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07.27.12

Links 27/7/2012: Linux 3.6 Plans, Bodhi 2.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The GUI Bloat Effect

    Something dawned on me just yesterday. When using a slim and clean-lined theme or skin on GUI based software, the user can be easily convinced that the system is actually running faster and much lighter on resources. Or at least that’s how I see it. It is a psychological case, whether this affects only a small percentage of users or is within our nature to believe so, I am unsure. Read on and let me explain.

    The thought came about yesterday when I updated VLC Media Player on my Linux system. I was not only starting to get bored with the default GTK interface used by VLC, but it also doesn’t fit into my IceWM theme. It sort of looks out of place, considering VLC is an application that is open almost all of the time. So I checked out some VLC skins. I decided to install the hx_milky skin.

  • The Writing on the Wall: GNU/Linux Has Arrived

    I have believed, with good reason, that GNU/Linux has “arrived” just about everywhere in IT except in some business desktops and gaming for some time. Certainly, no one needs that other OS to do everything.

    I have been dismissive of gaming as a barrier to GNU/Linux but spotted it as one of three evidences that GNU/Linux has arrived:“Valve has decided to support GNU/Linux with its Steam platform to hedge its bets in case Windows 8 fails”. It used to be that some would do nothing by taking a risk on anything else but now some see that other OS as a risk to the business.

  • OS WARS: Nexus 7 JB 4.1 – iOS 6 – Mountain Lion 10.8 – Windows 8 – Linux

    There’s the word of Linux too, with Linux.com showcasing the “The 2012 top 7 best Linux distributions for you”, where the desktop Linux winner isn’t Ubuntu, but Linux Mint 13, just released in two versions, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” on last Saturday on the 21st of July, and the “KDE” version released on Monday the 23rd.

    There’s also the aforementioned Ubuntu Linux distribution, www.ubuntu.com with the 12.04 LTS (long term support) release having arrived on April 26 2012, and the 12.10 release due on the 18th of October 2012, 8 days before Microsoft releases Windows 8 to GA or “general availability” on retail computers, for online download and through retail boxed purchase.

  • Server

    • Oracle’s file converter holes endanger many server services

      Strictly speaking it is not a single hole, but fourteen holes in the parsing of certain types of tile. The affected file formats are .VSD, .WSD, .JP2, .DOC, .SXD, .LWP, .PCX, .SXI, .DPT, .PDF, .SAM, .ODG and .CDR. A program that opens a specially crafted file with the Oracle libraries is fundamentally compromised. A range of server services are affected, including anti-virus scanners like McAfee GroupShield, but also specific desktop applications that need to handle different file types, such as the Guidance EnCase Forensic toolkit.

  • Kernel Space

    • The Linux Talent Draft is On

      While the NFL season prepares to get underway there is an ongoing, intensive draft for Linux talent taking place right now.

      We hear this from companies large and small, universities from all over the world and from the Linux kernel community, but we also know demand is high for Linux professionals based on our Linux Jobs Report issued this year (produced in partnership with Dice.com). Eighty-one percent of the hiring managers surveyed for the report said that hiring Linux talent this year is a priority. Sixty-three percent are seeking more Linux professionals relative to other hires. But 85 percent said finding Linux talent is difficult.

    • CloudOpen Q&A: SUSE’s Michael Miller on Why Linux is the Natural OS for the Cloud

      In the latest of our LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynote Q&A series we talk to SUSE’s Vice President of Global Alliances Michael Miller. Miller will be talking in his keynote at the events about how service-oriented clouds are bridging the divide between IT and lines of businesses. He also hinted twice during our conversatoin about a big announcement coming.

    • VIA Puts Out Some Linux Kernel, Boot Loader Code

      Earlier this year VIA launched a $49 Android PC and now finally they are releasing the source-code to its boot-loader and kernel.

      VIA still isn’t engaging in anything in terms of open-source graphics following their failed strategy, but at least when it comes to VIA’s APC Android PC, they have now opened up a bit more.

    • Btrfs Filesystem In Linux 3.6 Kernel Has Big Changes

      The Btrfs file-system update for the Linux 3.6 kernel is “a large btrfs update” with new features introduced to this next-generation file-system.

    • Stable kernel 3.2.24

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Coming Soon : Sync Stats, Ratings And More With Amarok

        Amarok has the ability to connect with Last.FM and submit your tracks listened, recommend you music, show your top artists and more. Soon Amarok will be able to sync your stats and ratings as well. Say you listen music from a number of devices, your iPod, phone, PC etc. Now all of them are connected with Last.FM. As the music gets scrobbled, Amarok will submit your ratings (stars), the last played time, track added time etc to Last.FM. So next time you listen music from any other device which supports StatsSyncing, you will be able to get data submitted via Amarok (eg stars, labels, last played date etc) on that device as well!

      • KDE Social Feed Out Online

        KDE is becoming more social and developers are working to include Internet and social network sites right into the KDE desktop. A student developer, Marty, has created an KDE plasma widget as his GSoc project, which allows you to interact with Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca from your KDE desktop.

      • The Qt-based Tea Text Editor: Managing Image and Text Files in One Application

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Flickr your Gnome with Frogr!

        Flickr is maybe the most popular image hosting website in the world, helping millions of users to manage their photos online, and to easily share them on any of the widely used social networks.

        Frogr is a smart and very useful little application that allows you the easier pre-set and upload of your photographs on Flickr straight from your Gnome desktop!

      • Reglue Finds Solus in Gnome3/Unity Wreckage

        The Reglue project was, as many were, caught off guard when both Gnome and Canonical simultaneously lost their minds. With their eyes solidly focused on the mobile market, each moved swiftly to develop an environment that would be both friendly and useful on tablets and phones.

  • Distributions

    • Did Zorin OS Ultimate save me money? You bet it did.

      We have been using Zorin OS since version 3.0 in our business and on our personal computers. I purchased several copies of Ultimate to support Zorin and because of the value added software on the Ultimate DVD. The look changer and splash screen themer are what I call value added. Also, the fact that we can configure our wireless without a wired connection has changed the way we use Linux.

      If the Zorin Team can think of “value added” programs to add to the Zorin DVD, I am convinced they will sell more DVD’s and that would help fund Zorin OS.

    • New Releases

      • LuninuX 12.00
      • Clonezilla 1.2.13-11
      • Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 Released
      • Bodhi 2.0 released!

        Bodhi Linux is proud to present it’s second major release! Bodhi Linux 2.0 is now available for download!

      • Bodhi Linux 2.00 Released

        Jeff Hoogland has announced the release of Bodhi Linux version 2.00. This stable release comes after two months of hard work and bug fixing, followed by a Bodhi Linux 2.00 Release Candidate.

      • Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 stable release arrives

        Alongside the launch of a new web site, the developers at the Bodhi Linux project have published the second major release of their minimal Linux distribution with an Enlightenment-based desktop. As previously described by lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of version 2.0 of Bodhi Linux was not to “introduce ground breaking new features” to the distribution, but rather to smoothly transition to a new version of its underlying operating system.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva SA at FISL 13

        Mandriva will be present at 13th FISL (International Free Software Forum – Brazil), taking place July 25th-28th in Events Center of PUCRS, Porto Alegre. FISL is the most important meeting of the Free Software Communities of Latin America and their 13 years of history have seen many creative and innovative people who encouraged, and believe in the strenght of free software, inside and outside Brazil.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Hardened on the move

        Gentoo Hardened is thriving and going forward. For those that don’t exactly know what Gentoo Hardened is – it is a Gentoo project dedicated to bring Gentoo in a shape ready for highly secure, high stability production server environments. This is what we live by, and why we do what we do. To accomplish this goal, we use a great community of developers & users that work on several subprojects: the implementation of kernel hardening features such as grSecurity, memory-based protection schemes such as PaX, toolchain updates to harden against buffer overflows and memory attacks, mandatory access control schemes such as SELinux and RSBAC.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Is Overvalued

        Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) is a growth stock that provides a variant of the Linux operating system family, which is formally known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (If you haven’t heard of Linux, take your IT guy or IT gal out for a cup of coffee.) Unfortunately, Red Hat trades at very high valuation multiples. When compared to its peers, it is readily apparent that investors should stay away from RHT shares at current price levels, even after considering growth projections. RHT high price multiples should dissuade investors from buying at current prices until its valuations descend closer to those of its peers.

      • Red Hat’s Top 4 Priorities for 2013: Cloud, Virtualization, And…

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Gives Away Raspberry Pi, OLPC For Free

          Fedora is one of the most successful community driven open-source project. Its community is most active, helpful, skilled and diverse. You will find people helping in forums, writing documentation in wiki, maintaining the website, doing artwork, packaging software, coding and more.

        • Fedora rewards contributors with Summer of Fun

          Get a Raspberry Pi for contributing to Fedora this Summer, along with other open hardware in the Summer of Hardware and Fun

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Saga

        I want preface this blog post by stating I am a Debian Linux fan. I think when set up properly, Debian can be almost unbreakable. It can run light and fast and cool, but first you have to get it installed.

        I’ve installed numerous Debian forks and had few if any issues with them, distributions like SolusOS, Linux Mint debian, SalineOS, and Mepis. All were very solid Linux distributions and relatively easy to install. Not so with vanilla Debian.

        My goal was to install Debian to a 16 gig usb stick, essentially installing Debian to an external hard drive. To start with, Debian is not as easy to find and download as say, Ubuntu. You don’t go to the home page and click on the “install” button, you have to search through directories to find what you need. I began with what should have been the easiest way, the Debian Live page and Stable release. I downloaded the KDE image and burned it to a usb stick with Unetbootin and booted up the operating system. So far so good, I had a wired Internet connection that was working and the KDE desktop looked good. So I click on “install”.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Unity On Fedora

            I was delighted to read the news of Unity entering Fedora. Although many associate Unity with Ubuntu, we would like to encourage the wider adoption of Unity in other Linux distributions and projects. Unity is a desktop that is designed to provide a unified experience not only on your desktop for GNOME, KDE and other apps, but also across different devices and screens.

            With Unity getting more eyeballs from Fedora and other distributions, we would like to welcome you folks into the upstream community. If you would like to participate in programming, design, testing, support or other ways of contributing, you are more than welcome! You can find out more here and feel free to post questions of how to participate to the Unity development mailing list or the Unity design mailing list. You can also join our IRC channel at #ubuntu-unity on freenode.

          • Canonical Calls For Volunteers For Ubuntu Accomplishments
          • Help Test Webapps For Ubuntu
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Released

            The third alpha release in the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle has been made available for download.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Radio Lens for Unity
          • VirtualBox: Creating Backups & Clones Of Running Virtual Machines (No Downtime) With LVM Snapshots
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 unifies user menus

            The Ubuntu developers have released the third alpha of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”, the final release of which is scheduled for 18 October. This development release includes several changes over Alpha 2, which was released a month ago. These changes include a reworked session menu, improvements to the update manager and removal of the third party driver installation tool. Upstream changes to the Nautilus file manager have caused theming issues with the default Ubuntu theme, but the developers expect to have these fixed by the time the first beta release of 12.10 arrives at the beginning of September.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 things about FOSS Linux virtualization you may not know

    In January I attended the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo. In addition to speaking and running the Ubuntu booth, I had an opportunity to talk to other sysadmins about everything from selection of distribution to the latest in configuration management tools and virtualization technology.

    I ended up in a conversation with a fellow sysadmin who was using a proprietary virtualization technology on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not only did he have surprising misconceptions about the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) virtualization tools available, he assumed that some of the features he was paying extra for (or not, as the case may be) wouldn’t be in the FOSS versions of the software available.

  • Parse Shows Off Anypic, The Open Source Instagram Clone That Took 30 Minutes To Build

    It took Instagram a good amount of time to build a mobile photo-sharing app that could scale to 50 million users — and its efforts were obviously recognized by others when it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion earlier this year. But Parse, the startup that launched out of Y Combinator last summer and provides backend-as-a-service tools for mobile app developers, says that making such services should not take so much time and money anymore, because Parse’s tools make it much easier and faster to build really scalable mobile apps.

  • Apache OpenMeetings

    We are happy to announce Version 2.0 of Apache OpenMeetings Incubating!

  • Don’t buy that security software!

    Open source doesn’t have to mean free of cost, but thanks to the generosity of open source developers many thousands of great applications are free. Why spend money when you don’t have to? Though if you like and depend on an app, nothing says thanks like clicking the “Donate” button.

