04.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Now that the hype over “7″ is declining, I expect GNU/Linux to continue rapid growth in share. Here, as far as I know, last year there was only one server loaded with GNU/Linux, sitting on a shelf. This year there are 40 PCs and servers running GNU/Linux and by next year, everyone in the community will know something about GNU/Linux. We could add another 20 GNU/Linux PCs from Computers for Schools, and with luck, a bunch of thin clients if the budget comes through (expected this month). There might be only 1% share for that other OS in the school by the end of next year.
-
-
Spain has a rich language diversity. While the main official language is Spanish, there are several regions in which it coexists with others with the same or similar degrees of official recognition. These are Basque, spoken in the Basque Country; Catalan, spoken in Catalonia, the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands; and Galician, spoken in Galicia.
Asturian is yet another language spoken in the region of Asturies, in the North of Spain, and it is special in the sense that it does not enjoy official status but there is a regional law that contemplates its promotion and protection. However, this still means that there are no public or private initiatives to make it available in IT and the newer technologies.
-
I recall that Absa offered to e-mail me the statement in a Microsoft format. As a computer geek I only use Linux, so I ignored it – thereby inadvertently volunteering to give Absa R5 a month to kill trees for no purpose.
-
Microsoft’s latest operating systems are boasting a great “new” feature, Windows PowerShell.
[...]
It’s pretty clear that Microsoft has discovered the value of the shell, since it has integrated it into Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, the latest operating systems. However, other more stable operating systems like Unix, Linux, and other flavors of Unix, have used shells like ash, bash, and others for decades. And, they have proven to be essential. The shell is an extremely lightweight yet powerful tool for tackling just about any operation you could want. The nice thing is that the shell is completely text driven, so that it can be used over small data links like modems, even though modems are becoming extinct these days.
But, Linux and other Unix flavors still have an advantage over Windows. Decades of refinement for one. Windows’ implementation of the command line is still a little limited. It would take Microsoft quite a long time to catch up and try to match the huge array of command line tools available with Unix/Linux.
-
Law enforcement recently has been following the general tide of government and public service groundswell by seeking computing solutions in the Linux direction. Particularly in law enforcement, their needs match well with open source software. They have to work lean on a taxpayer’s budget, and open source is free or low cost. They need top security, and Linux is still the highest-scoring operating software in official government assessments. They need mission-critical reliability, and Linux is so stable, it doesn’t just outrank the competition in stability – it makes the competition disappear!
-
Marketing isn’t the first word that one associates with the Linux community, but it is a necessary activity for those who wish to bring new users into the fold (and perhaps make a buck at the same time). The recent Ubuntu rebrand, and the subsequent media attention surrounding it, provides an opportunity to consider the larger question of branding for Linux distributions and open source projects
-
Byfield recommends CentOS and Debian for users seeking “refuge” from commercialization. Both fine projects, and they’re great for a lot of users. But Ubuntu exists in part because Debian doesn’t make a very good distro for mainstream users. CentOS is simply a re-packaging of a commercial Linux distro. If it weren’t for Red Hat’s work, CentOS likely cease to exist. So what’s to gain from avoiding all hints of commercialization? Refusing to acknowledge the contribution that companies make to the production of free software?
-
-
Your editor has just returned from the Linux Foundation’s annual Collaboration Summit, held in San Francisco. LFCS is a unique event; despite becoming more developer-heavy over the years, it still pulls together an interesting combination of people from the wider Linux ecosystem. The following article is not intended to be a comprehensive report from the summit; it is, instead, a look at a few of the more interesting thoughts that came from there.
-
Desktop
-
Beijing Red Flag Software Company released free and open source Red Flag Linux Desktop 6.0 SP3 on April 19, 2010, according to the company’s web site. The web site now provides a simplified version and a full version for free download.
-
Chrome OS
-
Chrome OS extends this strategy. It will be a Web browser running on top of a hardware-controlling Linux kernel, and not a whole lot else. Chrome OS should take up less than a gigabyte of your computer’s hard drive, and the operating system will boot in seconds. It won’t have a “Start” button–it will just have the Google home page, with links to your favorite Internet applications. Panels will appear on the side of the main window when you connect the laptop to your digital camera or when you find a new wireless network.
-
Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, has revealed that he expects netbooks and other devices based running the company’s forthcoming Google Chrome OS to be available for between $300 and $400.
-
Although still scheduled to launch towards the end of this year, there hasn’t been much in the way of news about Google’s Chrome OS for netbooks for a while. Google CEO Eric Schmidt did let a few details slip about the cloud-based operating system at a recent conference though, including a re-iteration of the planed low price for the hardware.
-
In Samsung’s own vision, the main technologies would be its own silicon plus the Ubuntu Linux for notebooks, and Google’s Chrome browser/OS. This shows Samsung signing up enthusiastically for the search giant’s concept of a ‘cloudbook’ – a lightweight device heavily geared to web access and streaming on the move. Google will release its new Chrome OS later this year.
-
Server
-
Supercomputer maker Cray doesn’t talk much about the systems software that runs on its massively parallel, midrange, or entry HPC gear, but it probably will start doing so more because of the work it has done to make its non-standard XT boxes look a little less proprietary as far as Linux applications are concerned.
-
The High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets trade show is on today in New York, and Andy Bechtolsheim, twice the chief technology officer at the Oracle-borged Sun Microsystems, is using the event to launch the first modular 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch from his latest company, Arista Networks. And it looks like Bechtolsheim will, in his quiet way, be shaking up the networking market enough that someone will have to buy his company again.
-
-
The future of IT favours open standards and open source as enterprises search for solutions that are robust, interoperable and free of vendor lock-in. Google, Amazon and IBM run massively scalable infrastructure on open source Linux.
Linux can run on multiple hardware options, bringing freedom of choice. And without the burden of licence fees to be paid to any vendor, it comes with an inherent cost advantage. As a consequence, it is the platform of choice for many software developers.
-
A new email archiving software system that enables companies to better handle regulatory compliance and storage issues has been launched by The Linux Box Corporation.
-
Applications
-
-
Proprietary
-
Blackmagic Design has now introduced 3 models of DaVinci Resolve. These models include a new Mac based software only version, a Mac based version that includes the incredible DaVinci Resolve control surface, and a high end Linux version that lets you build multiple GPU supercomputer based systems for unlimited power. Blackmagic Design has also worked hard to give colorists affordable and easy upgrade options as needed.
-
-
Instructionals
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The topics covered in this 500+ page eBook include Linux network, server and data administration, Linux kernel, security, clustering, configuration, tuning, optimization, migration and coexistence with non-Linux systems. A must read for any serious Linux system admin.
-
Another way to protect your released binaries is to sign them with a PGP signature. You can use the same tool GNU Privacy Guard for that. When you start using it, you first need to generate a public/private key combination.
-
Games
-
There are lots of good native games for Linux, but the idea that Valve might bring over some of the big guns like Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress is near intoxicating for this Linux gamer!
-
We have our hands on the bash launcher used by Valve’s Steam client for Mac OS X that was recently announced — along with the Source Engine for OS X — and is currently in closed beta. While such scripts are usually insignificant, there is something interesting within it and that is explicit support for Linux.
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
Amarok’s latest upgrade to version 2.3 brings several new and useful featurs to the table. The music-playing software’s interface is highly configurable — with a simple setting, you can arrange any of the panels and the toolbar to your liking. There’s also been some performance optimization to make the application move with a lot more snap.
-
-
Even as a basic user, I was able to install and tap into some of the advantages of this Arch-based Linux distro. KahelOs gave me a very stable feel and with a little effort I was able to add packages, customize my desktop and everything else I needed to do in the short term. Making this my daily driver is another story though and would take some time to get used to.
-
New Releases
-
-
-
-
-
-
Mythdora 12.23 has been released. There are a few changes from 10.21 but mostly on the cosmetic side of things. We’re now using the stock mythtv theme out of the box, as well as stock paths. Please review the following release notes and use this link to retrieve the isos.
-
Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
-
One of the major changes for this release is the availability of six PCLinuxOS 2010 variants, each with a different desktop environment. In addition to the project’s standard KDE release with version 4.4.2 of the KDE desktop, users can choose a GNOME 2.30.0 desktop, the GNOME Zen Mini desktop, LXDE, XFCE or the Enlightenment E-17 desktop.
-
In this mailling list we will focus on all kde related discussions / problems / issues.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Lulu Ltd., a self-publishing company led by Red Hat Inc. co-founder Robert Young, postponed its initial public offering after investors balked at the price for the company’s shares.
-
-
Linux vendor Red Hat today released the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6), giving observers a look at what’s to come in the next version of its flagship operating system platform.
The new release takes advantage of a long list of new Linux kernel improvements for performance and scalability while also providing new technologies for security, management, and virtualization.
“When you look at RHEL 6, there is no one single feature that is the killer feature in the release,” Tim Burke, vice president of platform engineering at Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), told InternetNews.com. “It’s truly a release where the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. It’s a large, coordinated effort aiming for improved operational efficiency.”
-
Red Hat will preview on Wednesday an upgrade to its enterprise Linux distribution, which offers dramatic improvements in scalability as well as power management and storage enhancements.
-
Red Hat has added a number of new capabilities that should help data centers better support virtualization and cloud computing. The beta release of RHEL 6.0 removes Xen.
-
-
-
Driving leadership across virtual, physical and cloud deployments, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 update harnesses the scalability and performance optimization of the next-generation of server processors. Also included are enhanced virtualization capabilities that enable greater guest density, improved interoperability with Windows environments, and new tools and utilities enhancements.
-
Debian Family
-
MEPIS LLC has announced the upload of SimplyMEPIS 8.5 ISOs that will fit on a 1GB USB key. The USB sized ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-USB_8.5.03-rel1_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-USB_8.5.03-rel1_64.iso respectively.
-
Ubuntu
-
-
When we set up Project Ayatana to improve the usability of the whole desktop, we called it Ayatana because we were focused on the “sphere of consciousness”, one’s awareness of what’s going on outside of the current application. There are two key aspects to the work:
1. Notifications are “awareness distilled” in the sense that you cannot interact with them at all. We designed them as ephemeral “click-transparent” messages, implemented in Notify-OSD. Their sole purpose is to notify you of transient events.
2. Indicator Menus combine persistent awareness of a state with a set of options for modifying that state.
-
The notification area in Ubuntu is to be removed by Ubuntu 11.04 the Canonical design team have announced. Labelled as ‘ineffective’ and ‘inconsistent’ Ubuntu will instead be encouraging applications to make use of panel menus that assemble related applications into one area.
-
I’ve been looking for a way to combine all my inboxes in one place for a long time; little did I know my favorite operating system would make this dream feature of mine a default. Previously I didn’t really see the point of the indicator applet, but with the addition of access to one’s social networks I see a bright future for this handy little tool.
If you’re really interested in the next version of Ubuntu, and you’re brave enough to try something still in beta, check it out here. If you’d rather wait, the full version comes out on April 29th, and you can always read more about Ubuntu tomorrow when my next post goes up.
What do you think? Is this a killer feature for Ubuntu, or more bloat you’ll never use? Will you yourself use the indicator applet now that it supports social networks, or will you continue to remove it as part of your Ubuntu setup routine?
-
As Ubuntu continues to grow and refine, particularly in bringing excellence in design to the platform, there has been some concern in some parts of the community that it is less attuned to power users who want to tweak many aspects of the system than it once was. I agree. That in my mind is not a bad thing: Ubuntu is focusing on a simple, sleek and refined experience, and sometimes as Mark said recently, less is more.
-
Variants
-
Edubuntu 9.10 was our first release that returned from being an add-on CD to a full installation disc. It had a big problem though, it was almost double the size what it needed to be. The alternate installation that shipped with the disc required for LTSP installation meant that every program and its files were shipped twice on the image, resulting in a very bloated disc. It was unavoidable at the time though but for Lucid we have managed to integrate everything that’s required for a full Edubuntu setup into the desktop LiveCD, so no more alternate installation is required. The effective overall gain on the Lucid installation media is about 1GB. We don’t want to waste space since the current 2.2GB image is already quite heavy on mirrors, but at it is good to know that we have some more leeway when we want to add more features.
-
Linux Mint 9 will feature a brand new version of mintBackup, the “Backup Tool”, rewritten from scratch by a newcomer in the development team, somebody people on the IRC and the forums know quite well: Ikey.
-
-
At this year’s UK Embedded Masterclass event, engineer Paul Tingey from Wind River will give a presentation outlining some of the technical challenges associated with the design of multicore based embedded systems as well as the challenges involved in migrating existing systems from current single core processing to multicore processing.
-
SUNNYVALE, CA, Apr 19, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Zoran Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!zran/quotes/nls/zran (ZRAN 10.92, -0.11, -1.00%) is now shipping Inferno, a new Linux-based firmware platform for its Quatro(R) family of processors that allows manufacturers to easily integrate new technologies supporting advanced features and improved performance in printers, multi-function printers (MFPs) and scanners.
-
“With many business-critical applications running on Linux, the quality and reliability of Linux-based software technologies is of utmost importance,” said Andrey Isaev, director of the technology products department at ABBYY. “ABBYY FineReader Engine SDK delivers a complete set of technologies to ensure accurate and comprehensive OCR functionality yet provides qualified technical support and protection from potential additional costs relating to implementation and upgrades.”
-
ABBYY has announced the availability of ABBYY FineReader Engine 9.0 for Linux, a robust software development kit (SDK) to integrate ABBYY optical character recognition (OCR), barcode recognition, and PDF conversion technologies into Linux-based applications.
-
Baig modified the innards of the clock, which has a touchscreen display with a controller board and a Wi-Fi dongle. It also uses Chumby, a hardware open source platform with a Linux operating system.
-
Project Pandora has been one of those open source handheld gaming console developments that has been plagued with delays and accusations of being ‘vapourware’ for the last two years.
-
Recently I had a chance to put my hands on Lexicon Alpha usb recording interface and I must say I was surprised to discover that it works out of the box with Linux. I couldn’t find any compatibility information for it, except for this post, and still, Lexicon Alpha was purely plug-and-play device with my Ubuntu Studio 9.10 netbook.
[...]
Bottom Line
The Good:
- works out of the box
- can record two tracks simultaneously
- well designed and made of good quality materials
The Bad:
- no phantom power
- no MIDI input
-
Phones
-
The hack utilizes OpeniBoot, a Linux 2.6 bootloader that works with first- and second-generation iPhones. The system provides dual-boot functionality, allowing users to run either the iPhone OS or Android.
-
Nokia
-
-
Intel said that the Linux-based operating system will be linked to its AppUp software store and demonstrated the unique media syncing capabilities between devices running on MeeGo: video playing on one device will not only sync over to another but also carry certain data, including picking up where the user left off while watching video on the first device.
-
Intel is developing an edition of the Linux-based Meego OS that will work on mainstream laptops and desktops, a company executive said this week.
-
-
Since the announcement of the MeeGo operating system earlier this year, we’re still waiting for the first Nokia handsets to take advantage of the new OS. We’re expecting to see at least one device in the next few months, but in the meantime it looks like Nokia has also been working on an entry-level handset that isn’t set to appear until 2011. To find out more, join us after the break…
-
Android
-
Our fearless leader Andrew really liked the Sony Ericsson Experia X10 when he got his hands on it at a SE press event a few months ago. Rumors have persisted for a while that the device was coming to the ‘States with AT&T for a few months, but now, a source within AT&T is saying that the phone is definitely coming.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
It features an Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz processor, 8.9″ 1024×600 widescreen LCD, 1GB RAM, 4GB Solid-State Disk (SSD), 802.11g wireless, USB ports, 4-cell battery, GNU Linux, and more.
-
Tablets
-
What a surprise, but it seems that Sharp will propose from Next month (May) a new NetWalker Ubuntu powered device in Japan with the PC-T1.
-
-
The spec of the NetWalker included a 5-inch display, Freescale 800MHz processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB storage, and Ubuntu Linux OS. Weighing in at 409 grams and rated at 10 hours battery life it was certainly portable, but possibly too small for most people.
-
If you aren’t a programmer and have no idea what else could possibly need to be done, here are a few ideas:
* Artists are needed for making themes and wallpapers for Linux distros and desktop environments like GNOME & KDE
* Make little tiny icons for programmers to put on the buttons in their programs
* Translating a program from English to whatever other language you speak
* Writing documentation (no project is too-well-documented)
* Tech support
* Testing is a great way for early adopters to help out
* Bug triaging
* Packaging software for a Linux distro
-
There were other “Hot, New OSS Projects” mentioned by the LUGs, but in order to keep the blog entry within the “reasonable length” category, I will save some of the others until a later date. In the meantime I hope that you enjoy reading about some of the projects that you might not know, or ones that you do know but have “moved on” since the last time you looked at them.
-
Norwegian company eZ Systems, creators of the eZ Publish open source enterprise content management system, recently lost the last two core developers of the eZ Components PHP library. The other project developers left earlier in the year. However, the component library will continue to live on and have a future thanks to an agreement between the developers and eZ Systems, sponsors of the project for the last few years. The project will be continued as a fully open source project, renamed as Zeta Components.
-
Soon after acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook released its Tornado sharing framework under an open-source license.
-
Mozilla
-
Mozilla released a public beta of Firefox 3.6.4 yesterday, which also debuted “Lorentz” – a project that the open source outfit is hoping will stablise browsing for Windows and Linux users when Adobe’s Flash, Apple’s Quicktime and Microsoft’s Silverlight plugins crash.
-
The Mozilla developers have released the beta of Firefox 3.6.4, which now includes technology from the Mozilla Lorentz Project. Lorentz plans to bring full process isolation to Firefox, separating web pages and plug-ins from the main browser by running them in their own processes.
-
Oracle
-
With the improvements in Impress, and exciting applications such as Fielder’s Impressive, the presentation outlook in 2010 certainly isn’t as bleak as it was in 2006. On the other hand, we still have some way to go before all that presentation power becomes readily accessible to ordinary end-users.
-
CMS
-
Squiz, developers of the enterprise-class open source CMS MySource Matrix, today announced the availability of a new, independent review of MySource Matrix, from leading analysts Ovum / The Butler Group.
-
The Indigenous Human Rights Network Australia (IHRNA) has opted for the open source content management system, Joomla, for its new website.
