bitwig is an international music software company based in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by a team of music enthusiasts with extensive experience in the music technology industry and a strong vision about new cutting-edge methods of music production, live performance and collaboration.
The team includes many veterans who worked on Ableton Live, a popular software for professional music creation.
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Linux has quite a few PDF readers available, but Okular stands out as the best of the bunch, due to its ability to comment on, highlight, and otherwise annotate PDFs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Blender is known for its 3D creation capabilities worldwide and is widely used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications and games with cutting edge computer graphics. Quite a number of videos and animated movies have already been created using Blender and we have featured the very best of them before. But they are not alone, games are there too. Let’s find out the best games available for Linux made using Blender.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Big Bash Of Video Players On Gnome 3 is a lazy comparative study of Linux based video players , specifically those which are available on GNOME 3.2.1 , openSUSE 12.1.openSUSE 12.1 offers a large variety of video players based on various platforms like gstreamer , phonon , xine , mplayer etc : Most of the video player options can be installed through the addition of OSS , Non OSS , Update and Packman repositories in YaST.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Not too long ago I wrote a similar article about the top three distributions of the Debian side in the Linux family (Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint), but as a true Linux geek I would never want to forget the entire other side of the Linux family, probably best known as the “RPM family”.
All of these Linux distributions use .rpm files as installable packages rather than the .deb files which belong to the Debian family. So, let’s get started!
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Máirín Duffy, head art team designer for Fedora, posted a strange message Friday afternoon. She’s seen a vision of the future and it was of Fedora mascot Beefy Miracle holding some sort of futuristic ray gun at a poor radioactive panda. What could this mean for the popular Linux distribution?
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unfortunately these are similarities that I do not like. Ironically my choice to soon abandon Ubuntu was ultimately caused by the creation of their product they called Unity. It was the final push that tipped me over the edge. With over 700 various linux distributions to choose from, there is no reason for me to continue using a commercialized by-product of one of the most amazing free and open source operating systems ever created –Debian. My choice with considering Slackware is completely based on my desire to try something different during a pivotable point in my journey of learning the most as I can about linux.
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Such a little thing – getting a thumbnail for your images, videos or office documents. In Windows, once a directory has been thumbnailed, it creates a hidden file “thumbs.db” in that directory, so that when other people visit the directory, there’s no need to recreate every thumbnail from scratch.
In Ubuntu, however, there is. Every user stores their own version of thumbnails . At work, my .thumbnails directory is a little shy of 40Mb. If you multiply that by 1000 employees, you’ve just wasted 39.96Gb of data creating the same set of thumbnails 1000 times. Bandwidth, Disk I/O, wasted. Worse, if you make your staff’s home directories a network share, you’re now wasting 40Gb of storage across your home share.
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Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a “Classroom 3.0″ connected, secure, interactive learning environment.
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The typical Wi-Fi deployment today involves access points deployed in hallways or rooms as standalone boxes. As the move towards pervasive wireless access grows, so too have the demands on wireless infrastructure. That’s where Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN) is aiming to fill a gap with a new wall mountable access point.
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What do you feel like doing, going out for dinner or buying a computer? The computer’s probably cheaper. In a joyful moment for the the charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that as of “a couple of days” before January 10th, production has begun on their $35 Linux computer. The Raspberry Pi Model B is an ARM GNU/Linux Box with 256 MB memory, 700 MHz processing, HDMI port, and Blu-Ray video quality capabilities. According to the post by foundation spokesperson Liz Upton 10,000 of the Model B computers will be fully constructed in a manner of weeks. As stripped down as a computer can probably be, the Raspberry Pi Model B is little more than a circuit board that fits in the palm of the hand. Yet that tiny bare bones board holds the promise of cheap computing for all.
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Google recently rebooted Google TV with the release of Google TV 2.0 based on Android 3.1 (Honeycomb). This detailed review introduces Google TV 2.0, demonstrates its features, apps, and flexible new user interface, and shows how to add customized folders and shortcuts to the homescreen for instant access to all your favorite apps and websites.
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The drone control systems used to operate U.S. military drones appear to have made the switch to Linux, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, in a tweet.
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Phones
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Android
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Google launched an “Android Design” website that offers an in-depth style guide for Android 4.0 app developers. Explaining how to create apps for both smartphones and tablets across multiple vendors and devices, the guide gets down and dirty on details such as themes, notifications, typography, navigation, multi-pane layouts, and much more.
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UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play. It is a set of computer network protocols which enables devices on a home network to be aware of each other and access selected services. This collection of protocols with the appropriate software offers a very easy method of sharing media on your network as it features automatic discovery and supports zero-configuration.
There are many devices that run UPnP audio visual servers. For example, a wide range of software exists for the Linux, Windows, and OS X operating systems that turn computers into media servers. Many NAS devices also have built-in UPnP media servers. We even see UPnP turning up in routers, audiophile hard disk players, and HD media players.
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Now that Android has “taken the world by storm,” as AppsGeyser VP Eduardo Robles put it, Google apparently wants to tame the beast. It has launched a style guide — Android Design — in the hope of reining in app devs and encouraging a more uniform look and feel for Android products. “It’s only natural to bring out a tool like [Android Design] right now,” said Robles.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Intel announced the fifth generation of its reference platform for education-focused portable PCs. The Classmate now features a dual-core Atom N2600 processor, delivering battery life of up to 12 hours, plus optional capacitive multitouch functionality, according to the company.
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The hottest selling Indian tablet Aakash is overwhelmed by the orders. There are thousands of buyers waiting for the delivery of their Aakash 2 tablets. The anxious customers are looking for the information about their order from various sources. Now the company behind Aakash has stepped up their efforts to help these customers.
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Archos is brand name that is quite popular and known all over the world. We all love them for their wide range of Android tablets. If you are familiar with their G9 Tablets or currently using one of them, then you would love to hear that Archos just confirmed an ICS update for G9 Line.
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Genesi currently offers two products with the EFIKA mx51 ARM board. They are the SmartTop and the SmartBook. I own one of their SmartBook models and today I would like to do a comprehensive overview of the device.
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Coming from Kino, Blender’s “Video Sequence Editor” is a huge step up. Most people don’t think of Blender when considering video editing tools, but in fact, Blender contains a very good one. This is not a separate application but an editing mode within the Blender application. It can work directly with animated scenes created within Blender or with video footage from other sources. Evaluating it is a little tricky because of this unique niche.
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The primary author of the Open Source Definition, Perens was in Melbourne today en route to Ballarat to attend the 13th Australian national Linux conference where he will be delivering the first keynote on Tuesday. The conference begins on Monday.
[...]
The enthusiasm is still there in 2012. Perens is wiser, older – “I don’t have so much hair now,” he laughs – but open source is still very much what drives him.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences. These include the Linux Kernel Summit, which will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.
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The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences, starting with the Android Builders Summit Feb. 13-14, co-located in Silicon Valley with the Embedded Linux Conference, Feb. 15-17. The Linux Kernel Summit will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.
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This will be the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) that’s taking place in Los Angeles, California and is all about open-source and Linux. This year’s weekend event will range from talks about Python to MySQL, Git, Qt, and and even a Tux Paint demo. Keynotes include Greg DeKoenigsberg at Eucalyptus Systems (previously at Red Hat and known within the Fedora community) talking about “Amazon and the Future of the Open Cloud” and Selena Deckelmann talking about mistakes and downtime.
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SaaS
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The notion of being able to fork a project is core to open source. It’s also potentially a bad thing in some cases as it can lead to fragmentation of a user base and compatibility issues.
The OpenStack effort which is currently trying to figure out how to govern itself in a new OpenStack Foundation isn’t keen on forks. In a Friday Webinar talking about the goals of the new Foundation, Rackspace VP of Business & Corporate Development Mark Collier specifically took aim at the fork issue.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is an open source Office Suite, an excellent alternative to MS Office. If offers a number of features and the added functionalities in the form of extensions. Here are some of the useful extensions for LibreOffice.
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BSD
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Linux may not yet enjoy the widespread recognition that Windows does, but there’s no denying its popularity on servers, its growing use on desktops, or its ubiquity in the mobile world in the form of Android.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Google’s Go was originally announced in 2009 and reached a production status in 2010, but in 2012 only version 1.0 of the language is being readied. Go version 1 will be a stable, long-term release with no language or API changes. This forthcoming specification is described in this Google document.