  • Why Open-Source Principles Are a Recipe For Innovation

    Two weeks ago, Amy Clark wrote that an open-source model can — and should — be applied to scientific research in the pharmaceutical industry. Using insights from Ashoka Fellow Stephen Friend, she showed that open-source science would eliminate redundant efforts and fast-track lifesaving drugs.

  • Events

    • Interview With O’Reilly Open Source Award Winner Elizabeth Krumbach

      During LinuxCon this year one of the lead Linux kernel developers, Alan Cox, pointed at the challenge the community is facing in terms of gender gap. Unlike other areas where women are in leadership positions open source is an exception. So, we are starting an interview series on Muktware ‘Woman Force In Open Source’ where we will feature one female developer/executive every week. We are starting this series with Elizabeth Krumbach, the winner of the O’Reilly Open Source Award.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Mobile OS Seen in the Wild

        Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. We’ve previously covered the company’s Boot to Gecko platform — an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine — which is part of the effort. And since February, Mozilla’s mobile operating system has moved ahead rapidly. Now, there are new pictures emerging of what some are calling “Firefox OS.”

  • SaaS

    • Top Open Source Cloud Headlines Week of July 23

      This week’s top open source cloud news features VMware’s acquisition of Nicira; a Q&A with Citrix’s Mark Hinkle; the pros and cons of open source cloud platforms for IT managers; and insider news that Nebula has enticed some Rackspace developers away.

  • Databases

    • Oracle Releases Migration Tool For Microsoft SQL Server To MySQL

      Microsoft SQL users will now be able to migrate data from proprietary MS SQL databases to free MySQL databases, thanks to the new migration tool unveiled by Oracle. By switching to a free and open-source RDBMS, companies and individuals will be able to easily save ownership costs by 90%.

  • Funding

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Student With Diabetes Forced To Decide Between Health Care Or Going To College

      A Massachusetts college student with diabetes is facing a tough situation: Either she stops going to college full-time to qualify for the insurance she’s currently using, or she opts for help from the state that isn’t going to give her the quality of life she’s used to. So what’s a student trying to get ahead in life to do — try to get an education on a part-time basis or get along without the insulin pump that helps her treat her diabetes?

      Katie’s had diabetes since she was 9, reports CBS Boston, and her mom has been grateful to qualify for MassHealth. That coverage has allowed Katie to use an insulin pump to regulate her blood sugar, something that at $1,000 a month, her single mother couldn’t afford otherwise.

  • Finance

    • Into the Bailout Buzz Saw

      Thus the collision course was set between Mr. Barofsky and a crew of complacent, bank-friendly Treasury officials. He soon discovered that the department’s natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren’t at risk for fraud and abuse.

      “The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

      To be sure, Mr. Barofsky and his team were up against a powerful status quo. And that meant that they ran into plenty of brick walls.

      “Bailout” covers a lot of ground, running through attempts of the inspector general’s office to ensure that additional rescue programs suggested by the Treasury had safeguards in place to avoid conflicts of interest, collusion and fraud. One battle involved the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to get troubled mortgages off banks’ balance sheets by encouraging private investors to buy them using mostly taxpayer dollars. When the inspector general’s office recommended ways to protect against fraud and to fix other flaws in the program, Mr. Barofsky writes, the Treasury rejected the suggestions, maintaining that they would gut the programs and reduce participation.

    • Sandy Weill, In Stunning Reversal, Tells CNBC It’s Time To Break Up The Banks

      n a stunning reversal, a former big bank CEO who crusaded for policies that helped create the so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks now says we need to break up the banks.

  • Privacy

07.26.12

Links 26/7/2012: Serious Sam 3 for GNU/Linux, Rekonq Reaches 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Flemish voting machines to run on Linux operating system

    The new voting machines to be used by the government of Flanders, Belgium, will use the Linux open source operating system, according to a report by Binnenband, a magazine targeting Flanders’ public administrations.

  • Let’s talk: how to help your team share more with Linux-based communication tools

    Communication and collaboration are crucial to business success; and can be improved when supported by Open Source enterprise unified communications and collaboration platforms. No matter where they are, teams and individuals can work together closely with tools like Linux-based instant messaging, email, document and knowledge management systems and mobile applications. Employees can improve their productivity and performance within teams or between departments.

  • Murchison radio astronomers to get Linux cluster
  • TLWIR Special: Three Signs That GNU/Linux Has Arrived

    Three recent news items provided evidence that the age of GNU/Linux on the desktop is arriving. The years of GNU/Linux languishing on the pc desktop are finally drawing to a close. Here are the three news items:

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • TI Releases Linux Kernel Support For “Keystone”

      Texas Instruments has published their initial Linux kernel patches for providing support for their forthcoming Keystone platform, which is an interesting ARM-based platform dealing with many-core SoCs using Cortex-A15s.

    • DRM Drivers On Linux 3.6 Kernel Aren’t Too Fun
    • Apple OS X Mountain Lion vs. Linux

      As far as why Apple OS X Mountain Lion is being mentioned today on Phoronix is just to say that new OS X Mountain Lion vs. Linux benchmarks will be available on Phoronix in the near future. From earlier this year using development versions there were preview benchmarks of OS X Mountain Lion vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but new benchmarks from multiple Macs will be done in the near future for a more in-depth Phoronix comparison.

    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Paul Mundt

      In this week’s 30 Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Paul Mundt, who works on the SuperH architecture and core parts of the AMR-based SH/R-mobile platforms. He shares a variety of stories from his nearly 20 years of experience working on the kernel, including one that proves collaboration never sleeps, even when you do during an inter-contentinetal flight.

    • 5 Best New Features of the Linux 3.5 Kernel Release
    • Linux 3.5 Boosts Ext4 Filesystem

      For many Linux distributions, the Ext4 filesystem is the default choice, following the decade-long legacy of Ext2 and Ext3. While Ext4 provides a higher degree of performance and reliability in comparison with its predecessors, it has trailed other fileystems. Both Oracle’s ZFS, used in Solaris, as well as Btrfs, which is part of the Linux kernel, have gone a step further than the Ext filesystem family with integrity checks. In the Linux 3.5 kernel a feature called metadata checksum has been added to help narrow the filesystem integrity gap.

    • RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open

      ndre Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a wife, four young children and many friends.

    • Linus Torvalds holds ‘ultimate authority’ on Linux

      Below you can view a nice video explaining the mechanics of how Linux is actually built from a real world software application development perspective.

      The video explains that 10,000 patches go into each new release of Linux, but that after each submission has been checked over by a senior level Linux developer or “maintainer”, when the maintainer finishes his or her review they will pass it on to Linus Torvalds himself how holds “ultimate authority” on Linux before each new kernel can be released.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Radeon Driver Commit Activity Is On The Decline

        After delivering development statistics on the Nouveau driver and the Intel driver, here’s some numbers looking at the development pace of the xf86-video-ati X.Org driver for Radeon graphics cards.

        The Git stats on xf86-video-ati go back to 14 November 2003 with there being 2,970 Git commits in this time from 151 developers. The current size of xf86-video-ati is 64,148 lines of code spread across 83 files.

      • VIA’s OpenChrome 0.3.0: “A Major Step Forward”

        The xf86-video-openchrome DDX driver has been updated today with a version 0.3.0. Xavier Bachelot from the OpenChrome camp describes this release as “a major step forward for the openchrome X.org driver.”

      • RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets New State Handling

        AMD pushed a load of commits this morning into the mainline Mesa Git repository that provide a new state handling implementation for the Radeon HD 7000 series “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver.

      • Intel Releases 12.07 Linux Graphics Package

        Like usual, the Intel Linux graphics package isn’t some new software component release, but rather it’s just what Intel recommends their customers and Linux distributions use for appropriate versions of the upstream Linux components to deploy when running Intel integrated graphics.

      • Wayland 1.0 With Weston Is Near: v0.95 Is Released

        Version 0.95 for Wayland/Weston marks the point of maintaining protocol and client API stability. They will attempt not to break any Wayland clients or toolkits written against this 0.95 protocol/API. The interfaces aren’t completely frozen until the 1.0 release in the near future, but they will to resist breaking things and use appropriate versioning.

      • Radeon Driver Commit Activity Is On The Decline

        After delivering development statistics on the Nouveau driver and the Intel driver, here’s some numbers looking at the development pace of the xf86-video-ati X.Org driver for Radeon graphics cards.

        The Git stats on xf86-video-ati go back to 14 November 2003 with there being 2,970 Git commits in this time from 151 developers. The current size of xf86-video-ati is 64,148 lines of code spread across 83 files.

      • Mesa 8.1 Will Offer Some Speed Improvements For Nouveau
      • Binary Driver Blobs Aren’t Yet Ready For Wayland
      • Intel SNA vs. UXA On Ivy Bridge
      • Intel updates its open source Linux drivers

        Intel’s developers have released version 12.07 of the open source Intel graphics package for Linux systems. The package includes the new X Server drivers for Intel cards as well as several other components that have been tested with these drivers.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Linux Mint 13 KDE Review

        The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 13 KDE. This is an important release for KDE and Linux Mint users as it brings the latest and greatest technologies from KDE and Ubuntu.

      • KDE’s Rekonq browser turns 1.0

        KDE developer Jonathan Riddell has announced that the Rekonq web browser has now reached version 1.0 and is available to download. Rekonq is a QtWebKit-based alternative to the more feature-rich Konqueror browser for the KDE desktop; it uses the WebKit rendering engine and aims to be faster, lightweight and simpler to use.

      • Akademy: Freedom and the internet

        Mathias Klang opened this year’s Akademy with a keynote look at freedom and the internet. It was something of a cautionary tale that outlined the promises that technology brings, while noting that the dangers are often being overlooked. Klang comes from an academic and legal background—he is currently a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Göteborg in Sweden—which gives him something of a different perspective on technology issues.

        Klang’s talk was titled “Expressions in Code and Freedom”, but he came up with a different title the night before the talk: The TiVo-ization of everyday life. That title is “silly”, but it does reflect some of the dangers he sees. He noted that he is not a programmer, but is surrounded by them, and they “put up with my stupidity”. His background in the law means that he “likes reading licenses” and thinks everyone should. His current research is looking into social media, particularly in the area of control by the providers.

      • Qt 5.0 Beta Likely Coming In Early August

        After facing some delays, the Qt 5.0 Beta will likely be published in early August.

        In response to questions raised on the Qt development list, Marius Storm-Olsen of Nokia has shared that the Qt 5.0 beta is likely to come next month. “We are pushing as hard as we can to make it happen asap, but with all the vacations happening in Europe right now I think it will happen in early August.”

      • [Development] Latest stable Qt5 code
      • Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules

        The KDE project has announced Project Neon, an effort to provide daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. The aim of this is to give developers and testers the ability to easily install cutting edge builds of programs from the KDE Software Collection without the risk of creating problems in their working KDE desktop environment.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Committed to Accessibility

        Accessibility is overlooked by many people because they think that it doesn’t affect them. But as Jonathan Snook points out, “accessibility is a spectrum. On one end, there are those with severe cognitive and/or physical disabilities; on the other end… well, what is the other end? People who wear glasses, or are color-blind? What about those who choose to use the keyboard instead of a mouse? Where does one draw the line?” Over time, almost all of us will require assistance of some kind to be able to make full use of our computers and devices.

  • Distributions

    • LPinguy 12.04.1 Screenshots (07/24/2012)
    • Bridge Linux 2012 Xfce Review

      Here is another wonderfully simplified way for less advanced users to get a taste of Arch Linux. This time I will be looking at the powerful but less-known Bridge Linux distribution.

    • Arch Linux 2012.07.15 drops AIF

      Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz has announced the availability of a new installation image for the project’s flexible Linux distribution, the first updated install media since August of last year. Arch Linux 2012.07.15 is a snapshot of the rolling-release operating system for new installations that includes several changes and the 3.4.4 Linux kernel.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon 9 KDE review

        Sabayon 9 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a multi-purpose distribution based on Gentoo Linux. It is a rolling distribution, which means that existing users do not have to reinstall to get the latest edition. The simple act of installing updates and upgrading the kernel gives those users the latest and greatest edition.

    • Red Hat Family

      • German Manufacturing Firm Modernizes IT Systems with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

        Red Hat, Inc. [...] the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Ferrotec, a global market leader in technologies based on the magnetic liquid Ferrofluid that is used in multi-phase motors, dampers for shaft ends and transformer cooling, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization at the core of its infrastructure. Through this Red Hat technology combination, Ferrotec is increasing scalability, flexibility and performance while lowering operating costs.