Hosted by the Australian Human Rights Commission and funded by Oxfam Australia, the network serves as a resource for advocates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s human rights.
-
-
With enterprises utilizing more cloud-based web services, including social and digital media applications, Rackspace has seen a significant uptick in Drupal installations across its customer base.
-
-
-
-
-
The Obama White House has contributed code back to the Drupal community, six months after it made headlines by adopting the open source CMS.
Dave Cole, a senior advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, announced the code release this afternoon during a keynote at the DrupalCon trade show in downtown San Francisco. The administration is contributing a quartet of Drupal modules it built for the new-look WhiteHouse.gov, a site meant to provide improved communication between the President and his people.
-
Education
-
E-learning comes in many forms. For example math and vocabulary aids on CD-ROM or screencasts on YouTube are just two obvious examples from a large range of different options. Less familiar, since they frequently deal with specialised knowledge, are thousands of specific learning systems and managed online courses. Programs such as Blackboard, Sakai, the German Ilias, Dokeos or Moodle are used to create training platforms for personnel and to provide computer courses for schools and universities.
[...]
With over 40,000 registered installations in more than 200 countries and an estimated 30 million users, Moodle is currently the most frequently used LMS. Many schools, and universities, such as the prestigious Humboldt University in Berlin, use Moodle. Another typical application is for staff training in medium and large companies and commercial providers of online courses often rely on Moodle. Almost half of the Moodle installation are used by groups with more than 500 members, for example the Open University with more than 600,000 students is one of the largest users.
-
Business
-
The SugarCRM developers have announced the release of a first beta for version 6.0 of their open source customer relationship manager. In Sugar 6, the developers focused on creating a completely re-designed user interface with new buttons and icons. Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, said that, “Sugar 6 delivers a look, feel and user experience that consumers of popular social networking and other collaboration tools will appreciate.”
-
-
Talend has integrated its three major data integration products into Talend version 4.0. The combination represents the first attempt to supply integrated data integration, data cleansing, and master data management in one open source product.
-
Zenoss, Inc., the fastest-growing provider of commercial open source, enterprise IT monitoring products for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments, today announced it has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors”* in the “Cool Vendors in IT Operations Management, 2010” 1 report by Gartner, Inc. The “Cool Vendor” research1 discusses innovations being delivered by companies targeting the problems of IT operations management.
-
Ingres Corporation, the leading provider of open source database management software and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, hosted the fifth annual Ingres OpenROAD Code Sprint, this year in Manila, Philippines, where community members collaborated on developing new features for Ingres OpenROAD. The event, held in mid-March, provided Ingres OpenROAD Server training for attendees and resulted in a number of improvements to the solution that will give developers new tools for increased productivity, error handling, and flexibility.
-
Pentaho Corporation, the open source business intelligence (BI) leader, today announced its strongest quarter yet. Compared to Q1 2009, Pentaho had a 177 percent increase in new Enterprise Edition customers. Q1 2010, the second straight record quarter, also saw a record number of new OEM partners and the introduction of the revolutionary Pentaho Data Integration 4.0.
-
Funding
-
David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL, is also a principal investor in OrangeHRM.
-
BSD
-
Android is becoming more and more popular. It is used in mobiles/cell phones, runs e-book readers, can be found in tablet computers etc etc, but Android is not just for smartphones anymore. A Swedish company has unveiled the first Android-based TV and there’s been an announcement recently that it will be used in TVs.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Some of you may not know that in addition to my admin responsibility at GNU-Darwin, I am a biochemist and protein crystallographer, as well as the X-ray lab manager and systems admin for the Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry Department at Johns Hopkins University. Here are some Hopkins links.
[...]
In addition to providing a computer operating system, packages and source code, The GNU-Darwin Distribution has branched into body hacking, and so we release information to help people increase their intelligence and longevity. In the spirit of software freedom, the information is put into the public domain, and the tools that are discussed are non-proprietary readily available to anyone. Appropriate to the tenor of the distro, this activity has become activism, and we expose the abuses of corporations and governments when we can find them.
-
Releases
-
-
The Eraser developers have announced the availability of version 6.0.7 of their advanced security tool for Windows. Eraser is a software utility for securely deleting files and folders from different types of magnetic media, such as hard drives and floppy disks. It removes sensitive information by overwriting the area of the drive on which the data is stored one or more times using special algorithms.
-
National
-
Italian public administrations considering to use open source can turn to a competence centre specialised in this type of software. The web-based centre, which will be opened tomorrow, aims to foster the development and adoption of open source software.
-
Soon after the campaign went down and from no time, the branded vehicles began to disappear one after another from Nigerian roads across the commercial nerve centre of the nation, Lagos. But one thing remained intact, the knowledge and awareness such a campaign has drawn to Open Source Software (OSS).
For Nigerians, open source means various things to diverse individuals and organizations. A school of thought would not like to hear anything about open source software and yet for another, open source is where the future lies.
And for the software engineers at a California-based Open Source Initiative (OSI) founded 12 years ago, www.opensource.org, the term ‘Open Source’ does not mean mere access to source codes, but must comply with some core 10 distribution terms for OSS, including free redistribution, source code, derived works, integrity of the author’s source code, no discrimination against persons or groups, no discrimination against fields of endeavour, distribution of license, non-limitation to specific product, restriction of other software and technology-neutrality.
-
Cuba
-
During the inauguration of the Eleventh International Conference on Information (INFO 2010), Moreno pointed out that the country’s progressive migration to this kind of software aims at guaranteeing national security and technological independence.
-
Cuban Deputy Minister of Informatics and Communications Boris Moreno said that Cuba is moving towards open source platforms to counteract Washington´s economic blockade.
-
Government
-
The Labour Party has also said it would publish details of procurement deals and create a level playing field for open-source ICT.
[...]
Although the Liberal Democrats did not make ICT a central issue in their manifesto, they put emphasis on using cloud computing technology and open source software.
Sarah Burnett, government IT analyst at Ovum, welcomes the use of open source technology in government.
-
Health
-
We are currently witnessing a significant increase in use of Open Source tools in the field of health. Our study aims to research the potential of these software packages for developing countries.
-
ImageWare Systems, a developer of biometric technology, has announced that they are creating a project called the Open Biometrics Initiative (OBI) intending to push biometric technology development in the open source software development environment. The OBI project will take place by ImageWare operating a forum that will be available to anyone in the open source community.
-
VillageReach, the Seattle-based social enterprise that increases access to healthcare for remote, last mile communities, today announced the launch of openLMIS™, a new open source initiative to improve health system supply chains in low-income countries. VillageReach also announced the third release of its management information system, vrMIS, an integrated component of its logistics programs that improves cold chain performance and last mile distribution for a wide variety of medical commodities.
-
We’re big fans of innovative applications of simple technology to address complex health problems in areas short on resources, so we’re excited to hear that a project developed at MIT has won $150,000 in prize money for its work on an open-source software platform that enables health workers to capture and transmit EMR data on mobile phones and connect remote workers to physicians for clinical decision support.
-
Italian children hospitals are saving money by using the ‘Smart Inclusion project’ using open source technology and offering access to for instance medical data and e-learning applications. According to a statement from the Ministry for Public Administration and Innovation, hospitals can save about 1000 Euro per PC and about 500 per thin client.
-
Licensing
-
The tool audits the contents of compiled software, explained Shane Coughlan, former legal expert at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), in his video introduction.
-
Open Access/Content
-
The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project has announced that it will reach more than 250,000 registered users today. OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. It was founded by Steve Coast in August of 2004 and is run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
-
The Dallas Morning News, in fact, wrote that the Texas state Legislature approved reviewing open source textbooks for use in the K-12 system. Virginia already has approved them and California is considering it:
“This is really a revolution that has been going on for a while,” said Brian Bridges, the director of the California Resource Learning Network and one of the state’s online text reviewers. Money saved by these free options could go toward the purchase of computers for students who need them, he said.
But, really, what better project for an open-sourced textbook than a textbook about open source?
-
Students from The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin will present research that calls for open-source data and better transparency in Texas state and local finance at a half-day conference April 23.
-
The new state laws grant the commissioner of education the authority to select a list of electronic textbooks for districts, including open-source content – texts that can be downloaded free from the Internet. The laws also allow districts to use their textbook funds to buy electronic material and devices like netbook computers that can access it. That means the state board will have less control of the content.
-
The U-Bookstore and Flat World Knowledge, an online, open-source database for textbooks, recently announced a pilot program that would give students free access to digital versions of textbooks and supply related supplemental materials and hardcopy versions at a lower cost than traditional publishing prices. It offers options such as printing individual chapters for $1.99 or ordering hard copies of the books.
-
At a time when Facebook and iPad are the rage and information updates with a click, some policymakers are trying to take textbooks off the shelf and onto the Internet.
-
Over the past decade, those who wished to contribute to SETI’s mission of locating life elsewhere in the universe could leave their computers on running a special screensaver and donate their unused computing power to the cause. Now, SETI director Jill Tarter is asking people around the globe to get more involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by opening up SETI’s servers to the public calling for a worldwide, open source contribution to the search.
-
-
Programming
-
With the recent release of GCC 4.5 and the forthcoming release of LLVM 2.7 that is expected in the coming days, we have decided to see how the performance of GCC compares to that of LLVM. For this testing we have results from GCC 4.3/4.4/4.5 compared to LLVM with its GCC front-end (LLVM-GCC) and against Clang, which is the native C/C++ compiler front-end for the Low-Level Virtual Machine.
-
The thing about the Perl community is that almost no one gets paid solely for participating in the Perl community. Sure, you can volunteer for a while to earn the cachet and the right to apply for a TPF grant at a fraction of the going consulting rate to justify continuing to work on the unpleasant parts of a project, but you’re still effectively a volunteer.
The thing about volunteers is if it’s not worth their time or energy or health or sanity or happiness to keep volunteering, they can walk away whenever they want. They have no obligation to continue to do what they do. Not even their sense of devotion or duty or guilt or community camaraderie should compel them to continue on projects that aren’t worth their investment of time, and that’s more than okay.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
-
But the reasonable part of me wants to point out that one part of the Apple statement is worth looking at – the assertion that H.264 is open. Because I certainly don’t consider it to be – not even a little.
-
Science
-
Like microscopic inchworms, cancer cells slink away from tumors to travel and settle elsewhere in the body. Now, researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College report in today’s online edition of the journal Nature that new anti-cancer agents break down the looping gait these cells use to migrate, stopping them in their tracks.
-
Security/Aggression
-
The best approach is to determine where the threats are, and choose defenses accordingly. Most important is to realize that all systems are not the same! Some systems with very sensitive data should probably be protected with two-factor authentication: tokens and/or biometrics. Other systems/accounts, with low value, can still be protected by plain passwords with a flexible period for change. Of course, that assumes that the OS is strong enough to protect against overall compromise once a low-privilege account is compromised….not always a good bet in today’s operating environment!
-
Last Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee entertained SB 235, the bill sponsored by Sen. Chip Pearson (R-Dawsonville) to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings.
-
-
Environment
-
Finance
-
The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering new rules that would prevent financial firms from masking the risks they take by temporarily lowering their debt levels before quarterly reports to the public are due.
-
Greece’s borrowing costs skyrocketed to new record highs Wednesday as the government began crucial talks on the details of a rescue package for the debt-ridden country.
-
The SEC has faced intense criticism from the public and media regarding the way it loosened leveraging rules, a key cause of the implosion of major investment banks and the meltdown as a whole. The SEC also took a pounding over its handling of the Bernie Madoff fiasco. SEC officials chose to ignore explicit warnings from whistleblowers that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC also mishandled its first major case related to the crisis, being roundly scolded by a federal judge for not being tough enough on Bank of America’s secret bonus and salary deal with Merrill Lynch.
-
Senate Republicans and Democrats predicted on Wednesday that Congress would soon pass a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system, indicating a potentially swift resolution of the latest partisan firefight on Capitol Hill.
-
Charles Schwab, the brokerage firm, said Tuesday that it had agreed to pay $200 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit claiming it had misled investors about the risks of a short-term bond fund.
-
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs signals a new era of toughness for an agency beset by a series of public blunders.
Yet as it aims to become a tougher cop, the SEC faces a new obstacle: Banks have grown faster than the penalties the agency typically imposes. The sheer size of Goldman — whose quarterly profits just hit $3.3 billion — means court-approved penalties are likely to be too small to hurt it financially.
-
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission split 3-2 along party lines to approve an enforcement case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to two people with knowledge of the vote.
-
American International Group Inc., the financial firm rescued by the U.S., is the lead insurer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s board against shareholder lawsuits, said a person with knowledge of the policy.
-
American International Group Inc. is considering potential claims against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street banks over soured mortgage assets that led to heavy losses for the insurance giant, according to a person familiar with the matter.
-
Government allegations that financial giant Goldman Sachs defrauded investors are creating a political storm, with some lawmakers hoping that the civil lawsuit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission is just the beginning.
As the heat increases on the investment bank, which has denied all wrongdoing, Politico reports that they have hired Greg Craig for legal help. Craig formerly worked as the top lawyer for President Barack Obama and left the White House earlier this year to join the law firm Skadden, Arps.
-
Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are looking into whether the Securities and Exchange Commission was motivated by politics in filing civil charges against Goldman Sachs last week. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro a letter Tuesday asking for documentation of “any sort of prearrangement, coordination, direction from, or advance notice” between the SEC and the Obama administration or congressional Democrats.
-
With the Securities and Exchange Commission formally charging the huge investment bank with fraud last Friday, Brown’s campaign has been handed a fresh opportunity, not only to disrupt the Whitman campaign narrative that her executive business experience splendidly qualifies her for governor, but also to perform political jujitsu on the exorbitant campaign spending eMeg is fronting with her personal fortune.
-
The Financial Services Authority, Britain’s financial regulator, said Tuesday it had opened a formal investigation into Goldman Sachs in relation to recent accusations that the firm had defrauded investors, Julia Werdigier reports in The New York Times.
-
Some readers blame Republican dislike for governmental rules and regulations as one reason a massive government bailout was needed to rescue the economy. Other readers claim that all Democrats want to do is have government run everything, a solution that flies in the face of our freedoms and what once made our country great. A few seek more specifics about exactly what is being proposed.
-
Goldman’s (GS) fraud charges are sure to affect oil prices too — and I think crude will be a terrific short for the medium term. Of all the things surely affecting oil prices, it has been my theory that the financial player’s perceptions of the market are the most important and telling.
-
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged that Goldman Sachs defrauded investors by failing to disclose conflicts of interest in subprime mortgage investments it sold as the housing market collapsed in 2007. Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Vice President, is accused of encouraging investments into subprime mortgage securities he knew would fail, while working with a hedge fund to bet against its success. Referring to himself as the “the fabulous Fab,” Tourre boasted in e-mails about his scheme to defraud investors.
-
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over claims that it deceived investors about one of its financial products, tried to fend off regulators last fall by arguing it had a duty to keep the information confidential.
The company failed to disclose that hedge fund Paulson & Co., run by billionaire John Paulson, helped pick the underlying securities in a collateralized debt obligation and then bet against them, the SEC said in a lawsuit filed April 16. After being told in July 2009 that the SEC planned to bring a complaint, New York-based Goldman Sachs argued it had been compelled to keep Paulson’s role secret.
-
Goldman Sachs has set aside a quarterly pay-and-bonus pot of £3.6bn – just hours after learning it faces a formal fraud investigation by the City watchdog.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Bucolic Prospect park in Brooklyn, NY played host to a bizarre spectacle on Sunday, as a dramatically under-attended Dow-sponsored “Run for Water” was infiltrated and turned upside down by hundreds of furious activists, including a hundred dressed as Dow spokespeople.
New Yorkers who came to the park expecting a light run followed by a free concert found themselves unwitting extras in a macabre and chaotic scene as runners keeled over dead, Dow-branded grim reapers chased participants, and a hundred fake Dow representatives harangued other protesters and and handed out literature that explained Dow’s greenwashing program in frank detail.
-
After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, thousands of Louisiana residents claimed to suffer respiratory problems after being housed in government trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. Despite this, Senator David Vitter, (R-Louisiana), has been working to stall the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s process of updating its 20 year-old health risk assessment of formaldehyde.
-
When a company promotes pink-ribboned products and claims to care about breast cancer while also selling products linked to disease or injury, it’s called pinkwashing, and it’s has taken some pretty outrageous forms in the last few years. Ford, Mercedes and BMW have all urged people to buy and drive cars in the name of breast cancer, but exhaust from internal combustion engines contains toxic chemicals linked to disease. The Yoplait yogurt company sold pink-lidded yogurt to raise money for breast cancer, while manufacturing products with milk from cows stimulated by the artificial hormone RBGH, which studies show increases the risk of breast cancer. (Some yogurt companies, including Yoplait, have stopped using RGBH.) There’s even a breast cancer awareness gun, and we thought that took the cake.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of “South Park” that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.
-
More than 40 organisations and associations yesterday asked the German Federal Minister of Justice to “push for the abolition of EU telecommunications data retention requirements” which compel phone and Internet companies to collect data about their customers’ communications. According to the letter, data retention puts confidential activity and contacts, for example to journalists, crisis lines and business partners, at risk of disclosure by way of data leaks and abuses. It is expensive and damages the freedom of communication.
-
Copyrights
-
In my opinion Richard is in a Conflict of Interest situation. He didn’t disclose in his article who he was working for. He may claim that his article was his personal opinion, but it reads like it was written by and/or for the MPAA and the RIAA, and in fact I have good reason to believe that he is working for them, or for one of their member companies. There is nothing wrong with representing your clients. What is wrong is not declaring those clients, when the client’s interests are at variance with the interests of the Canadian public.
John Enser of the 1709 Copyright Blog has made a good point. In some cases a non-disclosure agreement may be in place, which may prevent the lawyer from stating who he or she is working for. I suggest that if the lawyer is not able to disclose who their client is, that silence is the honest option.