Ian Lance Taylor at Google has shared his desire of having Go v1 in GCC 4.7. Go was sent into GCC 4.6 already, but Google is just concerned about making sure this long-term version 1 support makes it into next release — GCC 4.7.
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Public Services/Government
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Municipal administrations in Germany are starting to follow the example of the city of Munich, and increase their use of free and open source software, reports the Financial Times Deutschland on 3 January. “The demand for open source is growing – and not only at public administrations”, according the newspaper. It mentions the cities of Freiburg and Jena as examples of city administrations following Munich’s lead.
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One thing that reducing complexity should do is to cut the numbers of data-centres and IT organizations in government. This involves a lot of work but in the end more should be doable by fewer people and fewer computers. Probably more will be done with GNU/Linux and thin clients. Obama has already shown with whitehouse.gov that FLOSS works. Several departments have already deployed a lot of FLOSS and the overall plan for a more open government should call for open standards and FLOSS.
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Openness/Sharing
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The cost and complexity of commercial robot surgeons has meant slow penetration in the market and to only one player–Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci.
But that could all change if researchers at the University of Washington (UW) carry out their plans to accelerate innovation in surgical robotics.
UW researchers will do final testing and then ship their latest version of robots named Ravens to five universities, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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The rapid expansion of digital technologies, and opening up of new channels of communication and information, challenges notions of the ownership of ideas. Richard Hillesley investigates…
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Finance
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Steven Delaney, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC, talks about a Wall Street Journal report, citing people familiar with the matter, that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. offered to buy a bundle of risky mortgage bonds that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York acquired in the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc. Delaney, speaking with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop,” also discusses the outlook for mortgage securities.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. approached the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with a bid for a block of the mortgage bonds assumed from American International Group Inc., prompting the central bank to weigh an auction of the debt, three people familiar with the matter said.
The central bank may sell securities held by its Maiden Lane II vehicle with a face value of about $7 billion, said the people, who declined to be identified because the deliberations are private. New York-based Goldman Sachs may have sought the bonds for itself or clients, they said. Four or five dealers may be asked to assemble bids this month, they said.
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You may have noticed that the rehabilitation of Goldman Sachs is in full throttle. Its brand is coming back according to YouGov’s BrandIndex’s Buzz score. Goldman’s share price has been falling recently but Goldman never seems to go without clients. Goldman is being sued by a number of individuals and firms but that is just the cost of doing business and they have set aside billions of dollars to deal with that contingency.
Adam Davidson of The New York Times is offering his bit to rehabilitate Wall Street and that includes Goldman Sachs. His take on Wall Street is that without Wall Street “The poor would stay poor;” “There would be no Middle Class;” and “Lots of awesome things would never happen.”
He asks two questions: “How does Wall Street do this?” and “Is it still O.K. to hate Wall Street?”
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Censorship
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This follows a decision in Düsseldorf at the end of last year, where a judge had ruled that Vodafone and Telekom were not responsible for the content of Web sites, because they played no role in selecting material, and therefore should not be forced to block access. Moreover, the latest judgment can be used as a precedent in similar cases, according to the Der Spiegel report.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Internet is set to witness a phenomenal change in 2012 with 5 major changes under way, having the potential to modify Internet history like never before. A technical upgrade is going to happen from Internet Protocol version 4 to version 6 and key Internet infrastructure and operations contracts controlled by the U.S federal government are going to be re-bid.
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One of the first Canadian digital-era laws was the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act, a model law created by the Uniform Law Conference of Canada in the late 1990s. The ULCC brings together officials from federal, provincial, and territorial governments to work on model laws that can be implemented in a similar manner across all Canadian jurisdictions.
While a federal e-commerce law may have been preferable, the constitutional division of powers meant that it fell to the provinces to enact those laws.
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DRM
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Cory Doctorow’s “keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress” and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC “free and open.” Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven’t watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.
I’m generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I’m not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow’s focus on the copyright war we’re facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I’m not sure it covers everything.
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“Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and ‘Anna Kournikova.’ The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company’s 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million. Today, the stakes are much higher. ‘TWC Next’ will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Well, well, well. It looks like some in DC are starting to get the message that there is real concern with SOPA/PIPA. The latest is that the fact that SOPA/PIPA support is becoming “toxic” is starting to make the press. In response to that, plus significant pressure from those within the government who are concerned about online security issues… the folks behind both SOPA/PIPA are doing some trial running of finding out how people would respond if they just completely dropped the DNS/site blocking aspects from the two bills. The goal is to get the tech industry to “stop opposing” the bills (if not actually support them). Clearly, the opposition is having a pretty big impact, and we’re hearing that some of the “pressure” to “fix” these bills is coming from pretty high places. Separately, even with the House Oversight Committee hearings scheduled for next Wednesday, it sounds like Lamar Smith has decided he wants to restart the SOPA markup on the same day (perhaps with a new version of SOPA… sans DNS/site blocking).
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Last year, as I was checking the licensing and attribution on the tracks in my soundtrack library for Lunatics, I came across a bizarre and rather disturbing practice: bait and switch licensing as a ploy to sell music. This is a truly weird idea, if you understand what a free-license means, and it’s deeply unethical, but here’s what I think is going on: the artist (or more likely, some intermediary, such as a small record label) gets the idea of using a “free” loss-leader to try to draw people into buying a commercial/proprietary album. This is okay in itself, but the problem lies in that confusing word, “free”.
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Dammit, this is frustrating. You see how prophecy works? It’s just like in the stories, where you make a wish to a genie and you wish to be a millionaire, and then you’re buried in piles of worthless Zimbabwe currency that’s worth about $1.88 American, and the genie goes, “Oooooh, you meant in DOLLARS! Well, sorry, you already spent your wish.”
A while ago last December, I spake the Prophecy “SOPA shall not pass”. And I promised to follow up on that, which I’m doing now.
It came half-true: Lamar Smith has now cut the DNS-blocking part from the SOPA bill. This was the part that made the bill so Draconian and had everybody in such an uproar. So, without the Gestapo-like powers to black out millions of websites at the fingertips of the Black Hand of the MPAA/RIAA, SOPA now becomes another toothless, gummy, mushy bill that kinda-sorta makes online piracy a no-no, just like twenty other laws we already have.
But they’re still trying to pass SOPA anyway.
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Interesting blog post by Peter Brantley over at Publishers’ Weekly last week, mocking the big publishers for supporting SOPA/PIPA, despite the fact that it (1) won’t stop much, if any, infringement, but (2) will have massive unintended consequences. The first half of the post focuses on SOPA/PIPA and uses the recent Cory Doctorow talk we wrote about to highlight how this is yet another example of old line content businesses not understanding how the technology works.
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With the news that the ESA supports SOPA, thus representing all its member companies on the matter, many gamers have taken to writing to ESA member companies asking for their input on the matter and especially asking them to oppose the legislation. As Kotaku reports, one such gamer has received word back from Sega after writing a very nicely worded letter outlining his concerns over SOPA.
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Want to understand just how insane things may get under SOPA/PIPA? Just take a look at what’s already happening under today’s laws. Back in 2010, one of the first websites that Homeland Security’s ICE (Immigrations & Customs Enforcement) group seized was TVShack.net. TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing — but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O’Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times — with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.13.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Maybe it’s just a sign that I’m getting old, but more and more often lately I’ve found myself thinking thoughts like, “Back in my day, Linux didn’t have X, Y and Z. We did without!” With these sentiments in mind, I decided to put together a list of a few major desktop Linux technologies that millions of users now take for granted, but which didn’t exist only a few years ago. Read on for a look.
First, though, I should caution that this isn’t a paean to desktop Linux’s infallibility. There certainly remains a lot of room for improvement in the Linux experience, both on the desktop and beyond. But that said, it’s also worth recognizing the clear progress that has been made over the course of the last several years, bringing innovations that — if you’re like me — you may now simply take for granted.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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With the merger of the first changes into Linux 3.3, the number of lines of kernel source code has passed through the 15 million mark. Maintenance of Linux 2.6.32 is set to end in one month’s time, while Linux 3.0 and real-time kernels based on it will be maintained for the next two years.
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Toward the end of December, LWN looked at the new push to move various subsystems specific to Android kernels into the mainline. There seems to be broad agreement that merging this code makes sense, but that agreement becomes rather less clear once the discussion moves to the merging of specific subsystems. Tim Bird’s request for comments on the Android “logger” mechanism shows that, even with a relatively simple piece of code, there is still a lot of room for disagreement and problems can turn out to be larger than expected.