      • Analysis: Nimsoft, Red Hat Collaboration Sets Stage for Mixed Virtualization, Clouds
        [print article]

        Nimsoft is expanding the reach of its Nimsoft Monitor, adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

        In specific, Nimsoft Monitor for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization streamlines administration for IT using virtualized environments from multiple vendors, Steve Smith, Nimsoft’s senior principal manager for product marketing, told IDN. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an open source virtualization management solution for servers and desktops.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Shows Contributors Some Love

          Fedora (and probably Red Hat) really really appreciate the contribution community developers bring to the popular Linux distribution. So much so, they want to give out some presents – 220 presents to be exact. Since that isn’t enough to go around, contributors will be randomly chosen from a sweepstakes pool.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Accomplishments: Call For Volunteers

            As some of you will be aware, we have working on a project called Ubuntu Accomplishments in recent months. We are making good progress with the project and are working to our 0.3 release. The goals of this release will be:

            * Assure quality and stability in the platform.
            * Provide the ability to publish your accomplishments online.
            * Expand our range of accomplishments.
            * Expand and improve the documentation for our accomplishments.
            * Provide a greater breadth of translations coverage.

          • FiberCloud Adds Ubuntu to its Supported Open Source Operating Systems
          • Amazon EC2 Benchmarks With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

            …here are new benchmarks highlighting Amazon’s public cloud computing platform using all of the major instance types.

          • Help PC Pro write its Linux distro Labs

            In the past couple of years, we’ve seen huge interest in the reviews we’ve published of the different versions of Ubuntu. The popular free operating system has a massive following, and rightly so. It’s a fully fledged operating system, complete with office software and a host of useful tools and utilities. And Ubuntu, which has now reached version 12.04, is now a usable, mature operating system.

            But what of the rest of the Linux landscape? There’s a whole selection of other desktop distributions, or “distros” to give them their collective name, and the choice ranges from simple, lightweight distros designed to run on older hardware to more fully featured operating systems such as Linux Mint and openSUSE. How good are they? Can they challenge the usability of Ubuntu?

          • Foundation introduces software

            While introducing the Ubuntu Linux software — a free open source software (FOSS) — at the University of Fiji on Saturday, Software Foundation Fiji founder Prof Rohitesh Chandra said the new system was readily available at no cost.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 13 KDE released: But does it live up to expectations?

              Hot on the heels of its Xfce build, the final release of Linux Mint 13 KDE is now available for download. This is an iteration that a lot of people have been anxiously awaiting, because it combines a lot of good things in a single package.

            • Peppermint OS Three Review

              Peppermint OS Three, released yesterday picks up from where it left off in version two of this great lightweight distribution. It is based on an Ubuntu 12.04 variant, called LUbuntu which is geared towards the lightweight end of things. Peppermint OS Three is using Openbox as its desktop environment.

            • Bodhi Linux

              Along my quest to find a Linux distro to call home I stumbled across quite a gem – Bodhi Linux. It has to be said that is one of the less popular distributions but, it is by far the most fun!

              Originally an Ubuntu varient I think this one in particular has grown very well on its own. The only noticeable thing that it relates to ubuntu with its the package manager.

            • Xfce edition of Linux Mint 13 released

              The Linux Mint developers have released the Xfce version of their latest release, Linux Mint 13 “Maya”, with version 4.10 of the lightweight desktop environment. The Linux Mint team describes the Xfce environment as user friendly and good looking, and recommends it for systems with constrained resources. As with the other editions of Linux Mint 13, the Xfce version is based on Ubuntu 12.04.

            • Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” KDE

              About a week ago, I reviewed the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya”. While I was quite pleased with how that turned out, I held off on going ahead and installing it because I wanted to try the KDE edition as well. Now that is here, so I’m reviewing it.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Arduino Leonardo released

      The long awaited Arduino Leonardo is now finally available in commercial quantities. It contains a 16 MHz Atmega32U4, which also takes care of USB communication with the host. On the Arduino Uno, a separate chip is required to take care of this. The simpler layout and smaller number of components means that the Leonardo is around £3 cheaper than the Uno. It is available with or without headers for the shields.

    • Microchip Giant ARM Reports Q2 Earnings: Sales £136M, Net Profit £39.4M, EPS Of £3.58; ‘Record Order Backlog’

      ARM Holdings — supplier of microchips for Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, Samsung’s Galaxy line and soon technology for Microsoft’s Windows 8 devices — continues to report strong results while riding the wireless device boom and expanding to newer areas. The company reported Q2 earnings (ended June 30) of £135.5 million ($213 million), beating analyst estimates of $206 million. Net profit was up by 48 percent, to £39.4 million compared to £26.6 million for the same quarter a year ago.

    • Hardware Hacks: Pi in the sky and Linux on the MK802

      Hardware Hacks is the section on The H that collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. Find out about interesting projects, re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition, Raspberry Pi in the sky, Linux distros for the MK802, Chromium on Pi and cheaper ARM quad core boards.

    • Smartenit Adds the Sweetness of Linux Home Automation to Raspberry Pi Making it HomAidPi à la mode

      There is nothing as tasty as homemade raspberry pie in the summer, and the ice cream on top makes it even more delicious, especially when it’s free. Smartenit®, a home and building automation solutions provider, has added the popular Raspberry Pi® board to their repertoire of Linux platforms that run its XML-socket based automation package. The firmware enables the RPi to become a fully-featured and sophisticated automation gateway that manages large home/building automation networks based on ZigBee®, INSTEON® and X10® protocols. “HomAidPi” in a Raspbian equipped RPi plus one of several USB automation interfaces available from Smartenit and other suppliers, provide access to a large ecosystem of automation devices that include lighting, HVAC, irrigation, appliance control, energy management, water management to name a few.

    • Phones

      • Enyo’s Out of Beta – but Will Devs Give it Love?

        Enyo 2 was rewritten from the ground up to enable cross-platform development, supporting mobile and desktop browsers from iOS to IE8. However, its focus is on mobile devices. “Enyo is a good JavaScript/HTML 5 framework,” said Sam Abadir, chief technology officer at appMobi.

      • HP’s Enyo 2 Open-Source WebOS Offshoot Exits Beta
      • Enyo 2 HP open source app is more than webOS
      • HP’s open source Enyo 2 app framework goes gold, not just for webOS anymore

        Uptake of Enyo 2 in the web development community will be an important metric to watch over the coming months; the team says that its vision of a “web-centric future [...] won’t come to pass overnight,” but the final code drop is an important checkpoint nonetheless.

      • Android

        • Android apps for the London 2012 Olympic Games
        • Apple Slides Further on Walmart’s Best-selling Tablets
        • XBMC coming to Android soon

          XBMC Media Center is a very popular free and open source cross platform media player application that is developed by the XBMC Foundation. Being an open source application, XBMC media center software is available for multiple operating-systems and hardware platforms. The latest version features a 10-foot user interface that can be used with televisions and controlled using remote control. What makes XMBC unique is that it lets its users to play and view videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files of various formats from local and network storage media and the internet right out of the box.
          It has been a popular alternative to Windows Media Centre and likes, and now the popular platform is finally going to be available for Android. Previously, there were applications like XBMC remote on the Android Play Store which could control the desktop software, just like the VLC remote app, but this is not just a remote application, nor is it a stripped down “mobile” version of the actual application. It is the real deal, and it promises to deliver the exact same experience that users enjoy with XBMC on a TV set top box, a computer, or any device on which XBMC is available.

        • Encrypted calling app RedPhone goes open source on Android

          Have you ever heard that mysterious click, or burst of static on a phone call and wondered if someone was listening in? Obsessing over such things might be a sign of a larger issue, but if you want to be sure no one is spying on you, there is always RedPhone for Android. Whisper Systems released an official app a while back, but now the product is going open source.

        • This week: Apple vs. Android

          Innovation and litigation meet again this week and next when Apple squares off in courts around the world with rivals Samsung and Motorola. With over a 60 percent market share in mobile device litigation, will Apple, the company that wanted you to “Think Different”, prevail? So far, the results have been mixed.

          Apple lost its patent case against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the U.K. while the same tablet was blocked for sale in the U.S. by a preliminary injunction. Apple has been ordered to run ads in the U.K. stating Samsung did not copy the iPad. The Galaxy Tab patent case in the U.S. is set for trial starting July 30 in California.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Linus Torvalds Loves Google Nexus 7

        Linus Torvalds posted a review about his newly bought tablet, Google Nexus 7, and it seems he is quite satisfied with it. Linus finds Nexus 7 ‘So far: very positive’, as he writes on his Google+ page.. Linus finds Nexus 7 ‘So far: very positive’, as he writes on his Google+ page. He also is not bothered about the fact that the tablet has only a front facing camera – “It’s probably fine enough for some video conferencing, but since that’s not my thing let’s just say “whatever”.”

      • Why a 32GB Nexus 7 is almost inevitable

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Telcos Deny Trying To Turn FCC’s Open Network Diagnostics Into A Closed, Proprietary Affair

  • Security

    • Mac malware Crisis as Apple lets slip its Mountain Lion
    • Black Hat: Wintel Flaw Remained Unpatched For Six Years

      Unknown to tens of millions of users, a hidden security vulnerability has been lurking on many Intel-based Windows PCs for the past six years.

      The vulnerability was found by researcher Rafal Wojtczuk from security firm Bromium. Wojtczuk announced his findings at the Black Hat security conference here in Las Vegas. According to Wojtczuk, the vulnerability he re-discovered was actually first exposed and patched six years ago, albeit only on Linux systems.

      The vulnerability involves the unsafe use of an Intel CPU instruction called ‘sysret’. The risk is that if left unpatched, an attacker could have executed a user-to-kernel privilege escalation attack. In such an attack, the attacker could potential get system access and then execute arbitrary code.

    • NSA open source database draws Senate’s wrath

      Lawmakers are questioning in a recently introduced bill whether a massive National Security Agency database modeled on Google’s BigTable is in conflict with a government policy preventing federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives, reports Wired.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs, Bain Seek Dismissal of Bid-Rigging Lawsuit

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS), Bain Capital Partners LLC and Carlyle Group LP (CG) (CG) urged a federal judge to dismiss an investor lawsuit accusing the largest investment banks and private-equity firms of conspiring to rig bids on leveraged buyouts.

      The financial companies were among the defendants seeking summary judgment from U.S. District Judge Edward Harrington in the five-year-old class-action, or group lawsuit, according to court filings yesterday in Boston.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Turns the “War on Women” on Obama

      Karl Rove’s American Crossroads is hoping to help the GOP regain ground among women, particularly Latina women. According to a Gallup poll President Barack Obama has a 48 point advantage among Latino voters, while a CNN poll finds that women voters back Obama over Romney by a 16 point margin. Now Rove’s Super PAC is trying to make inroads with these voters, releasing an online ad that attempts to turn the “War on Women” charge on Obama. The Super PAC is testing the video in focus groups, with an eye toward potentially creating a 30-second TV ad, according to CNN.

  • Privacy

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Time to Fight for Net Neutrality in the EU

      Net neutrality is one of those areas that most people are vaguely in favour of, without giving it much thought. Governments take advantage of this to make sympathetic noises while doing precisely nothing to preserve it. For example, following a UK consultation on net neutrality two years ago, Ofcom came out with a very wishy-washy statement that basically said we think net neutrality is a jolly good idea but we won’t actually do anything to protect it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • SOPA/PIPA Wakes Up Internet Giants To Realize They Need To Be More Engaged In DC

        Earlier today it was announced that a new industry trade association representing large internet companies, called The Internet Association, is going to be launching this fall, with Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook as the charter members. Part of the thinking behind this group stemmed from the realization of how little influence various internet companies had in DC when SOPA/PIPA came along last year — and a concerted effort to change that.

07.25.12

Links 25/7/2012: Dell Has Red Hat Enterprise Linux Loaded

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Seven Expectations of Linux Users

    Claiming that Linux users are different reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that “the rich are different from you and I” and Ernest Hemingway’s alleged reply, “Yes, they have more money.”

    After all, computer users are computer users. A few geeks may argue over the differences in operating systems, but aren’t average users more interested in simply getting work done?

    Superficially, yes. But operating systems and applications are far from neutral. Behind the code and the interfaces are assumptions about how users should use an application and what they want and expect from an application – even about the relationship between users and an application and its builders.

    Use an operating system long enough, and the assumptions behind it start to shape your expectations — so much so that another operating system may seem hostile and bizarre.

    You can hear the differences any time Linux users mingle with Windows and Mac users. The three groups have very different ideas about their relationship to their software, and communication is regularly confounded by differences in expectations.