-
-
In the vast universe of Connexions, an open-source repository of course materials, Catherine Schmidt-Jones, known as Kitty, is something of a champion. She is one of the most prolific producers of “modules,” the chunks of information that are arranged — and can be rearranged — into courses. Her subject? Not English literature or math or other topics generally considered to be the core of education. It is music.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.21.10
Posted in News Roundup at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time (or you’ve gone through the archives) you know that I love the Linux operating system. I first switched to Linux in 2002, and eventually ended up running a heavily-modified version of Debian for years, until I was seduced by the elegance and stability of OS X. From time to time, though, I grab a LiveCD (usually Ubuntu, these days, though I’ve gone through most of them at one time or another) and spend an hour or so poking around to see what’s new and how quickly I can break it.
Shortly before I went to Vancouver for Eureka, I burned an iso of Ubuntu 10.4 beta, to see what all the fuss was about (short version: Ubuntu made some significant UI changes for that version, and a lot of Linux users are apparently as keen on change as Garth was in Wayne’s World.)
My incredibly short review: I liked it.
-
Audiocasts
-
Tools for model railroad computer control and open source patents and licensing.
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
The Linux KVM hypervisor is gaining steam in the cloud computing market, with two major vendors using the virtualization software to create cloud platforms to compete against Amazon’s popular EC2 service.
IBM announced in March that its test-and-dev cloud service uses KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), and now hosting company The Planet has built a cloud service using a version of KVM.
-
Applications
-
-
The Sabayon Linux CoreCD edition is a minimalistic release designed to provide a foundation for building a customized installation tailored to the users specific needs.
-
Fedora
-
Every release, we provide our community a chance to give name suggestions for the next one. Each consecutive name must be linked to the previous one, but that link must be different from the link that connected the previous releases. So for example, Fedora 12, Constantine, and Fedora 13, Goddard, are linked by being names of rocket scientists. Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 must share a different link.
-
We’ve got here our very first entry for “The $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest”. It’s from Mauricio, a Music Theory student. If he wins the contest, he says that he will be using the money to buy a USB mic for some serious music recording.
-
Ubuntu
-
The Ubuntu Manual Team have decided on their goals for the Maverick Meerkat 10.10 release at the end of this year. We will continue to strive to make quality educational materials, to be an interesting project with a low barrier to entry and to use the latest technologies and develop our own applications and tools to help us achieve our overall mission as a project.
-
-
Tor is available for Android by installing our package named Orbot.
-
I came across this text over at www.linuxformat.gr and it got me into a lot of thinking. I would like to thank NikolaosX1 for sharing the original post in Greek and Danae for the translation in English that follows.
[...]
After discovering this article I really wanted to write a post here expanding my thoughts on it and how they relate with Free Software. I decided to just express some initial points of concern I have instead, leaving it open for discussion. Here’s what’s troubling me:
1. In general I don’t like taking words of great people out of context, nor misusing them just to make a point. I only use this quote here, with respective differences taken into consideration and respecting the analogy, to trigger a conversation. I already feel awkward, but I felt this was something worth sharing.
2. I am aware that FLOSS has other “rules” and “freedoms” to define itself and I have in mind that the quoted text is far from expressing the Free Software ideology. However I agree with the initial writer. For me, the idea behind Socrates’ words in a way demonstrates the substance of Free Software, and the “sharing knowledge” concept is one of the reasons that drove me into this community in the first place.
-
One of the miracles of free software is that it always begins with one or two people saying: “hey, how hard can it be?” The miracle is that they say that even when “it” is an operating system like GNU, or a kernel like Linux, or a graphic image manipulation package like the GIMP. Despite the manifest impossibility of one person writing something that usually requires vast, hierarchical teams, and months of planning, they just start and the miracle continues: others join in and the thing grows until one day, with the help of a few hundred friends, they achieve that impossibility.
-
Databases
-
The Apache Software Foundation recently announced Apache Cassandra Release 0.6, a NoSQL database. As a reformed database architect, I was intrigued by the appearance of yet another data management model.
-
Business
-
I had so much fun writing about Ubuntu last week, I thought I would return to the topic with some new Ubuntu news and analysis. Two pieces of news on Ubuntu today. First of all they announced the imminent release of the LTS Server edition 10.4. In a related announcement MuleSoft and Canonical announced a partnership in releasing an updated Tomcat package for Debian and Ubuntu that makes it easier for developers to use.
-
Open Access/Content
-
Scientific data sharing has become big news in the wake of the theft of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit and ensuing investigations. Although the CRU researchers appear to have had an attitude towards data sharing that breached generally accepted scientific ethics, the process of actually sharing the data would have been anything but straightforward. The CRU had no procedures in place for data sharing, the data came from a variety of sources with no standardized data format, it was a mix of published and proprietary information, etc. In short, it’s one thing to decide to share the data, another challenge entirely to actually do so.
-
The biosciences, like other branches of research, are being dragged into the digital era. This is in part because traditional mediums of communications, including journal articles, are migrating online, and in part because high-throughput approaches to biological research are producing staggering amounts of data that can only be stored in digital form. A couple of papers released by PLoS ONE have presented new approaches to both aspects of digitization that, in essence, simply involve modifying tools that are common outside of the field specifically for use by biologists.
-
Queen’s University in Belfast has been told by the Information Commissioner to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings, used for climate research.
Douglas Keenan, from London, had asked for the information in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act.
-
For example – can someone write me a Linked Data query to show how much is spent by the government on UK education quangoes?
-
The number of contributors to OpenStreetMap has grown steadily over the years. A year ago 110,000 individuals had added or edited data. Today it’s up to 245,000 individual mappers. An average of 7,000 edits an hour are made to the data.
-
If the mission of the university is the creation of knowledge (via research) and the dissemination of knowledge (via teaching and publishing), then it stands to reason that giving that knowledge away fits neatly with that mission. And the branding benefits are clear.
The Open University, the distance-learning behemoth based in England, has vastly increased its visibility with open courses, which frequently show up in the Top 5 downloads on Apple’s iTunes U, a portal to institutions’ free courseware as well as marketing material. The Open University’s free offerings have been downloaded more than 16 million times, with 89 percent of those downloads outside the U.K., says Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the university. Some 6,000 students started out with a free online course before registering for a paid online course.
-
David Wiley has a new post expressing frustration that the Khan Academy, an OER repository, did not have a clear license. Shortly after Wiley’s post the Khan Academy added the CC BY-SA license.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
The web browser was just another application five years ago. A useful app, no doubt, but it played second fiddle to operating systems and productivity software.
That’s no longer the case. Browsers have matured into multi-purpose tools that connect to the Internet (of course) and also grant access to a host of powerful online applications and services. Shut off your web connection for a few minutes and you’ll quickly understand the browser’s impact.
I got in touch with Charles McCathieNevile, Opera chief standards officer and a speaker at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, to discuss the the current role of web browsers and their near-term future. He shares his predictions in the following Q&A.
-
The proposition above is, obviously to anyone, not really a question but a set of dubious propaganda statements designed to influence the interviewee.
-
Vineet Nayar, chief executive at HCL, told the Financial Times that the companies had a “stranglehold” on the market, with almost no room for other suppliers to participate. Weeks away from a general election, the issue is becoming increasingly heated, and the Conservative party has insisted that it would open up the market to more companies if it wins on 6 May.
Nayar did not name the companies he alleged to be dominating the market, but Patrick Dunleavy, chair of the public policy group at the London School of Economics, told the newspaper that five companies including HP-EDS, IBM and BT run an estimated 90 percent of government contracts. Other suppliers commonly selected by the government include Fujitsu, Logica, Civica, CSC and Accenture.
-
Science
-
Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing.
-
Sadly we know how long humans can survive if suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space. Three Soviet cosmonauts died in 1971 when a faulty valve caused their Soyuz 11 capsule to depressurise at an altitude of 168 kilometres, shortly before re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Investigations revealed that the cabin pressure dropped to zero for 11 minutes and 40 seconds, until the capsule hit the atmosphere. The crew died within 30 to 40 seconds from hypoxia. “You need both oxygen and air pressure to deliver oxygen to the brain,” says Jonathan Clark, a former space shuttle crew surgeon.
-
Security/Aggression
-
The practice of retaining genetic samples from people arrested for a crime but not convicted is growing in the U.S. It has serious human rights implications.
-
Last summer, The Pavement’s reports into Operation Poncho – a City of London’s scheme to wake rough sleepers in the middle of the night to “wash” where they were resting with freezing cold water – hit national headlines. Their night disturbed, many homeless people reported their inability to sleep, and felt it was a brutal attempt to damage them psychologically. Human rights legal teams labelled the process inhumane.
-
Environment
-
-
As global population grows and access to sanitation improves, the world’s forests are “under assault” from paper companies competing to respond to growing consumer demand for toilet tissue, the only paper product that cannot be recycled after use, writes the Worldwatch Institute.
-
Today, in a letter to Greenpeace, Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe sets out the steps Nestlé is taking regarding palm oil. He emphasises: “Nestlé is highly concerned about deforestation in Indonesia and other countries, and we support a moratorium on the destruction of rainforests.”
-
“If you think about Brazil, their two biggest industries are mining and agriculture,” Friedberg says. “That’s billions of dollars, and there’s a massive market for developing crop insurance. If we can figure out agriculture and do it right, the opportunity is huge to go country by country.” Does he believe that global warming is already noticeable? “Oh yeah,” he says. In just the three years that Weatherbill has been collecting data, extreme weather events have risen 8 percent.
-
Spending a week on the beautiful North California coastline with a bunch of interesting people talking about a fascinating topic is obviously a chore, but I girded my loins and took the plunge. The Asilomar meeting on the regulation of geoengineering research was intended to echo the Asilomar meeting of 1975, which set out procedures for moving beyond the moratorium on genetic engineering experiments that had been set up the year before.
[...]
The other 4 lessons are: Nobody has any clear idea how to resolve the inequalities inherent in geoengineering; People will be talking about banning field experiments; It’s all about the money; and trust is everything.
-
Finance
-
The International Monetary Fund has endorsed proposals to charge a levy on the largest banks for the cost of any future government-led rescues as well as a tax based on bank profits and compensation.
-
The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday pledged better oversight of the nation’s largest banks after criticism that the agency failed to spot accounting tricks at investment bank Lehman Brothers before it collapsed.
-
As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I’ve sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven’t got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven’t.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
A year ago, I went to a London pub to speak at a meeting for the apparently doomed cause of libel reform. Simon Singh had written an article which was true and important about the dangers of the quack therapy of chiropractic healing. Then, like so many authors and publishers before him, he learned English law persecuted rather than protected honest argument and that he was in trouble.
The British Chiropractic Association was suing him for saying that there was “not a jot of evidence” that its members could help sick children by manipulating babies’ spines in accordance with the teachings of a more-than-usually nutty American faith healer.
-
Three bloggers from Fujian who spread information online relating to the alleged rape and murder of Yan Xiaoling were found guilty of slander on Friday. AP reported that self-taught legal expert Fan Yanqiong received a two year sentence, whilst two others, You Jingyou and Wu Huaying, will each spend one year in prison.
-
-
-
One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). EFF Boardmember Brad Templeton even got in on it, creating a very funny remix with Hitler ranting about troubles with DRM and the failure of DMCA takedowns to prevent fair uses. (Ironically enough, that video resulted in the Apple Store rejecting an EFF newsfeed app.)
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
La Quadrature du Net sent a letter to the members of the JURI committe of the European Parliament, along with a 8-page policy brief on the Gallo report. La Quadrature urges EU citizens concerned about the future of copyright and patent enforcement, fundamental rights, and the Internet, to contact them as well.
-
The BPI has warned that it may be forced into suing UK file-sharers, despite the recent passing of the Digital Economy Act. In an interview yesterday, Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said although the industry would prefer for file-sharing to be dealt with via ‘technical measures’, they might still have to sue some people.
-
A rather different view is the attack on the idea of traditional knowledge being granted legal recognition and protection. The proponent of this view seem concerned that the idea of collective ownership of knowledge will subvert their view of intellectual property. In their view knowledge can be viewed as property which can be owned by an individual or (more likely) a corporation, and as a commodity, traded, rented out and the like. Since they generally also represent those corporations that have amassed large inventories of copyrights, trademarks and designs they are also concerned that traditional knowledge will subject them to claims of ownership of the same material.
-
Copyrights
-
A staggering 764,448 titles were produced in 2009 by self-publishers and micro-niche publishers, according to statistics released this morning by R.R. Bowker. The number of “nontraditional” titles dwarfed that of traditional books whose output slipped to 288,355 last year from 289,729 in 2008. Taken together, total book output rose 87% last year, to over 1 million books.
-
The entire premise behind copyright law is that by making sure there is enough financial remuneration, people will be more interested in creating more great content. The argument of those who push for ever stronger copyright law is always based on this very premise, with the often explicit claim being “if artists can’t make enough money making art, they’ll do something else instead,” while suggesting that would be a net negative to society. Now I’m all for artists making money and being able to create more art. It’s why I spend so much time discussing business models that work for those artists. But what if that entire concept — that we need this monetary incentive to create — is bunk?
-
-
Joining Google Music China in the trend of attracting users with free content, Nokia has launched a free music service in the PRC.
-
Printing/Digital
-
I’m just soooooo tired of the doom and gloom. It really makes one want to give up on the main stream media (like many, many, many people under 30 have). But, we can’t. We’ve got to save these guys from themselves – the institutions and the brands matter (I think). So, in that pursuit, let’s tackle the beast head on, again.
-
Everyone must get stoned — Rolling Stoned, that is. Starting today, the mag beloved by aging mamas and papas and young music fans alike is making its entire collection of magazines (43 years’ worth) available on the web — for a price.
Although much of the content will, in fact, be free, RS plans to charge a fee for full access to all content new and old: $3.95 per month or $2.50 dollars per month with a year’s subscription, according to AFP. The move comes as part of the mag’s overhauled website, which will also feature more audio and video content.
-
Our five-year projections assume a current market share of 0.5% for digital textbooks in the U.S., and an average yearly increase in sales growth of approximately 100% over the next five years. We project that growth to taper to approximately 30% annual growth for the ensuing five years (2015-2019).
-
Canada
-
Last summer, TorrentFreak encouraged its Canadian readers to have their voice heard in the country’s public consultations on copyright reform. The response to this call for action was overwhelming, and as a result a pro-copyright lawyer is now claiming that we “systematically abused” Canadian democracy.
-
As a writer and musician I’ve always been interested in copyright. It’s part and parcel of what I do. However until last summer I wasn’t involved in the discussion of where copyright in Canada should go. In fact you can blame my current high level of interest in copyright law on TorrentFreak.
-
ACTA
-
Leaks of the ACTA text show that dangerous provisions have been pushed by the negotiators and that the agreement could have severe consequences on freedom of expression, access to medicines and innovation worldwide1. Although the upcoming establishment of transparency is a positive step, the substance of this international agreement harmonizing civil and criminal enforcement of copyright, patents and trademarks must be openly debated. This fundamental discussion is long overdue.
-
After more than two years of opaque elaboration, ACTA negotiators have finally bowed to the pressure of NGOs and citizens worldwide.The European Parliament, as well as various institutions and industries have also opposed the negotiating process and the potential consequences of this non-amendable plurilateral agreement.
-
Companies across the technology industry — from Internet access providers to social networking sites to video-sharing services — are bracing for this week’s release of a draft of a trade agreement that they fear could undermine all sorts of online activities.
[...]
The Bush administration began negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, in the fall of 2007 in an effort to harmonize intellectual property protections across different nations. The far-reaching agreement would encompass everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals to fake Prada bags to online piracy of music and movies. Once ratified, trade agreements take full effect and a country can face complaints for noncompliance.
-
We’ve been covering the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for two years now, and in that entire 24 month period no official text of the agreement has been released. Remarkable, really, given the intense scrutiny, but there you have it.
-
Digital Economy Bill
-
-
When the Digital Economy Act (DEA) passed into law, it prompted many anguished posts and tweets about a broken political system, asking how MPs could cave in to lobbyists and vested interests, impose censorship, remain oblivious to the online debate (or “social media whingeing” as it was also called) and fail to recognise the impact on young people.
-
After a successful meeting last week, Coadec has decided to focus its energies on two fronts in the short-term:
1. Supporting efforts to get the Digital Economy Act repealed.
2. Participating in the consultation processes on how the Act is implemented.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Garrett Heaton has been struggling for months to get his bank to open up its deposit@home feature to Linux and Unix. As he and a few other savvy users have figured out, there’s no real technical barrier. All Linux users have to do is pretend to be a Mac. For nine months, the bank has been declining Heaton’s persistent, polite and helpful requests — and, amazingly, he is still a very loyal customer.
[...]
The bank does not currently support Linux for its Deposit@Home service, company spokesperson Lisa Carr confirmed, though she added that “we’re always considering ways to expand the services we offer to additional platforms.”
-
Robots and beer-brewing computer programs are just two of the things to check out at LinuxFest Northwest this weekend.
This is the 11th year for the tech event, which will feature a variety of demonstrations and speakers. Sessions are geared toward computer novices and pros interested in open source software and Linux, a free computer operating system that is an alternative to for-profit operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Vista.
-
Desktop
-
I honestly asked myself the other day, “do I really need to use Windows?”
And then that’s when hit me, Ubuntu linux was now pretty up to par with Windows counterparts, there’s so much support and improvements happening, there was not many reasons I would need to continue using Windows.
-
Server
-
Turquoise, the London Stock Exchange’s large volume ‘dark pool’ trading platform, will go live on a new Linux-based platform in August or September.
The move will be an ambitious “big bang” approach instead of a soft migration, according to a technical note the LSE sent to customers yesterday.The quick changeover is a response to “participant feedback”, the LSE said. Services across the Integrated and Dark Midpoint order books will commence trading on the same day.
-
Kernel Space
-
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced The Planet as its newest member. The Planet is a global leader in IT hosting and will participate in community initiatives and projects that support enterprise Linux.
The emergence of cloud computing and virtualized environments in the Web hosting industry has opened the door the Linux community to gain important competitive advantages. The Planet leverages Linux platforms to provide these services across its global customer base.
-
The last two years have seen a large number of file systems added to the kernel with many of them maturing to the point where they are useful, reliable, and in production in some cases. In the run up to the 2.6.34 kernel, Linus recently added the Ceph client. What is unique about Ceph is that it is a distributed parallel file system promising scalability and performance, something that NFS lacks.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Last night it was reported on VirtualBox not being convinced about Gallium3D and what it could provide its virtualization stack not only in terms of better OpenGL acceleration for the guest virtual machines, but also for accelerating other APIs like OpenVG and OpenCL. This is coming a year after VMware rolled out its own Gallium3D driver (called “SVGA”) that allowed Gallium3D to work on its virtualization platform. But there’s also another virtualized Gallium3D driver out there.