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Network virtualization startup Big Switch Networks this week confirmed the release of an open-source controller based on OpenFlow, the increasingly popular switching and communications protocol that addresses packet routing on a software layer that’s separate from a network’s physical infrastructure.
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The CompuLab Trim-Slice is quite an interesting dual-core ARM Tegra 2 device. This nettop/desktop-oriented system ships with Ubuntu 11.04 by default, but it is also well supported by Arch Linux. In this article are some tests of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.0GHz system running under Arch.
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Graphics Stack
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Alpha quality patches were published today that introduce the “Virtual GEM Provider” for the Linux kernel DRM, which can improve the software-based acceleration experience for graphics.
First some history… Back in September the Softpipe driver for Gallium3D became slightly more useful when GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support came for software drivers, which is needed for some compositing window managers to function. In October that support then came to the LLVMpipe driver, which is the more useful software-based graphics driver since it takes advantage of LLVM for real-time shader generation and can take better advantage of modern CPUs to deliver slightly better performance.
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Continuing in the coverage of the soon-to-be-out Mesa 8.0, here are some benchmarks of the CPU-based LLVMpipe software driver for Gallium3D.
LLVMpipe is the CPU-based software rasterizer driver that is faster than the standard Gallium3D “Softpipe” since it leverages LLVM for taking advantage of more of the CPU — especially on modern hardware with SSE3/SSE4, multiple cores, etc. See LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU and Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme for just a small portion of the Phoronix coverage of this unique software driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The two programs here, “iclock,” and, “ibanner,” are simple, and, hopefully, useful programs that demonstrate how displaying animation on Linux desktops is as easy as accomplishing the same tasks on Windows or Macintosh displays.
Linux desktops are actually capable of displaying fantastic, animated graphics. The main difficulty, as usual, is that Linux and the the X Window System provide so many options that it’s difficult for beginners to navigage through all of the programs and libraries needed to accomplish any task.
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Yes, this is another post on the internet about properly aligning your SSD partitions on Linux. It’s mostly my notes that I have gathered from other posts around the net. Please read the whole post before starting to create partitions on your SSD.
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The recently released systemd v38 includes Journal, the syslog alternative originally announced last autumn. Developed to a large extent by Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the extension for the sysvinit and Upstart alternative systemd is intended to, in the long run, solve some of the problems the developers see in the logging service syslog. For many years, syslog has been the de facto standard for system-wide protocolling on Unix systems. When Journal was announced, it received a lot of criticism, especially for the extent of its reach, as can be seen in this discussion on an article on LWN.net about the Journal announcement.
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Wine
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CodeWeavers is now working towards CrossOver 11.0 as the next major version of their Office and Gaming products that allow popular Windows software to run unmodified under Linux and Mac OS X platforms. CrossOver 11 will be based upon the Wine 1.4 release and is expected for release in just a few months.
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Games
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The game is based on Darkplaces engine and brings back Quake like old school goodness with a difference. Rich cel-shaded graphics, sound effects and colorful environment give the game an altogether new feel and make it more light hearted.
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Desktop Environments
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It seems like the recent discontent over GNOME 3 and Unity has caused a renaissance in DEs that act more traditionally. Xfce is gaining popularity as it basically replicates GNOME 2.X and can do even more now, while KDE is winning over users attracted to its shininess and power. LXDE is also gaining attention as a DE that pushes the limit of how stripped-down a DE can be before it is just a WM again, while Enlightenment seems to be gaining renewed interest thanks to Bodhi Linux. Linux Mint has modified GNOME 3 through MGSE, and now it is replacing GNOME 3/Shell with GNOME 3/Cinnamon. Yet only one of these alternatives (KDE) uses the Qt toolkit; save Enlightenment, which uses the E17 toolkit, all the others use GTK+. Until now.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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From the Mageia 2 Alpha 3 release notes, “Following the standardisation effort going on in other distributions, Mageia has decided to adopt systemd for booting. This would lead to a simpler boot process, and easier maintenance. More details can be found on the systemd website. The option of keeping the current init system will be offered for people who prefer to wait a little and switch with a next release.”
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Anne Nicolas announced the release of Mageia 2 Alpha 3 today. With plans of using the latest of major software packages, the alpha ships with some of the latest packages available. The release plans include KDE 4.8, GNOME 3.4, Linux 3.3, MariaDB 5.5, and systemd.
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Gentoo Family
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Say “Gentoo” and most people think of a source code based DIY distro. However, this is a pre-built desktop system that comes as 3.4GB disk image. Michael Reed takes it for a spin…
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Red Hat Family
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Open source business intelligence vendor JasperSoft wants its software to become another arrow in the quiver for developers using commercial PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offerings.
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Debian Family
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Steve McIntyre has been contributing to Debian since 1996, 2 years before I joined! But I quickly stumbled upon Steve: in 1999, he was struggling with getting his debian-cd script to produce 2 ISO images (it was the first time that Debian did no longer fit on a single CD), I helped him by rewriting debian-cd with a robust system to split packages on as many ISO images as required.
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Derivatives
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I had heard of this Linux distribution a long time ago. Different readers who commented on my blog mentioned it. But I continued postponing a review of it all for a long time. The last time the Mepis name was dropped was during my interview with Geek-in-Pink who mentioned this distribution as her favourite.
The time has come.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is showing here at CES Ubuntu TV: a version of its Linux OS aimed at televisions (as the sharper among you may have spotted from the name). Ubuntu TV is still in beta – a spokesman told us it was really ‘more of an alpha’ – but it could be available on retail products within the next 12 months.
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The Unity development team at Canonical has published a development build aimed at testers of version 5.0 of its custom desktop interface for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Users running the current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” alpha can install the preview release by manually adding the Unity PPA, which is hosted on the Unity Team’s Launchpad.net page.
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Are you a cutting edge Ubuntu user that’s been using Precise Pangolin since it was made available December 1? If you are, you’ll want to try out the just-released Unity 5.0. It’s an absolute test version, and you won’t want to install it on your production machine, but if you’re running 12.04 we’ll assume you’re already running a test box, so let’s dig into the process and changes.
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One of the biggest pieces of tech news last year was the development of a $25 PC by a charity in the UK known as the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Producing a fully-functional PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is no small feat.
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TI (Texas Instruments) used this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to demonstrate its freshly minted OMAP 5 processor, which it claims will be the first ARM Cortex-A15 product on the market. Shown off on an Android 4.0 smartphone reference platform, the SoC (system on chip) will support both tablets and thin-and-light notebooks, the chipmaker promised.
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Phones
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New details on the forthcoming MeeGo update for Nokia N9 users have just emerged this morning, courtesy of a batch of leaked screenshots and firmware information. Originally posted by a user on talk.maemo.org, the shots point to many upcoming functions with which Android and iOS users are already familiar, including copy-paste browser support and a notably iOS-like folder layout. Also included in the screenshots are support for video calls and tweaks to the OS’ camera and gallery apps, though details remain unclear. Equally unclear is the release date for PR1.2, though the screenshots cite a build date of January 30th, so it may very well be nearing.
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The Linux Foundation’s Tizen project has previewed an alpha version of its MeeGo and LiMo-based mobile operating system and SDK. The HTML5-oriented release — including components from the carrier-backed WAC interoperability standards and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — follows rumors of Intel-based Tizen tablets, plus a screenshot leak that suggests an appearance on an upcoming Samsung I9500 phone.
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What may sound like a perverse concept is actually one of the many ways smartphones can change your life. If you play a musical instrument but don’t happen to have perfect pitch (most of us, sadly), you can buy a tuner, pitch pipe, tuning fork or any number of other aids to keep yourself in tune. If you have a smartphone in your pocket, however, you also can simply download gStrings. Available in the Android Marketplace in either a free ad-supported version or an inexpensive ad-free version, gStrings will help you tune any number of instruments accurately.
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Android
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As new Android flavors develop, particularly with the new version developed by Amazon for the Amazon Fire, the debate rages over whether fragmentation is actually a problem for developers or a red herring introduced as open source FUD.
Just this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman tried to tamp down any concerns about fragmentation saying that it was about freedom for developers and handset manufacturers to compete on what he calls differentiation.
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Parrot announced three new versions of its Android-based Asteroid in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform: a 3.2-inch Asteroid CK Bluetooth hands-free system, a five-inch Asteroid Nav navigation system, and the Asteroid 2DIN multimedia car radio. Parrot also announced a revised 2.0 version of its Linux-based Parrot AR Drone “quadricopter” flying drone that can now be flown with an Android phone.