    So what do Linux users expect from their operating system of choice? I can think of at least seven replies:

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Introducing Project Neon KVM

        Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. It is an easy way to get the latest code without having to build the entire KDE-SVN tree and maintain the checkout. Project Neon is unstable, but it installs alongside stable packages. It is suitable for contributors such as new developers, translators, usability designers, documenters, promoters, and bug triagers. With Project Neon, people can experiment freely without risk to a working KDE environment.

        Project Neon is especially useful for reporting bugs. With its daily builds, bugs can be reported in the most timely manner. The more time that elapses between when a bug is introduced and when it is reported, the more difficult it gets to find it and fix it. With Project Neon, a bug can be reported on the same day that it is introduced.

      • Searching for Search in KDE

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Reglue Finds Solus in Gnome3/Unity Wreckage

        The Reglue project was, as many were, caught off guard when both Gnome and Canonical simultaneously lost their minds. With their eyes solidly focused on the mobile market, each moved swiftly to develop an environment that would be both friendly and useful on tablets and phones.

      • Making GTK3 themes – Part 2: The gtk.css and gtk-widgets.css files

        This is the second post from the “Making GTK3 themes”series. The first post can be found here.

        We will name our theme as “Dream”. So create a directory named “Dream” under “~/.themes” and then create another directory named “gtk-3.0″ under “~/.themes/Dream/gtk-3.0″. All the files we create will be inside this directory.

  • Distributions

    • Arch Linux Install Media Updated For July 2012

      For those that haven’t heard yet, the Arch Linux 2012.07.15 install media is available as a major installer update for this popular rolling-release Linux distribution.

    • Peppermint Three Screenshots (07/24/2012)
    • Peppermint Three Released, Cloud Based Free Linux OS

      Peppermint is a distro based on Linux Mint and Lubuntu. But unlike other distros that use offline desktop apps, Peppermint focuses on cloud services for applications. Peppermint three is based on Lubuntu 12.04, an LTS release which will be supported with security updates for a period of five years.

    • New Releases

      • VortexBox 2.1 released today

        It’s been a while since we had a release. This release is a roll-up of a lot of features and fixes we have been working on since the last release. It’s been over 6 months since 2.0 was released so there are a lot of new features and fixes in this version. This release includes Logitech Media Server 7.7.2. Backups now support more than 2.2TB drives. This is great for 3TB+ VortexBoxes. We have the latest Fedora kernel with upgraded audio drives. The new ALSA drives now have better support for USB audio devices. We are now using ALBUMARTIST instead of BAND tag in the FLAC to mp3 mirroring.

      • Slackware 14.0 Beta Features Xfce 4.10

        After months of development, Slackware 14.0 reaches Beta status on July 22nd, as announced by its developer, Patrick Volkerding.

        Among lots of interesting features, the Slackware 14.0 Beta operating system comes with the ultimate Xfce 4.10 desktop environment.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Gooseberry – An alternative to Raspberry Pi

      Gooseberry is another alternative to Raspberry Pi, and according to the manufacturers it is three times faster than its rival. This new berry comes with a new ARM A10 processor running at 1GHz stock frequency, while there is enough headroom for overclocking up to 1.5 GHz. Also, it has twice the RAM of Raspberry Pi, meaning 512MB for this board. As for its power consumption, Gooseberry board consumes on average 4 watts of power when in use. When idle consumes 3.5 watts of power and when on standby consumes 2.3 watts of power.

    • Four Young Programmers Coded 48 Hours To Raise Donations For The Raspberry Pi Foundation

      Four young programmers, Ben, Luke, Ryan and Edward, aged between twelve and sixteen coded 48 hours in Python. The result was a game and more than 500 pounds raised for the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

    • Phones

      • Another one bites the dust, and goes open source

        According to an old saying, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. That, however, does not seem to apply in the proprietary software business, because as we have seen over the years, whenever a proprietary software vendor falls on tough financial times, it closes shop and releases its products under an open source license.

        HP did it with webOS, which is now called Open webOS. OpenOffice.org is not a very good example, but it went from one open source license to another after the sponsoring proprietary software vendor pissed off core developers. OpenOffice.org is now known as Apache OpenOffice. I am sure you know how that story unfolded. And, then, there is the most recent case of Mandriva SA

      • Android

        • Vizio Co-Star: Is Google TV finally going Prime-Time?

          I wanted to like Google TV. Who wouldn’t want to be able to watch Internet video, normal television, and use their HDTV as the world’s biggest Web browser. There was just one problem. The various Google TV implementations, such as the Logitech Revue, never worked well. It looks to me though like the soon to be released Vizio Co-Star may finally fulfill at least some of Google TV’s promise.

        • Motorola XT926 (DROID RAZR HD) Cruises Through FCC With Verizon Radios and NFC

          A Motorola device with model number XT926 attached to it, cruised through the FCC today. As we know thanks to a variety of Moto employees who posted both pictures and benchmarks from the device to public sites over the last few months, this should be the DROID RAZR HD. According to this FCC filing, it was tested for Verizon’s 3G (CDMA 800/1900) and LTE networks. It also packs GSM and WCDMA radios, so there is a good chance that this phone will end up with global roaming capabilities. As you can see from the picture above, an NFC chip is included as well.

        • Apple, Android Battle for Enterprise App Market Share

          Apple’s strength in the enterprise was attributed to several factors, including the success of the company’s best-selling iPad tablet.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Linus Torvalds reviews, loves, the Google Nexus 7

        Linus Torvalds, Linux’s inventor, software developer extraordinary, and, now, tablet reviewer! On Google+, Torvalds reviewed his Nexus 7 tablet and like ZDNet reviewers such as James Kendrick, he loved it.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Refining Due Diligence for Enterprise Open Source

    There are differences in how you evaluate open source applications, and it behooves security organizations to think through those differences and plan accordingly. Why does it matter? Because those differences can sometimes gate or slow down the adoption of a perfectly serviceable tool — like if you have inflexible corporate software acquisition policies that mandate non-applicable steps.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Silent Updates Appear to Boost Firefox 14′s Uptake

        Many dedicated users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser have been wrestling with the new silent updates, which upgrade and modify the browser automatically, rather than at users’ discretion. The silent updates have been quite controversial. They are in place and going strong with Firefox 14, and there are signs that they are helping with adoption of that version of the browser. At the same time, some users find them very intrusive.

        For a long time, Firefox had no silent updates. The Mozilla team reported earlier this year that the browser would begin to have them, and it was clear that doing so was an effort to compete more closely with Google Chrome, which has offered silent updates for years.

      • Customize Firefox to Show Support for Your Country

  • SaaS

    • Citrix’s Hinkle Proposes Linux Model for an Open Source Cloud

      But the project has seen more community contributions in the last 90 days than it did in the last two years it’s been open source, he said. CloudStack has also seen a nice uptick in adoption from a wide range of companies that includes cloud hosting providers, social gaming companies and research labs, among others.

  • CMS

    • Blogging Software

      I have been using WordPress for years and it works but by now I would expect a mature product. Instead we still have “features” like displaying newest comments at the tops of pages unavailable. Really. I thought this was a bug because there is an option in the Dashboard/Settings/Discussion settings for newest first but it does not work. When I reported this to WordPress.com I was informed to get help from WordPress.org where I see this has been a problem for years and no solution exists except to install plugins that may or may not work depending on “theme” and editing PHP. Apparently, WP is not amenable to fixing. I tried two different plugins and could not get it straightened out. My son may look at the PHP to figure out what’s wrong. I even turned off caching to no avail.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Benchmarking GCC 4.2 Through GCC 4.8 On AMD & Intel Hardware

      Here are benchmarks of all major GNU Compiler Collection releases from GCC 4.2.4 through the latest GCC 4.8 development build. Benchmarking was of the seven GCC compiler releases from an Intel Core i7 “Clarksfield” system and an AMD Opteron “Shanghai” workstation.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Join the M revolution – M and R programming languages

      Developers who take a first peek at the M language may get a quick impression that it is strange and alien. Here is the good news: If you have used R, or have friends who know R, then you are in good company and can learn M in a much shorter time. Moreover, you can combine M with R to get a powerful with an excellent statistical package.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Former McDonald’s Honchos Take On Sustainable Cuisine

      I had come to the artisanally fed vale of Facebook and Tesla to sample the first fruits of Lyfe Kitchen, a soon-to-be-chain of restaurants that might just shift the calculus of American cuisine. At Lyfe Kitchen (the name is an acronym for Love Your Food Everyday), all the cookies shall be dairy-free, all the beef from grass-fed, humanely raised cows. At Lyfe Kitchen there shall be no butter, no cream, no white sugar, no white flour, no high-fructose corn syrup, no GMOs, no trans fats, no additives, and no need for alarm: There will still be plenty of burgers, not to mention manifold kegs of organic beer and carafes of biodynamic wine. None of this would seem surprising if we were talking about one or 10 or even 20 outposts nationwide. But Lyfe’s ambition is to open hundreds of restaurants around the country, in the span of just five years.

  • Finance

    • Titanic banks hit Libor ‘berg

      At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.

      Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

  • Civil Rights

    • Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Great Charter, Its Fate, and Ours

      This week the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit against CIA Director David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and two top special operations forces commanders for “violating the Constitution and international law” in the drone assassination of three American citizens in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman (though no one claims he had anything whatsoever to do with terror campaigns). The suit is based on the Constitution’s promise of “due process” (“[N]or shall any person… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”), which to the untutored eye of this non-lawyer clearly seems to involve “law.” Attorney General Eric Holder evidently thinks otherwise and has explained his reasoning when it comes to the right of the Obama administration to order such deaths: “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” If you’re not inside the National Security Complex, it may be just a tad hard to grasp how “due process” could mean a secret process of review in the White House presided over by a president with a “kill list” (whose legal justification, laid out by the Justice Department, cannot be made public). And yet that is, as far as we can tell, indeed the claim.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Non-answer to BEREC’s Consultation: We need Net Neutrality Law!

      La Quadrature du Net publishes its non-answer to the EU body of telecoms regulators’ (BEREC) consultation on Net Neutrality. It is not time for yet-another consultation on the EU Commission’s failed “wait-and-see” policy aimed at letting telecom operators take control of the Internet by discriminating communications. The only way to protect a free Internet as well as freedoms and innovation online is to clearly enact and protect Net Neutrality in EU law.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Leaked Report Reveals Music Industry’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy

        A confidential internal report of the music industry outfit IFPI has been inadvertently made available online by the group itself. Penned by their Head of Internet Anti-piracy Operations, the report details the global strategy for the major recording labels of IFPI. Issues covered include everything from torrent sites to cyberlockers, what behavior IFPI expects of Internet service providers, the effectiveness of site blocking, and how pirates are accessing unreleased music from industry sources.

07.24.12

Links 24/7/2012: X.org Foundation, GNOME 3.5.4

Posted in News Roundup at 5:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Rethinking Linux Hardware: Upgrade or Buy New?

    When you come from the proprietary operating system way of thinking, it’s difficult to get your mind around the idea of not automatically needing to upgrade your PC hardware every two years. While upgrading is not an absolute necessity, more often than not we feel compelled to, as if to make sure we enjoy maximum compatibility.

    On the Linux desktop, however, it’s completely different. You aren’t bound to the usual set of rules that come with a proprietary desktop. Generally speaking, peripherals from any time period are going to do well on the Linux desktop.

  • Desktop

    • Chrome OS Beta Brings Major Improvements

      Google has updated the beta channel of Chrome OS to version 21.0.1180.50. This version is available for Chromebooks (Samsung Series 5, Samsung Series 5 550, and Cr-48) and Samsung Chromebox Series 3.

    • Chromebox Review: A Ketchup & Salt Affair

      You will notice that there is no HDMI port on the back. I suppose it would be easy enough to throw a couple of bucks at a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, but even still, the option would have been nice and would have made the Chromebox more complete to more people.

  • Server

    • Fear not, Linux admins: There are TOOLS to help you

      Most Linux distributions have a significant focus on security. This does not mean they are necessarily ready for production out of the box. Tools like SELinux, excellent firewall options, and robust access controls can make Linux exceptionally secure. Despite this, actually deploying a Linux system into production still requires that the systems administrator have some idea what they are doing.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3.5.4 Comes With a Revamped Nautilus

        The GNOME Project unleashed a few minutes ago, July 23rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.6 desktop environment.

  • Distributions

    • Airinux 12.05 Screenshots (07/23/2012)
    • Improve Photos Automagically with aaphoto

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Gentoo Family

      • Premade Gentoo Stage 4
      • Gentoo debates recruitment schemes

        First, Gentoo has 280 people with commit rights to the main repository. Numerous experiments have shown that an average human brain can’t deal with relationships in a group of >100 peers or so (the size of an ancient tribal band). So some degree of bureaucracy/HR is absolutely required for a project of such size, otherwise you get chaos.

        Second, it’s not enough for the answers to quizzes to be discoverable. Much of it is information you need to know by heart, so you don’t make mistakes and break user machines or community rules in the first place, instead of merely being able to google for how to fix the mess you had made after the fact.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Linux 3.5 Debuts as Fedora Gets a Cinnamon Dusting

          There are a few things that keep the Linux Planet spinning, one of them is the Linux kernel itself. This week, we saw a new kernel debut, providing another incremental step forward for performance and stability.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Community Leadership Summit 2012

            With a busy week away, I am just catching back up with everything. I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the Community Leadership Summit 2012 that happened the weekend before OSCON. You can also read a wonderful write-up from Andy Oram.

            This was the fourth Community Leadership Summit, and I was delighted with how everything went. We had a wonderful turnout with around 280 people joining us, and a fantastic breadth of sessions from our attendees. Topics of conflict, governance, gamification, diversity, collaboration, structural integrity, scale and more all generated great discussions and I think every one of us who joined the event took away some lessons learned.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Juju: DevOps for Cloud Services

              Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, is trying to make Development/Operations (DevOps) on the cloud easy with its Juju framework. The Juju project has been around for a while, but frankly it wasn’t that impressive… until now. At a demo at the Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jorge Castro, a Canonical developer relations executive, and Mark Mims, a software engineer, showed that Juju is finally ready for cloud prime time.

            • Linux Mint 13 now in KDE, XFCE flavours

              Get the latest, greatest Linux Mint, now with even more community loved desktop environments

            • Linux Mint 13 Xfce released: Installation tour

              Not just a refuge for those disillusioned with Gnome and KDE, the Linux Mint 13 Xfce distribution stands on its own merits

  • Devices/Embedded

    • D-Link MovieNite Plus review

      Although Apple’s and Roku’s streaming media players are the darlings of “cordcutters” seeking freedom from cable TV costs and restrictions right now, several other companies are angling for a slice of that rapidly emerging market pie. This review takes a look at D-Link’s most recent streaming player, the DSM-320 MovieNite Plus.

    • Power Strip’s a Penetration Testing Tool in Disguise

      The Power Pwn “is similar to a 1.2 GHz ARM-based processor running Linux,” M. Anthony Hughes, customer development manager, told LinuxInsider. It runs well-known open source tools including MetaSploit.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • ZTE launches N880E smartphone with Jelly Bean in China

          ZTE. the worlds fourth largest mobile manufacturer, according to a recent Garnter Report, has launched its first smartphone with the latest Android OS, Jelly Bean, in China. ZTE made the announcement in a press release.

          The ZTE N880E smartphone will run on Jelly Bean and is the third Android 4.1 smartphone. ZTE said that planned to also launch other handsets with Jelly Bean.

          The press release said: “ZTE has an excellent relationship with Google and this, combined with our extensive R&D capabilities and our experience of customising devices for partners around the world, means we are able to bring new technologies to market very quickly,” said Mr. Kan Yulun,Vice President and CTO of the Handset Division, ZTE.“Our aim is to provide the best quality customer experience for the best value, and the N880E is a great example of this.”

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Review: My Sordid Fling With The Nexus 7

        I will give Google credit, their propaganda hype machine is starting to rival that of Apple Inc. I’ve had the Nexus 7 for two and half days now and I must say I am far from impressed. Don’t get me wrong, I love Android and have been a user of the ecosystem since day one back in 2008, but I am not in love with, nor would I date this device. I am sure some of you will think I am nuts, but just because you put the name Nexus on it doesn’t make it the best thing since the advent of the wheel, and if you’re still reading this I will explain why.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

07.23.12

Links 23/7/2012: Linux 3.5, Rupert Murdoch Out

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Smart meter hack framework goes open-source

    Security outfit SecureState’s smart meter hacking framework, Termineter, has gone live over at Google Code.

    The software is described as having a structure like Metasploit, with a similar interface and ability to be extended with external modules.

  • Open Source For Me But Not For Thee

    Open source is the best way to build and maintain big software projects. The more heads and hands you have on a project, over time, the more bullet-proof it can get.

    Trouble is, everyone wants the maximum benefits from open source but few people want to put in the work for someone else’s project. That’s why VMware (VMW) went through its recent reorganization, promising to separate its open source cloud projects from its proprietary virtualization.

    Open source is often the flag that’s flown after failure. When IBM (IBM) failed in operating systems two decades ago, it slowly began embracing Linux, eventually unifying its whole product line under the open source operating system. The results were spectacular.

  • Four insights to selling and marketing open source software

    In the last 15 years of my career I have worked at several open source software companies, each with its own unique approach to software delivery, packaging, branding, and sales. Two things have become clear to me:

    1. There is no single best way to build a successful business around an open source software solution
    2. Success depends on an organization’s commitment to building real-world solutions and its readiness to deliver genuinely valuable services that help customers to be successful with the solutions.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 15 Beta Tackles Memory Leaks

        Mozilla has released a beta version of the next version of its Firefox browser with better memory management and significant speed improvements.

      • Mozilla Releases Test Version of Firefox OS

        Mozilla this week released an early desktop version of Firefox OS that will let developers experience the mobile OS before comes to phones.

        The builds are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

      • Firefox 15 reduces memory consumption

        In the beta version of Firefox 15, the Mozilla developers have implemented a “radical idea” to force add-ons to release memory allocated to them. According to the developers, many add-ons are causing memory leaks by not releasing their DOM structures when a tab is closed. This creates what the developers call zombie compartments – areas of memory that are never released.

  • SaaS

  • CMS

  • Education

    • Open source default choice for some Czech schools

      Schools in the Czech cities of Šumperk and Hradec Králové have been using open source for years, the Czech open source news magazine LinuxExpres reports.

    • BBC: A New ICT Curriculum

      I rejoiced when the Western Canadian Provinces got together and revised the maths curriculum to use computers and calculators in teaching. I had been using computers in that role for 25 years but most teachers had never done it. They took two years of “professional development” to indoctrinate the teachers. The UK has given the teachers just months for radical change. I predict “uneven” results…

      In ICT courses in Canada I have always been giving students the basics. I stretched “how to sit at a PC and turn it on” into disassembly/reassembly of ATX PCs with nomenclature and on-line shopping for parts… Instead of teaching them how to use M$’s office suite, I gave students a list of tasks to do with five different office suites and asked them to compare ease and performance. Instead of teaching students 300 features of Excel TM, I gave them real-world problems that could be solved several ways with spreadsheets and computer programming and had them learn the kinds of things that were better done with different methods. I exposed students to several spreadsheets and, yes, paper and pencil… Instead of limiting students to one PC with one hard drive, I showed them what they could do with thin clients, servers and clusters of servers, databases and web applications…

  • BSD

    • FreeNAS 8.2 is Released!

      The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ARMv8 AArch64 Support For GCC Keeps Coming

      Support for AArch64, the ARMv8 64-bit architecture, continues to move along within the GCC compiler world.

      Besides the recently published AArch64 support for the Linux kernel, developers with ARM Holdings have also been tackling the compiler support and other areas of the Linux toolchain.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming

    • Finding Bottlenecks In Your Linux Game, Application

      If you are curious how Valve and Intel improved the OpenGL performance of their Mesa driver and also at the same time finding areas for performance optimizations within the Source Engine, here’s some of the tools used.

      The tools that seem to be predominantly used, based upon what Intel’s Ian Romanick wrote in a blog comment and from what I’ve learned in email communications and while at Valve, are Sysprof and APITrace.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Cotton brings doom to tribal farmers

    Desperation seems to have caught up with the normally imperturbable tribal farmers of Adilabad which is evident from the abnormally large number of suicides by them since 2011. As many as 27 of them, all cotton farmers including a woman, from the aboriginal Gond, Naikpod, Mannepu and the Lambada plains tribe, figure in the list of 101 cotton farmers who have committed suicide since January 2011.

    Giving up life, for whatever reason, was hitherto an unknown phenomenon in the primitive tribal communities which, paradoxically, have deprivation for a way of life. The gamut of Bt cotton, however, has dislocated their way of dealing with failures and like the trend in other communities, tribals are increasingly preferring the ‘easy way’ out.

    In 2010, only one Gond cotton farmer had committed suicide owing to debts. There was a drastic increase in the extent of land under cotton cultivation and the incidence of suicides in the agency in the following year.

  • Hardware

    • AMD could unveil low power tablet chips in August

      AMD isn’t expected to bring its new low power processors aimed at tablets to market until 2013. But according to Hexus, AMD will show off the first chips with its new low power “Jaguar” cores at the Hot Chips Symposium on August 28th.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels

      In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

  • Finance

    • Cities: Be Like Oakland and Walk Away from Interest Swap Payments to Goldman and Bankers!

      The city of Oakland, California, is fighting back against Goldman Sachs by refusing to pay a penalty for getting out of an interest rate swap contract that is to Goldman’s advantage.

      Isn’t that a hoot? Anyway, turns out that Goldman and the city of Oakland entered into a deal to protect variable interest rate bonds issued by the city in 1997. Oakland was given a fixed rate of under 6 percent to protect against inflation on those bonds.

    • £13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite

      A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

      James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.

    • Goldman CEO on Dodd-Frank: ‘The vast bulk of it is good.’

      At the heart of Obama’s reelection narrative is the story that he battled the Big Bad Banks, mostly by passing regulation, and now those banks are retaliating by lining up behind deregulator Mitt Romney.

    • California’s Employment Picture

      Total employment in California pulled back in June from a recovery high of 16.5 million, set in May. This data series has been volatile, with annual revisions each year that have shifted the trough in total employment between early 2009 and early 2010. For now, the low was set in November of 2009, at 15.93 million. While “recovery” seems the right word to use in describing California’s job market, it is still the case that unemployment is hanging at 10.7%, per the most recent data. That’s the third highest state rate, in the country. Worse, as of Q1, California’s “U-6″, the broad measure of unemployment, was still above 20%. | see: California Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2000-2012.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

07.21.12

Links 21/7/2012: Web Apps, Ubuntu and Dell

Posted in News Roundup at 10:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Open Source Initiative: Add your voice

    One of my personal open source community highlights this year was joining the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board. I first discovered OSI in 2003 when I was asked to weigh in on proposed legislation in Oregon that was designed to mandate the use of open source by all state agencies. Yep, I actually wrote the official executive branch position–but that’s another story.

  • Like an open book: Your 2012 summer reading
  • Open Source Drives Small Business

    Open-source software is a key driver for small business in the U.S. and contributes an enormous amount to the economy, perhaps to the tune of $1 trillion in economic output.

  • Open source alternatives to Windows Home Server

    The news that Microsoft is to kill off Windows Home Server in favour of a cut-down version of Windows Server 2012 hasn’t been met with universal approval. The low-cost, low-power Windows Home Server has proved popular since its introduction, and its absence is going to leave a hole in the market – a hole that the OEM-only Windows Server 2012 Foundation and $425 Windows Server 2012 Essentials is unlikely to fill.

  • Open Source Initiative Accepting Individual Members

    The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is now accepting individual members as the organization moves to enhance its impact in the open source world.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Infographics
    • Spain’s Las Palmas’ moves 1200 PCs to LibreOffice

      The administration of the city of Las Palmas on the Canary Island will start using LibreOffice on all of its 1200 desktop PCs. This free and open source office suite is already used on nearly 120 of the city’s desktop PCs. In a press release published on 27 June, the city explains that is why it can calculate that the migration will save about 400,000 euros.

    • Oracle courts CentOS users

      On a recently published web page, Oracle addresses CentOS users in an attempt to persuade them to switch to Oracle Linux. On the page, the company even offers a scriptDirect download that makes various changes to CentOS or Scientific Linux (SL) installations and causes them to receive future package updates and operating system packages from the Oracle Linux repositories. Ultimately, this will turn CentOS and SL installations into Oracle Linux systems.

    • Manage Google Docs With LibreOffice

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 9.1 preview

      PC-BSD 9.1 beta 1, the latest pre-stable version of what will become PC-BSD 9.1, has been released. PC-BSD is a desktop-centric distribution based on FreeBSD. It used to be primarily a KDE-using distribution, but the installer now has options to install a system using other major desktop environments.

      Aside from KDE, users can opt to install a PC-BSD desktop system powered by Xfce, LXDE or the GNOME desktop environment. The installer also makes it easy to install a FreeBSD server, as well as a server installation called TrueOS. Below are select screen shots from test installations of all four supported desktop environments.

    • FreeNAS 8.2.0

  • Project Releases

    • SelekTOR V2.07 released as open source.

      My reasons for going GPL are varied from folks worried about security issues regarding what SelekTOR does with their underlying system proxies to ensuring the longevity of the code as once its out there it can’t be taken back.
      Well not only do you have access to the debug facility here is the code as well.
      It also brings it in line with my other offerings which have been open source for quite some time.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Facebook exec: Celebration “premature” until OEMs open source their x86 systems

      Since unveiling its Open Compute Project and data center designs in 2011, Facebook’s Open Compute project has been rallying OEMs to support and build open, interchangeable components. At Oscon 2012 today, the project’s chief urged developers to accelerate the trend of open source hardware by refusing to buy “gratuitously differentiated” systems

  • Programming

    • Komodo 7.1 lets users add their own language support

      ActiveState has released version 7.1 of its integrated development environment (IDE) Komodo. The latest release of the IDE for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl and web development includes several improvements to the editor as well as new features for cloud deployment and easier integration with version control systems. Komodo 7.1 also updates the IDE’s support for several languages and frameworks and lets users add language support themselves.

Leftovers

  • Sheldon Adelson, GOP Mega-Donor, Investigated for Bribing Chinese Government Officials

    Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas casino magnate and GOP mega-donor, is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department under suspicions he violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) while dealing with the Chinese government and his Macau casino ventures. The FCPA, introduced in 1977 by U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), prohibits American companies from bribing foreign government officials.

  • Here’s The Proposal The FCC Says Doesn’t Exist To Move Network Diagnostics To Proprietary Servers

    We recently wrote about some concerns by Vint Cerf and others that the FCC was considering a proposal to move some of their network diagnostics efforts — which are a really good thing — from the open M-Labs solution to proprietary servers run by the telcos. As we noted, the telcos denied that this was happening — and Henning Schulzrinne, the CTO of the FCC, showed up in our comments to strongly deny that such a proposal existed.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Walmart Heirs Have As Much Wealth As Bottom 40 Percent Of Americans Combined

      Last year, Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, found that as of 2007, the Walton family — heirs to the Walmart fortune — had a net worth equal to that of the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And due to the effects of the Great Recession that ratio has gotten substantially worse.

      New Federal Reserve data analyzed by both Allegretto and Josn Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Waltons now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined…

    • Export Nation: Does A Tipping Point Approach?

      Since 2009, exports from the US have grown at a faster rate than GDP. This is reflected in the weak, national recovery in jobs while export-oriented regions and export-sector jobs have fared much better. As US exports are nearing 15% of GDP, one wonders that a nation long accustomed to protecting consumption may finally have to think about protection, and enhancement, of production. | see: US Exports as a Percentage of GDP 2007 – 2012.

    • Goldman Sachs’s Blankfein Says Libor Scandal Undermines Trust

      Allegations of interest-rate rigging by global banks are hurting the financial system by undermining trust, said Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

    • Donald Mullen, Ex-Goldman Sachs Mortgage Chief, Starts Fund For Buying Foreclosed Homes

      Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Donald Mullen, one of the architects of the subprime mortgage trade, is trying to raise at least $500 million for a fund that will buy foreclosed homes with an eye toward renting them out.

  • Civil Rights

    • It’s Bucky v. Adidas: Indonesia Labor Rights Violations Head to Court in Wisconsin

      A student rendering of Bucky Badger puts the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s furry mascot in a lock-up formed by the Adidas three-bar logo.

      But in a historic test, it is the midwestern university that is now putting Adidas on trial.

      The university filed a complaint against the global sportswear giant in Dane County Circuit Court on July 13 calling on a judge to determine whether the university’s code of conduct required Adidas to pay severance and other benefits to nearly 3,000 Indonesian workers. The workers were left jobless and impoverished by a Korean contractor’s abrupt exit from Indonesia in January 2011. The lawsuit marks the first time that one of the more than 100 U.S. universities in a national anti-sweatshop consortium has sought to enforce its code in the courts.

    • YouTube Introduces Face Blurring Tool To Protect Protesters

      As the governments are becoming more and more powerful and using all means to crush protest, it is becoming harder for activists to stand against suppressive governments.

      YouTube has become a very powerful means for citizens to provide video coverage/footage of events. But now governments are using these footage to identify protesters and take action against them. There is no way a protester can hide this identity and escape the wrath of government.

    • Is NSA’s Accumulo open source or Google knock-off?

      A new bill on Capitol Hill could have far reaching implications for government use and development of open source platforms – potentially requiring all open source projects to “prove adequate industry support and diversification.”

07.19.12

Links 19/7/2012: Linux and Higgs-Boson, Kororaa 17 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Economic impact of open source on small business

    A few months back, Tim O’Reilly and Hari Ravichandran, founder and CEO of Endurance International Group (EIG), had a discussion about the web hosting business. They talked specifically about how much of Hari’s success had been enabled by open source software. But Hari wasn’t just telling his success story to Tim, but rather was more interested in finding ways to give back to the communities that made his success possible. The two agreed that both companies would work together to produce a report making clear just how much of a role open source software plays in the hosting industry, and by extension, in enabling the web presence of millions of small businesses.

    We hope you will read this free report while thinking about all the open source projects, teams and communities that have contributed to the economic succes of small businesses or local governments, yet it’s hard to measure their true economic impact. We combed through mountains of data, built economic models, surveyed customers and had discussions with small and medium businesses (SMB) to pull together a fairly broad-reaching dataset on which to base our study. The results are what you will find in this report.

  • 5 things about FOSS Linux virtualization you may not know
  • Big Switch Networks launches OpenFlow development tool plug in
  • Apache Tika 1.2 introduces new network server

    The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of version 1.2 of Apache Tika. The metadata and structured text content extractor started its life as a sub-project of Apache Lucene and was elevated to Top-Level Project status within the foundation in 2010.

  • Twitter’s Open Source Big Data Tool Comes to the Cloud Courtesy of Nodeable

    Usually when we think of a pivot, we think of a company that has decided to drop its core offering and market a different product or service. Obvious Corporation put ODEO up for sale and focused on Twitter. BRBN shuttered its location check-in service and became Instagram. But Nodeable‘s pivot isn’t that sort of pivot.

    Today Nodeable launched a new service called StreamReduce, a cloud-hosted real-time big data analytics product. StreamReduce is based on the same architecture as Nodeable’s existing IT operations monitoring tool. The company is keeping its current service, but is expanding its scope by marketing beyond its current base of developers and system administrators.

  • Bristol extends open source adoption to document management

    Bristol City Council is using an open source electronic document management system to overhaul its record keeping and improve staff access to documents online.

  • Foundation gathering, open sourcing ID technology

    The OpenID Foundation introduces a message bus with identity capabilities as part of plan to create venue where ID technology can be vetted, open sourced and made available to enterprises, Web site operators and others.

  • Qantas’ social travel site built on cloud, open source

    Qantas has launched social-flavoured vacation booking website Hooroo using the cloud and open-source software.

    Hooroo suggests food, hotels and activities in destinations around Australia, and lets users create profiles showing where they’ve been and want to go. Visitors can book travel and accommodation through the website. Users can opt into an e-mail newsletter with deals and suggestions, and earn Hooroo credit that can be used for booking discounts.

  • Great open source map tools for Web developers

    A long time ago, when Web 2.0 was just Web 1.0, we had to ask people for directions, copy them down, and hope we had a foldable map to help us find our way. Then along came MapQuest, followed by Google Maps in 2005. Today, it seems impossible to imagine finding our way without handheld phones and Web-based maps.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Education

  • Healthcare

  • Funding

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing/Law

    • Open Source Law

      I’m hoping in the next few months (possibly weeks) to practise what I preach: I’m working with a client, Emerge Open, to release a suite of legal documents under a creative commons licence, provisionally BY-SA (attribution-share alike, which means that anyone can take the documents and use them for any purpose, provided that if they republish, they have to credit us as the authors, and also release any amendments they make under the same liberal licence).

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Make Your Own Pocketable Arduino Kit

        Make Your Own Pocketable Arduino KitArduino’s are already pretty small, but they’re still not conducive to travelling. Instructables user sath02 wanted to take his electronics tinkering on the road with him, so he built a pocket sized Arduino kit.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Oracle’s July patch day brings 87 security updates

      In its planned July Critical Patch Update (CPU), Oracle has released a total of 87 security updates to fix various vulnerabilities across a number of its product families. The updates affect products including Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle Database 10g and 11g, and MySQL. One of the holes was given the highest possible CVSS score of 10.0; it was closed in the JRockit Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is part of Oracle Fusion.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • European democracy’s victory in a treaty’s defeat

          In an era when effective global cooperation seems to be in short supply, the failure to approve a major international treaty would hardly seem to be cause for celebration. But the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a milestone for European democracy. Rarely has a debate on an international treaty been so intense and engaged so many people across Europe and beyond.

          ACTA, negotiated by a group of industrialized countries to fight counterfeiting and enforce intellectual-property rights, provoked widespread criticism from civil-society organizations for the lack of transparency in the process used to formulate it. In the European Parliament, we tried to redress these shortcomings. Over the past four months, we held countless meetings, hearings, workshops and online conversations with civil-society representatives and all of the concerned parties, to make sure all opinions were properly heard.

07.18.12

Links 18/7/2012: KDE Workspaces 4.9, Raspbian

Posted in News Roundup at 7:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What Large Brazilian Organizations Thinks of GNU/Linux

    A large retail chain, Casas Bahia, with 53K employees and $billions in revenue (2008) ran Suse GNU/Linux on mainframes and POS (point-of-sale) systems with zero failures in five years giving real-time information on every transaction with security.

  • Motoring on Linux

    Years ago, an old friend of mine remarked that if his car was controlled by the Windows operating system, it would take him ages to get anywhere.

    He reached this conclusion after spending many mornings downloading updates to his Windows-based system and then rebooting it before he could start work. From this, he surmised that if such Windows software was used to control the electronic systems in his car, he would spend an equal amount of time in the driver’s seat waiting for updates before he could even put his key in the ignition.

    My friend, of course, was a complete and utter technical Luddite — one of those chaps that would rather have lived in the age of steam where at least he would have some vague notion about how large amounts of very hot water could be used to propel vehicles along a track.

  • Softly on a budget

    The primary freeware photo-editing option on a Linux system is the ”ugly and cranky” GIMP.

    MICROSOFT is about to drop Windows 8 on us and Apple has an operating system update coming soon. They will cost money. And do we need them? What if you could get all the photo-editing and other essential software absolutely free? Well, good news – you can.

    Linux, the open-source operating system, has come of age. Not so long ago it was too geekily intimidating for the average mortal to even consider as an alternative to the big two, but the latest versions are not much harder to use than Windows or OS X.

  • Linux distributions that can run on an MK802 Mini PC

    The MK802 is a tiny computer that looks like a USB flash drive, and which ships with Google Android 4.0 and sells for around $80 or less. It’s designed to be something you can plug into a TV to surf the web, watch video, and play games on the big screen.

  • Desktop

    • Dell Gives Linux Laptops Another Chance

      Today Dell announced its official re-entry into the Linux laptop market. Project Sputnik, first announced in May, is graduating from Dell’s internal incubator program into a real product. According to project lead Barton Geroge, Dell will sell a special “developer edition” of its XPS13 Ultrabook starting this fall.

      The laptop will come pre-loaded with Ubuntu, a user friendly distribution of the open source operating system Linux (or GNU/Linux to purists). George said the laptop won’t be able to dual boot Windows. But Dell made available an Ubuntu install image customized for the XPS13, so you could buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu yourself if you require dual booting. George says the developer version will be the high end configuration of the XPS13, with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 processor and a 256GB solid state hard drive. This model currently sells for $1,499, and George says the Linux version will sell for a little bit less than the Windows version.

    • Fail Client: How Linux Fails At The Corporate Desktop

      My work takes me in and out of busy offices all day long. I see Macs, I see PCs, I see servers and printers. I see PCs running Windows which is no surprise, but what I never see are PCs running Linux. “Why is this?” I always ask myself. I mean, the benefits of open source far outweigh the risks and from an administrative viewpoint, the OS is a lot easier to manage. So what is it that is holding Linux back? It’s not spreadsheets and documents –word files and excel files can be easily handled in LibreOffice– nor is it Access/database related as you can get KEXI running in no time. No, I will tell you what is holding Linux back and the answer is simple. Outlook.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Shotwell Faces Tool: Weekly Report 07 & 08

      This last two weeks I’ve continued the work on the test suite, adding face recognition using Philipp Wagner’s FaceRecognizer class and some scripts to help doing the testing. I’ve also wrote the instructions to use all those tiny programs at [1] —it could be incomplete, please ask whatever you need ;)

      This face recognition thing seems to be more about collect people faces to make a decent and realistic database to train the face recognition model and then try to recognize this same people in other photos. There is really few code to show: Since I discover, read and understand the new OpenCV FaceRecognizer class [2], the written code is really simple [a] —in fact, the main task of this last two weeks has been mainly to do tests, trying to make a decent faces-database of my friends to improve the results I’m getting from my tests: About 30% of accuracy recognizing people —in the articles I’ve read there are people talking about more accuracy, but such accuracy seems to be not so real, because they use face-databases like the one at [3], and we can’t expect Shotwell users making that kind of photos.

    • Information Grows Strong Roots With TreeLine

      Part of what makes TreeLine such an easy information organization tool is its tree structure. It lets you configure the note-entering process to fit a variety of informational types. So you do not have to shoehorn information into a make-do mess. TreeLine may take some effort to learn to use at 100 percent effectiveness, but once you do, it will be worth the effort.

    • Proprietary

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine

    • Games

      • OUYA Approaches $5 Million In Backing, Attracts 5x Goal (So Far)
      • Unigine Hosting Open Air Game Conference

        Unigine Corp is hosting an interesting “open air” game development conference later this week in Tomsk, Russia.

        Unfortunately it’s on short notice, but hopefully it will become an annual thing: Unigine OpenAir. This is perhaps the most interesting and unique game development conference I’ve yet to hear about: it’s camping in tents outside the city of Tomsk for two days filled with gaming-related talks. There is no Internet connection at Unigine OpenAir, but to make up for it Unigine is hosting a whiskey party, barbecues and kebabs, the best DJ from Siberia, fires, and other special events.

      • Linux Gaming Begins Gathering Steam

        “Steam remains one of the best assets in the gaming space today that doesn’t get much attention due to the console cycles and the rise of social gaming,” said P.J. McNealy, consultant at Digital World Research. “However, it’s right in the thick of the emerging business models for gaming, and being available on Linux certainly can’t hurt.”

      • 100 “Funnest” Open Source Games and Apps

        It’s become something of a summer tradition here at Datamation to take a break from featuring open source apps for businesses and concentrate on open source apps that are just plain fun. This year, we’ve updated and expanded our list of the open source movement’s “funnest” apps with 100 titles in all. We’ve added two entirely new categories: board games and sports games, and we found plenty of good games that we had overlooked on previous versions of this list.

      • 5 Blogs You Should Follow For Linux Gaming
      • Valve Games and Steam on Ubuntu 12.04

        Yesterday, the Valve Linux team publicly announced their ongoing work to bring Steam to Linux. A major part of that announcement is the choice of Ubuntu 12.04.

        Valve has been a major force in gaming since 1996. Gabe Newell and the Valve team have created some of the best game series EVER. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and most recently Portal are extremely popular, and quite addicting.

      • With Valve On Linux, Has LGP Lost All Relevance?

        Aside from how Valve can better embrace Linux and open-source, another thing to ponder with Valve officially writing about Steam/Source on Linux, is the future of Linux Game Publishing.

        Linux Game Publishing got a new CEO in January and aside from a brief company update in February, nothing new has come out since. The company hasn’t released any new Linux game ports in years, their blog has been silent, and there hasn’t been any rumblings of new projects to be announced soon.

      • Steam’d Penguins
      • Steam on Ubuntu

  • Desktop Environments

    • New Features Of Enlightenment Desktop : Tooltips and Wallpaper Background Fill Colors

      The Enlightenment desktop is heading for a stable release finally, and new features are being added everyday. You can also submit your feature ideas in their Trac page and if you are lucky and your feature charming enough, the developers will add it to the next Enlightenment release. Recently, the developers closed two feature request tickets and added them in default Enlightenment desktop.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • QtNetworkManager To Be Improved

        If you are a Gnome user, you are lucky enough to face no problems in connecting with wireless and wired Internet networks.

      • Phonon-GStreamer Update Fixes Gapless Playback Bug

        If you are a KDE fan and felt irritated because you were unable to experience gapless playback, you will be relived to know that phonon developers have finally got this issue fixed. Phonon-Gstreamer 4.6.1 is a bugfix release, and along with this bug, developers have also fixed a handful of major bugs like:

      • Moun Suite 1.4 RC Released

        Kubuntu developer, Jonathan Thomas, blogged about the release of Moun Suite 1.4. Some of the major improvements in this release includes enhancements in Moun Discover, update manager and a bug fix in language support.

      • KDE 4.9: More Change Than You’d Expect

        KDE 4.9 is a mature release, so you wouldn’t expect major renovations. However, to judge from the second release candidate (technically, the 4.8.97 release), that expectation is no more than half correct.

        Yes, the release is full of the small refinements that characterize an incremental release. However, it also includes some more important features, most of them to do with Activities, as the development team continues its efforts to make the release series’ most major innovation more appealing and useful to users.

        Users wishing to try the release candidate can always compile from source, or check the development repositories of their distribution.

      • Sprint News and Pre-Alpha Release of Kolab 3.0

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Why I Went Back To Gnome From KDE

        I recently became a KDE user, that was the time when Gnome Shell was going through transition and extensions were missing and I was looking for something which I could use without much frustration. One of the things that I love the most about KDE is the polishes interface and total control over your desktop. You can customize almost every aspect of KDE. In addition, the familiar UI (simple and aimed at the traditional desktop) makes it easy to continue to work without having to learn new tricks.

      • Future Releases Of Gnome May Include PIN Unlock Facility

        If you find hard to type long passwords in your touch devices, you may get relief soon. Gnome developer Giovanni Campagna is currently working on a PIN unlock feature, similar to mobile phones, that is aimed at being touch friendly replacement of passwords.

      • Why Look Forward to GNOME 3.5.4

        Matthias Clasen routinely posts previews to upcoming GNOME releases and recently he did it again. In a post on his personal blog, Clasen, a GNOME developer, highlighted some of new features coming to GNOME 3.5.4. He is joined by Alex Diavatis, of www.worldofgnome.org, who offers a closer look at some of the new features as well.

        The first mention in Clasen’s post is of Nautilus. He said, “Nautilus has received a major face-lift, and looks very much like a GNOME 3 application now.” Diavatis writes, “Nautilus menu moved into a single button on top right” and “the symbolic icons on the left, which seems pretty.”

      • This is how Nautilus looks in SolusOS
      • Making GTK3 themes – Part 1: Basics

        I’m Satya. I’ll be writing some tutorials about making GTK3 themes here at World of Gnome. Thanks to woGue for giving me a chance to write here :)

        In this post I’ll discuss some basic things about GTK3 themes. So let’s start…

        The new trend is to use the web technologies everywhere, be it smartphone or desktop. Web technologies are generally easier, and that’s why they are so widespread. So what it has to do about GTK3 themes? A lot, because GTK3 themes use CSS syntax, which is widely used in the web. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The CSS syntax is very easy to understand and and use. For example, if we want to set a blue background and white text color in a paragraph (represented as p in HTML), the CSS syntax will be,

      • Oops!… I crashed it again ;)

  • Distributions

    • Linux Deepin 12.06 preview

    • New Releases

      • SystemRescueCd 2.8.1
      • Canaima 3.1-VC3
      • Alpine 2.4.5 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availablity of version 2.4.5 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

      • SystemRescueCd update includes version 2.00 of GRUB

        The latest 2.8.1 release of SystemRescueCd upgrades a number of the live system’s bundled tools as well as its underlying components, such as the GRUB bootloader. The Gentoo-based GPLv2-licensed distribution for administering and repairing systems includes the recent stable GRUB 2.00 bootloader release and updates the standard long-term kernel to Linux 3.2.23; the alternative kernel is now at version 3.4.5.

      • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 208

        · Announced Distro: CentOS 6.3
        · Announced Distro: OS4 12.5
        · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 13 RC KDE
        · Announced Distro: Finnix 105

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia has been visiting Europe

        Like last year, Mageia had a presence at Linuxtag in Berlin, one of the biggest Linux and OpenSource events in Europe.

        And like last year we shared a booth with the German MandrivaUser.de community. At Linuxtag, we had some prominent members of the Mageia project there, some of them (Nicolas and Marja) coming all the way from France and the Netherlands.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Burt’s Bees among Social Madness winners

        At long last, local winners have been crowned in their respective categories in the nationwide social media contest dubbed Social Madness.

      • Red Hat Taking Advantage Of Turmoil In Europe
      • Why the Street Should Love Red Hat’s Earnings

        Although business headlines still tout earnings numbers, many investors have moved past net earnings as a measure of a company’s economic output. That’s because earnings are very often less trustworthy than cash flow, since earnings are more open to manipulation based on dubious judgment calls.

        Earnings’ unreliability is one of the reasons Foolish investors often flip straight past the income statement to check the cash flow statement. In general, by taking a close look at the cash moving in and out of the business, you can better understand whether the last batch of earnings brought money into the company, or merely disguised a cash gusher with a pretty headline.

      • Switch your CentOS systems to Oracle Linux

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu App Showdown : Judges’ Voting On
          • Ubuntu 12.10 To Include Gwibber, Photos Lens By Default

            Ubuntu 12.10 scheduled to be released this October will include Gwibber and Photos lens by default. These lenses add up to the existing collection of lenses namely applications, files, music and videos.

          • Testing in Cadence

            Last month, an interesting thread emerged on ubuntu-devel. A proposal to change the way we as ubuntu look at testing and quality. In many ways it was more of a codification of ideas and thoughts from the precise cycle than a proposal.

            One of the outcomes of this was a change to how to test isos. Rather than focus on arbitrary moments in time, we’ve been asked to stick to a two week cadence for testing. What that means is a regular checkup of our images every two weeks. Quite a task, but not impossible! Given the fact the change happened mid-cycle, there has been some confusion over what exactly this means. I decided to put together a post detailing exactly what’s on the table for us as a community and more importantly how you can help!

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 274
          • Steam arrives on Ubuntu, Valve announces it from their new Linux blog
          • Your very own ARM-based Ubuntu servers in the cloud… for free

            Not content with dominating the world of smartphones and tablets, makers of low-power ARM chips are setting their sights on the server market. While x86 servers are still the norm, there have been hints for some time that ARM might become a presence in the data center. Another small, early step toward an ARM future was taken this week as the makers of an infrastructure-as-a-service testbed added ARM servers as a free option for developers.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • You Asked For It, PC-like Performance From A Small Cheap Computer

      While the Raspberry Pi is interesting to everyone, it is most suitable for absolute newbies learning software, it’s target market.

    • Want to buy more than one Raspberry Pi? Now you can!

      Up until now, we’ve had to restrict purchases of the Raspberry Pi to one per customer because the demand has been (and continues to be) so high. Both of our manufacturing partners have been working at building capacity so you we can lift that limit – right now, 4000 Raspberry Pis are being made every day. As of this morning, you’ll be able to buy as many Raspberry Pis as you want from both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell. (See below for ordering instructions.)

    • Raspbery Pi’s Own Raspbian Gets SD Card Image

      Raspberry Pi foundation has announced the release of the first SD card image based on the Raspbian distribution. The image will make it easier for Raspberry Pi users to switch from ‘generic’ Debian Squeeze to this ‘optimized’ image.

    • Raspbian Linux now available for Raspberry Pi: Up to 40 percent faster than Debian

      Raspbian is a Linux-based operating system optimized for the Raspberry Pi, a low power, inexpensive mini-computer with a 700 MHz ARM11 processor. Up until recently, the folks behind the little computer had recommended using Debian Linux for an operating system. But benchmarks show Raspbian to be up to 40 percent faster at some tasks.

    • Raspbian-based SD card image released

    • Phones

      • MeeGo Revived: Interview With Jolla CEO

        MeeGo was one of the most promising open source mobile platform developed by Intel in conjunction with Nokia. I have been tracking Intel’s MID (Mobile Internet Devices) efforts from my Linux For You days when I asked about it during an Intel event in Jaipur (India) and Intel director Narendra Bhandari took it to himself to explain about the project.

        Intel worked with Nokia to transform its Maemo platform into MeeGo to help Intel realise its MID aspirations. Everything was going of well, despite the slow yet promising development of MeeGo. Then came Microsoft’s Stephen Elop who infamously killed almost all of Nokia’s open source projects and reduced the once market leader into a hardware dilevery truck for Microsoft’s failed mobile OS.