-
Applications
-
I wrote about Klibido quite a while ago and whilst its a KDE app (being run in a Gnome environment on my rig) I have to say that I found it a good choice. Despite issues surrounding the apparent lack of development for a few years and it has no facility for .par checking, its a solid enough package that never let me down.
After receiving a recommendation for another KDE binary newsgroup reader I decided to investigate what else was available (since Im using gpar2 for my .par needs)
Since Im not a fan of KDE (Xfce is my DE of choice) I extended my search to Gnome aswell and one thing struck me, lack of choice. The Xfce desktop has a distinct lack of choice in respect of binary readers which is a shame (and I’ll go into that later)
-
-
-
Proprietary
-
Instructionals
-
Samba is essential for many SMBs. Not only does it work like a champ as a file server, it does so at zero software cost. The biggest hurdle to adoption is what most people consider to be complicated setup and administration. Like many assumptions about the Linux operating system, that’s a myth. Samba does not have to be a challenge to configure or administer. In fact, it can be downright simple. Here are some tips to make your Samba life is as painless as possible.
-
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
For a long time KDE has come with an assortment of games. Collectively, this suite of games is simply called “KDE Games“. With the advent of KDE 4, all of the KDE games were given face lifts and a standard set of features that make moving from game to game a seamless exercise.
The games are two dimensional and do not run inside of a separate layer like SDL. Instead they run inside a normal KDE window, utilizing the standard QT interface. Nevertheless, the rendering of of the graphics is amazingly impressive because of the use of SVG vector graphics. With SVG, the animations are smooth and the images are scalable. You can play in a small window or maximize it without losing any of its quality.
-
I’m glad to make available a fresh new Plasma animation: WaterAnimation. This animations uses the ripple effect to produce a liquefied behavior on the target widget. An example of the animation behavior can be seen below, enjoy! 
-
In my “quest” to update KDE-related Wikipedia articles, I had to do more research than I expected and I needed to fix things I didn’t expect. But that research was fun, too. It brought me back in time when I was still a teen who tried to get some ancient Linux distribution working and fiddled around with KDE 1.
-
Grantlee version 0.1.0 has been released by the Grantlee team. For those not in the know, Django is a high-level Python Web framework. It can be used to develop websites, and offers numerous features to make such a task easier.
-
The freedom of gamers as it is now is limited by the game industry’s old fashioned insistence on limiting the distribution of games. Gluon aims at breaking this by providing both the makers of games and the players of games with a new platform for sharing the experience of playing games, and for providing feedback to each other – both in the form of comments and ratings, but also through a donation based payment system. So: There’s a revolution coming where the freedom of gaming is at the center.
-
-
The winner: Slitaz 9/10
We hope you’ve seen that the world of light distros is more exciting than you may have imagined. Choosing the right one depends on the hardware you want to run it on and what you want to use it for.
The Ubuntu-based distros are interesting, particularly the nascent Lubuntu, mainly because they have a tiny footprint but offer the promise of installing anything from the vast Ubuntu multiverse. However, we were looking for a a distro to work painlessly in a cramped hardware environment.
Honourable mentions must go to DSL and Tiny Core at this point, which have clambered into the territory of the minuscule. It’s amazing how usable a system can be that takes up less space on your drive than your holiday pictures. Puppy Linux and Unity were both easy to use, although the latter was a bit more polished (and bigger).
-
Peppermint
-
A new cloud-focused Linux flavor launched recently; known as Peppermint, the operating system has entered a small, private beta and will open up to more testers over the next two to four weeks.
-
The Peppermint distro is being developed by Kendall Weaver, the maintainer for the Linux Mint Fluxbox and LXDE Editions, and Shane Remington, who works alongside Weaver as a developer at their day job at Astral IX Media in Asheville, N.C.
-
Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
-
PCLinuxOS should definitely be at the top of anybody’s desktop distro list. There’s a version of it for pretty much everybody, from desktop eye-candy addicts to extreme minimalists that want total control over what applications go on their system. It provides a great alternative to Ubuntu, Fedora and some of the other prominent desktop distros.
-
Red Hat Family
-
GH: Red Hat has been supporting the federal government in cloud computing in a number of ways.
First, on a basic technology level, much of the innovation that’s going on in cloud computing and virtualization has been happening in the open source world, specifically, in the open source Linux project.
Red Hat is best known as a vendor of Linux services and support and our engineers have been working for many years on virtualization technology, and doing what it is that we’ve always done with the open source community, which is creating an enabling layer that sits between your hardware and your applciations and actually gives your applications access to some of the really interesting innovations that are going on down in the hardware. So, in the role as a hypervisor — in the role as a software that hosts virtual guests in a cloud computing environment, we’ve been working in that space for some time.
-
Fedora
-
Fedora’s selection of Zarafa as an open source groupware component in Fedora 13 is very interesting.
The beta of Fedora 13, code named “Goddard,” was made available on April 13. The final version is expected in mid May.
-
The Fedora 13 beta contains more enhancements that many users will ever know. That is not necessarily undesirable, because users will still benefit and many do not care to know.
-
Debian Family
-
My impression is that Debian values stability and functionality over looks and release schedules. You can look at this alpha version as a preview of Debian’s next stable release, or you could simply run Debian Testing as a constantly-updated “rolling release.” Despite the “testing” moniker, it’s a pretty good balance between the stablity of Debian Stable and the more up-to-date applications in Debian Unstable. It’s also got a huge repository of over 25,000 available packages and an excellent package management system going for it.
-
Ubuntu
-
Linux distribution vendor Canonical will soon release an updated version of its production-ready server operating system, the company announced Monday.
Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition will be ready for downloading, for no charge, beginning on April 29, along with the desktop edition of 10.04.
-
This blog post is about the recent work done in aptdaemon – the backend used by Ubuntu’s software-center to install/remove packages.
-
Print test pages, for those that don’t know, is essentially a lot of coloured blocks in a row that allow users to check if a printer is printing graphics and colours correctly.
-
The UbuntuOne Music store no longer accepts Click&Buy as a payment method because Ubuntu/Canonical, who, given the Store is in Beta, are still experimenting with functionality “including the offered payment methods” according to a 7Digital spokesmen.
-
-
It’s a rugged robot based on the surveyor open source robot. It can be remote controlled over the internet or programmed for autonomous missions.
-
-
Z3 is shipping a Linux-based multi-format video encoder that’s said to support 1080p H.264 HD encoding with latency as low as 70 milliseconds. The Z3-MVE-01 Multi-format Video Encoder is based on a separately available, Linux-ready DM368-RPS design kit, which includes a DM368-MOD module that incorporates Texas Instruments’ new DM368 DaVinci system-on-chip.
-
Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework for custom embedded Linux devices now supports the recently announced Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM368 DaVinci video processor. The LinuxLink for DM368 service offers Linux development tools and a pre-integrated build environment for the ARM-based chip, the company says.
-
Via announced a tiny PC for do-it-yourselfers, available in a barebones configuration with room for a 2.5-inch hard disk drive. The Linux-ready Artigo A1100 has a 1.3GHz Via Nano processor, accepts 2GB of RAM, sports HDMI and VGA video outputs, and has five USB ports, the company says.
-
Android
-
Pantech’s Sky cellphone division announced a 1GHz Snapdragon-based Android smartphone in Korea. The Sirius IM-A600S is equipped with an 8GB flash card, WiFi, T-DMB mobile TV, an HDMI port, and a 3.7 inch, 800×480 AMOLED display, says the Korea-based Sky.
-
The steady rain of leaks about HTC’s Incredible smartphone has turned into a downpour, and the buzz has become a steady drone. If the Incredible is Verizon’s next launch, the company is making a smart move, said 451 Group analyst Chris Hazelton. It will give consumers their first opportunity to actually handle a phone that is expected to be strikingly similar to the much-ballyhooed Nexus One.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
Linux computer builders System76 have added a new netbook to their lineup. The System76 Starling EduBook is basically a rebadged Intel Classmate PC with a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor.
But while most Classmate PC models are sold with Windows XP or Windows 7, the Starling EduBook will ship with Ubuntu 10.04 Education Edition Netbook Remix.
-
Tablets
-
In contrast to Android, the wireless works right out of the box, using good old NetworkManager. I couldn’t get Bluetooth tethering to fly, though; they use a rather odd setup for this. They have Blueman for controlling Bluetooth, and you’re supposed to use Blueman to set up a DUN link with the phone and then run gnome-ppp which somehow transforms it into an actual connection. I got this to work once in ten tries, for about five minutes. So I’ve given up and am just using my phone’s wifi router functionality, which eats battery life but works simply. Hopefully a future version of the Linux implementation (they do release updates fairly frequently) will come with the newer gnome-bluetooth and NetworkManager builds that allow much smoother Bluetooth tethering.
-
I want to create. And because of that, for me, the list of negatives greatly outweighs the list of positives. Of course, if this device is truly doing what you want and need, that’s great. That’s what’s important. But I’m willing to wait for something better. Something meant for sharing. Something more open.
-
Don’t act, just absorb.
Pretty different from giving the same kid a laptop or a netbook, isn’t it? With one of those, a kid can respond, can experiment, can act in the very way the human species most efficiently assimilates new skills and information: learn by doing. By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, the netbook costs less. Even the laptop often does.
-
Events
-
The live feed for this week’s keynote sessions will be broadcast via Brightcove’s blog post, the DrupalVolCon site, the Drupal UK site, the official Drupalcon San Francisco site, and any other site that uses the embed code available through the player.
-
Databases
-
The rise of the NoSQL movement has brought debate back to the database space as the traditional relational model’s applicability to all problems has been questioned, not just in theory, but in practical code. At the heart of NoSQL is not a rejection of SQL itself; some have said NoSQL, rather than standing in opposition to SQL as “No SQL”, really stands for “Not Only SQL”. It more represents a deeper desire to explore database models which have, in the past and for various reasons, been left to languish in obscurity.
-
CMS
-
Drupal, the popular open source Web content management system, will sacrifice speed for scalability in the upcoming Drupal 7 upgrade, the founder of the project said on Monday afternoon.
The upgrade to Drupal, meanwhile, could be available perhaps in the June timeframe or as late as September, said Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert in a presentation at the Drupalcon SF conference in San Francisco. Ideally, version 7 would be available this month, he said.
-
Business
-
Talend, which offers open source data management software and solutions, announced this morning that it has secured $8 million in Series D financing. Previous investors Balderton Capital, AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners, all participated in the round. With the new $8 million investment, Talend has now raised a cumulative $28 million.
-
Among open source related projects funded under the sixth Framework Program, at least four of them – namely FLOSSMetrics, QualiPSo, QUALOSS and SQO-OSS – have been found overlapping around open source software development and quality.
SQO-OSS – Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software – similarly to FLOSSMetrics was aimed at massive collection of data from thousands of projects, though with different goals.
-
Releases
-
Bugzilla deserves props for enabling so many free software projects, but the ubiquitous bug tracking system has not been without its flaws. Namely, Bugzilla is known for being difficult to navigate and use, particularly for new contributors who have little experience working with bug ticketing systems. The 3.6 release sands off some of the rough edges following a usability study from Carnegie Mellon University. The list of bugs stemming from the research are not all closed, but the project has made significant progress.
-
Programming
-
Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.
The Gtk+ toolkit, which provides the underlying widget system of the GNOME desktop environment, is an important part of the desktop Linux ecosystem. Although the toolkit itself is built with C, it can also be used with other programming languages—including Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Java, and Scheme. Python is widely used by Gtk+ application developers and is important to the GNOME community. OLPC, the host of the hackfest, uses Python in conjunction with Gtk+ for its Sugar environment—the core user experience and activity collection that is shipped on its XO laptops.
-
On 7 April 2010, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency charged “… to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation”, proposed new rules covering “Asset-Backed Securities” [warning: 667-page PDF]. Administratively, this is a reaction to the trillion-dollar financial atrocities of the last few years, as well as a natural manifestation of the Obama administration’s commitment to enhance procedural transparency. Shockingly, “… Python, a commonly used open source interpretive programming language …” shows up on page 1 of the description. What is that about?
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Another chapter in the “what will HTML5 support” soap opera opened last week with rumors that Google will open source the VP8 video codec. Many outlets were reporting that VP8 is the video codec that runs YouTube. But that is not true. VP8 is actually the code behind On2 Technologies, another web video play which Google acquired just a few months ago. The story goes that Google will support VP8 in You Tube as soon as the open source announcement is made. This would make it an instant standard.
First of all, it seems that everyone has already concluded that HTML5 will indeed be the savior of web video. I am not sure web video needs a savior. Steve Job is perhaps looking for a savior from Flash and the millions of iPhone users and now hundreds of thousands of iPad users sure would like to view the web with video. I don’t think Adobe thinks that video support in HTML5 is that important.
-
-
A Kalamazoo towing company that has received multiple complaints to the Better Business Bureau is suing the Western Michigan University student who started a Facebook page against the company.
The four-page lawsuit filed by T&J Towing against Justin Kurtz claims defamation of character and libel. It asks for $750,000 from Kurtz, who received the papers Friday.
-
A federal judge on Friday issued an injunction preventing a rival liquor company from using a dripping wax seal on its tequilas sold in the United States, ending a seven year legal battle over the bottle topper.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II comes in a long-running lawsuit between Maker’s Mark and competitors Diageo and Casa Cuervo over the Fortune Brands trademark on the wax seal. Fortune owns Maker’s Mark.
-
Americans’ trust in government and its institutions has plummeted to a near-historic low, according to a sobering new survey by the Pew Research Center.
Only 22 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew say they can trust government in Washington “almost always or most of the time” — among the lowest measures in the half-century since pollsters have been asking the question.
-
Sure, newspapers are hard up, but exploiting bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices seems to be a distasteful and strategically inept way to try to make ends meet.
I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice.
-
Security/Aggression
-
In the Blaydon constituency, home to the biometric passport makers, Labour’s candidate Dave Anderson, pictured, has asked his LibDem opponent Neil Bradbury to clarify his position on his party leader’s plans.
It was last June that De La Rue Systems announced they could take on an extra 80 employees after winning a 10-year £400m contract to produce the UK biometric passport from the Government.
Dave Anderson, who lobbied hard for the contract to come to Blaydon in the first place, said: “Scrapping these passports is part of the price Clegg demands to fund his gimmick giveaway of raising tax thresholds, which would disproportionately benefit well-off people.
-
Tens of thousands of nightclub bouncers and private security guards could be given sweeping police-style powers.
Senior police officers have ordered a dramatic expansion of a controversial scheme that allows authorised civilians to issue fines for littering and other minor offences.
-
Although records will continue to be uploaded in some early adopter areas, Government plans to roll out the scheme across the country have been effectively halted.
The Department of Health said that uploading of data would begin again only when public awareness had been raised.
Information about more than 1.25 million patients have already gone on to the database, which eventually could hold up to 50 million records.
-
As a means of transportation it left something to be desired in terms of comfort and street cred.
And when police asked the driver to pull over, the Barbie car, with its top speed of 4mph, was hopeless as a getaway vehicle.
Paul Hutton, 40, is regretting his impromptu roadtrip after he was arrested for drink-driving when he tried to take the battery- operated child’s toy to a friend’s house.
-
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. The Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency has halted domestic collection of some type of communications metadata—the details are predictably fuzzy, though I’ve got a guess—in order to allay the concerns of the secret FISA Court that the NSA’s activity might not be technically permissible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
-
A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured thousands of images of students in their homes, sometimes as they slept or were partially undressed, according to documents filed in federal court.
Using a system to track lost or stolen laptops, officials from the Lower Merion School District also covertly surveilled students as they used their school-issued Macs, logging online chats and taking screenshots of websites they visited, according to the documents.
-
A woman was caught on camera running a red in Collier County. But after her husband fought the ticket, it was thrown out. Now officials say there may be other drivers who were wrongly ticketed as well.
-
Finance
-
There’s some curious things about that SEC case, like who’s actually charged with what. There’s no Jonathan Egol, Fabrice Tourre’s partner at Goldman, no hedge funder John Paulson, no Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Instead, the only person the SEC names -far as I’ve seen- is Fabrice Tourre, who, at the time the Abacus deal involved played, was all of 28 years old.
That age thing keeps on itching me. It somehow points to the degree of involvement of the likes of Blankfein, Goldman president Gary Cohn and CFO David Viniar. These guys don’t let a mere kid play with billions of their capital without keeping a close watch. They were all down there on the trade floor for extended periods of time, figuring out what exactly transpired, as can be proven.
Moreover, the then (2006-7) 28-year old Tourre was claiming something that was the 180 degree opposite of what other traders at Goldman had a lot of the firms’ money invested in, namely the continued upward growth of the housing market. Tourre’s contrary claims were nothing short of revolutionary, certainly in the eyes of the older, and more bullish, traders. So it should not come as a surprise that the highest echelons of the firm spent a lot of time with Tourre and other traders. They would have been mad not to. That also means, however, that claiming they didn’t know what was going on is not believable.
-
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner appealed on Monday to the centrist Republican senators from Maine for their support of legislation to tighten regulation of the nation’s financial system but came up empty-handed, leaving Democrats and Republicans on an apparent collision course.
-
Behind Iceland’s superficially booming financial markets in the mid noughties lay a financial system shot through with corruption and regulatory negligence that led inexorably to a dramatic economic meltdown 18 months ago, according to a damning truth commission report.
The 2,300-page forensic investigation, presented to Iceland’s parliament yesterday, reserves its deepest criticisms for the island’s three largest banks – Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki – which failed in quick succession in October 2008. The long-delayed report, produced after interviews with about 300 key players, found these banks had effectively been captured by some of their powerful majority shareholders and that the true extent of their financial vulnerability had been deliberately masked.
-
One of the most salient analogies of the financial meltdown was offered by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chair Phil Angelides when he grilled Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, over the firm’s unsavory proprietary trading. Angelides was questioning Goldman’s practice of minting toxic, mortgage-backed securities and badgering credit-rating companies for the highest rating for those securities, while betting in the market that those securities would later fail.