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Polaroid announced an Android-based, 16-megapixel camera with a 3.2-inch touchscreen, Android Market access, and Wi-Fi for quick uploads to social networks. The Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera offers 3x optical zoom, 5x digital zoom, geo-tagging, and automatic face and smile detection — but response time isn’t exactly “instant,” according to one preview.
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Android 4.0 a.k.a Ice Cream Sandwich is nowadays what every Android fanboy dreams about. We are all looking forward to more ICS powered devices like Galaxy Nexus and Transformer Prime. However, we shouldn’t forget devices that were launched last year and are expected to receive the ICS update!
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Oh. It was Dell. Oddly, the Dell CCO seems reluctant to mention the Streak, instead talking up future products with “We have been taking our time.” (Time to recover from the Streak, you mean.) Sadly, WebProNews doesn’t catch the omission either, and dully remarks that it’s “surprising that Dell has not entered into the tablet business”. (Entered it without crashing and burning, you mean.)
WebProNews gives its source as Reuters, whose article does mention the Streak – though so quickly you’ll miss it if you pause to spoon more corn flakes. After that gloss, Reuters simply goes along with the ruse that the Streak never happened. “Dell Inc intends to launch its first consumer tablet computer in late 2012″, proclaims the article. First?
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In the past week, the Kenyan media has been awash with reports that cyber cafes are ditching proprietary software for the perceived cheaper and user-friendly open source software.
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Events
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Forty three people have registered to attend the inaugural AdaCamp in Melbourne on 14 January, according to the event’s organisers.
The event, aimed at discussing ways of boosting women’s participation in open source, open culture and open technology in general, is organised by the non-profit Ada Initiative.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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A post by Kevinjohn Gallagher on “no longer recommending WordPress” to his clients has gotten a bit of traction lately. While there’s legitimate criticism to be leveled at WordPress, Gallagher’s isn’t (for the most part) it. If you’re approaching WordPress with the expectation that it’s the be-all and end-all of content management systems (CMSes) you’re going to be sorely disappointed. And frankly, I hope WordPress never tries to fit the ridiculous list of requirements that Gallagher tries to saddle it with.
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Education
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The Maricopa Community Colleges Small Business Development Center is launching a series of classes to teach entrepreneurs how to use free open-source software to manage their business operations.
The program is being funded by a $60,000 grant from Hewlett-Packard Development Co. LP.
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On Tuesday evening, my teen daughter and I had some quality bonding time over milkshakes and the first season of Star Trek, which was timely considering the conversation I’d have the next day with a couple of NASA employees.
In my Wednesday phone interview for an article I was writing about the new NASA open source outreach efforts, I asked William Eshagh, a technologist working on Open Government and the Nebula Cloud Computing Platform out of the NASA Ames Research Center, about the efforts NASA makes to help increase diversity in the STEM fields.
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Business
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BSD
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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on stable/8 and adds many new features. Some of the highlights:
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard , Johns Hopkins, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.
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I’ve been following the story about the scientists who have been working to figure out how H5N1 bird flu might become transmissible from human to human, the controversial research they used to study that question, and the federal recommendations that are now threatening to keep that research under wraps. This is a pretty complicated issue, and I want to take a minute to help you all better understand what’s going on, and what it means. It’s a story that encompasses not just public health and science ethics, but also some of the debates surrounding free information and the risk/benefit ratio of open-source everything.
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Open Hardware
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Arduino is an open embedded hardware and software platform designed for rapid creativity. It’s both a great introduction to embedded programming and a fast track to building all kinds of cool devices like animatronics, robots, fabulous blinky things, animated clothing, games, your own little fabs… you can build what you imagine. Follow along as we learn both embedded programming and basic electronics.
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Infrastructure as a Service is that part of cloud computing that allows you to lease and manage computing infrastructure for your business needs. Computing infrastructure includes virtual machines (VMs), operating systems, middleware, runtime components, network, storage, data and applications. Cloud computing vendors provide the necessary underlying physical hardware (servers, network, storage) that they own and manage transparently in the background. The two worlds have little crossover. The cloud vendor and customer have a non-intrusive relationship with one another just as you currently do with your web hosting provider. They’re there when you need help but their direct involvement in your business is zero.
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The Internet Systems Consortium is looking for a few more good programmers to bring the next generation of its open source BIND DNS server software to fruition.
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Finance
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I went and found the prospectus and it’s fascinating for someone, like me, whose understanding of Islamic finance basically comes from Wikipedia. Now, even I know that the basic idea of a sukuk is to replicate a fixed income, or let’s say not-quite-common-equity-anyway, financial instrument without the use of “interest,” because interest is forbidden under Shari’a law. This, actually, is a topic close to my heart, because it turns out that in regular old American law sometimes “interest” is also forbidden, and by “forbidden” I mean “taxed,” which means that people who do what I used to do have certain incentives to turn things that look like taxable interest into things that look like non-taxable equity returns and vice versa. One thing you learn in that line of work is that it’s in large part the business of defeating substance with form: you pay for the use of money over time, but fall into some category of “paying for money over time” that isn’t what that is normally called, viz. “interest.” There are ways to do that in American tax law (one is called “option premium,” true story), and there are apparently ways to do it under Islamic law (one is called “murabaha,” which is what GS is aiming at here, and it’s basically the equivalent of “getting paid a fee for brokering a commodity transaction with forward settlement”).
It’s unclear if Goldman achieved that here. People have said that the Goldman sukuk does and does not* comply with Islamic law, and I am the last person in the world to weigh in on that, so whatevs. Apparently there’s at least controversy. And here’s the thing: when you are in a line of work that exists to privilege form over substance, you really really have to get the form right. Implying that you’ve gotten signoff from people who you haven’t gotten signoff from is … unhelpful.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Every since the very beginning of the Internet, new top level domains (TLD) have been added incrementally. Currently the number of TLDs stands at 22, but thanks to a process that begins today that number could be over 1,000 by this time next year.
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The U.S. Congress’ road to Stopping Online Piracy (SOPA) and PROTECT IP (PIPA) has had some twists and turns due to technical constraints imposed by the basic design of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). PIPA’s (and SOPA’s) provisions regarding advertising and payment networks appear to be well grounded in the law enforcement tradition called following the money, but other provisions having to do with regulating American Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so as to block DNS resolution for pirate or infringing web sites have been shown to be ineffectual, impractical, and sometimes unintelligible.
For example an early draft of this legislative package called for DNS redirection of malicious domain names in conflict with the end-to-end DNS Security system (DNSSEC). Any such redirection would be trivially detected as a man in the middle attack by secure clients and would thus be indistinguishable from the kind of malevolent attacks that DNSSEC is designed to prevent. After the impossibility of redirection was shown supporters of PIPA and SOPA admitted that redirection (for example, showing an “FBI Warning” page when an American consumer tried to access a web site dedicated to piracy or infringement) was not actually necessary. Their next idea was no better: to return a false No Such Domain (NXDOMAIN) signal. When the DNS technical community pointed out that NXDOMAIN had the same end-to-end security as a normal DNS answer and that false NXDOMAIN would be detected and rejected by secure clients the supporters SOPA and PIPA changed their proposal once again.
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Either Hoffman didn’t understand what happened or he’s being purposely misleading (neither of which makes CreativeAmerica look very competent). No one is complaining about them sending out an email urging supporters to contact Senators. What they’re complaining about is that the text is almost identical, and uses the same three bullet points that folks at Public Knowledge admit they “over-edited” internally, including a long discussion that turned what had formerly been a paragraph into three separate bullet points.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In other words, they created a broader IPR exemption to transparency to make it more difficult to obtain information and found that IPR as an argument could be easier applied to deny access to documents. I wonder why Parliament under its rapporteur MEP Michael Cashman did not attempt to revert it.
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Copyrights
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In ever-increasing numbers, law enforcement is finding itself on the receiving end of the camera. Every low-end cellphone comes equipped with a still camera at the very least, and most have the ability to capture video. With a large percentage of the population equipped to document their interactions with law enforcement, hundreds of taped encounters have surfaced, most of them capturing policemen behaving badly.
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Another pro-SOPA/PROTECT-IP op-ed detailing the horrors wrought by “rogue sites” has appeared at The Hill. This time, it’s William Jenaway of the Congressional Fire Services Institute decrying the ready availability of counterfeits goods and the risk to “public safety” these items pose.