      • Android

        • Android-X86 4.0.4 (ICS) RC2 Released With ARM Translator, More [Android For Netbooks Or Laptops]
        • Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is Hard to Crack, Says Security Expert

          Google’s latest Android OS, version 4.1 Jelly Bean, is properly strengthened against hacking exploits and malware, according to mobile security researcher Jon Oberheide.

          The analysis, posted on Duo Security’s bulletin on July 16, says that Android has “stepped its game up” in protecting against malicious exploits.

        • Fujitsu to offer smartphone specifically designed for elderly users

          Japanese electronics firm Fujitsu unveiled a new smartphone yesterday designed for elderly users, featuring a unique touchscreen and Android user interface that’s been simplified. Called the F-12D from Fujitsu’s RakuRaku product line where “rakuraku” can be translated from Japanese to mean “easy” or “comfortable,” the company will primarily be aiming to target Japan’s aging population with this particular model.

        • XBMC Now Available For Android

          XBMC, an advanced, full-featured and attractive open-source media center is now available for Android. As per the announcement in XBMC blog, this version can be run on phones, media players, set-top boxes, tablets and all devices that are powered by Android.

          The program is in beta stage and not yet available in Play Store. XBMC developers are looking for people who can test this on their devices, so if you want to be one of their beta testers, head over to their blog.

        • CyanogenMod 9 running on the Nexus Q
        • Sony officially launches Sony Xperia S, P and U in the U.S
        • Android now powers 51.8% of US smartphones, growth continues

          Popular analyst company Nielsen has published its report on the US smartphone market in the second quarter of 2012. The quarter saw smartphone growth continue as two thirds of all new customers picked a smartphone.

          Android continues to be in lead, powering 51.8% of all US smartphones and 54.6% of the ones purchased over the past three months. And that was the quarter before the Samsung Galaxy S III was launched.

        • Meizu MX 4-core is now available globally, pricing still steep

          The original (dual-core) Meizu MX is one of the most popular smartphones in China. Shortly after the launch there, it was quietly made available around the world from various retailers. Later, after the huge success of the MX, Meizu announced a quad-core version – the MX 4-core.

        • sony xperia z: Leaked Details
        • Jelly Bean is the safest version of Android yet
        • Sony Xperia ion now available at Rogers, can be yours for $549.99 outright

          Here it is Canada… Sony’s first LTE-enabled smartphone has officially launched at Rogers, plus I think they are also first in North America to make this available. The Xperia ion can now be yours, as expected, for $49.99 on a 3-year and ranges north to $549.99 outright. The ion comes seriously stacked with specs: 4.6-inch display (1280 x 720), 12MP Sony Exmor R camera that shoots 1080p videos, LTE connectivity, has a 1.5GHz dual core processor and is 10.8 mm thin. Now, the ion currently runs OS 2.3 Gingerbread but is on a path towards Ice Cream Sandwich sometime “soon.”

        • MIPS Works with Android 4.1, Focused on Low-Cost Tablets

          Among chip makers that have worked steadily with the Android mobile OS, you don’t hear MIPS Technologies mentioned much. But MIPS has, in fact, worked with Android since the birth of the OS, as we noted all the way back in 2009. When it comes to low cost Android tablet devices, you hear much discussion of devices running ARM chips, but MIPS has in fact been a competitive player in this space. Tablets based on MIPS chips and priced under $100 have made a mark around the world. Now there is news that MIPS will develop around Jelly Bean, otherwise known as Android 4.1.

        • Tikl Me, Elmo

          If you don’t have the push-to-talk (PTT) feature from your cell-phone provider, you can download the free Tikl app from the Android Marketplace. Tikl allows you to use PTT technology with any other users that have Tikl installed on their phones. Because Tikl is available for both Android and iOS, it covers a wide variety of smartphones.

        • ZTE Grand X coming to UK for £190 pay-as-you-go: 4.3-inch qHD, microSD, stock Android 4.0

          If this is the “advanced gaming smartphone” that ZTE teased a few days ago, then we can’t help but feel a little miffed. It’d be fairer to describe the Grand X as the most advanced phone in ZTE’s growing budget line-up, and if you look at it from that perspective then it’s rather more impressive. For £190 PAYG with Virgin Mobile in the UK, you’re getting a 4.3-inch qHD LCD touchscreen, dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor (no Nexus 7 guts here unfortunately), microSD expandable storage (plus 4GB built-in and 512MB RAM), 5-megapixel rear camera and VGA front-facer, sub-10mm thickness and — ta-da! — stock Ice Cream Sandwich, albeit accompanied by legacy Gingerbread navigation buttons. We’d have liked to see the proper, up-to-date Android 4.0 button layout, but in any case the absence of ZTE’s Kanzi skin or indeed any other customization is a welcome change, because Google juice tastes fine served neat.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Chef Offers a Recipe for the Open Source Cloud

    As one of the original architects of Amazon’s EC2, Opscode CTO Chris Brown witnessed firsthand what happens when you make ubiquitous and nearly infinite computing power available to engineers who were used to working with a handful of machines. In short, you become very, very popular.

  • Multi-touch in WebKit-Clutter

    Following my past work on multi-touch support in Clutter, have been playing lately in implementing the W3C Touch Events API in the Clutter port of WebKit.

    A lot of code can be reused from WebCore without problems, but we’ll need to do some mildly complex event translation because the W3C API and the one in Clutter (and in XInput and in Gtk+) are very different.

  • Open source offense could be our best defense against cyberattacks

    A core dilemma for IT today is how to properly protect the organizations’ information systems and assets given security tools often seem like a black hole sucking down both time and money. But a strong defense doesn’t have to be expensive, and a good place to start is assessing what information is publicly available and figuring out how to safeguard it from attack.

  • Open Compute Project Driving Open-Source Hardware Development

    The open-source hardware movement behind the year-old Open Compute Project is gaining traction.

  • Eaves: Open source communities need simple social “hacks?

    Turns out the open source development model has some flaws after all. Or is it just a case of geeks being geeks?

    David Eaves, principal of Eaves Consulting, told attendees during his opening keynote at OSCON 2012 today that a lot of the “soft” skills that hard core coders often scoff at are actually important when it comes to producing flawless code.

  • Twitter’s Open Source Big Data Tool Comes to the Cloud Courtesy of Nodeable

    Usually when we think of a pivot, we think of a company that has decided to drop its core offering and market a different product or service. Obvious Corporation put ODEO up for sale and focused on Twitter. BRBN shuttered its location check-in service and became Instagram. But Nodeable‘s pivot isn’t that sort of pivot.

    Today Nodeable launched a new service called StreamReduce, a cloud-hosted real-time big data analytics product. StreamReduce is based on the same architecture as Nodeable’s existing IT operations monitoring tool. The company is keeping its current service, but is expanding its scope by marketing beyond its current base of developers and system administrators.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • New Security and Developer Features Now in Firefox [14]
      • Firefox 14 is now available

        Firefox 14 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/new/. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the newest version of Firefox for the latest features and fixes. The release notes for Firefox 14 are available at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/14.0.1/releasenotes/. Firefox 14 is also now available for Android. The associated release notes are available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/14.0.1/releasenotes/index.html.

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • 7 hard truths about the NoSQL revolution

      The NoSQL buzzword has been metastasizing for several years. The excitement about these fast data stores has been intoxicating, and we’re as guilty as anyone of seeing the groundbreaking appeal of NoSQL. Yet the honeymoon is coming to an end, and it’s time to start balancing our enthusiasm with some gimlet-eyed hard truths.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.6 RC1 Released
    • Will open source office suites go the way of Thunderbird?

      Microsoft’s latest entry in the office productivity is such a blatant move towards convergence of mobile and desktop, you have to wonder if they are going too far, too fast.

      If mobile and cloud is indeed the new direction of productivity apps, open source office suites must innovate quickly or die.

      Microsoft wants to embrace desktop and mobile users as much as possible with their upcoming Office 2013 release, and right now it feels like Microsoft just pulled away from LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, leaving the venerable open source office suites eating Microsoft’s dust.

  • Education

  • Healthcare

    • Open source hospital information system to be packaged for Debian

      The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (Vista), an open source hospital information system used in 160 hospitals, several hundreds of clinics and more than a hundred nursing homes, will become part of the Debian free software distribution. This was announced at the Libre Software Meeting (LSM/RMLL) in Geneva, last week Wednesday.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.1-BETA1 Available…
    • FreeBSD 9.1 enters beta

      The developers at the FreeBSD Project have released the first beta for version 9.1 of the open source FreeBSD operating system. Aimed at developers and testers, the first test build of FreeBSD 9.1 was originally expected to arrive on 6 July but later fell behind schedule. In the mailing list announcement, Ken Smith, a member of the Release Engineering Team, says that the developers “hope this will be the only BETA build”, noting that it will be followed by two release candidate builds.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The FSF Compliance Lab Doubles

      Last month, Joshua Gay and Donald Robertson III, two long time employees, took on responsibility for the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) compliance lab (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/). Already, they are finding that having two people not only allows them to do more, but to organize more for future growth as well.

      “Already, we’re doing all the things Brett was doing and rolling out new projects,” Gay and Robertson say. They are referring to Brett Smith, the former solo employee for the lab, who is now employed by the W3 Consortium.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Helping the European Parliament to release its own free software

      For the first time, the European Parliament is about to release one of its own programs as Free Software. The program in question is called AT4AM, short for “Automatic Tool for Amendments”. The Parliament is in the business of making laws, and AT4AM automates a lot of the formal stuff associated with the production process.

      To understand what AT4AM means for MEPs and their staff, have a look at how amendments were filed before, and how it works now. (Vimeo. Flash required, sorry.) Parliament staffer Erik Josefsson compared the introduction of AT4AM to the arrival of version control for developers. It’s been in use inside the parliament for about 18 months, and it’s a pretty fundamental tool for the people working there.

  • Licensing

    • Can the Terms of the GPL Prevent GNU/Linux being used for War?

      There’s been a lot of noise on the internet recently about the fact that the Windows-based software being used in the remote control system of drones use by the American military has been hit by a virus and this has caused the Department of Defense (DOD) to use GNU/Linux which is a more secure option. This has, predictably, caused raised eyebrows and demands by some that any military organisation should be prevented from using GNU/Linux in offensive weapons systems. The use of Drones in Afghanistan is a highly controversial issue but it is not the purpose of this article to debate the morality and ethics of deploying drones in an area of asymetrical conflict but rather to explore if it is actually possible to use the terms of the GPL to legally prevent the deployment of software or operating systems by any government’s military.

    • Now You Can Also Join The Open Source Initiative

      The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is accepting applications for Individual Membership, starting immediately. Open source community members worldwide are invited to join OSI now at opensource.org/join and help shape the future of open source.

      “The transformation of the OSI into a member-based organization is a timely and important step for the worldwide open source community,” said Simon Phipps, OSI President.”I encourage everyone to visit opensource.org/join and take a stand for open source.”

    • New life for the Open Source Initiative

      OSI, an important, but long quiet, open-source organization is seeking to revitalize itself with a new membership program.

    • OSI Announces It Will Open the Organization to Individual Members

      Wednesday, July 17, at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced a new initiative to open up the organization to individual members. Historically, the organization was open only to affiliate members, so this announcement marks a significant new direction for the open-source advocate. The shift represents a move from a governance model of volunteer and self-appointed directors to one driven by members.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Is The Wall Street Casino Closing?

      In a powerful sign of tough times for the casino business, Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs is actually going to use their bank charter to do what banks do – expand loans.

    • Goldman Settles Class-Action Over $698 Million Offering

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) reached a class settlement with investors in a $698 million mortgage- backed securities offering, a lawyer for the plaintiffs told a federal judge in New York.

      David Wales, who represents the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, told U.S. District Judge Harold Baer in a letter made public today that both sides had accepted a settlement proposed by a mediator. Details of the agreement weren’t disclosed.

  • Civil Rights

    • NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate

      In 2008, a team of software coders inside the National Security Agency started reverse-engineering the database that ran Google.

      They closely followed the Google research paper describing BigTable — the sweeping database that underpinned many of the Google’s online services, running across tens of thousands of computer servers — but they also went a little further. In rebuilding this massive database, they beefed up the security. After all, this was the NSA.

      Like Google, the agency needed a way of storing and retrieving massive amounts of data across an army of servers, but it also needed extra tools for protecting all that data from prying eyes. They added “cell level” software controls that could separate various classifications of data, ensuring that each user could only access the information they were authorized to access. It was a key part of the NSA’s effort to improve the security of its own networks.

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