Angelides likened this business practice to “selling someone a car with faulty brakes and then taking out an insurance policy on the driver.” With Friday’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing of civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, we learned more about those faulty vehicles. We learned that Goldman had cut the brakes.
-
Goldman Sachs is launching an aggressive response to its political and legal challenges with an unlikely ally at its side — President Barack Obama’s former White House counsel, Gregory Craig.
-
Richard Fuld, whose October 2008 appearance before lawmakers was marked by protesters with signs reading “shame” and “cap greed”, returns to Washington D.C. on Tuesday to answer questions about the accounting gimmicks alleged by a court-appointed examiner.
-
Foreclosure filings were at historic highs in March — 367,056 — an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, and the highest monthly total since 2005, according to RealtyTrac. Almost two years after the onset of the financial crisis with unemployment at historic highs, nothing is being done to put a stop to this on-going tragedy.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
On its Web site, Ayres McHenry is open about its Republican leanings. It identifies itself as a Republican-affiliated firm. Its founder, Whit Ayres, belongs to the National Association of Republican Campaign Professionals, and the Web site says that Whit Ayres is a member of the Association’s Board of Directors.
Media outlets broadcasting information about the Chamber’s polls and their conclusions would do well to research Ayres McHenry and its reputation, and inform readers know about the firm’s — and the Chamber’s — recent history of bias and poor poll quality.
-
The PR proposal obtained by Politico was written by Joe Wierzbicki, a principal at Russo Marsh & Rogers. In it, Wierzbicki suggests essentially taking over the Tea Party movement by rushing in with campaign-style event planning and advance work. He suggests obtaining a “proper luxury coach wrapped in ‘tea party’-themed graphical design,” and sending it out to “cross the nation, stopping in cities to conduct ‘tea parties.’ ” Wierzbicki suggests inviting local Tea Party leaders, talk radio hosts and fiscally-conservative political candidates to speak at each stop. Wierzbicki says a major fundraising effort would be needed “to ‘do this ‘right’ (have an awesome looking tour bus, getting the word out, having slick/persuasive/compelling advertising, paying for permits/insurance hotels, food, etc… ). He suggests that, to raise the money, “the bus tour rallies focus not on asking for funds to support the tour, but on the ” ‘Defeat Harry Reid’ or ‘Defeat Chris Dodd’ or ‘Defeat Arlen Specter’ political components to this effort.” In other words, Wierzbicki suggests exploiting the real Tea Partiers’ emotions to raise money, and take the focus off the PR project itself. He also suggests renting email lists from conservative news outlets like Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, etc. to begin direct fundraising — again, not a cheap endeavor.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a federal law that criminalized photographs and other depictions of animal cruelty, saying the law violated free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.
-
Unfortunately, for me, the filter didn’t work. But because no two people share the same standard, here’s a short exercise so you can judge for yourself. You need a computer, a browser and a live Internet connection.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
-
An important High Court decision today allowing Eircom proceed with cutting off internet access to illegal music downloaders, mainly peer-to-peer music sharing groups, has major implications for all other internet service providers.
Legal sources predict the judgment by Mr Justice Peter Charleton may compel other internet service providers to cut off services to illegal downloaders who fail to heed warnings to desist what the judge described as “theft”.
-
The two American lawyers who were illegally wiretapped by the Bush administration asked a federal judge Friday to order the government to pay $612,000 in damages, plus legal fees for their attorneys.
The demand (.pdf) comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the former administration wiretapped the lawyers’ telephone conversations (.pdf) without a warrant, in violation of federal law.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
For more than a decade the music industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. However, looking at the sales data of the music industry itself shows that the disappointing income might be better explained by a third factor that is systematically ignored.
-
Submit brief to govt “anti-piracy czar” Victoria A. Espinel bemoaning industry losses, and outlining a plan to crackdown on online copyright infringement. Among the proposals are website filtering, search engine keyword blocking, a crackdown on domain name registrars and proxy services, monitoring of social networks for promotion of infringing websites, bandwidth throttling, and “consumer tools” installed on home PCs that detect and delete illegally obtained copyrighted material.
-
Copyrights
-
Rock band Keane have said that the Conservative Party did not seek their permission to use one of their hits at their election manifesto launch.
-
That said, OK Go left EMI amicably, and Kulash is quite appreciative of the music labels. He calls them “risk aggregators” and commends them for funding the initial monetary investment necessary to get his band off the ground. However, with the costs of music production plummeting in recent years, the days of needing huge advances just to cut an album are numbered.
-
ACTA
-
That or the massive public rebuke the USTR has been receiving from almost every quarter on this particular agreement. The full document gets “released” on Wednesday, and we expect it to be… well, pretty much like what was leaked last month.
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 7 (2004)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Listen to Tom and Larry discuss this announcement in the April 20 episode (#100) of the Going Linux Podcast.
-
Of the 109 people asked, 71 did not know. 24 of them responded with the generic equivalent of “It’s some sort of computer program”. The remaining number were able to accurately describe Linux as an operating system or a server solution. Out of that 109 queried, 7 used Mac exclusively to run their businesses. I did not pre-choose the businesses I spoke to. They were chosen from a three block downtown area of Austin and a large business park located in North Austin.
-
I am pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 We’re Linux Video Contest. We had quite a few amazing videos to choose from, many of which captured the spirit of Linux.
-
Applications
-
Bombono is a simple to use DVD authoring program that doesn’t have the steep learning curve of many others in its field. Or in the words of the Web site: “Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is easy to use and has nice and clean GUI (Gtk).”
-
Instructionals
-
Games
-
Shadowgrounds Alien-battling carnage festival
Sacred: Gold Edition Action role-playing game
Awesome Soccer Modern day homage to the legendary Sensible Soccer and Kick Off 2
Mad Skills Motocross Fast and furious arcade motocross action
Jack Keane Colorful and cartoon like adventure in the spirit of Monkey Island
KreiselBall 2D action platform game with a classical game play with puzzle elements
Mystic Mine Navigate your cart to collect coins against the clock
Brukkon Puzzle game slightly inspired by Sokoban
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
Hello, my name is Thiago Macieira, Brazilian, 28 and I’m currently living in Oslo, Norway. I graduated with a double degree in Engineering in 2004 and I am also holding an MBA. I am now working for Qt Development Frameworks in Nokia and still somewhat involved in KDE activities (but not as much as I used to be).
When did you first hear about KDE?
Oh, sometime in 1998 or 1999. I don’t remember exactly. I remember being on IRC somewhere and someone pointed me to www.kde.org, which had that picture of a computer and was asking if Unix was ready for the desktop. I remember thinking, “yeah, right, this project will never be successful”.
-
-
In August last year Sharp introduced a new device it referred to as an ultra-compact netbook. It was named the NetWalker, and went to market in September.
-
Android
-
According to mobiles.co.uk, during the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, a rep said that the X10 is due for a very “big” update come second half of 2010, around September maybe.
-
You have to give Motorola credit for not churning out the same handset over and over. It’s simple to take the route of either a slab phone or sliding QWERTY, yet Motorola keeps coming up with various form factors for Android. Take a look at the pictures below and you’ll see the first images of a Motorola phone which borrows a tad from the KRAVE ZN4 design.
-
We previously reported that several hundred myTouch 3G Slide phones were gifted to select T-Mobile employees last week in Las Vegas. These units were handed out early in a joint effort by T-Mobile and HTC so users could test out the phones and provide their feedback before launch. One of our sources was lucky enough to receive this phone and they were nice enough to provide us with a 30 minute virtual hands on.
-
If you don’t know by now( and you probably do), the HTC Desire is a top-notch smartphone. Featuring Android 2.1, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, and a 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED screen, the Desire is loaded up with HTC’s custom Sense user interface, which many find classier than stock Android.
-
Is Google perfect? Of course not, but at least with respect to Android, they are a more welcome dance partner than Apple at present.
As a good friend recently commented to me about a situation out of my control, “you cannot always make other people do the right thing”.
Let’s hope Apple relents and we can continue loving and hating them based on technology alone.
-
Google is reportedly working on a tablet computer based on its Android operating system, not the Chrome OS. Google has declined to comment on the tablet rumor, but that hasn’t stopped analysts from mulling over the operating system choice.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
The OLPC program provides rugged, low-cost, connected laptops to children in developing countries. The program seeks to encourage learning by engaging students in a range of educational software undertaken both individually and with eachother via the XO laptop. The software, called “activities” in the OLPC system, come pre-installed on the laptop for immediate use, or they can be adapted to suit local needs, or supplemented by wholly local content.
OLPC Oceania is one of three programs carried out under the Pacific Plan Digital Strategy with the support of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. The Solomon Islands trial was also undertaken with the technical and resource support of the region-wide initiative, “One Laptop per Pacific Child”.
-
Can open source tools replace all closed source software? That is, are open source tools – freely downloadable software – really just as good as software you have to pay for?
In a lot of cases, the answer is yes. In fact, in some cases, open source tools offers features or performance benefits that surpass their commercial counterparts.
-
Google has been running its Summer of Code program since 2005. It has reached out to hundreds of open source programs and distributed millions of dollars to try to encourage more people to get involved with open source. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the pressing need that many projects have to develop more docs to go with the software they already have. Now Fedora is ramping up a “Summer of Coding for 2010, and yet again — it’s all about code doesn’t address any other forms of contribution.
-
More generally, every project has to have some idea of the problem it is trying to solve. In some ways, that’s a far more important part of a project than any specific body of code or any specific developer. One of the best things about free software is that it’s alive; it will evolve and, with any luck, be better tomorrow. A project’s goals say a lot about how it can be expected to evolve. In your editor’s opinion, both Subversion and Ubuntu have set worthwhile goals, and both seem to be trying to work toward those goals. These are good things; our community is richer for the existence of both.
-
Cisco has announced it has completed its £2.17bn acquisition of Norwegian video systems maker Tandberg and is launching a compulsory bid for the outstanding 8.9% shares it does not yet own.
Marthin De Beer , Cisco’s senior vice-president for its emerging technologies group, said the company “strongly believed” that telepresence, would allow everyone, everywhere, to be more productive through the pervasive use of video and face-to-face collaboration. The full Tandberg product line is now part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio, he said.
-
Events
-
I have just finished attending the Fifth Annual Open Source Think Tank, hosted by Andrew Aitken and I at Meritage in Napa Valley. Andrew and his team did a great job of organizing the event.
-
Mozilla
-
A computer security researcher has launched a project designed to provide people greater privacy when using Google, as the company expands the scope of data its collects about its users.
-
OK happily there has been a large speed up in 3.7.a4 as regards to the filtering.
The filter operation in 3.7.a4 takes 6 times less than it did in 3.6.
It does not look as if the reload time has seen any improvement.
The improvements in 3.7.a4 are very encouraging but it makes you wonder what Google is doing to get such incredible sub 10sec times.
Luckily as it is open source someone can go have a look
-
Education
-
Over the last few years, open source adoption has been growing within India’s education system. Five years ago, the South Indian state of Kerala, pioneered open source in schools with its famous IT@Schools project, that now covers three million students from the 5th-10 standards, involves 200,000 teachers across 4071 schools. Since then, other Indian states like Karnataka, Gujarat, Assam, West Bengal and others have made open source a key part of their school education initiatives.
-
Government
-
Twenty desktop PCs running the Ubuntu Linux distribution are used to manage the services at a shared office building in the Hague for all Dutch ministries, since the beginning of this month.
The shared office building, called Rijkskantoor Beatrixpark, facilitates ministries working together on temporary projects, and offers the ministries extra office space when needed.
-
Two hundred Romanians have signed a petition urging Gabriel Sandu, the Minister for Communications and Information Society, to support open source software on e-government projects. They also ask him to use open standards and to make government data public electronically.
The petition was organised by APTI, a Romanian Association for Technology and Internet. It was organised on-line regarding the eRomânia project, a 500 million euro project proposal to make government services and information available electronically. The project has been discussed for the past few years, and minister Sandu is one of its supporters.
-
The Portuguese government agency for public procurement has published a list of open source applications it deems suitable for use by public administrations.
The selected open source applications are now part of the official software catalogue published by Portugal’s procurement authority, the Agência Nacional de Compras Públicas, ANCP. Included on ANCP’s list are the database management system MySQL, content management system Alfresco, email server Scalix and server and desktop operating systems Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux.
-
Licensing
-
The most popular copyleft license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), has become a powerful enabler of collaboration, but a growing number of companies fall afoul of its requirements. Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) revealed last year that he finds an average of one new GPL violator every day. A GPL violation constitutes copyright infringement and puts the violator in a position where they risk having their license to use the software terminated. The SFLC and a handful of other organizations such as gpl-violations.org, attempt to educate companies about GPL compliance and help them conform with the requirements of the license.
-
Programming
-
Groovy++, the static typing compiler extension for Groovy, is to be released as open source under the Apache Public Licence 2.0. The Groovy++ project started last year and at the time Alex Tkachman, project founder said Groovy++’s compiler “uses several pieces of technology, which our company uses and plans to use in our commercial products. It was not critical when [the] project started as [an] experiment, but now we need to extract these parts and replace/rewrite [them] with proper open-source alternatives”. Since Tkachman has now announced that the source will be released under the APL 2.0 this process appears to be complete.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
A representative of the Spanish Ministry of Presidency, Miguel Angel Amutio Gomez, started the day explaining the crucial points of the Spanish law 11/2007: the right for everybody to use whatever digital technology they like best and the obligation for all Public Administrations to avoid discrimination of citizens based on their technological choices. In order to make this possible, the law stresses the importance of open standards, setting the goal that all e-government services and documents become available at least through such standards. In this context, Amutio said, the Spanish National Interoperability Framework (NIF) that A. Barrionuevo presented in the first day becomes an essential legal test for all Spanish organizations.
-
A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.
The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.
-
Finance
-
Paulson & Co., the world’s third- largest manager of hedge funds, may face civil litigation for its role in the collateralized debt obligations that led to the fraud charges against Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to Christopher Whalen.
-
-
-
-
Financial regulators in London and Germany on Monday said they would open investigations to see whether Goldman Sachs’s sale of mortgage securities broke any local laws following the disclosure that two European banks had lost money on what U.S. officials allege were fraudulent transactions.
-
It now appears that Germany may take legal action against Goldman Sachs because the New York-financial firm sold some of the CDOs to a German bank.
-
-
Prime Minister Gordon Brown called yesterday for the U.K. Financial Services Authority to start a probe, saying he was “shocked” at the “moral bankruptcy” indicated in the Securities and Exchange Commission suit against Goldman Sachs. Germany’s financial regulator, Bafin, asked the SEC for details on the suit, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
-
Despite continued evidence of an economic recovery, bank and broker bonds continued to soften Monday, eroded by a steady stream of negative financial newsflow stemming from the SEC’s probe into misconduct at Goldman Sachs (GS).
-
-
The SEC investigation of Goldman Sachs could hurt California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who as CEO of eBay sat on the investment bank’s board.
-
As Fabrice Tourre sat through a meeting on 2 February 2007, he appeared to know he was taking part in an unusual event. The Goldman Sachs executive, who is at the heart of the $1bn fraud allegations being levelled against the Wall Street firm, emailed a colleague during the meeting to describe it as “surreal”.
-
The S.E.C. case revolves around how much say Mr. Paulson had in building the portfolio that he would eventually short, whether that role was disclosed to ACA and those who eventually bought the C.D.O.’s, and if Goldman’s clients were given the impression that Mr. Paulson’s interest was aligned with theirs on the deal, or against them.
Mr. Tourre’s words, like Henry Blodget’s before him, have come back to haunt him after the crash, with the the S.E.C. citing two especially colorful bits in its filing:
[P]ortions of an e-mail in French and English sent by Mr. Tourre to a friend on Jan.23, 2007 stated, in English translation where applicable: “More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!” Similarly, an e-mail on Feb. 11, 2007 to Mr. Tourre from the head of Goldman’s structured product correlation trading desk stated in part, “the cdo biz is dead we don’t have a lot of time left.”
-
In this Too Big To Fail world, people at every investment bank share different views on the same investments. While Goldman was buying these mortgages, one of its vice presidents, Fabrice Tourre, wrote: “The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. … Only potential survivor the fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstrosities!!!”
-
But a few desks away, Mr. Tourre and Mr. Egol were quietly working on the Abacus deals.
They were, former colleagues say, something of an odd couple. A slight man with a flair for salesmanship, Mr. Tourre joined Goldman in 2001, after coming to the United States to study business operations at Stanford. At Goldman, he courted investors like European banks and big hedge funds.
-
On a short-term tactical basis, Goldman Sachs clearly has little to fear. It has relatively deep pockets and will fight the securities “Fab” allegations tooth and nail; resolving that case, through all the appeals stages, will take many years. Friday’s announcement had a significant negative impact on the market perception of Goldman’s franchise value – partly because what they are accused of doing to unsuspecting customers is so disgusting. But, as a Bank of America analyst (Guy Mozkowski) points out this morning, the dollar amount of this specific allegation is small relative to Goldman’s overall business and – frankly – Goldman’s market position is so strong that most customers feel a lack of plausible alternatives.
-
-
-
-
-
The financial reform bill pending in the Senate would have prevented the type of dealings that led to a civil complaint against Goldman Sachs, Sen. Christopher Dodd, the sponsor of the bill, said Monday.
-
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said failure to enact his financial overhaul bill would leave the American public vulnerable to “shenanigans” at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other large firms.
-
-
-
The last 72 hours have left Goldman Sachs with a shattered reputation among the people who matter to them, their customers and the politicians they have courted. The SEC’s civil fraud suit over one of their synthetic CDO deals is bad enough, but it’s just getting worse and worse for them.
-
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Big Brother is watching you. Actually, it’s the RIAA and the MPAA, especially if you’re parked on a BitTorrent client. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that both organizations–along with a few others–want to take the file-monitoring process a huge step further by infiltrating consumer PCs and deleting the infringing content off their hard drives. How? Through “anti-infringement” spyware developed and enforced by the government.
This is no joke.
-
Countries negotiating a major cross-border agreement to crack down on intellectual property crimes have agreed to release previously secret draft language of the controversial accord this week.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has confirmed plans to publish the draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) this Wednesday, following a series of successful negotiations in the eighth round of talks on the agreement last week in New Zealand.