It opens with the usual “the internet is wonderful but mostly it’s a den of thieves” rhetorical device before wading into the shallowest waters of the overused “appeal to patriotism” argument, stating that “Foreign-owned, rogue websites are increasingly selling counterfeit products to U.S. consumers,” reminding us yet again that xenophobia and lousy legislation still go hand-in-hand far too frequently.
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We hear it all the time: the entertainment industry legacy players insist that the world is ending, jobs are going away, and that they need new laws like SOPA and PIPA or it’s all over. That’s why SOPA & PIPA are being positioned as jobs bills. Especially popular are the major labels and the big Hollywood studios insisting that they’re really doing this not to save their own companies from having to adapt, but to protect the poor, poor indie creator, who is totally being destroyed by those evil online pirates. We hear time and time again about how it’s really the “indie” folks who are being decimated.
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A recent Techdirt post reminded us that thanks to its crazy copyright laws, the US won’t be seeing anything new in the public domain for many years. But even in those “fortunate” countries that get to use cultural works a mere 70 years after the creator’s death, the situation is still pretty absurd.
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Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.
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01.12.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While we still haven’t been able to deliver any Radeon HD 7000 series Linux benchmarks, we do know what are AMD’s three priority projects right now for their open-source Radeon Linux driver stack.
The three priorities right now for AMD and their open-source Linux driver stack come down to Southern Islands support, OpenCL, and UVD/video. If you’re part of the Phoronix Forums community, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since it was there where this information was first shared.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Follow the forum instructions carefully, because it’s possible to brick the device. Often, the first release day of any community-released code will be athwart with danger — the experimenters that day know it and like the thrill. We don’t. The first day of a recent Google TV upgrade bricked numerous devices. As a beginner, wait a few days after a release for the kinks to get ironed out, and always reads the forums carefully.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The new interface introduced with the latest version of Ubuntu has had a mixed response. MyUnity offers an easy way to change some of the visual settings. This can make the Launcher and Unity in general easier to use as well as that satisfaction in having it set up exactly as you want.
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At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Monday, platform vendor Canonical unveiled a special version of Ubuntu that is designed for televisions. The platform has an integrated media library manager and will offer DVR capabilities. It includes a variant of the Unity shell that is intended to be operated with a television remote control.
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Flavours and Variants
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The first release candidate of Linux Mint 12 KDE was made available for download yesterday, but do not be surprised if the “stable” version is released next week. While we await that, here are a few screen shots for your viewing pleasure.
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The CMOS camera platform transmits image data directly to the monitor via HDMI/DVI or is directly saved on the memory card. The processor and the embedded Linux operating system are directly on-board. The platform provides high-definition live streams, up to 5 Mpixels, with a maximum 20 frames/s. Facial recognition and motion detection may also be implemented.
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The tiny motherboard seen in the photo here forms the core of the Raspberry Pi computer, which has generated a lot of interest, as we originally noted here. Last month, as both CNet and Business Insider noted, the Raspberry Pi ultra low-cost computer was moving toward the manufacturing stage. It’s designed to run Linux via an ARM processor, and there will reportedly be versions available for $25 and $35. Now, there is word that manufacturing has begun, and there are more details about this diminutive, low-cost, yet surprisingly powerful computing device.
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FIFTEEN QUID Raspberry Pi computers are being manufactured and will soon be on sale.
Sadly, perhaps, the home grown PC on a USB stick is being made overseas due to a desire to keep costs down.
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Phones
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The Linux Foundation’s Tizen project has previewed an alpha version of its MeeGo and LiMo-based mobile operating system and SDK. The HTML5-oriented release — including components from the carrier-backed WAC interoperability standards and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — follows rumors of Intel-based Tizen tablets, plus a screenshot leak that suggests an appearance on an upcoming Samsung I9500 phone.
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Remember Tizen? You know, Intel’s Linux-based OS, which evolved from MeeGo when Nokia bailed. Surprise: It’s one of three OSes Intel is hoping to get onto tablets this year, along with the better-known Windows 8 and Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich.”
“In our tablet business, we made a commitment to move a lot faster,” said Mark Miller, director of marketing for Intel’s netbook and tablet segments. “We have a lot of room to make up.”
Here at CES, that includes showing off a slim, light Lenovo Android-powered tablet that runs on Intel’s new Medfield Atom Z2460 chipset. The Lenovo tablet (shown at left) is under 9mm thick and runs for up to eight hours on a charge. It’ll be coming midyear, Miller said.
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Android
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HDMI Dongle is an Open Source, USB-sized set-top box from Always Innovating, a technology outfit based in San Francisco, CA USA. A TV on a stick, it is designed to turn any TV with USB and HDMI ports into a connected TV running Android 4. Like the Cotton Candy, it has an HDMI and a USB port. The magic comes via the HDMI port, while the USB port is to power the device from the TV it is attached to.
The hardware specs of the device are: Texas Instruments Cortex-A9 OMAP 4 processor (1.0 GHz to 1.8 GHz), 1 GB RAM, a microSD slot, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules. It comes with a simple remote control that has voice control and Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities. On the software side, it “can run Android Ice Scream Sandwich and is technically compatible with Google TV.”
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AT&T is planning to launch a store for mobile Web applications that run in the browser. The company has released a set of JavaScript APIs and a software development kit (SDK) that provide Web developers with access to certain mobile network features.
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F4S: What is MathGL?
Alexey: MathGL is …
* a library for making high-quality scientific graphics under Linux and Windows;
* a library for the fast data plotting and data processing of large data arrays;
* a library for working in window and console modes and for easy embedding into other programs;
* a library with large and growing set of graphics.
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Free and open source software is steadily growing in popularity in Kenya as firms move to cut costs and achieve more customised technology solutions.
Many companies particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have adopted free and open source software (FOSS) to power their systems in the wake of increasing costs and shrinking IT budgets.
Adoption of FOSS is also seen as a promising solution to software piracy in countries like Kenya.
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In October Google announced pricing for its popular Google Maps API. Though most sites won’t hit the free limits, those with a lot of traffic may be scrambling for a solution. That was the case for a New York real estate service, which discovered their bill would be $200,000 – $300,000 per year.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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With Oracle’s announcement of general availability of the big data appliance, it is filling in the blanks by disclosing that it is OEM’ing Cloudera’s CDH Hadoop distribution, and more importantly, the management tooling that is key to its revenue stream.
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Education
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As universities transition to a mobile-friendly campus, more and more IT departments are considering the benefits of open source technology. Cost is definitely a factor, but schools are just as attracted to the flexibility that open source gives them.
When the University of Chicago (IL) first introduced mobile technology two years ago, a key goal was to launch a product as soon as possible. Developer skills for mobile apps were hard to come by, so it made sense to go with a vendor. “It was faster to have a turnkey product,” explains Cornelia Bailey, user experience consultant for IT Services. Today, the mobile landscape and the university’s thinking have changed. The original product is now “not flexible enough” for the fast-evolving world of mobile technology. Instead, Bailey and her team decided to explore the possibility of going open source.
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Semi-Open Source
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Open-source BI (business intelligence) vendor Jaspersoft wants its software to become another arrow in the quiver for developers using commercial PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offerings.
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As 2012 launches, some good news has rolled in on the employment front, but there are still many people looking for work. As noted in this post, it’s entirely possible to graduate with a technology-related degree but not end up offering in-demand skills to employers. Meanwhile, many tech workers with outdated skills are having to brush up on new skills. For prospective workers looking to differentiate themselves from the pack, new data shows that the intersection of open source and cloud computing can not only lead to a new job, but can lead to a job that will last.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Yesterday afternoon, this reporter was scrambling to finish reporting a forward-looking story about how banks are exploring the possibility of using social media data to judge loan and credit applicants. My editor wanted a quote from a privacy advocate, so I immediately thought of Eben “Spying for Free” Moglen, a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora. In hindsight, perhaps I should have just called Cory Doctorow.
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Openness/Sharing
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SANTA CRUZ, CA–Robotics experts at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Washington (UW) have completed a set of seven advanced robotic surgery systems for use by major medical research laboratories throughout the United States. After a round of final tests, five of the systems will be shipped to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, while the other two systems will remain at UC Santa Cruz and UW.
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Programming
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IBM has released an updated version of its Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) as part of its updated Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools 0.7 (EWDT),. The open source EWDT is designed to simplify web application development using a combination of web services and JavaScript (Dojo and others). The development environment is of particular interest to businesses that are looking to migrate classical COBOL/RPG applications to current Java and JavaScript environments using solutions from the open source community.