USTR spokeswoman Nefterius McPherson said that the negotiating countries are very close to a final deal, though differences remain over the language concerning enforcement mechanisms for dealing with trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.19.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
It’s an old debate among Linux enthusiasts, but new to me. Not because I haven’t heard it before, but because I haven’t really experienced it until now. There’s a lot of talk in the Linux and free open-source software (FOSS) communities about freedom and choice. It’s practically a mantra for many. Most of us non-geeky ordinary desktop users are simply grateful to have an alternative to Windows that doesn’t require a huge investment in new hardware and expensive software licenses. To us ordinary desktop users, “freedom” and “choice” in Linux and FOSS mean that we are no longer stuck with unsatisfactory and expensive Microsoft (or Apple, I suppose, as well) products.
But my “inner geek” apparently spent his vacation time mulling over a fuller meaning of Linux/FOSS “freedom” and “choice.” When he returned yesterday, he arrived with a Debian Linux installation CD and gave me a stirring speech about it. Most desktop users don’t concern themselves with things that they think have nothing to do with them. But I do, because I’m a wonderful, exceptional person.
-
Applications
-
On Friday we were briefed by Synaptics that they would be “announcing much-desired capabilities for notebook PCs running Linux and other open source operating systems”, which we found out to mean that they were bringing their Synaptics Gesture Suite software to Linux. Today this announcement has now been made in the form of a press release.
-
Have you wanted multi-touch support on your notebook’s touchpad, but were out of luck because you’ve been running Ubuntu? Synaptics announced today the extension of its Gesture Suite to several Linux operating systems, which means that you can now zoom, flick, rotate, and ChiralScroll to your heart’s content on your Linux box.
-
Apple’s multitouch finger controls on the iPad have inspired a wave of copycat tablet computers that will be out later this year. Those copycats are likely to get help from touch-sensor company Synaptics, which is announcing today that it has created a Linux version of its multitouch sensor system.
-
As I’ve been learning to use DesktopCouch, I’ve come to understand the key role that writing map and reduce functions play. Basically, a view is stored map function and optional reduce function. I still haven’t quite figured out reduce functions, especially wrt rereduce.
-
Instructionals
-
Games
-
Prey is a really great title. It has everything. Maybe too much. I’m not sure I’ll have the guts to see it through, just like I chickened out with Doom 3. Call me a sissy, but this is a great testimony to the game’s depth and quality. Then again, id folks always knew how to make games.
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
The ‘focus‘ word has many meanings, ranging from the optical concept of ‘good convergence of light rays generated by an object’ to the cognitive process of directing the attention to a particular target while ignoring other targets.
Now the interesting part: this concept can be used in computers too, especially in user interfaces, to direct the user to relevant information or to help him through a step-by-step process. How to do that? Since every image you see on screen is ‘on focus’ by default, you can easily unfocus unuseful information.
-
-
Arch Linux makes it acceptably light and fast, and with the addition of a very lightweight desktop, it’s a working-class computer. As you can see I added the old ath5k-based PCMCIA wireless card, which gives it decent download speeds, and the entire graphical desktop, plus nfs and ssh can all run in under 30Mb of memory with a little swap used. Triggering rtorrent and screen-vs over ssh takes care of the actual “work,” and all the rest is cake.
-
As a test for my new torrent slave, I downloaded an ISO of VortexBox, which is something I hadn’t ever heard of, probably because I don’t travel in Fedora circles very much. I had no rationale for grabbing that torrent; it just happened to be at the top of the stack at linuxtracker.org.
-
Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Good news for all who are looking for a Mature “Just-Works” Desktop. PCLinuxOS 2010 bandwagon is released. This time Tex and the Gang has offered 6 releases: Main KDE Desktop, KDE MiniMe Desktop, Gnome Desktop, Gnome ZenMini Desktop, LXDE Desktop, XFCE Desktop and Openbox Desktop.
-
Fedora
-
While we were trying to find a few good activities to show off the collaborative capabilities of the OLPC, we found out that the wifi connection was no longer working on it. So we decided to go ahead and use our developer key and try out some of the newer OS versions for the OLPC.
We now have Sugar 0.84.14 and build version 13 running on it. Some things that we found out about this version is that it is running Fedora in a switchable desktop from Sugar to Fedora we have taken some pictures..
-
Fedora 13 Beta has just been released for testing and bug reporting, with the stable version slated for release in May. Thanks to boot.fedoraproject.org, I didn’t have to download the full CD iso image. Used the same bfo iso image from last month and took the Fedora 13 beta out for spin. But rather than dish out a full review of this beta release (I only review stable releases), I’m using this article to showcase a new storage feature of Anaconda. A storage capability that is not available on any other non-enterprise Linux distribution.
-
Debian Family
-
There are some superb desktop Linux distributions that are designed to work with very old hardware. For example, Puppy Linux is a great choice to quickly turn an old PC into a secure, easy to use word processing, email and light web browsing workstation. Puppy can work minor miracles on very old hardware, and I carry a Puppy boot CD-ROM around with me as my emergency recovery system.
-
Do you consider yourself to be fairly familiar with the Debian Linux distribution? I thought I was familiar with it enough to know its origin and history, how its name was derived and that Richard Stallman, the Father of the Free Software movement, uses a Debian derivative (gNewSense) for his own personal computer. There’s one significant piece of the Debian puzzle that I didn’t know about: Its Constitution.
-
Ubuntu
-
One of my biggest complains about Apple is iTunes. Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple. They offer fantastic (albeit overpriced) hardware, a solid operating system, and a killer aesthetic. But as for iTunes – you won’t find much love in this heart for that powerhouse music mecca. What you will find is contempt. I don’t think I need to go off on the why I loathe iTunes. Why? Because everything the UbuntuOne Music Store is is what iTunes is not.
-
Ubuntu, undeniably, is in a great moment, one can say that it has achieved enough traction to trail its own way. When I first had contact with Ubuntu, and it was in the times of 6.06 and 6.10, Ubuntu seemed a better Knoppix than Knoppix . The Distro was very promising, showing signs that it would bring Linux, until then, an arcane magic of geeks and nerds, for the average user.
-
The USC as it is in Lucid is really great. Well polished, nicely categorized and above all easy to navigate. However, don’t you think there is still one thing missing? Look up an application and it comes up with brief descriptions of what it does. Then you have a place there that tells you the price (in all cases that I have seen, FREE).
-
I recently downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx Beta2 for testing. I love what I am seeing, so I want to share some of my initial impressions on what seems to be a release that could mark a milestone in Ubuntu’s history.
[...]
I definitely recommend installing and using Ubuntu 10.04 once it is released, you will be pleasantly surprised!
-
On the one hand, I want to give Canonical credit: 12 million estimated users is a big figure. And it provides a foundation upon which Canonical can promote additional services — Landscape, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Music Store, etc. — to consumers and business users.
But just how well is Canonical doing? In March 2010, new Canonical CEO Jane Silber said the company had about 320 empl0yees and was on a path to profitability. But she conceded the company wasn’t yet profitable.
As a privately held software company, Canonical certainly doesn’t have to say much about its financial performance. But frankly, I think Canonical can share a bit more information without having to completely open its books.
-
In this issue we cover: Archive frozen for preparation of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu Open Week, New Loco Council Members Announced, New operators appointed on #ubuntu, #ubuntu-offtopic and #kubuntu, Reminder: Regional Membership Boards – Restaffing, 1st Annual Ubuntu Women World Play Day Competition Announced, New Ubuntu Member, Lucid Parties, Hungarian Loco Team shares Release Party Badges, Lucid Release parties in Norway, Ubuntu-ni presentation at American College, Ubuntu Honduras Visited UNAH-VS, Minor Team Reporting Change, Feature Friday: project announcements, Links round-up 16th April, Facebook app for Lucid countdown banners, Free Software and Linux Days 2010 in Istanbul, Quickly 4.0 available in Lucid!, Out of beta: 40 Ubuntu-based TurnKey virtual appliances, Full Circle Podcast #4: It’s Everyone Else’s Fault, Ubuntu-UK podcast: Hear Em Rave and much, much more!
-
Variants
-
I always likes the ideas within Mint…make a good package better by adding little features and taking out what isn’t necessary. I remembered from the day that everything just worked. Websites played flash, video on DVD would play with audio, documents opened without too much effort or downloading extras. So what else is here that most people would like to know about?
-
Their computer was then taken over by a botnet and started spewing spam left, right and center. Which I found out about a month or so later.
[...]
Knowing what sort of computer user type this person is I decided to make sure I chose the right distribution for them. After careful thought and a bit of google trolling (in the searching sense of the word) I decided to give Linux Mint a go. So I backed up their computer and settled down to install Mint.
[...]
This is the latest story on how a “typical” computer user made a seamless transition from windows to Linux. Do you have any such stories? What about the other way around? While I had no problems transitioning this person doesn’t mean that there are none. What issues have you come up with when introducing people to Linux?
-
-
These questions are natural, because a few years ago they wouldn’t even be possible. What reason would you have for breaking open an first-generation iPod, or hacking an original Playstation? The question of “unauthorized software” on System 9 and Windows XP was plainly moot. But as the capabilities of the PC, console, and phone have expanded, so have their magisteria. And as their power grew, so did their chains. These chains were so light before that we didn’t notice them, but now that they are not only visible but are beginning to truly encumber our devices, we must consider whether we are right to throw them off. The answer, to me at least, seems obvious: no company or person has the right to tell you that you may not do what you like with your own property.
-
In what is becoming the rule rather than the exception, Digg is the latest social media player to “come out of the closet” and not only acknowledge that it is built on open source components, but they have contributed to and host several open source projects. Like Facebook and Twitter, Digg loves open source.
-
They spend some time talking about the open source model and a few FLOSS-geeks from Washington, DC (maco and myself included) are featured near the end of the segment. There is also a nice shot of the KDE website featuring KDE 4.4.
-
Mozilla
-
Firefox 3.6.4 has been in the talks lately because of the intention of the Mozilla developers to add out-of-process plugins to that version of the web browser which basically means that popular plugins run in their own process instead of the main browser process. This is beneficial in case of a plugin crash as it will only take down its own process and not the whole web browser.
-
-
Oracle
-
Moving all of your apps and information in the cloud has been adopted by a great number of people. However, there are also a large number who still prefer having a desktop application.
-
Programming
-
We began our testing by first measuring the time it took each GCC release to build Apache, PHP, and ImageMagick.
-
-
What’s so interesting about HelenOS that we can’t get from Linux, BSD or MINIX? Having played with HelenOS for a while, I have two answers:
1. HelenOS is still in a fairly early stage of development. It’s young compared to the other operating systems I mentioned. It’s small, clean and has several papers written on it. This makes the HelenOS project a great way for students to jump in and learn about OS design with a minimum of overhead. It’s light, highly portable and doesn’t have any spare parts left over from a previous decade.
2. For the same reason people build model cars – the fun of it. Some people stargaze, some collect stamps and some write kernel code. It doesn’t need to be practical to have a purpose. Though, given time, HelenOS may become practical too.
-
Environment
-
The impact of climate change on the Amazon rainforest could be much worse than previously predicted, new research suggests.
-
Finance
-
Pecora exposed the ways in which leading banks mistreated their customers – typically, retail investors. The SEC alleges, with credible detail, that Goldman essentially set up some trusting clients and deliberately misled them – to the tune of effectively transferring $1 billion from them to a particular unscrupulous investor.
-
There is some good stuff in the bill, but it is riddled with loopholes. Far more important than the actual bill is the effort to actually enforce existing laws. While it is true that the near-complete absence of a regulatory structure to oversee derivatives trading is problematic, there is a lot the government could have done still, if it had wanted to, to prevent catastrophes like AIG and Lehman Brothers. The decision to take a whack at Goldman for this Paulson business is therefore the best news there’s been on this front…
-
Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all
The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers’ colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud.
-
This is a statement made by GS in their recent Annual Report filed with the SEC and is – BS from GS. As with many of their public statements, they deny any wrongdoing, knowledge or participation. This is the same position they are taking now after the SEC announcement. Not surprising and expected. But the reality is – as I have been saying for almost three years now – THEY KNEW. And knowing makes their crimes premeditated and intentional. Not only criminally wrong but morally wrong as well.
-
My concern is that the American people even now do not understand how serious this crisis is. They are quickly distracted into ridiculous partisan spirit and frivolous diversions. This is the freedom and the welfare of their country that is at risk, and it is time to put aside childish things, and begin the serious work of reforming their financial system, the ownership of their media, and the political campaign process.
-
-
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
Two and a half years ago, we outlined our approach to removing content from Google products and services. Our process hasn’t changed since then, but our recent decision to stop censoring search on Google.cn has raised new questions about when we remove content, and how we respond to censorship demands by governments. So we figured it was time for a refresher.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
At 68 pages, the report [.pdf] is quite long, and very professionally produced. It is stuffed full of tables designed to bolster its case. In calculating the claimed loss from piracy, a fairly simple approach is adopted. The number of copyright infringements are multiplied by the substitution rate (the percentage of people who would have bought stuff if they had not downloaded it for free) times the unit retail price. This is calculated for the top 5 economies in Europe, and scaled up proportionally to include all the other EU economies. The claimed job losses caused by that revenue lost is obtained by dividing the latter by an average sales revenue per employee.
[...]
In other words, the IFPI is the global equivalent of the British BPI and French SNEP: another industry organisation, whose job is to push its particular interests. Indeed, for some countries in the “Building a Digital Economy” report – such as Italy and Spain – the IFPI is cited directly as the source of the figures for the alleged number of copyright infringements. The only major country that seems to draw on an independent source is Germany, where “GfK” is cited. This is the market research company GfK Group, but I was unable to find anything on their website regarding piracy figures, so there was no way to examine their underlying assumptions or reliability.
[...]
We can hardly blame politicians for being fooled by such impressive-looking documents. It is only when you dig down through the Appendices at the back, and start hunting out the actual references given for the claimed figures in multiple national markets that it becomes clear the entirely spurious nature of those shocking headline claims. Given that the Digital Economy Bill passed in part because of this kind of misinformation, we can only hope that the politicians who were deceived by plausible-sounding industry lobbyists will reconsider their position in the new Parliament and repeal the most egregious clauses of this deeply-flawed Act.
-
The draft Gallo report on “Enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market” contains the entertainment industry’s wishlist for the future of copyright policy: extra-judicial sanctions turning internet service providers into a private copyright police, harsher criminal sanctions paving the way for the revival of the IPRED2 directive, etc. These proposals are very similar to the provisions found in leaked ACTA drafts.
SourceCode Season 3 – Episode 8: Sustainability and Alternatives (2006)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.18.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
The latest build comes in at 665.39mb which is small when you consider the wealth of functionality it provides.
-
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that CiviCRM has earned its recommendation as a fully featured donor and contact management system for nonprofits.
-
That’s Archivist with a capital A, as in the person who heads up the National Archives and Records Administration. The latest person to hold that position is David S. Ferriero, who became AOTUS (Archivist of the United States) in November 2009. Mr. Ferriero used to be the director of the New York Public Libraries, and it looks like he has brought some of that public-outreach sensibility to his new role.
-
Use the Internet much? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is probably: more and more every day.
You rely on programs and Web sites – maybe even one where you’re reading this column – to work as promised. If they don’t, you’re likely to be momentarily frustrated, and then move on. On the Internet, there’s always someplace else to go. Unless you’re a geek or wonk, there’s little reason to dwell on what went wrong.
-
Every business owner dreams of enjoying a legally enforced monopoly. Fashion designers are no different. Although the brands and logos that appear on clothes are protected by trademark law, the designs of fabrics themselves are protected by copyright, and functional innovations in clothing are protectable by patent law, fashion designs themselves are legally, um, naked. For decades, designers have complained that, like painters, filmmakers, architects and authors, they are entitled to intellectual property protection to protect their creative efforts against unauthorized copying. So far, they have been unsuccessful. That hasn’t stopped Senator Charles Schumer from teaming up with Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk to try, yet again, to make fashion designers’ monopoly dreams come true.
vvvv
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Server
-
The Power7-based blade servers can also run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, which was just tweaked two weeks ago to support the Power7 chips as well as all the new x64 processors from Intel and AMD. Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3 will support the new Power7 blades, but you’re going to have to wait until SP1 to get SLES 11 for these machines.
-
In conjunction with the launch of Power7-based blade servers this week, IBM is also delivered a long-awaited upgrade to its proprietary i For Business operating system (formerly known as OS/400), with i 7.1 bringing native XML and encryption capabilities to the integrated database management system embedded in the OS. IBM is also adding features to i 7.1′s compiler tools that allow them to create applications without using the legacy green-screen protocols that have defined IBM midrange systems for more than 40 years.
-
Applications
-
-
-
Proprietary
-
Have you ever been asked to do any Linux desktop remote support only to find out the client didn’t have secure shell (so no tunneling of X) nor did they have a vnc server setup? In these cases, what would you do? You still need to be able to support that client. Or what if you had a Windows client that needed support and the only operating system you had available was a Linux box? In that case, you need TeamViewer. TeamViewer is an incredibly easy to use remote support tool that allows you to do more than many similar tools.
-
Instructionals
-
Games
-
Speed Dreams 1.4.0 is finally released. the new version of this game comes with many new features like 3 amazing fine tuned and balanced new car sets, 3 exciting new tracks and many visually improved ones, 2 new TRB first-class robot for the Supercars, 36 GP and TRB1 car sets and more.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
As for whether the Activity Journal on its own can serve as a true replacement for traditional file browsers, I’m not sure. Currently, it’s only really useful for finding files that have been accessed in the recent past, and in that sense, it’s not necessarily more helpful than Nautilus. Finding the files you worked with yesterday is always easy enough; the real challenge is to come up with a way to organize data so that it’s as accessible three years from now as it was ten minutes ago.
Features that might help in this regard are searching and tagging, which are also in progress. Again, this functionality is already abundantly provided by other utilities, but combining it with a heavily chronological approach to data organization could prove to be very useful.
-
-
Salix OS 13.0 “Live” is a Slackware-based distribution that runs the XFCE desktop environment. This distro offers a complete desktop running as a live CD and it also offers users the Persistence Wizard, a tool designed to help you save data and modifications between live CD sessions. In addition to using the live CD features, you can use the brand new graphical installer to install Saltix on to your hard drive. Make sure you create a partition first using the Gparted icon on the Salix desktop.
-
Ubuntu
-
The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player.
-
Ubuntu has a system of sending live CDs to enthusiastic users who order it online. This time as well, we have Ubuntu 10.04 live CDs shipping for free through Ubuntu Shipit. To order your free copy of the Ubuntu live CD, visit the Shipit homepage.
-
Nautilus Elementary 2.30 for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx also comes with all the tweaks that were in Karmic such as RGBA, “F8″ to toggle the menu bar and so on. The one thing missing for now is the ClutterFlow view.
-
Variants
-
I recently heard the comparison that Mint today is a lot like Simply Mepis was years ago, and I feel its accurate. Barring my personal lack of hardware support (this included fan control which is vital on a metal Macbook), I’ve heard great things including more extensive printer support, and after using it for a little bit I felt that aside from the menu, that I think might in fact be harder for a new user, Mint is a good distribution.
-
-
Android
-
WeFi Inc. (www.wefi.com), creator of the world’s largest community-based global Wi-Fi network, launched today an enhanced version of its free software for PC and Android mobile devices.
-
So, you can read the whole thing but he starts with Android: applications that are no longer visible to the user are suspended — remaining in memory but without event handling or processing.
[...]
Quintana concludes by noting that if Apple introduced Android-like unrestricted multitasking, “all current [iPhone] applications that might take advantage of background processing would require a redesign to use a client/service architecture. Developers would have to maintain a completely different app for pre-iPhone OS 4 devices or iPhone OS 4 devices with no multitasking. In addition, the backend server infrastructure required for PNS would only be used for pre-iPhone OS 4 devices and non-multitasking iPhone OS 4. This would fragment development severely.”
-
And now this makes me wonder, what if Pidgin was proprietary software? Would its makers still give a damn about whether the users are guaranteed their full privacy and security while using it? Or will it be just another piece of software that’s full of deceptive eye-candy from the outside, while the inside (i.e. the under-the-hood stuff) can be as far from security and privacy as east is from the west? The difference between proprietary and free open source software is in the fact that in FOSS, the source code is open and visible to everyone, meaning that if there’s anything wrong with the source code, it can be easily detected and fixed. On the other hand, proprietary software keeps the source code visible only to its owners, which means that the owners/developers of a proprietary software can write all the code they want (be it good for the user or not) and nobody will ever know for sure what they wrote because their code is only visible to them, which simply means that they can be spying at every single action done on their software while the user is unaware of anything because A) He can’t see the source code.
-
We free software advocates surely know that, no matter what we say or how we say it, some people have to or (if you prefer) simply want to use proprietary software for one reason or another – and that’s even when they’ve heard and understood everything we have to say on the matter. Many free software advocates, though, only preach abstinence from – and a zero tolerance policy towards – proprietary software. I have to disagree with this approach. Let me explain…
While many would disagree, I think educating abstinence and taking a zero tolerance policy on just about anything – while often laudable – just doesn’t work well enough and in many cases can be naive and downright negligent. Take educating children to abstain from sex and/or drugs as an example.
-
Marcus: if you would like to talk about why I feel the need to fork your project and am proceeding despite my afore-mentioned reluctance–and what, if anything, it means to you–we can talk about that privately.
-
The last quartile of the 20th century was marked by a rise in software development by companies, individuals and hobbyist groups. Key among software development methodologies was a controversial yet innovative idea about giving away your software code for others to use and improve upon it.
Those new to the free and open source community may not appreciate how radical and dangerous the idea of giving away your source code for free was for people. Those that did subscribe to the ideology sacrificed tremendous profits and fame yet helped create what we now call FOSS today.
-
The O’Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted this July at OSCON 2010 in Portland, OR. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software.
-
Sourceforge.net estimated that there are 230,000 open source projects on its site till Feb last year.
-
Databases
-
His presentation followed those of MySQL daddy Monty Widenius and leading MySQL architect Brian Aker who’d spoke against a single company running MySQL. They’d also pitched their MySQL forks, MariaDB and Drizzle, as alternative projects and products to MySQL for developers and DBAs.
-
A: Let’s consider the plausible outcomes:
1. Oracle intends to keep developing MySQL as a weapon against, among other products, Microsoft’s SQL Server
2. Oracle intends to kill the project, and will do so explicitly by limiting or narrowly focusing development.
3. Oracle intends to kill the project, and will do so implicitly by deliberate indifference.
Personally, I still believe the first outcome is the most likely. I’m also on record as arguing that the second is much less of a problem than people believe, because if Oracle acts publicly in bad faith, this would create – immediately – massive commercial opportunity for a second player or players. The last scenario is clearly the most problematic, as an Oracle that didn’t do anything bad but simply failed to do anything good could leave the community paralyzed and unable to muster a suitable response. Still, I consider this the least likely of the three potential outcomes.
Is Oracle’s handling of the MySQL project important? Quite obviously the answer is yes. Whether you agreed with Sun’s valuation of the project at one billion, MySQL is clearly a valuable asset.
-
Education
-
In its 10 year history, Moodle has been confined to computer screens around the world; with countless fields, description areas and scrolling filling the screen. There have been attempts at mobilizing Moodle in the past, but as a user you either didn’t have the time to use it or it simply wasn’t worth using. With the proliferation and widespread availability of web-capable phones, however, mobile customers worldwide now have in hand a versatile portal into the web and to Moodle.
-
Programming
-
Due to arrive in June 2010, Python 2.7 has now reached its first beta. Python 2.7 is planned to be the last major edition of the Python 2.x series before it goes into “bug fix mode”. Python 2.7 is focussed on back porting a number of features which were included in Python 3.1, such as a C based I/O library for higher performance, the addition of an ordered dictionary type and the new syntax for nested with statements. Full details of what is in Python 2.7 are available on the What’s New in Python 2.7 page.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
There are only a few problems web browser developers and users have with Adobe Flash.
1. Performance.
2. Stability. Due to poor implementation in the browser.
3. Need for a Plugin. Having to download and update a plugin.
4. Platform Compatibility. There are long standing bugs in the GNU/Linux version.
5. Need for Expensive Proprietary Software. To develop Flash content.
-
-
FLOGGER OF SHINY TOYS Apple has managed to shaft Nvidia, implementing its own graphics core switching technology by hiring former AMD employees.
-
Billions of Twitter tweets, everything from urgent messages about the Haitian earthquake to Justin Bieber fans professing their love, are headed to the world’s largest archive, the Library of Congress.
-
Billions of Twitter posts will no longer fade into obscurity now that Google is indexing them all in a massive, searchable database.
Google announced a new search feature that lets users look at an entire history of tweets on any subject, in any time frame. The feature will roll out over the next couple of days, but you can see it in action now through a special link (ironically, it didn’t work for me in Chrome, but Firefox was fine).
-
Law
-
A Milan judge Monday explained the reasoning behind his decision to convict three Google executives of violating Italy’s privacy law by allowing the posting of a controversial bullying video, saying the Internet is not a lawless prairie and the executives are criminally responsible because their company benefitted financially from the offense.
-
A Florida man faces a $15,000 defamation lawsuit for leaving negative feedback on an eBay seller.
-
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has announced, social network Tagged, has agreed to pay a fine of $650,000 for sending millions of deceptive emails in a 2009 campaign to boost its membership.
-
Science
-
President Barack Obama Thursday set a bold new course for the future of US space travel, planning to send American astronauts into Mars orbit within the next three decades.
-
The Obama administration’s vision for the future of manned space flight will bump the United States to “second or even third-rate” status as a space-faring nation, the commanders of three U.S. moon missions warned Wednesday.
-
President Obama pledged his full commitment to the space program Thursday, outlining a new strategy that ends current programs while funding new initiatives intended to propel humankind farther into the solar system.
-
Researchers at Southwest Research Institute have used the Hubble Space Telescope to take images of the dwarf planet Pluto. Because of its tilt to the Sun, its atmosphere actually freezes and falls to the ground, forming large molasses-colored patches. Why? Don’t know yet. But, New help is just over the Horizon!
-
Security/Aggression
-
THE FORMER BRITISH COLONY of Virginia thinks it should be allowed to declare war on whoever attacks it over the Internet, even if it does not know who that is.
US Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, who is the Obama administration’s nominee to take on additional duties as head of the new Cyber Command, said the US should attack countries such as Iran and North Korea if it thinks they might launch online attacks.
-
The discovery that some CCTV cameras around Moscow streamed prerecorded images, instead of live pictures, has resulted in criminal charges against StroyMontageService, the firm that maintained the network.
-
-
-
The embattled security company Blackwater, which became known as the privatised face of warfare in Iraq, faces new legal difficulties after its former president and four other former employees were charged with federal weapons charges related to the alleged stockpiling of automatic rifles.
-
Environment
-
One of the first things you notice about grocery stores in Zambia is the plethora of processed foods from around the world, from crackers made in Argentina and soy milk from China to popular U.S. breakfast cereals. Complementing these foreign foods, however, are a variety of locally made and processed products, including indigenous varieties of organic rice, all-natural peanut butter, and honey from the It’s Wild brand.
-
The UK has created the world’s largest marine reserve, covering some quarter of a million square miles of ocean around the Chagos Archipelago — one of the most pristine and biologically diverse coral ecosystems on the planet. But as much as we’d like to break open the champagne and tell our oceans campaigners to go home – we’re a long way off reaching our goal for defending our oceans.
-
-
The EU’s Ecolabel is used to certify a product partly made from Indonesian rainforest timber. What a shame
[...]
The news of this gross deflowering of the EU’s green logo is contained in a new report, EU Ecolabel Allows Forest Destruction, from the Forest and European Union Resources Network (FERN), an NGO set up by the World Rainforest Movement to track European policies on the world’s forests.
-
One theory is that the Larsen breakup results from human-driven global warming, but there are other explanations. German and Russian scientists, for instance, have suggested lately that interglacial periods like the present Holocene – which is probably ending – may finish with one or more brief warming periods before the glaciers return.
-
The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm over emails released on the internet were disorganised but did not fudge their results, an independent inquiry into the affair reported today.
-
Thirty activist ‘orang-utans’ greeted shareholders as they arrived for Nestle’s Annual General Meeting today asking them to give Indonesia’s rainforests a break and stop profiting from destroying rainforest, threatening biodiversity and accelerating climate change.
-
According to the London VAAC graphic above, ash danger will still exist over all of England and much of central and northern Europe from the surface up to Flight Level 200 (that is 20,000 feet with altimeter on the standardised 1013 millibar setting) through midnight GMT tonight (0100 British local time). Parts of the area, bounded by the green dotted line, are considered dangerous up to 35,000 feet.
-
-
-
Finance
-
The U.S. is destined to endure a new economic crisis that sticks taxpayers with the bill unless Congress tightens oversight of the financial industry, President Barack Obama said Saturday.
-
A White House plan to reform regulation of the financial sector has already attracted Republican opposition, but US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is “very confident” the overhaul will pass.
-
The case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) over a 2007 mortgage derivatives deal it set up for a hedge fund manager could be just the start of Wall Street’s legal troubles stemming from the subprime meltdown.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman (GS.N) with fraud for failing to disclose to buyers of a collateralized debt obligation known as ABACUS that hedge fund manager John Paulson helped select mortgage derivatives he was betting against for the deal. Goldman denied any wrongdoing.
-
A civil suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday accused Goldman of “defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts” about a financial product based on subprime mortgage-backed securities.
The securities were a key contributor to the financial crisis that peaked in 2008 because many contained risky mortgages.
-
When it comes to Wall Street, “reform” is not the issue.
We know this, because everyone supports reform.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured thousands of images of students in their homes, sometimes as they slept or were partially undressed, according to documents filed in federal court.
Using a system to track lost or stolen laptops, officials from the Lower Merion School District also covertly surveilled students as they used their school-issued Macs, logging online chats and taking screenshots of websites they visited, according to the documents.
-
-
Privacy advocates say it shouldn’t be and that we need to be more careful about what we share and don’t share online. Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt and others in similar positions say no one wants privacy anymore. If they did, they wouldn’t be posting everything from how many miles they’ve run today to what they had for a midnight snack on these sites. And then there are those who stand to make a buck by convincing us that privacy is teetering on the edge of extinction, but their software or their service can help us keep our privacy alive.
-
In the past week, Google has been noticeably absent from a growing debate about the future of a net neutrality policy being proposed by the Federal Communications Commission and the agency’s role over broadband services.
-
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas has become the latest federal court to uphold the right of U.S. customs agents to conduct warrantless searches of laptop computers at U.S. borders.
-
The South Korean government is introducing policies aimed at curbing the amount of time children spend playing online games.
-
The case had become a cause celebre, with scientists, celebrities and freedom of speech campaigners lining up to condemn the British libel laws and argue that Singh had a right to express his opinion in print.
The sudden end to the case will strengthen the campaign for reform of the libel laws, which Jack Straw, the justice secretary, is considering. It is also a specific pledge in the Liberal Democrat manifesto.
[...]
Robert Dougans of Bryan Cave LLP, who represented Singh, confirmed that the BCA’s case was at an end. “All that now remains to be settled is how much of Simon’s legal costs he can recover from the BCA, and how much he will have to bear himself,” he said.
“However well this process goes, Simon is likely to be out of pocket by about £20,000. This – and two years of lost earnings, which he can never recover, is the price he has paid for writing an article criticising the BCA for making claims the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled can no longer be made. In the game of libel, even winning is costly and stressful.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors. This came shortly after Rupert Murdoch started going on about blocking search engines, yet again. Schmidt hinted at new ways of making money around online news content being developed (and Google working on this itself). If you’ve got 45 minutes to kill, you can check out Schmidt’s keynote below.
-
The familiar-sounding name and packaging may rile the Atlanta-based soft drinks manufacturer, but Coca Colla could also cause groans in Washington.
-
Copyrights
-
This crucial observation is the missing element to every argument I hear from those fighting to lock down copyright-as-it-is now, instead of seeking to devise a new copyright-as-it-should-be. In the Digitial Economy Bill debate in the House of Commons, the lone SNP politician Pete Wishart argued constantly from the perspective that criminals were stealing his birthright. There is indeed be an aspect of that in the way music is treated on the internet. But equally, there is a dimension in which a new generation is innovating – creating works, devising uses for information and enjoying both – in ways that should rationally be beyond the need for constant, nitpicking copyright clearance.
So in future discussions on the topic of copyright in the digital age – assuming Lessig is correct in the article that radical reform is impossible – I’ll be asking why we are criminalizing innovators rather than accommodating them.
-
ACTA
-
At the session, the potential signatories agreed to make details of the divisive treaty public for the first time.
-
-
In other words: an ISP is free to do as he wants, but if he does not have ”three strikes” (or something similar) in the contracts, the ISP will risk facing unlimited damages if any of his clients does anything illegal.
So even if it is technically true that the government does not mandate it, the net effect will be the same. Three strikes will have been introduced in practice, because no ISP can run his business without introducing a three stikes clause in his terms of service.
-
The draft Gallo report on “Enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market” contains the entertainment industry’s wishlist for the future of copyright policy: extra-judicial sanctions turning internet service providers into a private copyright police, harsher criminal sanctions paving the way for the revival of the IPRED2 directive, etc. These proposals are very similar to the provisions found in leaked ACTA drafts.
-
Digital Economy Bill
-
Ofcom will ask Internet service providers (ISPs) to notify web users if they suspect that the users’ accounts have been used for filesharing, and will insist that they retain a list of those customers that have had ‘multiple unchallenged notifications’. It explained that broadband subscribers should be given information on what they were being accused of, insisting that this should let them dispute their cases through a ‘robust and effective’ appeals mechanism, once the copyright lawyers come knocking.
-
Apparently all the firm was doing was “just protecting its rights-holders”, according to an interview with the BBC. The firm, which is based in Germany, wasn’t willing to divulge quite who those ‘rights-holders’ were, but simply said they were “musicians and producers”.
-
10. Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain, mistakes IP address for ‘Intellectual Property’
In a leaked letter written to an MP in February, Timms showed that he is unworthy of his title by saying that the ‘IP’ in IP address stood for ‘Intellectual Property’ and not Internet Protocol.
“They can then seek to download a copy of that material and in doing so capture information about the source including the Intellectual Property (IP) address along with a data and time stamp,” said Timms.
“However, at present they do not have the ability to match this information to the broadband subscriber to whom that IP address was allocated at that precise time.”
Timms was one of the chief voices behind the Digital Economy Bill, which crops up later in our top 10.
SourceCode Season 2 – Episode 6: New Orleans/Sacrificial Zone (2005)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.17.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
Naturally, the perfect Linux is different for every user. I want something that Terry can use without having vexing little problems cropping up all the time. It is enough work learning to use applications like Audacity, Ardour, Digikam, and OpenOffice without also having to babysit a colicky Linux. It seems to me that the “noob-friendly” distros like Ubuntu, Mandriva, and openSUSE start out great, but the more you use them the more weird little glitches they exhibit. I want something with a reasonable degree of sanity, and something I can fix without having to untangle mare’s nests of distro-specific “improvements.”
These are my criteria for the perfect desktop Linux distro:
* Rolling releases and continual upgrades. I think fresh installs with new releases are silly and should be done only when it’s absolutely necessary, like a system that is hopelessly messed-up. A good Linux gets better with age, it’s not like Windows which runs down like a cheap wind-up clock.
* Reasonably fresh package versions
* Stable
* Easy to maintain
* Active dev team and community
-
If the old guard wish to remain relevant they must innovate and/or reduce prices. Both Dell and HP have obvious GNU/Linux expertise. There is a lot of room to innovate there. They could reduce unit prices $100 or more by switching to GNU/Linux. From what I have seen of Debian GNU/Linux, Squeeze (my recent bug has been fixed by an update), once the bugs are out in a few months, they could put out products as smooth as “7″ and much cheaper. Further, they could put ARM into mainstream products and cut prices another $100 or so. ARM+GNU/Linux would permit HP and Dell to put out units at about half their current price.