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Standards/Consortia/ODF/OOo
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The Open Document V1.2 OASIS Standard has now been published.
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After 4 years of existence, the Community Forum has moved on the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) servers at the end of October 2011 (see details). Here are some figures about how we are doing on the English forum. We will try to make this kind of report on a monthly basis in the forum and perhaps quarterly on the blog.
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I just wanted to send some notes about added features which are part of AOO3.4 version. This one is actually the result of fixing tasks #118558#, #118485#, #108221# and #67705# which are all about GraphicObjects, OLEObjects (OLE means Object Linking and Embedding) and their geometrical attributes and properties. You may take a look at the tasks if you are interested in details, here I want to describe the benefits.
GraphicObjects are used when you insert a picture (pixel and vector data) or convert something to it. They already supported the full attribute set, so line style, fill style, text and shadow are possible. Geometrically, they could be transformed widely, but could not be sheared. Because now the content of GraphicObjects is displayed using primitives (and these are fully transformable) it is possible to also use shear and thus now completely support all geometrical transformations used in the office.
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The bottom line is that shipments of PCs (notebooks and desktops only) are about flat for 2011/2010, with just 1.6% growth. For Q4 only, there was a decline of 0.17%. Worse, for M$, USA, the most M$-friendly country on Earth, was off 6.7% for the quarter and 4.9% for the year. You know the USA, the country where people want to pay extra for words like “super-dooper” and such,
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Security
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Go Daddy was not liable for a form of trademark infringement when a system that the domain name registrar operates was used to redirect visitors from allegedly ‘cybersquatting’ web domain names to a pornographic website, a US court has ruled.
Petronas, the national oil company of Malaysia, had argued that Go Daddy was in breach of US trademark law because it “used” the two domains to re-route visitors to the allegedly infringing sites to the pornography website through its servers in bad faith with the intent of profiting from its actions.
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The first Patch Tuesday for 2012 brings seven bulletins from Microsoft. One was held over from December, and only one of the seven is regarded as being critical.
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Censorship
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In a milestone strategy document on Internet policy, the EU Commission is getting ready to propose new repressive policies. With the upcoming consent vote on the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA and the revision of the “Intellectual Property Rights” Directive (IPRED), the controversial censorship schemes currently discussed in the United States will soon arrive in Europe.
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TWO BULGARIAN filesharing web sites have been raided by the country’s organised crime unit.
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INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS (ISPs) in the Netherlands must block access to the Pirate Bay website within ten days, following a court ruling.
Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN demanded the ban, and the Court of The Hague approved it, so now two ISPs in Holland, Ziggo and XS4ALL have been ordered to block the web site.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report examined the important question of whether internet access is a human right.
While the Special Rapporteur’s conclusions are nuanced in respect of blocking sites or providing limited access, he is clear that restricting access completely will always be a breach of article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to freedom of expression.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.
But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?
From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.
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The long suffering Irish taxpayer will be delighted to learn that the music industry has joined the queue of those seeking a payout and yesterday issued a plenary summons against the State in the High Court for alleged failure to implement aspects of EU copyright law.
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When Prime Minister Noda announced that Japan intended to join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, a grim reality set in. Canada knew it needed to be at the table. This was decided even before President Obama invited Prime Minister Harper to join at the APEC Summit last November.
Canada cannot allow Japan, its fourth most important merchandise export market, to become another Korea, with the US inside the tent enjoying discriminatory preferences and eroding Canada’s market position.
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On December 7, 2011, USTR issued Federal Register Notice 76480-76481 requesting comments on “Canada’s Expression of Interest in the Proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement.” USTR issued similar requests for comments regarding Japan’s (Notice 76478-76479) and Mexico’s (Notice 76479-76480) expression of interest in the TPPA.
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THE IRISH arm of multinational music group EMI has launched a High Court action against the State as part of its bid to stop the illegal downloading of music.
The Government recently pledged to issue an order to allow copyright holders to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that they consider are engaged in piracy.
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HACKTIVIST GROUP Anonymous will turn off its lights for twelve hours in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US.
The hackers are following Reddit’s lead, and will join a communications blackout on 18 January that will begin at 8am and end at 8pm.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The mission statement of developers for the Linux-based SalineOS for desktops puts it this way:
“The primary goal of the SalineOS project is to deliver a fast, lightweight, clean, easy to use and well documented operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux.”
With a wide range and assortment of Linux-based desktop operating systems available for free, developers seeking to attract eyeballs to their software have a particular mission: Standout with something people will need or want real bad.
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I hope all my readers enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I’ve been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you’ve been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don’t worry if your budget’s busted – it’s all free software, you can’t beat these deals.
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Desktop
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I had the opportunity yesterday to visit CTL Corp located in Portland, Oregon and sit down with Erik Stromquist, Executive VP and COO and Michael Tupper, Director of Business Development.
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Linux will make it big the moment the kernel strings becomes unimportant in the desktop sphere. If you must know it, you will fail. As simple as that. Once the software becomes agnostic to the point that you can use it any way you want, including not looking at little strings or looking as much as you want or need, then we will have passed to the next level in the game. Till then, we will get defeated by tiny mistakes in the major and minor numbers, and woe the fool to cross a number-strict geek.
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Chinese PC maker Lenovo has hit a mega deal with Indian state Tamil Nadu. The state will buy 3 lakh (0.3 million) laptops from the company making it one of the biggest deals for the Chinese maker. The Tamil Nadu government recenly announced the free laptop project for students of state-run colleges and high schools. ELCOT earlier issued a controvercial tender where it removed Linux as the requirement. Muktware broke this story. Within a few weeks ELCOT was forced to change its pro-Microsoft policy and put Linux on these computers.
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Server
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Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a “Classroom 3.0″ connected, secure, interactive learning environment.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation has announced its schedule of conferences, summits and training for 2012. In Europe, and co-locating as they did last year, LinuxCon Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe will run from 5-7 November in Barcelona, Spain, alongside the KVM Forum.
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Graphics Stack
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While Mesa 8.0 has a lot to like about it from advertised OpenGL 3.0 support to performance improvements and new Gallium3D features, there are also several shortcomings of this major Mesa release for open-source graphics drivers.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The point of all this is, when did the transition from printed documentation to “online” documentation, which I agree is a good thing because of the paper and weight saved, get changed to “no documentation”? Is this happening just because it is not obvious, nobody is looking, nobody cares, or what?
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Games
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So the web has been abuzz with news of Humble Bundle doing a Humble Indie Store.
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It’s 2012 already and the impact Android had on the overall mobile eco system in the year 2011 was nothing short of spectacular. Nearly 700,000 Android activations are happening everyday(which doesn’t include Amazon, Nook tablets apparently) and Android Market is teeming with some 400,000 applications. I have never been a good PC gamer of sorts, but I’m really enjoying many Android games. Here are my favorite 10 Android games for 2011.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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No feature defines the KDE 4 release series more than Activities. At the same time, no feature is so little understood — Fedora even has a package for removing the desktop toolkit, which provides mouse access to Activities.
But, when you take the time to learn about Activities, you’ll find them a natural extension of the desktop metaphor that just might help you to work more efficiently.
Activities are a super-set of Virtual Desktops. They don’t replace Virtual Desktops — in fact, each Activity can have its own set of Virtual Desktops if you choose. Instead, Activities are alternative desktops, each of which can have its own wallpaper, icons, and widgets.
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Today’s video spotlight is a very polished and well-edited one by Youtube user GhindaUcigasa who aims to show us what happens when Ubuntu’s Unity Shell meets KDE. It’s an interesting concept, to be sure.
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GNOME Desktop
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Are you bored with your current theme? Here are 5 cool GTK2/3 (some also come with a Shell theme) themes that are optimized to work on any “shell”: Unity, GNOME Shell or the GNOME 3 fallback session.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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Two months back, Red Hat developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers proposed a fundamental change to the structure of Linux in the shape of the Journal daemon, meant to replace the venerable syslog.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Explore the thousands of programs available by default in Ubuntu, online, regardless of what operating system you’re using at the moment. Whether you’re a would-be Ubuntu user curious about the software options or a current Ubuntu user occasionally stranded in Windows-land, Ubuntu’s clean and simple online catalogue is a great place to explore.
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Flavours and Variants
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“I gotta ask….why?” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “I don’t see why, now that mint has grown in popularity, they don’t follow Canonical’s lead and pick their own DE which can be customized to their distro instead of trying to keep some horrible kludge of GNOME 2 and 3 running, which I bet will be a buggy nightmare.”
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Last month Linux Mint 12 was released to quite a buzz. It addressed many of the issues disaffected users experienced with GNOME 3 (and Unity). This was great for GNOME users and Linux Mint in general, but hey, what about us KDE users? Well, the KDE version is nearly ready and users can test a release candidate now.
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Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, unleashed a couple of minutes ago, January 11th, the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 KDE operating system.
Linux Mint 12 KDE Release Candidate features updated applications, general improvements and new features, all to make your desktop experience more comfortable.
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First, I must say that all that follows here is my own demented view. But blog thingy already implies that, and about the ‘demented’… well, going against the flow might always be demented, no? Our topic here is Linux Mint. It is very popular right now, but does it really deserve that much popularity?
I don’t think Linux Mint is really important enough to give that much attention. Most of they have, they have because of Ubuntu. And all they contributed to the FOSS is some shiny panels and menus together with some non-crucial tools for package management, hardly worth mentioning in the greater scheme of the things. Cinnamon is still in the works but more on it later. Ubuntu greatly changed their Debian base and started projects like Upstart (which I am fond of), they made great leaps in desktop hardware recognition and use; Mint made some panels and menus. Comparison here is quite clear that I don’t think my intelligent readers (let me butter you up a bit) might need more clarification.
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The control of US military spy drones appears to have shifted from Windows to Linux following an embarrassing malware infection.
Ground control systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, which commands the killer unmanned aircraft, became infected with a virus last September. In a statement at the time the Air Force dismissed the electronic nasty as a nuisance and said it posed no threat to the operation of Reaper drones, but the intrusion was nonetheless treated seriously.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation is planning on revitalising computing amongst young people by bringing back the good old days of tinkering around with programmable computers.
Production has begun for the credit card sized PC, which has an ARM GNU/Linux box that can be plugged into a TV and keyboard. Its system on chip is a Broadcom BCM2835.
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Ah, the beauty of spreading the guts of some hackable hardware across your workbench. This happens to be the circuit board and LCD screen from a Parrot DF3120 digital picture frame. The device is pretty powerful, considering you can still find them available for around $25. You’ll get a 3.5″ screen, ARM9 processor with 8MB or RAM, Bluetooth, a tilt sensor, and more. It seem that [BusError], [Sprite_tm], [Claude], and few others really went to town and spilled all of the secrets this device has to offer.
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I used a PID (proportional–integral–derivative) controller to regulate the temperature of my espresso maker. I wrote about it in my book, Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself. (You can read an except from the chapter on Gizmodo.)
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Phones
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The Tizen Linux project, which is backed by Intel, Samsung, and others, have released some initial code and other information in time for CES 2012.
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Android
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Intel and Motorola announced a multi-year agreement focused on the development of Atom-powered, Android-based phones and tablets. Meanwhile, Intel showed off an smartphone reference platform and a Lenovo K800 handset that both run Android on the “Medfield” processor — now unveiled as the Atom Z2460 — and third-party benchmarks rated the CPU high marks in performance and power consumption.
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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t seem to like it when the word “fragmentation” is applied to his company’s Android mobile OS. Android isn’t fragmented, he said during a recent interview — it’s “differentiated.” But to developers and users, the change of wording may not make much difference. “If developers say Android is fragmented, then it is,” said Flurry Analytics CEO Simon Khalaf.
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CyanogenMod development team member Koushik Dutta has announced that the project’s open source modified Android firmware has been installed on more than one million devices around the world. At the time of writing, the CMStats web page currently shows a total of 1,001,177 installs of CyanogenMod across all versions, with 7,895 having been added in the past 24 hours.
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Micromax and eyeSight partner up to create what seems to be a new type of smartphone. Although, their Android A85 Superfone boasts ordinary specs for today’s standard. This devices offers a 1GHz Dual Core processor, of the Tegra 2 variety, a 3.8” display, and offers Gesture Control.
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Huawei is a brand which is rapidly making a highly ranked place in the mobile market. They started from China as a small brand, they are now famous all over the world. Last year in June, they introduced their first ever Honeycomb tablet which was launched as Huawei MediaPad, and it featured Honeycomb and a dual-core processor. Now Huawei is back with the announcement of Huawei MediaPad, which is the world’s first tablet to feature Android 4.0; also the announcement of Huawei MediaPad Color series but this series will be Honeycomb powered, just like the original model.
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Yesterday, O2 and Three UK have confirmed that they would launch the new Sony Xperia S. And today it was Orange’s turn to do the same.
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Sony have announced a range of ‘smart’ accessories for their latest Xperia smartphones including this the Sony SmartWatch which connects via Bluetooth
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Intel announced the fifth generation of its reference platform for education-focused portable PCs. The Classmate now features a dual-core Atom N2600 processor, delivering battery life of up to 12 hours, plus optional capacitive multitouch functionality, according to the company.
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At CES, ViewSonic announced a seven-inch ViewPad E70 tablet that runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHz processor and costs a mere $170. The company also unveiled a 9.7-inch ViewPad 10e tablet for $270, a 10.1-inch, dual-boot Windows/Android model (the $849 ViewPad 10pi), and a 3.5-inch ViewPhone 3 (Latin America-bound with Android 2.3).
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Chinese device maker ZTE has been promising to enter the North American phone and tablet market for a while, but so far hasn’t made much of a splash in the States. So I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for this sleek new 7 inch ZTE tablet to come to the US. But it’d be kind of nice if it did.
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Big Switch Networks, a startup using the OpenFlow protocol to help companies build software-defined networks, has open-sourced its controller software, dubbed Floodlight. The company, which is one of several startups trying to solve networking issues that arise from virtualization and webscale systems, said on Wednesday that it would release the source code for the controller it developed on its website and will focus on developing an ecosystem of applications around the Floodlight code.
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Don Parris wrote a book a while back called “Penguin in the Pew.” The book is an outstanding guide for nonprofits — aimed at churches, but it can apply to any other nonprofit — in the way to use Free/Open Source Software, which Don like to call “libre,” but you know it’s the same thing.
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Liferay logo Liferay has released version 6.1 of the Community Edition of its open source and Java-based enterprise portal software. Designed to power corporate intranets and extranets, it combines a content management system and a web application framework in one platform. The Community Edition of Liferay contains the latest features and enhancements for the platform which will appear in a few months in the Enterprise Edition.
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That’s no slam on OpenStack, mind you: the Rackspace-owned cloud computing project is much-beloved in the open source community for the technology and the Apache license that covers the project. The fact that governance will be shifting from Rackspace proper to a planned OpenStack Foundation definitely helps, too.
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Google Body has open sourced the enjoyable to use 3D visualisation of the human body built by Google labs engineers in their “20% time”, the fuzzily-measured time slot employees are allowed to use to work on personally inspired creative projects.
The open sourcing of this code is a result of the Google Labs division being closed last year. The code now sits with Zygote Media Group, who provided the imagery for Google Body in the first place.
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Admit it, you’ve got something to say, you’ve got something that the world needs to hear. You’ve got something on your mind that you need to get out, and you want to do it in style. Marco Arment may have exactly what you are looking for. He has released the blogging engine that powers his personal site, Marco.org as open source, available on github under a basic BSD style license. If you do not know who Marco is, you might wonder why this is interesting. Marco’s last side project turned out to be a little thing called Instapaper, and the last web publishing platform he helped build was Tumblr, so his new project is worth taking a look at.
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In this interview Olivier Courtin and Vincent Picavet, founders of geospatial service provider Oslandia, share with us their business story, some advice and how free and open source geospatial software plays a major role in their company. Enjoy the interview!
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Open Source software is created in a number of different ways, but the most common is simply when a developer has an “itch.” Rackspace’s Cloud Monitoring Team had such an itch when it came to having the right tools for the continuous deployment of software to their data centers and that’s how the new Dreadnot tool was born.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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One of the perceived shortcomings of Mozilla’s rapid release cycle, with new browsers every 6 weeks – is that enterprises couldn’t keep up.
So now Mozilla has officially embraced a plan for an Enterprise release version of Firefox dubbed Extended Release Support (ESR). Personally, I don’t think it’s a great idea. In fact, I think it could hurt Mozilla’s mission for improving the web for us all.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle’s speed to market with its Big Data Appliance is indeed impressive, but what still remains to be seen is whether the product will be a success. “Something like 40 percent of computer PhDs are working on Hadoop projects, sometimes unsuccessfully,” noted Schooner CTO John Busch. “It can be a very complex process, so I don’t know if bundling it with hardware will be easy as one-two-three.”
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CMS
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There has been nearly a 25 per cent rise in the number of registrations for the Drupal Downunder conference this year as compared to 2011, according to one of the main organisers, Donna Benjamin.
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Education
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And there’s no reason that US schools couldn’t do exactly the same.
I listen to the war stories my kids bring home, from the tiny, reluctant, Medieval amount of computer education they get. Here is what a junior-high-school computer class in Iowa (top education achievement in the country, mind you) is teaching as of last month: “OK, kids, today we’re going to create an account at a web page. Open the broooowser, use the moooouuuse, click on the liiiink… We’re going to open a ‘Hotmail’ email account…”
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Free and open source software is steadily growing in popularity in Kenya as firms move to cut costs and achieve more customised technology solutions.
Many companies particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have adopted free and open source software (FOSS) to power their systems in the wake of increasing costs and shrinking IT budgets.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Every December for the last few years, NY Times OpEd columnist David Brooks picks the best magazine essays of the year. He describes his choices in two of his cols, with links to the essays in their online versiumns, with links to the essays in their online version. I generally really like his selections. One of his choices this year is a New Yorker article by bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell – Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.
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Security
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Those who follow my dulcet tones on TechBytes or read my musings on the various social networks I maintain will know that recently (after years of being let down) I changed my ISP. With this change brought the expected, a shiny new router, a nice welcome letter and, shovelled into the box was also a free trial of McAfee Anti virus. Of course there was no way of them knowing that the troubles Windows users may get with malware, virus’s and spyware don’t really have any relevance to a Linux user, but nevertheless their “kind” and “free” trial was put in the same place as probably many a Windows machine when it had been brought to a halt by malicious code and the user (through their own lack of knowledge) merely thought the machine itself was broken.
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Finance
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More than a year after first publishing allegations of a multi-billion pound tax avoidance scheme approved by HM Revenue and Customs boss Dave Hartnett, Private Eye has published details of a second tax scheme by Vodafone.
The Eye alleges that, under the scheme, Vodafone Holdings, a holding company based in the US that owns Vodafone’s 45% stake in Verizon Wireless, borrowed billions of dollars from a second company called Vodafone Luxembourg 5 sarl.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I’m sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here).
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The internet makes it easy to redistribute unauthorized copies – SOPA is an effort to put an end to that, albeit at the price of getting rid of the internet. But the internet also makes it easy to reach audiences. From the point of view of the big distributors represented by the MPAA and the RIAA it’s all bad. I’m pretty sure buggy-whip makers didn’t much like automobiles either. But what about the artist? Chris Phelan points us to a recent article about Louis C.K. a successful but not superstar comedian. Rather than taking the $200K that the big distributors would have paid him, he put up $170K of his own money to produce the video of his show. Unlike the big distributors who hate their customers as much as their customers hate them – Louis C. K. has a good relationship with his customers. He put the video on-sale for a quarter of the price the big guys would have charged – $5 each copy. He did it without DRM, and simply asked politely that people buy it from him and not redistribute it. He took in $2 million, a net of about $1.8 million.
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You’ve just got to love those crazy Swedes. Liberal, progressive, cool and politically correct. What’s not to like? They’ve excelled themselves this time though. As dedicated filesharers they applied, and succeeded at the third attempt, to register filesharing as a religion.
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One of the responses to my earlier post about the MusOpen symphony recording project mentioned a project I had overlooked: the Open Goldberg project has created new public domain scores for the Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” using the MuseScore free software musical notation software and is commissioning a studio recording of piano soloist Kimiko Ishizaka performing the pieces, also for public domain release (with CC0).
This is another fantastic confluence of free software, free culture, and crowd-funding, as the project raised over $23,000 to fund the commission. According to the projects’ site, the score produced will be peer-reviewed, making them on par with commercially produced scores.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of Oracle’s big contributions to the Linux kernel is Btrfs, a filesystem that adds many features that enterprises would like to see in Linux. For example, Btrfs allows for snapshots, a maximum file size in the exabytes, compression, integrated RAID features and many other features you don’t find in Ext.
However, Btrfs has been missing a few features—most notably a filesystem check (fsck) tool—that you’d want before rolling it out for production use.
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Server
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The evolution of hardware development and operating system support has allowed mainframes to endure in the modern data center. Today, open source operating systems like Linux have found a home on mainframe platforms such as the IBM z114. This has spurred important improvements in both the operating system and the mainframe hardware. In this Q&A, James Vincent, a senior z/VM systems programmer and director of conference operations for SHARE, offers his expert insights on the future of Linux and mainframes.
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Applications
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Songbird does not fit squarely into one particular category of application. Instead, it is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up all nested in one cozy package. It bears a striking resemblance to the user experience that comes from tabbed Web browsing. And its customization extends far beyond the large collection of plugins.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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With the new year, hard to escape to the temptation of upgrading tool and system.
My last working professional system was done over a Linux Mint 11 installation detailed on this blog so I was first tempted to upgrade with Linux Mint 12, but Gnome 3 provided me bad performances while painting, and the operating system was really missing of simple settings already their in Gnome 2 ( windows colors / thumbnail of my files / panel position / changing ergonomy ). In fact, my Gnome 3 experience was a deception because of that feeling of regression and non flexibility.
So, I tryed the fork of Gnome 2 : Mate ( also delivered on the Linux Mint 12 DVD ). Mate worked pretty well, but was also a regression compare to the Gnome 2 of Linux Mint 11 because of a lot of things who worked for Gnome 2 to readapt to all the new Mate’s name. Plus this, my home hidden preference folder started to look like this : Mate configuration mixed up with Gnome 2 configuration , mixed up with Gnome 3 configuration. So it started to really look like a big mess. And , I don’t really likes to invest a future into forks ; it’s still good to look ahead.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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inux may be enjoying great popularity in the mobile arena, thanks to Android–and even on the desktop, to an increasing extent–but there’s no denying its longtime success on servers.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The name Ubuntu is closely tied to Linux, but that doesn’t mean Ubuntu is only interested in Linux servers and desktops. This week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, is showing off where it’s headed in the consumer space.
Canonical is demoing their Ubuntu TV concept, which puts the Linux vendor’s distribution onto TV sets. They’re also showing In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems powered by Ubuntu. Helping to connect those items together with desktop users, the company is also stressing the importance of their multi-platform UbuntuOne service. UbuntuOne enables users to share and synchronize content across desktop and mobile devices.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint team has announced the availability of a release candidate for Linux Mint 12 KDE, the version of the Linux Mint distribution with the latest version of KDE, 4.7.4. Like Linux Mint 12, it is based on Ubuntu 11.10. This is the first Linux Mint KDE release which, like other recent Mint releases, has hybrid ISO images; this enables the simple creation of a bootable USB stick, which can behave just like a live CD or DVD, using just the dd command. A tutorial is provided to explain how to install Linux Mint via USB.
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Last year Toyota joined the non-profit Linux Foundation, which is dedicated to accelerating the growth of the open-source operating system. The car maker said it was joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold member to maximise its own investment in Linux “while fostering open innovation throughout the automotive ecosystem”.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced this week that its $35 Linux computer has entered the manufacturing stage. The system, which is an open board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM, could be available for sale within a matter of weeks.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Many children pick up an iPad and figure out how to use it right away — swiping and poking the screen in a way that just seems to come naturally to them. One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit organization that produces low-cost computers for developing countries, wants to take the tablet experience to poor children as well. It showcased its XO 3.0 tablet at the International Consumer Electronics Show this week.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It wanted to bring in modularisation and licensing plans for Java with version eight under the handle of something called Project Jigsaw. But some of the Java contributors are worried that Project Jigsaw conflicts with the OSGi module system already geared to Java.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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When I talk to people as a member of FSFE’s education team, there’s always the question what we are actually doing. It is not so easy to come up with something specific. I know we’ve been busy all the time, but ad hoc, it’s difficult for me to name examples, that are worth mentioning. A lot of work that’s being done just doesn’t provide a presentable outcome (more on that below). With this post, I’ll publicly report what we’ve done in 2011 and give a brief overview of what is about to come in 2012.
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Finance
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The New York Times published a column by its leading financial experts, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, on November 22, 2011 which contains a spectacular charge against the Obama administration’s financial regulatory leaders. I have waited for the rebuttal, but it is now clear that the administration does not contest the charge.
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