-
Six hours of fiddling instead of a 20 minute installation of GNU/Linux… Was it worth it? I do not know. Certainly the student is very aware of the high cost of maintaining that other OS. At my usual rate of pay, six hours would be worth roughly the value/price of the netbook so it could have been scrapped and replaced for the cost of “fixing” it until next time. His family is also aware that that other OS cost the boy an evening at home with family. I will write up an advertisement to send home with students promoting our “InstallFest” to be held next week. Such costs will figure prominently.
-
This installfest is for fund-raising for various projects like graduation expenses. At the last bazaar, I ran hockey target-shooting. This could be more fun and more profitable, I hope. By parallel processing I should be able to do 20 machines easily, about double the take on the last bazaar.
-
Server
-
OSNews: Which brand of Linux is the company looking to implement and why?
ZA: Most of the servers I have built for are being shared by multiple applications so I require a hearty and stable operating system. With that in mind, I have decided on 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel version 2.6.18). The servers usually have 2x CPUs and have around 8GB of RAM. I try to get away with 50 GB of disk space. I have jobs that run, which regulate any of the disks from filling up with logs, by archiving them. I will usually build a web application server on these boxes with either Tomcat 6.x for simple Java applications, or for more of a heavier load of applications containing EJB or Cluster requirements, with Weblogic 10gR3. When Oracle bought out BEA, costs for the use of Weblogic in production environments rose quite high, so I only use it when I feel it is necessary to, and not as our primary application server.
-
While I wish they had not tried to do this in the first place, I do want to be sure to give kudos to Dell for listening to reason. Matt Simmons is reporting that Dell is reversing its position on 3rd party drives.
-
Audiocasts
-
This week on the show: Dan rants on the Digital Economy Bill, we discuss the question if IBM is really evil, Mo Duffy’s paper on F/OSS design, Microsoft now uses Launchpad and Apple throws a spanner in the works of developers once again…
-
-
Google
-
The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer – how well it plays with the printer.
With Chrome OS on course for arrival at the end of 2010, the details of how the operating system, which is all about cloud computing, will do familiar computing tasks are an increasingly important factor.
The Chrome OS developers are mindful of the interest and the latest blog post from Mike Jazayeri, group product manager for Chrome OS, explains the detail.
-
-
Kernel Space
-
As the first update in 2010, ALSA 1.0.23 has been released this morning to replace ALSA 1.0.22 that was released last December. Like usual, this update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture brings mostly individual driver fixes but there is also support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and a few ALSA core fixes.
-
Applications
-
Netlive is a slightly unusual distribution developed in Italy: a live version of Linux that makes available on demand any other live version of Linux chosen by its administrators to all the computers of its local network. Its developers, Ezio Da Rin and Marco Clocchiatti, call Netlive “a very efficient way to build portable ICT labs for schools, alternative to the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)”.
-
Proprietary
-
The Wine development release 1.1.43 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* A number of new icons.
* Improved support for alpha channel in bitmaps.
* Many Direct3D fixes and optimizations.
* More complete msvcr80/90 implementations.
* A wide range of 64-bit fixes.
* Various bug fixes.
-
Instructionals
-
Games
-
About a month ago I’ve posted that Hemispheregames were looking for someone to port their game Osmos to GNU/Linux.
-
Out of the Park Baseball has recently been developed with support for Linux in mind. This program is not available free of charge and is sold for 39.00 per download.The lack of games available for Linux is a factor that have kept some from making the switch from Windows to Linux. At least this is one less game that is not compatible with Linux. Actually though there are numerous games available for Linux.
-
The Bethesda blog (as Bethesda and id Software now share a parent company) has posted interviews with two Doom 3 mod developers: Bryan Henderson of Zombie Slayer (mod site) and Gareth Ward of Classic Doom 3 (mod site). Both discuss their background and how their projects came about; it’s interesting to see them revisited now, and I think I’ll give cdoom3 another spin shortly myself.
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
ClearOSClearOS is a network and gateway server distribution derived from RedHat and CentOS. Formerly known as Clark Connect, it is developed and maintained by the Clear Foundation, an IT solutions provider based in Wellington, New Zealand.
-
Fedora
-
One of the benefits of Btrfs besides offering competitive performance against other Linux file-systems and SSD optimizations is its support for sub-volumes and writable snapshots. While Btrfs is still in development and is not yet used as a default file-system by any Linux distribution, Red Hat has been looking to capitalize upon the capabilities of Btrfs by introducing support for system rollbacks into Fedora. The Btrfs-based system rollback support has been a feature for Fedora 13 so with the release of the Fedora 13 Beta earlier this week we decided to further investigate this feature.
-
Simple scan is also a tool to make scanning fast and simple. This tool is like Deja-Dup maintained in the launchpad.net community, and if you want to use an newer version of the program just add the PPA. I will add a list of PPA´s that will be good to have when we got the release of Fedora 13.
-
But looking through the list of changes in Fedora 13, I’m really excited to try out Déjà Dup. It’s a new backup tool that should make life a lot easier. With it, you can do local or remote backups, including to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. Everything is encrypted and compressed, and backups are such that you can restore from any particular snapshot.
-
Debian Family
-
Senior developer Stefano Zacchiroli has been elected the leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project for 2010-11, having defeated the other three candidates in the race.
-
-
-
Ubuntu
-
There are more things to this version of Ubuntu, each time cleaner and smoother (I didn’t have any problems in spite I’m using the Beta version). Probably a 6 months schedule for a new version is too tight for fixing all the bugs. In the other hand the One Hundred Paper Cuts is obviously having good results and the system looks clean and professional.
The system still doesn’t accomplishes what it promises: to work from the moment its installed. Nevertheless I discover a nice script that will make most of the task you have to do after install Ubuntu (like add repositories and install third party codecs, web browser plugins. Updates, etc.). But I think any people could use this OS without much problems (older versions of windows and even Mac use to have more problems and people still use to work with them without much problems).
-
The theme of most of the baseless criticisms is that Ubuntu is unstable for everyday use. Why you ask? Because either the author plugged in a peripheral that Ubuntu did not recognize right away or because there are some bugs that have not been fixed for period of time. This has even caused some to label Ubuntu as ‘garbage salad.’ I have no problem with people expressing their views, but then certain basic facts should never be misconstrued to the unsuspecting person out there.
[...]
Global powers like Dell and IBM are shipping Ubuntu preloaded computers, that should go a long way to attest to the reasonable reliability of the OS. Besides, those companies have more resources at their disposal to conduct even more rigorous testing on the OS than Canonical itself can. So on what basis can someone claim that Ubuntu is so unreliable that the project needs to be scrapped? Sure Ubuntu has problems, heck everything made by man has problems, but we must learn to be fair and give praise where it is due.
-
It’s especially appropriate from Ubuntu Women, as studies have shown women in open source development are even more underrepresented than in other tech fields.
If women are going to change the future, they have to change the now. And this contest actually makes sense.
It’s not asking for what many sneer at as a form of affirmative action, for girls.
-
-
Let’s face it. Most people don’t back up their important computer files with any regularity. The time you do think about doing a backup is typically right after you discover your hard drive has crashed. At that point it’s too late. The only real way to consistently backup your files is to have it done automatically for you.
-
Watch this: a Linux powered baby dinosaur, with a arm processor heart. The robot runs Live OS. An embedded, linux based operating system which features a custom programming language, giving the possibility to interact with the robot on the programming level. It features Artificial intelligence,programmable emotions and lot’s more.
-
Android
-
Taking a quick look at the definition of “open source” provided to us by the Open Source Initiative – who is highly regarded as the authority in what “open source” is – I have to present the question: where is Google stepping outside of any lines to call Android so? Source code is readily available, compilable, downloadable, freely distributed, properly licensed, free to be modified (for use with any field without discrimination), and it definitely isn’t an OS that is restricted to be used on anything other than phones.
-
Lately, it seems as if quite a few people are concerned about the status of Android as a Linux fork. There is quite a bit of talk about re-admitting the Android Linux kernel into the vanilla Linux kernel source.
Chris DiBona commented on many things in Android being irrelevant to the majority of Linux users, such as mobile phone chipsets. Is most of the kernel relevant to most people, or is it that we de-select the majority of device drivers when we do our kernel configs? I think that the latter is more the case, and quite often we de-select the vast majority of filesystems. For most people, NTFS, FAT, Ext2/3/4, swap, proc, and sysfs are really all that is required. A few may get into Reiser (what a killer filesystem), JFS, Squashfs, and UnionFS for particular machines. So, why is there a fuss over certain things making little difference to main stream Linux users, when most things in the Linux kernel are irrelevant to start with?
-
The TV technology will run on Intel’s Atom chips, the report says, and Google will develop a new version of its Chrome browser for the TV project.
-
-
Engadget scored a couple bits of Dell-related Android news today and was only happy to share with the world. First up, the Dell Aero handset is due out in early June. You know the Aero, right? It’s that other locked down AT&T handset besides the Backflip.
-
This is asinine. Orange couldn’t find a better company to imitate than AT&T, seriously? As we know, AT&T has decided to lock down Android devices and limit app installation from the Android Market. Not that we support this notion, but fine. Orange is taking it one step further in stifling Android and its open nature, according to Android Community.
-
Finding the right open source product is just as important as the decision to use an open source product to begin with. In every business software environment there are a few common components. There is the commercial product we’ve all used for years. There are the two or three popular open source alternatives, and there is a list of migration headaches we all experience that eventually becomes the list of reasons why we should stick with what worked before. Occasionally there is a product that inspires us to stay in the fight. A classic example we can all relate to is a product most of us use all day, every day: the email client.
-
-
Late last year, getting a Google Wave invite was reminiscent of getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in 1983. It was the newest gizmo everyone just had to have. As a geek, I was one of the kids begging the loudest. Thankfully, one of our readers from across the pond (Paul Howard, thanks!) sent me an invite, and I cleared my schedule for the product that was going to change the way I communicate. Only, it didn’t.
-
Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available” (John Hopkins). Exploring software alternatives like open source is critical considering all business or personal information and finances may be dictated by private software companies agendas.
-
Mozilla
-
Since its release, I have been testing it out to see how the new security enhancements work and help in increase user browsing security. One of the exciting improvements for me was how Firefox handles SSL secured web sites while browsing the Internet. There are also many other security features that this article will look at. For example, improved plugin and addon security.
-
-
It looks like there’s a good chance the code will make it in to Thunderbird 3.1 beta 2, so with any luck, soon your Thunderbird will be a pretty as mine.
-
Oracle
-
So unless you can figure out how having OpenSolaris running on millions of devices everywhere ultimately translates to revenue, I doubt Oracle mgmt will be impressed. Business is only a popularity contest when people vote with dollars.
-
Let’s move on to people that run Solaris on non-Sun servers: No Solaris for you, not yours! Items 1 and 6 make it clear that there is no possible way to legally run Solaris on non-Sun servers. Period. End of story.
-
Government
-
Looking into EU funded open source initiatives I stepped into few projects, included EDOS, QualOSS and few others around FLOSS metrics and quality. Over the last 7 years a number of open source software assessment methodologies have been proposed, and FLOSSMetrics definitely achieved some interesting results in this respect, and not only.
-
Programming
-
SourceForge.net introduced a new service this week. Until now, if you wanted to distribute your software on SourceForge’s global network, you needed to set up a complete project, which for project leaders who preferred to develop elsewhere meant generating services for collaborative software development that they didn’t need. Now you can develop your software anywhere you like, but just distribute it via SourceForge, and get the benefit of our free, global distribution network, along with the visibility of being listed on the leading open source software directory.
-
Clearly, there is growing interest from employers in open source programming languages and platforms, not just from developers. I tend to agree with Asay that it will take time for these trends to lead to a seismic shift toward open source, but as long as the developers and employers, in tandem, favor open source, there is no stopping the shift.
-
-
Standards/Consortia
-
The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This page, as the others that will follow on this website, is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference. Later next week I’ll also post a non-technical summary of the whole event at the Stop.
-
Adobe Flash is one of those shackles which keep the ‘free’ citizens of the world tied to the chains of Slaveware (proprietary) technologies. You have to install proprietary software to watch videos and other rich content like animation.
Apple bursted Adobe’s bubble when it refused to allow Flash on its mobile devices like iPhone and iPad. The reason Apple did that was not that it preferred Free Standard based HTML5, but because Flash would allow a lot of applications run in these devices without Apple’s permission.
-
The House has passed the “Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010″ (PDF), which does exactly what its name would lead you to believe.
-
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ)’s Moscow offices were raided by Russian authorities Wednesday as part of a joint Russian and German bribery investigation.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story, German and Russian authorities are investigating whether HP paid nearly $11 million in alleged bribes to win a lucrative government contract in Russia worth 35 million Euro, or approximately $47 million. Ironically, the contract, which HP won in 2003, was to supply computer equipment and software to Russia’s criminal prosecutor department in Moscow.
The report states that authorities suspect HP of allegedly using a German subsidiary to win the Russian government contract and then using an assortment of shell companies throughout the globe to funnel the bribe payments to the intended parties in the Russian government.
-
Science
-
One of the eyewitnesses commented on his You Tube account, that it was a tiny red dot with a tiny white tail traveling leisurely and then suddenly it became enormous and green and then travelled at a super fast pace.
-
You may remember that his last revamping caused quite a stir, with people screaming that it would doom NASA. I disagree. Canceling Constellation still strikes me as the right thing to do, because it was becoming an albatross around NASA’s neck. Mind you, this was also the recommendation of the blue ribbon Augustine panel. You may also note that NASA astronauts are split over all this, with Buzz Aldrin, for example, supporting Obama, and Neil Armstrong and many others disagreeing.
-
For those who find it tough to juggle more than a couple things at once, don’t despair. The brain is set up to manage two tasks, but not more, a new study suggests.
That’s because, when faced with two tasks, a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divides so that half of the region focuses on one task and the other half on the other task. This division of labor allows a person to keep track of two tasks pretty readily, but if you throw in a third, things get a bit muddled.
-
Security/Aggression
-
NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander tells senators the U.S. Cyber Command aims to protect the privacy of American citizens despite the uncharted legal territory in cyberspace.
-
In the Big Brother Watch manifesto released yesterday, we have written that we want to see the Independent Safeguarding Authority scrapped within the first 100 days of a new government. There are several reasons for this, but the main ones are:
1. It encourages suspicion and fuels the paedophile-paranoia that infects our society
2. It is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy ,which is scarring public life and making it very difficult for adults to volunteer with children’s groups like after-school sports clubs and the scouts
3. It is yet another state database, affecting 9 million people who will have to surrender their personal details to an unaccountable and expensive quango
-
Rather than simply phase this geriatric version out (it was at least one year old, revised to versions .95 and .96 since release, and announcements about the need to upgrade had been made for six months) the development team put to halt instances of V0.94 in production yesterday, April 15, 2010. This was to protect users from an issue that existed with the older version in terms of its inability to be updated with fresh virus signatures.
-
Police say a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers’ and staff members’ passwords, change or delete course content, and change course enrollment. One of the victims was Fairfax Superintendent Jack D. Dale, according to an affidavit filed by a Fairfax detective in Fairfax Circuit Court this week.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
Apparently the curfew will help “eradicate video game addiction”, and will apply only to underage users.
-
A former high-ranking National Security Agency employee was indicted on 10 felony charges Thursday for his alleged role in leaking classified information to a news reporter.
The federal indictment does not identify the reporter, but several news organizations, citing government sources, named a former national security correspondent for The Baltimore Sun as the recipient of the leaks.
-
THE GOVERNMENT has had extensive private discussions on introducing internet blocking – barring access to websites or domains – according to material obtained under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
The approach is used by some internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile network operators to block access to child pornography. But increasingly, governments and law enforcement agencies are pushing for much broader use, ranging from blocking filesharing sites to trying to tackle cybercrime and terrorism.
-
Yahoo prevailed Friday over Colorado federal prosecutors in a legal battle testing whether the Constitution’s warrant requirements apply to Americans’ e-mail.
Saying the contested e-mail “would not be helpful to the government’s investigation,” (.pdf) the authorities withdrew demands for e-mail in a pending and sealed criminal case. For the moment, the move ends litigation over the hotly contested issue of when a warrant under the Fourth Amendment is required for Yahoo and other e-mail providers to release consumer communications to the authorities.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
-
Note that this is apparently a trial, but it’s a very expensive one. According to the letter that’s now being sent to customers in the trial market, users (on any speed tier) who breach the 100 GB monthly threshold are being asked to suddenly pay $99.99 per month. Customers who breach 250 GB a month are being told they’ll need to pay a whopping $249.99 per month. Users who don’t respond in fifteen days to the letter get disconnected (how’s that for a business model?).
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Germany-based DigiProtect has a long history of using a machine-gun approach to “fight piracy”, in which it sends out tens of thousands of letters to people it says have illegally downloaded its clients’ content, and demanding a “pre-settlement” payment to stop them from being sued.
[...]
These answers from Digiprotect are completely unsurprising, and it’s not clear if the BBC expected the company to have some sort of epiphany and shut down or what.
-
Another article on intellectual property enforcement? Yes, since I consider this to be the most important struggle technology has to face over the coming decade. We already know that content providers don’t care one bit about hard-fought concepts like freedom and privacy, but the joint proposals by the RIAA and MPAA to the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator really blew my brains out: monitoring software installed on people’s computers, border inspections – it’s all there, and then some.
-
ACTA
-
Negotiators will on Wednesday publish the first officially-released draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a new treaty designed to harmonise copyright enforcement around the world.
The decision to release the consolidated draft on 21 April was made at the eighth round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) negotiations, which took place this week in Wellington, New Zealand. So far, the only publicly available information on the negotiating countries’ proposals and amendments have been leaked documents purporting to be drafts of the agreement.
-
Digital Economy Bill
-
With the rushed passage into law of the Digital Economy Act this month, the fight over copyright enters a new phase. Previous to this, most copyfighters operated under the rubric that a negotiated peace was possible between the thrashing entertainment giants and civil society.
But now that the BPI and its mates have won themselves the finest law that money can buy – a law that establishes an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain, a law that provides for the disconnection of entire families from the net on the say-so of an entertainment giant, a law that shuts down free Wi-Fi hotspots and makes it harder than ever to conduct your normal business on the grounds that you might be damaging theirs – the game has changed.
-
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 10 (2004)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA