02.24.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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That was written the year after I adopted GNU/Linux and he was right on all those points. I went from being a newbie to being able to do everything a teacher normally would do with that other OS in just a few days. The download took more time, 10 days of nights and weekends on dial-up… I replaced Lose ’95 on five old PCs in my classroom and never looked back. GNU/Linux was clearly superior to the software we were using on Macs and other PCs in the school.
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Automation is a perennial technical buzzword among System Administrators (SAs) and in management circles alike. Business owners and managers demand automation with the thought that it will save “man hours” and possibly decrease the need for a full technical staff. System Administrators realize that this is not the case nor is staff reduction the inevitable result of automation. The bad news is that the purpose of automation isn’t to reduce staff numbers. The good news is that there are several reasons for automation that make it a worthwhile pursuit.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Where oh where is the open-source support for the “Southern Islands” GPUs, a.k.a. the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series? It’s been over two months since the first hardware launched and there still is no open-source Linux driver support available.
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Earlier this week I shared a pleasant surprise in Mesa 8.1 Radeon Gallium3D with some significant performance improvements to be found in the current Mesa Git code-base for the “R600g” driver in some OpenGL games. In this article is a more diverse look at the current state of Mesa 8.1 development for R600 Gallium3D and comparative benchmarks from every major release going back to Mesa 7.10.
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Applications
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The nuts and bolts of Linux seem destined to be increasingly hidden away from the desktop user. The continuing development of popular desktop environments offering attractive interfaces and fancy features shows no sign of abatement. We note that one of the most popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu, is even going to replace its application menus with a “head-up display” (HUD) box. However intuitive and slick the HUD will be implemented, and how advanced, in general, desktop environments become, there is little prospect that the faithful terminal will be consigned to the recycle bin in the near future. There is simply too much power at the hands of a terminal for many experienced Linux users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.10 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.10 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated winetricks, fixed a bug in the Bordeaux GUI, fixed a bug in the Cellar manager and made other small bug fixes.
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Games
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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This week Ubuntu sponsor company Canonical released the results of its latest Ubuntu Server User Survey. Over 6,000 Ubuntu Server users from around the world responded. Possibly the most interesting result is that although VMware still leads, Red Hat’s KVM has overtaken the Citrix backed Xen as the most common host environment for virtualized Ubuntu Server instances. According to the report, this is the fist time in the three years that Canonical has been conducting this survey that KVM has beat out Xen.
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Oracle has reaffirmed that it’s in the Linux business to stay by extending the support lifecycle of its own-brand build to ten years, and tempting Red Hat users with a trial offer of its Ksplice patching system.
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Fedora
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Fedora 16 was released a while back, and I’ve finally gotten around to checking it out. For this review though I’ve opted for the KDE version of Fedora. As you may already know, Fedora comes in multiple spins including GNOME, Xfce, KDE and others.
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Early adopters of the Raspberry Pi $25 computer will be offered a cut down and customised Fedora ‘remix’ compiled to run on the system’s ARM microprocessor, it has been confirmed.
The first Raspberry Pi is just bare circuit board for now but developers at Toronto’s Seneca College have worked hard to fit a Fedora image on to a 2GB SD card to boot the computer into a GUI, complete with a small suite of applications and admin tools.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The popular Linux distributor is helping travellers turn smart phones into laptops, but we’ve barely imagined the potential
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It’s always nice to follow the development of Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora. But what about the people behind the scenes that use these operating systems. The developers. The community. The Users. Behind all those pixels that make up your display, there’s a whole wide range of interesting geeks with plenty of talent to contribute in many ways to the future of Linux development.
Geeks of all ages, young and old. I found one such person for which I briefly interviewed for Unixmen. A promising young developer who is still in his teens. Boden Matthews is a community developer who is currently working on a version of Ubuntu designed for the HP TouchPad. And it seems to be an interesting project with potential.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical has acknowledged that Ubuntu’s shift to the Unity user interface was painful for many of its users but insisted it hasn’t led to a decline in the popularity of the Linux distribution.
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According to a development update posted on Ubuntu Fridge by the Ubuntu developer Daniel Holbach, Ubuntu 12.04 is on its way to release the first beta next week, on February 29, after the user interface freeze which occured today. “Today User Interface Freeze and Beta Freeze will kick in, next week we will do a test rebuild of the whole archive and Beta 1 will get out next week as well.”
Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is a LTS (long-term support) release and it will ship with Linux kernel 3.2 by default, GNOME 3.2, Unity 5.4.0, LibreOffice 3.5. According to Ubuntu Kernel Release Manager, Leann Ogasawara, as soon as new stable versions of the 3.2 kernel branch will be released, they will be included in Ubuntu. “With Ubuntu 12.04 being an LTS release, our primary focus has been on stability. As such, we chose to ship with a v3.2 based kernel and will continue to rebase to the latest v3.2.y stable kernels as they become available.”
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Flavours and Variants
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Softpedia is once again proud to introduce a new Linux distribution based on the popular Ubuntu OS from Canonical, this time with a modernized GNOME 2 desktop environment.
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As one of the GNOME users who’s still fond of the old-school GNOME desktop, the recent release of Cinnamon 1.3.1 caught my eye. While it’s not exactly GNOME 2.x, it’s close enough that most users with a fondness for the 2.x days will feel right at home.
The GNOME Shell (and Ubuntu’s Unity) are making lots of rapid progress, and they may (or may not) be the bee’s knees for many users. I’ve been using Linux desktops for a long time now, so I’m probably not the target audience for GNOME Shell or Unity. Either way, I’d rather spend my time writing and learning about how to use server-side software than re-learning how to use my desktop.
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Throughout this smackdown, there are links to DeviceGuru’s in-depth reviews of all five devices. The reviews provide lots more detail on each device’s unique capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and also include comprehensive screenshot tours that demonstrate the device’s user interface and operation.
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Phones
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Android
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Rugged phones have been around forever, but melding extreme survivability into a true Android smartphone that’s not laughably large or looks like an off-road tire is a challenge. Samsung feels it has created a tough device that has beaten the odds.
The $99.99 Samsung Rugby Smart certainly has a rough and tumble name. The company claims it’s built to meet both the U.S. military Mil-spec 810f and the IP67 international standards for ruggedness. In a nutshell, that means the phone should be able to withstand submersion in 3 feet of water for 30 minutes, plus prolonged exposure to blowing dust, driving rain, extreme temperatures, and the odd drop onto hard surfaces.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It’s real: Tablet PCs have arrived. According to a recent DePaul University study, one in every dozen airline passengers is using a tablet PC or e-book reader at any given moment.
Like many of you, I got a tablet (a Nook, if you’re interested) as a gift this last December (thanks Jeanette!). It’s pretty nice. I read Wired on it now, check news, post tweets occasionally. But it’s moderately frustrating that I can’t really do anything worthwhile on this machine.
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Free and open source software such as Firefox, LibreOffice, and Linux is enjoying increasingly widespread adoption on business and home computers alike, but every once in a while a naysayer will still pipe up with one vague concern or another about open source quality, in particular.
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The Piwik development team has released version 1.7 of its open source web analytics suite. The major update brings performance improvements and adds a number of new features, including additional reports.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is about ready to invite developers to submit applications to be distributed on the Mozilla Marketplace, the organization’s upcoming app store. The Mozilla Marketplace will be a cross-platform distribution system that works on a variety of operating systems. By not nailing its store down to a particular OS, Mozilla says developers will have an easier time building and maintaining their wares.
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“The Web is the largest platform in the world. We are enabling the Web to be the marketplace, giving developers the opportunity to play on the biggest playing field imaginable,” Mozilla innovation chief Todd Simpson told theinquirer.net.
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SaaS
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Developers who are interested in testing their applications in an OpenStack environment can now do so for free and without having to configure their own cloud. TryStack is a free service that is supported by Cisco, Dell, Equinix, HP, NTT and Rackspace, and provides “156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1TB of disk storage” to allow developers to run their code on a reasonably substantial system. Equinix provides the data centre space and Dell provided the servers; HP plans to add a zone in a different data centre so developers can also experience geographic diversity in the system.
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Quantum is a networking component for OpenStack that delivers networking technologies that that no other cloud stack (that I know off) provides. It first showed up in the OpenStack Diablo release as an incubated project and now it’s set to be a core project for the Folsom release set for the fall of 2012.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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So, I see some good and bad in this. On the one hand AppUp does make it easy for users of that other OS to use FLOSS like LibreOffice and VLC. On the other it does nothing to promote FLOSS as a platform except to get end users familiar with FLOSS applications. That is a typical step in migration from that other OS to GNU/Linux but it also helps end users remain comfortable with that other OS. Ultrabooks are certainly not small cheap computers, either. They are netbooks on steroids with lots of non-free software and fire-breathing CPUs.
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Intel has begun distributing the open source LibreOffice suite via its online AppUp Store, and has joined the board of The Document Foundation (TDF) – a decision that will have many of the Redmond old-guard fuming.
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Education
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Thirty-five unemployed information technology (IT) graduates have boosted their marketability and chances of finding employment after an intensive, week-long open source software workshop organised by information and communication technology (ICT) incubator the Eastern Cape Information Technology Initiative (ECITI).
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Gotham Gal has been under the weather this weekend. Last night we made soup for dinner and decided to sit on the couch and watch a movie and go to bed early. After dinner, we fired up Boxee and checked out Netflix. Nothing good there. Then we fired up the Mac Mini and checked out Amazon Instant Video. Nothing good there. Then we went to the Cable Set Top Box and checked out movies on demand. Nothing good there. Frustrated and unwilling and uninterested in heading to a “foreign rogue site” to pirate something good, we watched a TV show and went to bed.
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Trademarks
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It was only yesterday that the European Commissioner Karel de Gucht made the surprise announcement that the European Commission would be referring ACTA to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) “to assess whether ACTA is incompatible — in any way — with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms.” Just a few hours after that, there are already signs of panic among ACTA’s supporters that the treaty may indeed be incompatible — and thus dead in the water as far as the European Union is concerned.
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Copyrights
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Australia’s commercial radio stations won’t have to pay out extra royalties for online “simulcasting” of recorded music following an important ruling last week from the country’s Federal Court.
Recording companies’ collecting society PPCA had sought a declaration from the court that Internet streaming of radio programs – or simulcasting — should not be regarded as a “broadcast” under the country’s Copyright Act and should there be subject to a separate music tariff.
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02.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A recent study from The Linux Foundation has found that Linux talent is a hot commodity among many hiring companies. The conclusions made sense to many on the Linux blogosphere. “Linux and open source are becoming strategic investments in many companies and have been for years,” said Chris Travers of the LedgerSMB project. Others, however, took issue with the study’s methodology.
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When Tomasz Sablinski was working in pharmaceutical R&D, he was often frustrated by the demand for secrecy in the clinical trials process—a misdirected effort, he says, to keep competitors in the dark about what drug companies were up to. “The price you pay when you hide what you’re doing is you only get feedback from a precious few people,” he says. “There is very little new blood in the ideation process.”
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Desktop
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Last year, Dell announced selling Ubuntu/Linux at 200 stores in China. Today Dell announced they will expand to 1000 stores.
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Kernel Space
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In his seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond put forward the claim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He dubbed this Linus’ Law, in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It sounds like a fairly self-evident statement, but as the Wikipedia page points out the notion has its detractors. Michael Howard and David LeBlanc claim in their 2003 book Writing Secure Code “most people just don’t know what to look for.”
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While the Linux 3.3 kernel is still weeks away from release, there’s more building up to look forward to with its successor: the Linux 3.4 kernel. A few months down the road when Linux 3.4 makes it out, there will be some additional Intel performance improvements.
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Graphics Stack
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Remember the proof of concept PRIME multi-GPU rendering / GPU offloading work that was being hacked on two years ago? Work on it has been resurrected and could make it into the kernel when the VGEM driver is ready.
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The 12.02 graphics driver is basically what was Intel’s quarterly package release under a new numbering scheme. Instead of being the “2012Q1″ Linux driver package, it’s now 12.02 to reflect its release in February of 2012. Back in October I wrote about Intel working on a new release cycle and this is part of their new development process.
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Applications
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Oracle has released a second beta version of “DTrace for Oracle Linux”. The Linux port of the tracing software that was originally developed for Solaris now implements a provider for SDT (Statically Defined Tracing), providing in-kernel static probes; the developers say that they have also fixed a number of bugs.
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Games
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A few days ago, I experienced a motherboard failure. This gave me ample opportunity to do a fresh Linux installation. The first disk on hand was Pardus Kurumsal 2 for AMD64. I thought it would be interesting to give the distribution another spin.
Upon a first boot attempt of the Pardus Kurumsal 2 installation disc, I was met with a black screen and a blinking cursor. Using ALT+Left, I determined that this was merely a failure of Xorg to start. The disc was automatically set to attempt usage of the best drivers possible, but at the time of the Pardus release, the NVIDIA GT520 was no where near the market. Running X -configure and then setting the driver manually to vesa allowed me to run the installer without further complication. Although, this problem did reassert itself after installation and upon the first boot of the newly installed system. This time, I wanted to have higher resolutions and improved performance, which prompted me to fire up Lynx. After navigating to nvidia.com, I downloaded the driver I needed. The next thing is the installation of the Pardus equivalent to Slackware’s D package set as well as the required kernel headers for module building.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“Canonical doesn’t intend to offer a public cloud as part of our business strategy,” Jane Silber, the company’s chief executive, said on Wednesday. “We have no plans to do that right now.”
Because of Canonical’s close ties with the OpenStack cloud project, it doesn’t want to go down the Red Hat route, Silber said.
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Ubuntu 12.04 development hits the User Interface freeze tonight. This is also evident from all the user interface updates trying to meet the deadline. One such update brought a significant update to the Ubuntu One control panel.
We all know about Ubuntu One, sync service developed in house by Canonical. In this update, the Ubuntu One developers have released a new interface based on the toolkit QT. This new interface is going to be the standard interface on all platforms like Windows, Ubuntu and MAC OS. A step in trying to bring about some integrity and commonality in the Ubuntu One usage on all platforms. It also helps with the Ubuntu One branding.
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Phones
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Android
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We recently came to know about HTC’s new name branding, and the two phones under this branding are HTC One X and One S. HTC One X is actually the HTC Endeavor/Edge which will be launched at the Mobile World Congress next week. Our friends over at Pocketnow managed to get their hands on leaked shot of the HTC One X, and the device looks familiar (reminds me of Sensation).
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Toshiba is now telling customers it’s targeting the “end of spring” to provide the Android 4.0 upgrade to its flagship 10-inch tablet. Company reps have been openly discussing the Thrive’s Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade plans via the official @ToshibaUSA account on Twitter in recent days. Up till now, Toshiba hadn’t said much of anything about if or when the Thrive would get ICS.
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We’re at t-minus three days until the festivities start in Barcelona, and Asus isn’t letting the likes of HTC and LG have all the premature fun. In a new video posted to YouTube, the company teased a high-resolution tablet with an abstract, 17-second commercial before Mobile World Congress. There’s no hardware on display (a drawer with colored balls stands in for a Honeycomb/ICS home screen) but the teaser “twice the detail, twice the fun” leaves little room for doubt. Presumably, Asus is talking about a tablet with more than the standard resolution – i.e., more than 1280×800.
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Most interesting among the bunch is without a doubt the “Best Cloud UX Device,” which offers two 4.3-inch displays that open and close like a book — a hell of a lot better than Kyocera’s attempt, if you ask us. Also among the mix will be a 5-inch “Large Screen in One Hand” model, along with another 4.3-inch “Stylish” unit. Unlike previous products, the latest trio fully embrace the design philosophy of Ice Cream Sandwich and eschew the dedicated navigation buttons from bygone days.
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Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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One of the challenges companies often face when using Hadoop to aggregate massive volumes of structured and unstructured data is finding a way to efficiently control and manage user access to that data.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice, the OpenOffice fork, is a very popular open-source office suite. But, while it has great support from Linux distributors, like openSUSE and Ubuntu, LibreOffice has never had a major corporate backer on the Windows side… until now. Intel is now offering LibreOffice to Windows users via its AppUp application store. I wonder how Microsoft feels about this.
According to The Document Foundation (TDF), the newly incorporated group behind LibreOffice, “LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE is available in Intel AppUp Center as a special, five-language version featuring English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. As a validated Intel AppUp Center app, LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE features a new, smooth, silent installation flow and improved un-installation cleanup.” This version of LibreOffice for Windows is now available from the Intel AppUp store.
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Public Services/Government
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“By challenging developers to leverage government data in new and innovative ways, they’ll help businesses fund new activities, learn about and evaluate opportunities in the US and abroad, support education and training, and more,” the contest announcement says.
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Open Access/Content
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Finance
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Although last week’s $26 billion settlement between the Obama administration, attorneys general from 49 states, and five large banks over unscrupulous lending practices appears to have been deeply flawed, it may provide a modicum of relief for two million homeowners nationwide, including a half-million Californians. The agreement, however, does nothing for cities like Oakland that are trapped in expensive and toxic financial deals with some of Wall Street’s biggest players. Oakland’s bad lending deal is with Goldman Sachs, and it’s already cost the city $26 million. By 2021, the total pricetag for local taxpayers could reach $46 million.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Late in the evening, on February 22, the Wisconsin Legislature turned back the clock gutting key provisions of Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act (Act 20).
Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison), a long time women’s rights advocate lamented: “It’s like we’re going back to 1912. We are fighting the same fight our mothers fought, just to be treated equally.”
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Censorship
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Last month, we noted the odd propaganda film from ICE director John Morton, in which he seemed to be trying to pat himself on the back and pump up the morale of ICE agents for their hard work in illegally censoring the internet. Perhaps it’s because he knew that ICE agents apparently hate working there. An anonymous person pointed us to the news that in a recent ranking of government agencies, ICE ranked very near the bottom — 222 out of 240 agencies. It seems that morale isn’t particularly high there.
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Privacy
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Good news today as the White House supports efforts for online service providers and web browsers to implement a “do not track standard”– just as we have been doing here in the EU.
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On March 1st, Google is going to combine its 70 different product-specific privacy policies and terms of service into one super-duper privacy policy. You’d think from all the screaming out there that Google was kicking in your door, ripping your credit cards out of your wallet, and taking your children hostage. Would everyone please chill already!
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is touting a victory in a copyright lawsuit that had the potential to shut down the database that all Linux and UNIX-based platforms and many time-based applications use to keep track of the ever-changing global timezones.
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Copyrights
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There’s proposed legislation in the US (sponsored by Lamar Smith) and in Canada (sponsored by Vic Toews) and in the UK that uses various flimsy justifications for the mass collection of data on telecommunications users. The data covered by these proposals varies, but includes things like URLs, phone calls, text/instant/email messages, and other forms of communication. Some of this proposed legislation deals with communication metadata, e.g., sender, recipient, time, etc.; some of it deals with communication content, e.g., the full text of messages.
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Not this again. Ever since SOPA/PIPA were shelved, we’ve been hearing from MPAA and RIAA officials about how important it is that they “sit down and meet” with “the opposition.” Part of the problem is that they still can’t figure out who the opposition really was. They usually blame Google. And sometimes Wikipedia. We keep hearing these requests to work together, but when people take them up on the offer and agree to meet… they seem to chicken out. Another big part of the problem is assuming that the only answer to the challenges they’re facing is more legislation… but that’s clearly not true.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So for now, lets not make a mountain out of something that very well appears to be nothing more than a molehill.
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Desktop
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My name is Eugeni (which is sometimes written as Evgueni or Eugene and with all the possible variations of it) Dodonov. I am 30 years old right now, and I was born in Moscow, Russia, but I live in Brazil since 1996. While in Brazil, I did my bachelor and master degrees at the UFSCar University, working with distributed parallel file systems; and my PhD in the USP University, proposing a prediction approach to allow computing systems behave autonomously, without any human supervision. It was really interesting research, and one of the most curious questions I got about about it was if I had thought about safety measures, because the overall autonomic approach we did looked similar to Skynet to some of the PhD thesis readers :).
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Applications
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The first beta release of Mageia 2 was made available for download yesterday (February 21). The final stable release is not due until May 3, but from test installations of this first beta, in both real hardware and virtual environment, I can tell you that Mageia 2 may very well turn out to be the best desktop distribution of 2012.
For a beta edition, almost everything I tested worked smoothly, though there are a few packages that are not in the repository. These are Stackfolder and Takeoff Launcher, two applications that make a KDE desktop a lot more fun to use. Aside from those missing packages, there is a minor issue during the boot loader configuration step of the installation process. Bug report on that is on its way.
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Red Hat Family
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As the world’s first and only billion-dollar fully open source company, Red Hat has a unique corporate culture. The employees collectively have more power than any one person, even the CEO.
No one is more aware of this than Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. He calls it a “meritocracy” meaning leaders arise based on their brains, not their spot on an org chart.
Whitehurst took the CEO job in 2007 after being COO of Delta Airlines, a cultural shock if ever there was one.
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Does Red Hat Enterprise Linux perform any better (or worse) than the various “Enterprise Linux” distributions that are derived from RHEL? Now that Scientific Linux 6.2 was released, here is a performance comparison of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, and Scientific Linux across three different systems.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The jury may still be out on what exactly cloud computing even means, but that isn’t stopping most IT movers and shakers from churning out incessant reminders of how important the cloud is. Canonical, which this week released a new publication highlighting the way Ubuntu fits into the cloud, is no exception. Here’s a look at this latest effort to market Ubuntu to a cloud audience, and what it says about Canonical’s strategy over the longer term.
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The ClearPass solution is not part of Aruba’s existing ArubaOS based product line that delivers wired and wireless network connectivity. ClearPass is a server appliance that runs on a CentOS Linux base and it’s also available as a virtual appliance.
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Web Browsers
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Public Services/Government
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NASA, like any other major enterprise, is a heavy user of open source and Linux. Now the agency is planning to open source its main portal NASA.gov and internal Intranet insidenasa.nasa.gov.
The space agency recently (Feb 6) posted a draft Statement of Work (SOW) seeking vendors to submit their response to the request for information.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Obama Administration’s innovation agenda is aimed at finding, testing, and scaling new ideas that change the way government conducts business and delivers services through engagement with the American people. An innovative government incorporates an entrepreneurial mindset into its daily work – taking risks, building lean organizations, and developing innovative products and services faster than the rest of the world.
On his last day in office, then-U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra released the Open Innovator’s Practitioner’s Toolbox. It contains 20 of the best disruptive innovation practices conceived and built by entrepreneurs across government. They provide a rich set of guiding principles that any Federal, state, and local government can use to support rapid innovation supporting economic growth and job creation.
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Twitter (as well as Xanga, Odeo, and Blogger) co-founder Biz Stone keynoted this week’s 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference with the history of Twitter alongside advice on the future of the social web and what it means to be successful.
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Censorship
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According to Moroccan Blog, Moroccan Geeks [French], Skype and all other VoIP services have been blocked in the country, pointing to an article from Moroccan newspaper Al Sabaheya confirming the news [Arabic].
While services are more often than not blocked as a result of authoritative governments, Skype usually finds itself targeted by mobile operators and telecom providers, as was the case for Skype itself in Egypt. In Morocco, it would appear the move has been made in an attempt to create a monopoly on calling options available in the country.
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Civil Rights
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When the government placed the Internet surveillance bill on the notice paper one week ago, few would have predicted that within days of the introduction, the anger with the legislative proposals would have been so strong that the government would steadily backtrack on its plans, with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews yesterday telling the House of Commons the bill will go to committee before second reading to ensure that there is greater openness to amendments (changes are more restricted after second reading). While the battle is only beginning, the overwhelming negative reaction seems to have taken the government by surprise.
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DRM
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A new Web standard proposal authored by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix seeks to bring copy protection mechanisms to the Web. The Encrypted Media Extensions draft defines a framework for enabling the playback of protected media content in the Web browser. The proposal is controversial and has raised concern among some parties that are participating in the standards process.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Despite the EU Commission’s attempt to buy time and defuse the heated political debate by referring ACTA to the EU Court of Justice, this Saturday February 25th will be one more opportunity for hundreds of thousands of citizens across dozens of cities all around the European Union to take to the streets and protest against ACTA. For all of us, ACTA has become the symbol of corrupt policy-making, and the evidence that it has never been more urgent to reform copyright so as to protect our fundamental rights online.
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We welcome the decision to release the European Parliament legal service’s opinion on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). We have compared the legal service’s opinion with multiple academic opinions on ACTA and some civil society analyses.
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The European Commission considers asking the Court of Justice an opinion on ACTA. This would be irresponsible, it could seriously compromise the Court. The Commission should withdraw ACTA in stead.
The 1994 WTO TRIPS agreement spread out the enforcement of intellectual property rights over the world. Countries lost the ability to abolish their copyright and patent systems. For instance, the Netherlands abolished its suffocating patent system in 1869, and reintroduced patents in 1912. Since TRIPS, this is no longer possible.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Just because you had what it takes for a good Linux-related job a decade ago, it doesn’t mean that you have what it takes today. The Linux landscape has changed a lot, and the only thing that’s really stayed constant is that a love of learning is a requirement.
What employers want from Linux job seekers is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, but this post by Dustin Kirkland got me to thinking about just how drastically things have changed in a very short time. The skills that were adequate for a good Linux gig in 2002 may not be enough to scrape by today.
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Google is working with Adobe to keep its proprietary Flash player alive on Linux. The two companies have been working closely to develop a single modern API for hosting plugins within the browser (one which could replace the current Netscape plugin API being used by the Flash Player).
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Adobe today said that it would stop offering direct downloads of Flash Player for Linux, telling users to move to Google’s Chrome browser, which bundles Flash with its updates.
Today’s demotion of Flash Player on Linux to Chrome-only was the second time in the last three months that Adobe has withdrawn some or all support from a version of the popular media software: In November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers, including the new Chrome for Android.
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Adobe has issued a statement this morning that they will effectively be abandoning Flash Player support on Linux. After Flash Player 11.2 they will no longer be providing updates for Linux users but just maintaining the 11.2 release. Google is expected to take over with a Flash Player implementation based upon a new API, but only for Google Chrome-based web-browsers.
Hitting my inbox this morning was Adobe and Google Partnering for Flash Player on Linux. The statement is brief but basically it says Google and Adobe have been working to develop a modern API for web-browser plug-ins. The result of this collaboration is PPAPI (codenamed “Pepper”) and is designed to be work for different web-browsers and operating systems. The Pepper Plug-In API is something that Google has been working on for at least the past three years to replace NPAPI (the Netscape Plug-In API).
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Linux is dead on the desktop…and it died long ago. Who hasn’t heard that?
Apparently, the 1,500 school children whose happy faces could not hide the illusion of using a laptop for the first time didn’t. They just received their own Linux-powered computers…wow! That’s a lot of dead computers!
True…1,500 dead PCs is far too modest to worry about…but the total number of Linux computers that the government will give to students for educational purposes is 25,000! Whoa! Now, that is more than enough to call it a zombie apocalypse!
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Server
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A set of open source designs for the RECS Compute Box, a high density server developed by German start-up Christmann Informationstechnik, will also be created. It is hoped that these designs will allow other projects or commercial data centre operators to build on the research conducted by the CoolEmAll project.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Btrfs and MD code offers new ways to change RAIDs while keeping data intact. Ext4 filesystems can now be expanded more quickly. The kernel also gained a driver for an upcoming storage device interface.
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Graphics Stack
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When running some tests on the latest Mesa 8.1-devel Gallium3D code-base for the “R600″ Radeon Gallium3D driver, I was surprised by some of the results.
Coming up in the next few days will be benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D using Mesa 8.1-devel compared to the recently-released Mesa 8.0.1 and the previous releases of Mesa going back for as long as the R600 Gallium3D driver has functioned. While Mesa 8.1 has just been in development for about one month, there’s already some interesting improvements for at least Radeon Gallium3D.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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About 10 years ago I decided I didn’t feel comfortable running a proprietary operating system on my computer anymore and made the leap to Linux, and like many converts, I had to give up PC gaming. I moved over to the next best thing, joining the legion of console gamers, but once and awhile there would be that one big PC game that I would miss out on.
The OnLive MicroConsole promises to change all that. With this device, it’s now possible to play some of the hottest titles on the PC…without the PC. For those of us running free and open source operating systems, this little device can get you back in the game (literally), and it even runs Linux!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Plasma Active looks so nice in so many of the details, but there is one place that sticks out like sore thumb an which we really haven’t been able to get replacement artwork for: those icons in the upper right corner.
The Home icon is nice enough and looks like it belongs. It won’t be there on all Plasma Active devices either: on Spark we have a Home hardware key and so will probably be using that exclusively instead of an icon in the panel.
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In the middle of cold January, the team behind DigiKam met in Genoa, the sunny old port city in northern Italy. DigiKam is the award-winning KDE photo management application. Participants started gathering in the evening on Thursday 12 January, getting together over dinner to form new friendships and to find out how people’s lives were going. The next day, real work started.
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New Releases
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François Dupoux proudly announced last night, February 21st, a major release of his popular SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.
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I am announcing the release of ConnochaetOS 0.9.1. This is a maintenance release. The ConnochaetOS 0.9.0 ISO was downloaded 20,000 times. The Free Software Foundation examined every package very closely and said, that we meet the FSF’ criteria at this point. So we consider that the ConnochaetOS project is a success.
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The DragonFly 3.0 release is here! This release was delayed from our regular schedule for tracking down what appears to be a AMD CPU bug. As a pleasant side effect, the giant kernel lock has been removed from much of the system and this release performs significantly better on multi-core systems than previous DragonFly versions.
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DragonFly 3.0.1 is now available! This release has superior multiprocessor support compared to previous versions. Speed has improved significantly. Binary packages from the 2011Q4 release of pkgsrc are available. Check the release notes for details.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia development team has announced the arrival of the first beta of version 2 of its Mandriva Linux community fork. This beta 1 release is aimed at developers and testers, and is based on the current stable 3.2.6 Linux kernel, which will be upgraded to Linux 3.3 before the final release.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Cornell University Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies is using Red Hat Storage, formally Gluster, technology to manage data-intensive research projects. With Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, the department is experiencing cost-effective, highly available and scalable storage, and using it for such projects as DNA sequencing. It has delivered flexibility and reliability that has allowed the Institute to achieve the growth needed to continue its research programs, while increasing researcher productivity due to the high availability of the data.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A representative told Linux User & Developer that there are currently no plans to release Ubuntu for Android on the Android Marketplace, but that they are in talks with phone manufacturers to include it with specific devices.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical will show off a Motorola Atrix 2 running its Ubuntu for Android Linux operating system to mobile phone vendors at Mobile World Congress (MWC).
Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution is arguably one of the most popular consumer friendly versions of Linux available, and the firm will tip up at MWC with a Motorola Atrix 2 smartphone that when placed in a dock can run a full-blown desktop Ubuntu Linux installation. According to the firm, smartphones will be able to ship with Ubuntu for Android this year.
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Canonical announced last evening, February 21st, the Ubuntu for Android product, allowing users to connect a multi-core Android phone to an Ubuntu desktop.
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As part of the on going work to improve the Gnome Control Center, there has been an update today which brings some new features.
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People in FOSS circles don’t like to talk about that kind of thing openly; making money is fine if it is done quietly, but pointing out that developing free or open source software can also be as crassly commercial an activity as, say, the activities of Microsoft, is considered to be, well, not kosher.
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This week a new Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix has been launched providing a complete software environment for the new $35 Raspberry Pi computer which will soon be launched.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung is using Wind River’s Android testing software and expertise to speed its smartphone development and test for Android software quality, performance and compliance.
Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android and Wind River User Experience Test Development Kit are currently in use to rapidly and efficiently test Android software for Samsung smartphones. A global leader in high-tech electronics and digital media, Samsung Electronics is a top smartphone manufacturer worldwide.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Even though Amazon’s Appstore has far fewer wares on its shelves than Google’s Android Market, many developers of top apps have found Amazon’s platform to be more lucrative, according to a recent study. The hot-selling Kindle Fire seems to have played a part in driving Appstore sales. The curated nature of Amazon’s Appstore may also appeal more to users willing to pay a buck or two for their software.
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Huawei‘s 10-inch MediaPad 10 tablet wasn’t expected to show itself until MWC 2102 next week, but that hasn’t stopped the Android 4.0 slate from sneaking out for a quick pre-show flaunt. The tablet – which reminds us of HTC’s Flyer with its combination of brushed metal and white plastic inserts – has been previewed by Hi-Tech Mail, who confirm the 8-megapixel camera and solid build quality.
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Ford (and other automakers) envision future cars with high tech infotainment systems galore where car dashboards could have downloadable app’s just like todays smart phones and tablets. With the OpenXC platform Ford is creating a channel for open collaboration with 3rd party application developers, allowing them to use cars like the Ford Focus to prototype their gizmos.
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I have been using OpenOffice.org and lately LibreOffice for years with no ill effects and plenty of benefits like working well with PDF and using proper open standard file-formats. The only problem the VA will have if it switches over is what to do with the bulk of archived documents in M$’s various formats. My recommendation is to convert as many of them as possible to PDFs and leave them as archives. They rarely have to modify old documents. They should be able to do that using their present software and some “print” function. The cost of the migration would largely be the cost of processing those archives. That cost should be chalked up as a mistake of the past because it will not be an on-going cost.
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Inspired by the success of the open source development model, criminals are creating similar community models and, in doing so, opening up a new avenue for malicious software and malware incubation, industry insiders warn.
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Events
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COSCUP is the largest Free software event in Taiwan and based on my experience from attending last year I can certainly say that it is one of the most well organized and vibrant F/OSS events in the world. It’s in the same category level as FISL in Brazil or Linux Conf Australia in my mind.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Enterprises are finding business-changing ways to put the power of Hadoop, an open source Apache project for storing and processing large amounts of data, to good use. They are using Hadoop and Big Data to reduce risks, better serve customers and even change the Internet.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Joomla is one of the most widely used open source content management systems available today. Though it’s not as popular as the MIGHTY WordPress, we are yet to discover the hidden treasures that lurk beneath. I am going to discuss the Pros and Cons of using Joomla in this article, so the next time you’re planning to invest on your online presence, you should have an idea where to spend and why!
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Healthcare
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In this entry I will briefly talk about how GNU Health can help the professional in making the best decision, and how to minimize mistakes.
I will focus in prescription writing and how we’re incorporating DS (Decision Support) to GNU Health.
GNU Health uses the WHO (World Health Organization) essential list of medicines by default, so you already have a very nice and updated set for your daily practice.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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NASA has released an RFI (Request For Information) asking for help reimplementing the nasa.gov web site using open source software and open standards. With 600,000 unique visitors and over 1.29 TB of traffic a day, 140 different web sites and applications and over 700,000 web pages, the task is large. As the first stage of an acquisition process, NASA has therefore published the RFI looking for companies that, according to Nick Skytland, Open Government Program Manager at Johnson Space Center, are “visionary, that get open source, cloud computing, and citizen engagement using the latest online technology”.
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Obviously security, supportability, and interoperability are among the factors the VA must take into consideration, so the department is only soliciting white papers right now. “The white papers should merely be focused on the per seat cost for services/tools provided, current state of the technology in terms of Office productivity suite benefits, supportability, security, ease of use, and interoperability with Microsoft based products,” the announcement says.
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Openness/Sharing
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How confident are you in your knowledge of open source geospatial software? How about a quick introduction or refresher? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg offers 10 points that are important to understand about open source software.
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From the beginning, Civic Commons has been a dynamic community initiative. What began in January 2010 as a simple wiki of open government policies and practices (originally called “OpenMuni”, domains for which were simultaneously and independently obtained by Code for America and OpenPlans), grew into a partnership between the two organizations to support the growing open government technology movement, and is now an open community of civic hackers, government technologists, entrepreneurs and many others.
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Regular Hypebot readers know how excited I get about Cash Music. It’s hard to imagine anything closer to what this blog is about than a non-profit group building free tools that help musicians to market and sell music online. That’s exactly what Cash Music is; and for one of the first time’s ever, they’re asking for help via a Kickstarter campaign.
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Programming
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Sonatype Nexus Professional 2.0 for “component intelligence” in repository management
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Kotlin, the JVM-targeted programming language introduced last summer by development toolmaker JetBrains, is now open source. The Prague-based maker of the venerable code-centric Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA has been developing Kotlin since 2010, and will continue to be a major contributor.
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You have to hand it to Microsoft. Their latest attacks on Google Apps are at least an attempt at comedy, but when you peel back the humor, what you have is just good old-fashioned Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), YouTube style.
I won’t discuss the irony of Microsoft going off on Google services using Google’s own YouTube channel. That’s fairly rich in itself, but as we shall see, Google has opened itself up to these attacks with its own behavior.
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Late last week, the Washington Post reported that The Smithsonian had acquired “tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who both the Smithsonian and the Washington Post insisted was the “inventor of e-mail.” There’s just one problem with this: It’s not actually true. Lots of internet old-timers quickly started to speak out against this, especially on Dave Farber’s Interesting People email list, where they highlighted how it’s just not true. As is nicely summarized on Wikipedia’s talk page about Ayyadurai, he was responsible for “merely inventing an email management system that he named EMAIL,” which came long after email itself.
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Health/Nutrition
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Isabel Salas reported to the non-profit Cornucopia Institute (Cornucopia) the difficulties she faced when her infant daughter reacted badly to a set of additives present in most baby formulas: DHA and ARA oils. Containers of formula containing these additives say things like, “Our formula is proven in clinical studies to enhance mental development” and “as close as ever to breast milk.”
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Finance
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CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95 percent of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up. CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald are pushing for radical changes in Wisconsin’s current mining law to benefit a single out-of-state company.
Gogebic Taconite, based out of Florida, has proposed a massive twenty-one mile long iron-ore strip mine in some of the most beautiful and pristine land in the northern part of the state. Walker and the GOP are promoting the mining bill as the most important “jobs bill” of the session. Since Governor Walker’s austerity budget kicked in on July 1, Wisconsin has lost jobs for six straight months, the worst record in the country.
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Censorship
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Hanno alerts us to the news that Techdirt has apparently been deemed harmful to minors in Germany. The German Media Control Authority has apparently been pushing internet “youth filters” to protect kids from dangerous things online. So far, it has officially approved two internet filters. Hanno got his hands on one and discovered that Techdirt was one of many blocked sites (Google translation from the original German) — as the filter declares that Techdirt has pornographic images and depictions of violence. We do?
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One of the things I’ve never liked about copyright is its potential to be the functional equivalent of censorship. Sometimes this censorship comes about because an author didn’t get permission to create his work in the first place (see: Richard Prince, JD California). While this unfortunately turns judges into cultural gatekeepers, it’s been deemed a necessary balance between copyright law and the First Amendment, and harm to the public is arguably lessened by the fact that we don’t know what we’re missing; because the censored work is never able to reach and impact us, we’ve only lost the potential of its cultural contribution.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Hockey may be Canada’s national pastime, but criticizing the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) surely ranks as a close second. From the substitution of Canadian commercials during the Super Bowl broadcast to Canada’s middling performance on broadband Internet services, the CRTC is seemingly always viewed as the target for blame.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland sent a letter to his fellow leaders in the EU Friday urging them to reject ACTA, reversing Poland’s course with the controversial intellectual-property treaty, and possibly taking Europe with them.
“I was wrong,” Tusk explained to a news conference, confessing his government had acted recklessly with a legal regime that wasn’t right for the 21st century. The reversal came after Tusk’s own strong statements in support of ACTA and condemnation of Anonymous attacks on Polish government sites, and weeks of street protest in Poland and across Europe.
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The European Commission just announced its intent to ask the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an opinion on the conformity of ACTA with fundamental freedoms. Beyond the obvious intent to defuse the heated debate currently taking place, this move aims to make the ACTA discussion a mere legal issue, when the main concerns are political by nature.
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So the European Commission thinks that tens of thousands of people on the streets somehow don’t reflect the wider community — presumably unlike the small band of negotiators and lobbyists behind closed doors that drew up ACTA in secrecy for years, who do represent the European Union’s 500 million people.
And the Commissioners are just shocked that the opponents of ACTA, who have been denied any meaningful transparency about what was being agreed to in their name during those now-concluded negotiations, are desperately trying to make their voices heard by the only institutions left that can listen: the EU nations that haven’t signed ACTA, and the European Parliament that must still ratify it.
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Of course, other parts of De Gucht’s statement are pretty questionable. He talks about how the EU Council “adopted ACTA unanimously” leaving out that they did so by hiding it in an agriculture and fisheries meeting. He talks about how ACTA “will not change anything in the European Union” but is merely about “getting other countries to adopt” stricter laws. However, some EU countries have already noted that they would have to change their laws to comply with ACTA.
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Send this to a friend
02.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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With my recent job change, I’m starting to run into a bunch of people asking “What exactly are you going to be doing now?”
I’ve tried responding by describing the kernel related stuff I’ve been doing for the past years, and it turns out that a lot of people didn’t even realize I was doing that.
So, here’s a short list of some of the things that I’m going to be doing at my new job, and most importantly, how you can track what I do yourself, so that I never have to write a status report again…
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Graphics Stack
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Last week I posted an image quality comparison of the Radeon Gallium3D driver versus AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver to highlight some visual differences between the open and closed-source Radeon graphics drivers. Now here’s a look between the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux graphics driver.
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Applications
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Gnome‘s Power Statistics application is a very easy-to-use way of getting hard numbers about your power usage. As far as out-of-the-box experiences go for power statistics, Gnome’s is probably the best. While it doesn’t have as many power options as Windows and Mac OS X, I don’t know of either having a way to see power statistics as detailed as Gnome’s from the get go.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Text LCD’s are handy for any occasion, a printer port on your PC is also darn handy as well. Mix together and add in a splash of linux and you get a very handy Linux device driver for a 16×2 LCD connected to the parallel port.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The response to the Spark pre-order registration program has been phenomenal. Thousands have registered and we’ve exchanged hundreds emails with various interested parties answering questions and receiving great feedback and input.
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Still, I’ll be around and available for meetings and hallway discussions about Spark and Make·Play·Live.
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Martin Gräßlin, lead developer of the compositing window manager KWin, has been considering the future of OpenGL 1.x support in KWin in a blog entry titled “The costs of supporting legacy hardware”. He is considering removing the code because almost all modern graphic chips and drivers support the more recent OpenGL 2.0.
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Red Hat Family
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As well as bug fixes and improved hardware support, the eighth minor revision of Linux distribution RHEL 5, which was first released in 2007, also includes new virtualisation and power management features.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu is taking small steps to get into the mobile game – at the same time, RIM’s big efforts have been underwhelming to the say the least. Is this reversible or can the veteran learn a thing or two from the open-source platform’s more restrained pace?
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There have been some recent accusation that the Ubuntu community isn’t taking criticism well. However, those making the accusations seem to have a misunderstanding about what exactly criticism is. In an effort to improve the quality of that feedback, I’ve put together a short, simple list of things you can check to make sure your criticism is in fact criticism.
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Flavours and Variants
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This tutorial is supposed to guide the reader through the features of the Cinnamon desktop, Mint’s new desktop environment to be used in Linux Mint 13. Cinnamon concentrates on holding on to classic design and functionality in times where Gnome 3 and Unity come up with different innovations to the user interface.
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The questions for which I would like accurate stats include: how many GNU/Linux users are there? Has Linux Mint really overtaken Ubuntu as the most popular distribution? Has GNOME gained or lost users with the start of its third release series? All these questions and more would benefit from reliable figures, yet we don’t have any. Instead, we have a series of indicators that are approximate at best, and completely unreliable at worst.
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Phones
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Intel Corp. is expected to provide more details next week on its plans to become a key supplier for the smartphone market when wireless industry experts gather for the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain.
Intel is the kingpin of personal computer technology but a late arrival in a smartphone market crowded with such providers as Apple Inc., Nvidia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc.
Intel has been trying to push into the mobile products market for years without much success. Analysts say a few of its recent attempts — chips called Menlo and Moorestown — fell short of the mark.
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Android
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Panasonic, looking to toss their name into various smartphone conversations, has unveiled an ultra-thin, high-end Android handset ahead of Mobile World Congress. Dubbed the Eluga, the hardware puts the device right in the mix with some of today’s elite Android combatants.
Thinner than most smartphones, the Panasonic runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and offers a 4.3-inch (540×960) qHD display, a 1GHz TI OMAP dual-core chip,1GB RAM, and 8GB internal storage. There’s a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera on the backside however there’s no front-facing shooter.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The newer version has more features but is still priced at around $US35.
Suneet Singh Tuli, Datawind’s chief executive officer, said: ‘We have already received over three million individual hand users pre-booking on this.’
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New Zealand open source digital media company SilverStripe is ramping up its presence in Australia, selecting Victoria as its Australian headquarters and hiring 50 new staff.
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Open source software has managed to find its way into the minds and hearts of users on all three popular desktop platforms. I know of countless Windows users who enjoy free access to applications such as Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, Filezilla, among others. Users of these popular software titles know all to well the benefits of using open source software.
Yet, there’s still the question of using open source software in place of proprietary software. Specifically: can open source software provide an adequate replacement for legacy software?
This is the question I’ll answer in this article. I’ll look at the open source applications I use, and how they differ from their proprietary alternatives.
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Open source software has been maligned and celebrated over the years. Proponents of the open source concept claim that collaboration and openness will lead to better technological results for the consumer at a fraction of the price. Opponents of the concept claim that without a profit motive, technological progression will grind to a halt. Both sides may be right, but with many technology companies finding ways to turn a profit outside of software sales over the past decade, open source software has gotten a significant boost in popularity.
Cloud computing encompasses many things, but a major part of it is the ability for multiple people in disparate places to collaborate on a single project at the same time. Since the information and processing are done in the cloud, each user only needs a way to log in to the cloud and all users can view updates in real time. This spirit of collaboration makes for an ideal pairing with open source software. Having the source code of a cloud service available to everyone makes it that much easier to spot bugs and improve performance.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Databases
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The Riak distributed database has been updated to version 1.1, and has a new administration console and diagnostic console. Riak creator Basho believes the changes in 1.1 make Riak the most scalable and stable NoSQL database available.
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Education
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Business
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Funding
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It raised $30,000 in 72 hours on Kickstarter with its plan to disrupt the music industry using open source, but what is the CASH Music project about? The H talked with co-executive director Maggie Vail to find out.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The Utah Office of Education (USOE) announced a new program late last month. Starting in the next couple months, Utah is going to develop and release open source digital textbooks for science, and mathematics, and English.
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You may recall that Canadian Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews announced Canada’s “lawful access” (read: government monitoring of the internet) bill by saying that if you weren’t in favor of the bill, you supported child porn. Over the weekend, he also seemed to admit that he didn’t even understand the bill he was supporting.
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Finance
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While we here are committed to exposing the actions of Goldman Sachs – many of which helped, if not directly, created our economic problems – we often over look and under report on those who have and had the power to prevent the actions of Goldman Sachs and their band of merry banksters (including The Fed). Charlie Reese says it in plain and simple language. A report that he began in the 1980′s and modified several times. The version below was the one from 1995, long before anyone could have ever imagined the mess we would be in at the beginning of the 21st century.
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Censorship
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I would have hoped that, by now, most people could understand basic secondary liability issues, such as the difference between a service provider who provides the tools/service for communications and a content creator and/or publisher who actually creates or chooses the content. Unfortunately, when large sums of money are involved, people often have difficultly distinguishing the two. The latest situation involves a guy in Australia, named Joshua Meggitt, who appeared to have a legitimate defamation claim by Australian writer/TV personality Marieke Hardy. On her blog, she accused Meggitt of writing “ranting, hateful” articles about her. She then posted a link to her blog on Twitter, where it got a lot of attention. Hardy and Meggitt have already “settled” the dispute between each other, with a rumored $15,000 changing hands, but Meggitt has now sued Twitter directly claiming that it “published” the tweet by putting it on its front page.
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On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto have signed a deal with Access. Copyright that allows for surveillance of faculty correspondence, unjustified restriction to copyrighted works and two million dollars in fees that will be passed along to students.
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The Belgian anti-piracy group, SABAM, has been one of the most aggressive anti-piracy groups out there. The group recently lost two huge court cases in which it tried to get courts to force ISPs and hosting firms to put in place filters to stop infringement. Perhaps more controversially, the organization has tried to require social networks to pay a flat fee for all the infringement happening on their networks. A year ago, there was a story of SABAM taking cash for a band they didn’t represent after a TV show played a “joke” on the group.
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Multiple studies have shown that piracy is almost never an educational issue. It’s not about people needing to “understand that artists should get paid for their work.”
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ACTA
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If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve probably heard SOPA/PIPA/ACTA supporters insisting that anyone against those bills is involved in a misinformation campaign. This seems pretty ridiculous, considering the level of misinformation that has been spewed for decades in support of these kinds of laws. But it’s reaching a new level of crazy over in the Netherlands, where the Dutch Econimics Minister Maxime Verhagen has apparently announced that “ordinary” people have nothing to worry about concerning ACTA because its focus is to take down child porn sites. Talk about misinformation. ACTA is about intellectual property infringement and has nothing to do with child porn.
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02.21.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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These 200,000 laptops will be running on both Linux and Micrsosoft’s proprietary Windows OS. ELCOT will be working on offering some educational applications with these laptops.
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Amelia Andersdotter, 24, is the youngest member of the current European Parliament. She’s a member of the Swedish Pirate Party, a political party centered around copyright and patent reform. Given her political interests, it’s probably not a surprise that Amelia is a Linux user.
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Kernel Space
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The x32 effort, an undertaking to provide a native 32-bit ABI for x86_64 on Linux, is finally moving closer to fruition. Peter Anvin has published the set of x32 patches for the Linux kernel that are now up for review and comments.
Peter Anvin and others have long been working towards Linux x32: a native 32-bit ABI for Intel/AMD 64-bit systems so that applications not needing 64-bit pointers can benefit from 64-bit performance while using the memory foot-print of a 32-bit ABI. The Linux x32 ABI support necessitates changes to GNU binutils, the Linux kernel, Glibc, and the compiler (GCC). On Sunday the set of 30 patches touching around 1,000 lines of code was sent off to the kernel mailing list by Anvin.
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After writing about Btrfs LZ4 compression support and that the Btrfs FSCK tool wasn’t available, it turns out that there is the new Btrfs repair tool, but it’s not widely known and it’s not recommended to ever use it — at least at this stage.
As pointed out by Phoronix readers, from the btrfs-progs Git tree on Kernel.org is a new branch that was pushed a little more than one week ago. This new branch is called “dangerdonteveruse” (expanded: don’t ever use [it]) and contains the ability to fix Btrfs file-systems.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s a new KMS/DRM driver to introduce to the world: UDL. UDL is a DRM kernel mode-setting driver for the USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters.
It was back in 2009 that DisplayLink decided to provide Linux GPU support and be open-source friendly for their interesting USB-based graphics adapters and since then the support has only become more compelling. At first DisplayLink provided a simple Linux library, documentation, and then a frame-buffer and X.Org driver for the hardware.
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Applications
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A new solution now is available. Fade In Professional Screenwriting Software is a powerful application for writing screenplays, and it includes tools for organizing and navigating the script, as well as tools for managing revisions and rewrites.
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Proprietary
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Last year, I decided I would start solely using Ubuntu as the primary OS on my laptop. But the lack of printer support, and hiccups here and there in Ubuntu unfortunately catapulted me back to Windows 7. As my classes right now are requiring students to SSH into university servers to submit homework, I thought I might as well start getting used to bash and Linux again.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For those where this is the first time hearing about this new Kot In Action title, the developers describe the game as “a first-person action-RPG dungeon crawler. With its fast-paced fluid combat, a multitude of medieval and magical weapons, an in-depth custom spell system, and randomly generated persistent worlds, ToM is a pinnacle of the genre.”
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KWin compositing window manager for KDE may drop its older OpenGL renderer, which would remove support for vintage GPUs/drivers, but this would also include eliminating — at least temporarily — support for the AMD Catalyst graphics driver.
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On Saturday, we held the first Frameworks 5 community day on IRC. It was organized by Kevin Ottens and he did a great job of making it happen. David Faure, myself and others showed up to help people get up to speed with Frameworks 5 hacking.
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Among the many tools out there for cloning drives and performing full-system backups, one came to my attention for being both free (and open source) and powerful: Clonezilla, a product of the Free Software Labs of the National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan.
Clonezilla’s power, however, is matched by complexity. You can get a lot out of it, but at the cost of paying close attention to what you’re doing. Here’s a guide to getting just what you need from Clonezilla — without wreaking havoc on your system or being swallowed by the monster.
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New Releases
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The Core Project’s “Team Tiny Core” has released version 4.3 of Tiny Core Linux, the lightweight modular Linux system. The new version introduces a “Self Contained Mountable applications” (SCM) package format for adding additional applications. Mountable applications take the file extension .scm and can be dynamically mounted and unmounted at runtime. They are managed using scmbrowser, a new graphical application.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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This FOSDEM thing could turn into a habit! Mageia was at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels – and this year, we had quite a noticeable presence.
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Gentoo Family
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Following a recent request I downloaded the Gentoo 12.0 Live DVD for a test drive. I tried Gentoo many years ago but gave up after a few hours due to the time involved, and my knowledge back then was a lot more rudimentary than today. Gentoo is a source distribution that is supposed to be configured and compiled from stage 2 or stage 3 tarballs, although some base images are available that allow you to cheat and skip the early part of kernel compilation etc. with minimal install images.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is designing a new heads-up display interface for the next version of Ubuntu. Its last interface tweak, Unity, was somewhat controversial. Now it looks like Ubuntu will double down on that departure and bring users even further from the typical desktop OS experience. Is this something that will make the OS easier for users to operate, or will it scare away users who think it’s too difficult to learn?
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For years, tech pundits have speculated about the merging of phones and desktop computers, with Motorola’s line of Webtop accessories only the latest in a series of products. Now Canonical has stepped in with what could be the most comprehensive attempt yet: Ubuntu for Android, which the company says launches a full desktop OS experience whenever you connect your phone to a computer screen and keyboard.
In this mode, Ubuntu works exactly as it does on a regular PC, with the same Unity UI and access to certified applications including Chrome and Firefox—except that your phone is now standing in for a bulky CPU tower. Otherwise, Ubuntu for Android stays invisible; when you’re out and about, your phone works just like a normal Android phone. Canonical says that all data and services stay consistent between the Ubuntu and Android environments, including contacts, SMS, and voice calls.
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But Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Linux distro Ubuntu, isn’t cutting Nokia’s man any slack. Shuttleworth reckons Elop is “short sighted” – and Canonical is today due to unveil Ubuntu for Android, a version of Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu juiced by multi-core on smartphones.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux User sits down with Mint creator Clement Lefebvre to get a measure of the past, present and future of one of the biggest success stories in Linux distro history…
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Phones
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Android
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The mystery around Android 5.0 aka Jelly Beans is deepening. The rumors are rife which indicate that Android may pose threat to Microsoft’s Windows 8, also expected to hit the market later this year.
A Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin is claiming that Google may introduce a new mode with Android 5.0 which will enable users to run Android on their desktops which will automatically optimize to the desktop.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Semi-Open Source
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Project Releases
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A key focus in the 2.4 release is improved performance which is delivered by way of multiple innovations.
“What we have done is checked 2.4 against itself and other web-servers; in general, we find 2.4 to be the fastest version of Apache by far,” Jim Jagielski, ASF President and Apache HTTP Server Project Management Committee, told InternetNews.com.
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The Apache Software Foundation has just announced the release version 2.4 of its award-winning Apache HTTP Server. This is the first major release of the Apache Web server in more than six years. Long before the release of Apache 2.2 in December 1st, 2005 though, Apache was already the most popular Web server in the world. Today Apache powers almost 400 million Web sites.
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Public Services/Government
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The UK cabinet office is seeking advice on the definition of open standards in the context of government IT. It posted its consultation documents online last week Wednesday. The consultation follows the withdrawing in November of a IT procurement policy in effect since in January 2011.
The consultation should also help to make clear what effects compulsory standards may have on government departments, on delivery partners and on supply chains. A third aim is to gain knowledge on international alignment and cross-border interoperability.
In a statement, Minister for Cabinet Office Francis Maude said: “We are committed to implementing open standards and want to create a level playing field for open source and proprietary software. Open standards for software and systems will reduce costs and enable us to provide better public services. We want to get this right; so we want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to have their say on this matter.”
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Openness/Sharing
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On February 10, 2012, CASH Music launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised more than 70% of their $30,000 goal in about 24 hours. What is CASH Music? And why does it already have vocal support from musicians, Firefox, and even Neil Gaiman? Jesse von Doom, Co-Executive Director of CASH Music, explains the inspiration behind the project and the big role Linux plays in it.
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If you’ve ever tried to collaborate with other authors and editors and the many other people who work to make a book successful, you know it’s not easy. Even if your experience stops at trying to incorporate three comments with changes tracked in word processing software, you get the idea. Last week at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, a new platform called Booktype was announced. It was created to help you collaborate on editing content and getting it ready for publishing.
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Open Hardware
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“Open source” is a term most often applied to software, and it’s become increasingly common in both the business and consumer worlds.
What some may not realize, however, is that hardware can be open source too, with design specifications, schematics, source code, and other data about the device’s inner workings available for inspection and customization by the user.
I’ve already written a few times about the new, Linux-based Spark tablet that’s on the way with unlocked hardware, but recently I came across two other open devices launched in the last few weeks that can be freely hacked and modified. Both the Openmoko GTA04 phone and the Auraslate Lifepad tablet promise a veritable playground for tinkerers and anyone who values complete openness and customizability.
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Standards/Consortia
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The increasingly heated debates about the traditionally dull area of computer standards is testimony to the rise of open source. For the latter absolutely requires standards to be truly open – that is, freely implementable, without any restrictions – whereas in the past standards were pretty much anything that enough powerful companies agreed upon, regardless of how restrictive they were.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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One year ago this week, blogger Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast pranked Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by posing as billionaire David Koch on a phone call. As the crowds at the Capitol protesting Walker’s bill to end collective bargaining were increasing in size and volume, the fake Koch inquired how Walker’s efforts to “crush that union” were going. Walker’s fawning response helped rocket the Wisconsin protests into the national media limelight.
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Civil Rights
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As the Arab Spring hits its first anniversary, tech activists around the globe are continuing their efforts to enable secure communications—especially in areas of the world that are in conflict or transition. After all, it’s become an open secret that governments ranging from Assad’s Syria to local American law enforcement to the newly created government of South Sudan are actively trying to find out what is being said and transmitted over their airwaves and networks.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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While copyright owners claim that they need anti-circumvention laws to address copyright infringement, twelve years’ experience with the U.S. DMCA provisions demonstrates that overbroad digital locks laws can wreak havoc on lawful, non copyright-infringing activities, stifle free speech and scientific research, and harm innovation and competition. The issue is that overbroad anti-circumvention bans can override exceptions and limitations in national copyright laws, restricting or eliminating perfectly lawful non-copyright infringing uses of copyrighted works.
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ACTA
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Now that the US bills SOPA and PIPA have been put on ice, attention has returned to their parent, an international treaty called ACTA. I’ve written extensively about ACTA before, but in summary it is an international treaty that has been secretly negotiated to ensure as little input as possible from the citizens of any country.
While superficially about stemming the flow of counterfeit physical goods (ACTA stands for “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement“), the copyright and patent industries (music, movies, software, pharmaceuticals and more) have successfully infested it and the result is a trade agreement that substantially reduces the scope for discretion over new approaches to business on the internet.
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Members of the European Parliament could submit as many written parliament questions to the Council and the Commission as they like and force these institutions to make official statements. If you have a technical question about specific ACTA provisions or procedural oddities feel free to suggest your Member of Parliament to table them. Most MEPs are not as industrious in tabling parliament questions as Phil Prendergast (S&D, Labour Party Ireland) recently, and they limit their tabling to the “priority questions”/”oral questions”, where they have limitations but the institutions have to answer in a faster pace. In the past most of the numerous questions on ACTA were posed to the Commission, not the Council. However, only the Council is competent to answer the procedural specifics of the strange criminal sanctions parts.
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The Economy Minister Daniels Pavluts has decided to block the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which has caused wide protests in the society.
On Wednesday, February 8, the Minister announced that he made the decision taking into account the mood of various groups of the society, as well as worries of several experts about the possibility of ACTA implementation in Latvia.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I have interviewed hundreds of candidates and had the delight of hiring dozens of Linux and open source developers, engineers, and interns over the last 10 years — at IBM, Canonical, and now Gazzang. The most recent one signed his contract this morning, in fact! It’s quite a rush to bring new talent into a small team.
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Talking about Secure Boot again, I’m afraid. One of the things that’s made discussion of this difficult is that, while the specification isn’t overly complicated, some of the outcomes aren’t obvious at all until you spend a long time thinking about it. So here’s some clarification on a few points.
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Desktop
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While Canonical has a well established business desktop scenario with Ubuntu, finding laptops with preinstalled laptops is sometimes a challenge. Laptops are usually available in two formats. First is the ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) who make the laptops. Second, is OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) who purchase from ODM but install their own brand of CPU, hard drive as well as the software. Some of these OEM
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The Nouveau 2D driver performance used to be very good against the proprietary/binary NVIDIA Linux driver. After running the new Intel SNA benchmarks earlier this month, I ran some quick 2D benchmarks of the latest Nouveau driver and NVIDIA binary driver.
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Over the last six months a lot of feature work has happened in Mesa, and the load has been carried by a lot of different people / organization. In the process, we discovered a number of development process issues that made things more difficult than they needed to be.
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David Airlie officially released the first version of the xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver this week. The xf86-video-modesetting driver is a generic KMS X.Org driver that will work with any kernel mode-setting DRM driver in Linux, but only provides shadow frame-buffer support.
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There’s some resurrected hope for the kernel symbols of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism to be not restricted to only GPL drivers, which started off as a request by NVIDIA. This could lead to better NVIDIA Optimus support under Linux, among other benefits.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Bricsys NV, the developer of Bricscad for design professionals, today announced the release of Bricscad V12 for the Linux operating system. All three editions – Classic, Pro, and Platinum – bring to the Linux world powerful 3D modeling and CAD API programming equal to the Bricsys product line running on Windows.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Installing Puppet can be a nightmare at times especially if you are doing it for the first time. Error messages are not always obvious and would require some experience to understand. So this is my attempt to explain the errors and suggest the solutions.
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Games
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The latest Humble Indie Bundle ended earlier this week without much fanfare and less than $1M USD in sales, but there’s a new special weekend bundle that’s a bit different from the rest… This new bundle lasts for only the weekend (28 hours left) as three teams compete to each make a brand new game in the span of this weekend.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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About once a year I try a new Asturix release and every time it’s something very different from the previous trial. The developers appear to be casting around, experimenting with this or that, and it always makes for an interesting ride. This time around I found the distribution to be a mixed bag and not in the way I had expected. When I heard they’d put out a release based on Ubuntu with a new, custom desktop I expected a solid base with functioning applications under a buggy interface. For the most part my experience was the opposite. The On interface is pretty good, mixing the mobile-like interfaces we’re seeing cropping up everywhere with enough traditional pieces to make it usable on a full-sized desktop screen. The developers surpassed my expectation there and I found only a few issues with the new interface. On the other hand I found some bugs which shouldn’t have made it through QA testing. For instance, the update manager that pops up and the Software Centre don’t launch with administrator’s privileges and don’t prompt for it. On the live CD there is a log out button in the corner of the screen where I would expect it, but the log out button doesn’t appear post-install, requiring the user to hunt for the proper icon. When trying to launch the backup utility it appears the software wasn’t actually installed, there’s just a useless icon in its place.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS Phoenix Edition 2012-02 is now available for download, featuring the following updates.
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Red Hat Family
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When open source started gaining in popularity, a lot of vendors started trying to co-opt the open source label without actually being open source. You don’t see quite as much of that today, but now we’re seeing vendors trying to affix the “open” label to cloud solutions that really aren’t. Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s cloud business unit, says the idea is “to lure customers in with open and then lock them in.” Bad move, says Crenshaw, because the decisions companies make today about cloud will last into the next decade.
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Fedora
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For those wanting to see another polarized discussion taking place within the Fedora camp, similar to the Fedora rolling-release discussion, drop by the mailing list.
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It will be great to know if llvm is ready to do same for several important linux package.
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Debian Family
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* Goodbye Lenny!
* Debian GNU/Hurd on the rails
* DPL and legal work
* Multiarch-ready dpkg
* GPL in Debian: a study
* Interviews
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Once upon a time I knew exactly what Ubuntu was. Built on top of Debian Linux, it was the most popular Linux desktop around. Today, Ubuntu is in the clouds, on servers, tablets and smartphones, and, oh yes, it’s still on the desktop. By spreading its energy in so many directions it’s hard to see what Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, really wants from Ubuntu. So what exactly is Ubuntu today? Well, here’s my overview of Ubuntu 2012.
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Ubuntu 12.04 is all about pixel perfecting everything and focusing on the quality of the overall release. This is important since it is a LTS release which would be used by companies and users all over the world for a long time. From the view point of a user and sys-admins, it is important to have all the customizable options in one place. Gnome Control Center is meant for just that. There have been quite some updates on the gnome control center which are worth mentioning.
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Ubuntu One team announced today, February 20th, that the Vodafone company has recently added the Ubuntu One Files app on their Vodafone AppSelect app store for the Android platform.
Vodafone offers the Ubuntu One Files app in the following countries: United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Portugal, and Greece.
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In recent weeks I have shown how Ubuntu 12.04 is ARM-ing up for better performance on the ARMv7 architecture by enabling hard-float builds and how the TI OMAP4 support has come together resulting in significant performance gains. Nevertheless, how is modern ARM hardware now comparing to the low-end Intel x86 competition? In this article are some results from Ubuntu 12.04 comparing the ARM performance to some Intel Core, Pentium, and Atom hardware.
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Flavours and Variants
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Over the years, I’ve tried every shade of desktop — from the ridiculously complex to the overly simple, from the barely usable to the extremely useful. Recently, the push seems towards touchscreen technology, with little success. Nevertheless, some operating systems — such as Ubuntu Unity, GNOME 3 and Windows 8 — are persisting with touchscreen-friendly features. The problem is these desktops aren’t particularly user friendly.
Then along comes Linux Mint 12. In terms of user friendliness, it offers something special. Here are the reasons why I think it’s the best desktop operating system available.
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Phones
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Cedar Trail represents the latest-generation 32nm Intel Atom processors. Unfortunately its graphics though aren’t developed in-house, but at least that’s changing to avoid such situations in the future.
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Android
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Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE today announced that it will be brining a pair of new Android smartphones to Mobile World Congress next week, both of them running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
The ZTE PF200 sports a 4.3-inch display at qHD (540×960) resolution, with an 8-megapixel rear camera and a front-facing camera for video calling. It’ll have LTE, UMTS and GSM radios, as well as NFC, and DLNA and MHL high-def outputs.
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Exciting news if you’re a fan of Sony’s Xperia designs, but not the huge displays that seem to permeate the mobile world these days: the Sony Xperia U (also known as the Kumquat/st25i) has been spotted in its first set of leaked photos. It’s getting comfy with Sony’s new international flagship, the Xperia S, in a series of shots found by Android HD Blog (Italian). Both phones share a lot of design DNA, but it looks like the Xperia U is much smaller, with a screen somewhere in the ballpark of 3.2 inches. Like the S, the Xperia U is still running Gingerbread.
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We’ve known that Huawei had something special planned for Mobile World Congress, and this would appear to be it. The first entry in Huawei’s Diamond line is the Ascend D1 Q, and TechOrz.com got their hands on some leaked press shots prior to Huawei’s conference. The renders show a typical high-end Android phone that’s clearly of the large screen variety – probably with a 4.3-inch or larger display. The device’s red-on-black color scheme is reminiscent of the HTC Rezound, though the shape looks more like a Galaxy-class smartphone.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Like it or not, it would appear that the tablet-ification of our desktop operating systems is inevitable. Setting aside the new Metro interface that will take the main focus of Windows 8, Apple are slowly creeping more tablet features into OS X and even Canonical are getting in on the act with their Unity interface for Ubuntu and their removal of drop-down menus. So is tablet-creep a bad thing, and need we accept it?
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A question about Spark that we’re hearing fairly often is how the economics behind it will work. This question has come in a few different forms such as requests to explain the price point we settled on or how much of the proceeds will go where. I thought since it has come up a few times instead of answering it in blog comments repeatedly I’d answer it here in a proper blog entry.
The economics around Spark have, as you might expect, been a focus point for us from the very start of project planning. To state the obvious: if the economics weren’t workable then the project wouldn’t be viable. So that was where we started.
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If you’re sick of firmware lockdowns and failed reflashings on your other Android tablets, the Auraslate may be for you. It’s basically an Ice Cream Sandwich-compatible tablet built from the ground up for hax0rz and programmers alike.
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Glyn Moody looks at calls to open up the source code of medical implants and finds they logically lead to recreating, in the image of open source, how we create new digitally controlled devices.
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Open source web server developer, NGINX, has partnered with Parallels, a hosting and cloud services provider to enhance Parallels’ web hosting products with NGINX web server capabilities. Recently ranked as the second most popular web server for active sites, NGINX has just passed the 60,000,000 mark of enabled Internet domains.
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The company said it would “maintain the original source code and … update the base code on SourceForge as developers make modifications”.
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Companies are increasingly turning to open-source software at the expense of proprietary software as they move to cut costs, according to a recent report.
Open-source software is software whose source code is available to the public and is often developed in a public manner.
On the other hand, private entities develop and hold sole legal rights over proprietary software.
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Extending its range of open-source projects to cloud computing, the Apache Software Foundation has approved the Deltacloud as a top-level project, the organization announced Thursday.
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The Apache Software Foundation’s Deltacloud cloud interoperability toolkit has emerged from incubator status to become a top-level project.
The Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) Deltacloud interoperability toolkit has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).
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Open source is almost always viewed as a positive force for the onward development of software code, even if the community contribution model still garners criticism relating to quality, compliance and support from time to time.
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A computer Trojan that targets online banking users is evolving and spreading rapidly because its creators have adopted an ‘open-source’ development model, according to researchers from cyberthreat management firm Seculert.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla today patched eight vulnerabilities in Firefox as it shipped the latest iteration in its rapid release schedule.
Firefox 10, sixth in the line of updates that have been rolling off the development line every six weeks since mid-2011, fixed half a dozen flaws rated “critical,” Mozilla’s highest threat ranking, and another two labeled “high.”
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Open-source software development initiative Mozilla is poised to announce partners for its forthcoming web-based mobile operating system, dubbed Boot to Gecko. “B2G is partnering up,” Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich revealed via Twitter. “More at [Mobile World Congress],” the annual industry event kicking off Feb. 27 in Barcelona. Additional details are unknown.
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OPEN SOURCE software outfit Mozilla has outlined its Firefox roadmap for 2012 by saying in effect that it wants to catch up with Google’s Chrome.
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SaaS
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The challenge to open source software for handling big data is that it is difficult to use.
You can either hire a Stanford PhD. . .or, get some knowledge from companies like Cloudera.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Florian Effenberger today posted the news that The Document Foundation has officially been incorporated in Germany. He said, “With this legal act, the entity officially came to life and is legally recognized.”
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The legal process of incorporating The Document Foundation as a German Stiftung (foundation) has been completed in Berlin, Germany. The creation of a legally based foundation was part of the founding plan of the organisation when it forked from OpenOffice in September 2010. The foundation, which will be the legal entity managing the development of LibreOffice, now has a set of legally binding statutesPDFGerman language link that define the foundation’s objectives, the use of its assets and its management structure.
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THE exciting news last week was the release of LibreOffice 3.5, the latest version of the free and open source office productivity suite.
Like the OpenOffice project from which it sprang, LibreOffice is a completely free suite of applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases. Versions are available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X and Linux. On Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora and openSUSE, LibreOffice is automatically installed.
Compatible with MS Office, LibreOffice enables users to read and write Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Unlike the commercial suite from Microsoft, LibreOffice comes with no licensing fees, so you can download and use it free of charge from The Document Foundation Web site (http://www.libreoffice.org). If you’re a LibreOffice user, you’re in good company. Since its launch in January 2011, the program has been downloaded about 7.5 million times.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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At Mediology, we thrive on Open Source platforms and the corresponding stacks. We leverage LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) for a lot of the platforms and web based applications we develop.
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Project Releases
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Today, Sonatype released Nexus 2.0, a significant upgrade to their namesake repository software and the engine behind the Central.
New in 2.0 is the ability to store .NET packages so that builds from different languages can use the same repository store, health and reporting to provide real-time feedback of the state of the repository’s assets, and blocks in place to restrict access to undesirable assets. In addition, the proxy support has been greatly improved for performance, so that large repository clouds can be provided with a single master for the source.
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OTRS Inc. has released version 3.1 of OTRS (Open source Ticket Request System), the company’s open source help desk system, and its ITIL-compliant IT Service Management (ITSM) solution. The first stable 3.1.x release of the help desk software includes a “Generic Interface” framework for connecting OTRS to third-party applications via SOAP and HTTP. With the bundled OTRS Ticket connector, users can create, update and search for tickets in other applications such as the SAP Solution Manager.
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Public Services/Government
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NASA’s CIO announced that the space agency has powered down its last mainframe as it moves into a new distributed environment with systems serving new needs, including mobile apps and open source.
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Openness/Sharing
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The modern zeitgeist is obsessed with zombies. In the past decade, 439 zombie-themed films were made, as compared to only 65 in the previous decade. In 2010, The Walking Dead TV show, based on a successful comic book series by the same name, premiered to 5.3 million people. Its second season premiered to 7 million. Some of our most beloved comic book heroes fell in to the 2005 Marvel Zombies series and its sequels. And even our classic literature isn’t safe. As if Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy hadn’t been through enough, in 2009, along came Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
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In his State of the Union Speech President Obama called for support for ‘the same kind of research that led to the computer chip and the Internet.’ He rightfully implies that for several decades now the innovation story has been primarily focused on computers, software and communication. As the power of science, technology, and free flow information have pushed modernism to new heights we are witnessing a new wave of innovation in other sectors, especially biotechnology and drug discovery. Yet in order to truly achieve critical mass, the innovation model must evolve from its current form.
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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Ninja Blocks are small, open source hardware devices backed by a web service called Ninja Cloud that allows each Ninja Block to talk to the user’s favorite web apps. Without having to write any code, users can configure a Ninja Block to take a picture of their front yard and save it to Dropbox when movement is detected, for example, or to turn on a lamp in the hallway when the baby cries.
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Programming
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Many of the big IT players today have student developer competitions and events. Microsoft has its Imagine Cup, Yahoo! holds its Open Hack Days (not strictly “student-level” but often attended by many) and Google hosts its Summer of Code.
Google’s annual “get ‘em while they’re young” initiative is now in its eighth year.
Actually, that’s a very cheap jibe, Google and the other vendors alike are mostly quite open about the way they give help and advice to student developers and these events mainly represent free tuition — Google’s is an open source project after all.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Security watchers are expressing reservations about whitelisting security that Apple plans to integrate with OS X Mountain Lion this summer.
The security feature, dubbed Gatekeeper, restricts the installation of downloaded applications based on their source. Users can choose to accept apps from anywhere (as now) but by default Gatekeeper only lets users install programs downloaded from the Mac App Store or those digitally signed by a registered developer. More cautious users can decide to accept only applications downloaded from the Mac App Store.
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Finance
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Some of the same investors who made big profits betting against mortgage bonds before the 2007 housing bust have started snapping up the toxic assets. Hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, who made $500 million when subprime debt cratered, is raising a fund to buy them. He’s joining John Paulson, who made $15 billion in 2007 thanks to the housing bust. Goldman Sachs Group has bought the bonds this year. Remarkably, so has American International Group —the insurer that had to be rescued by the U.S. government in 2008 after its wagers on risky mortgages went bad.
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The candidacy of Mitt Romney for President of the United States has drawn scrutiny to the practices of the “private equity” industry. Tired of being bashed as greedy “vulture capitalists,” the industry has launched an effort to polish its image.
The Private Equity Growth Capital Council (PEGCC), a trade group representing many of the most powerful firms in the venture capital and private equity industry, recently announced its intention to begin a new media initiative called “Private Equity At Work” to correct what it views as “a real lack of understanding about private equity.”
Private equity firms use the funds of their investors to buy up struggling companies. These companies are then retooled to enhance their perceived potential for profitability and are subsequently resold for a profit. Critics argue that private equity firms often force their corporate clients to cut jobs, increase their debt load or shut down solely to benefit the private equity firm’s bottom line.
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Censorship
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We don’t know at this stage exactly who asked for these four accounts to be removed, only that according to Twitter’s rules it must have been done “by Sarkozy, or someone acting on his authority”. We asked Twitter about this and it refused to provide specifics on why the accounts were closed or the timing, other than to say that just because the accounts were suspended in the same general time frame, it wasn’t necessarily for the same reason.
Be that as it may, the near-simultaneous closure of four accounts all critical of a powerful national politician inevitably reminds us that for many countries, “civilizing” the Internet often comes down to censoring it. It’s worrying to see France apparently starting to go down that route — and for Twitter to be helping it.
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On Saturday, January 14th the White House issued a policy statement in response to an online petition against pending anti-piracy legislation signed by more than 100,000 individuals. While supporting efforts to curb infringement of U.S. intellectual property by foreign websites, it outlined that to be acceptable to the Obama Administration any such legislation must guard against online censorship, be narrowly targeted at websites currently beyond the reach of U.S. law, have strong due process protections, be targeted at criminal activity, and not inhibit innovation. The statement was interpreted as indicating that current versions of the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) were not acceptable to the President — although no explicit veto threat was made.
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UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, is hosting a conference about The Media World after Wikileaks and News of the World. Sounds like it could be an interesting event, but one organization not happy about it… is Wikileaks. Seeing as it was a conference that touched on Wikileaks’ interests directly, Wikileaks asked to take part, and was instead denied a chance to speak at the event. When asked about this, UNESCO actually claimed that choosing to not allow Wikileaks attendees was an exercise in “freedom of expression,” which seems like a poor choice of words.
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India made headlines last week when Minister of State for Communications & IT, Sachin Pilot, said that online companies like Facebook and Google must comply with the country’s laws. His statement came one day after Google and Facebook revealed that they had in fact already removed content at an Indian court’s request.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Perhaps you’ve been following the “Linsanity” story over the last week or so. Even if you’re not a sports fan, it’s a pretty incredible story. The short summary for the six or seven of you who are sharing a rock to live under is that Jeremy Lin, who excelled at basketball as a high schooler in Palo Alto, was all but written off as having a real future in basketball. No college would give him a scholarship, and many thought that he should sign with a lower ranked college where he could play for fun, but not have any future. Even Stanford, which has a great basketball program and is literally across the street from where Lin played in high school, had little interest in getting Lin to play for them. He ended up going to Harvard (who did want him, but doesn’t do academic scholarships and isn’t known for its basketball program) and then wasn’t drafted by any NBA team. He did eventually sign with the Golden State Warriors (making him the first Taiwanese American NBA player) who played him sparingly last year and then cut him. He was with the Rockets in the pre-season, but they cut him before the season started. Then he signed on with the Knicks who had sent him down to the D-League and were rumored to be getting ready to cut him… before “Linsanity” began about 10 days ago.
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Steve Green, who was the absolute best reporter covering the Righthaven saga, recently wrote about the fact that 97 Las Vegas karaoke providers were recently sued by a company called Slep-Tone Entertainment Corp., which apparently mainly does business as “Sound Choice,” selling various karaoke content — music and videos. Green notes that someone familiar with Slep-Tone has called it the “Righthaven of trademark
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Copyrights
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After several delays YMCM artist Tyga is set to finally release his album, Careless World, on Feb. 21st. Well he was supposed to – apparently retailers like Best Buy have thrown a wrench into the plan by yanking the album and returning it to the label. It also appears to have been removed from Itunes Pre-Order. According to reports the title track “Careless World” contains portions of a Martin Luther King speech and it’s use on the project is unauthorized. Kings estate has apparently sent notices to retailers asking them to halt the sale of the album and return the copies to Universal Music Group.
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It’s that time again when the Librarian of Congress is considering special exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-cicrumvention provisions. One of the key proposals, which we discussed earlier, was Public Knowledge’s request to allow people to rip DVDs for personal use — just as we are all currently able to rip CDs for personal use (such as for moving music to a portable device). The MPAA (along with the RIAA and others) have responded to the exemption requests (pdf) with all sorts of crazy claims, but let’s focus in on the DVD ripping question, because it’s there that the insanity of Hollywood logic becomes clear.
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You may remember last fall’s numbers concerning how many first, second and third strikes Hadopi, the French agency in charge of kicking people off the internet for possible copyright infringement, was sending out. Now come reports that France is finally moving beyond just the strikes, and has passed along info on those accused (not convicted) of infringement to “prosecutors” for the next stage, which could result in them losing internet access.
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Two of these aren’t huge surprises. The Pastarnack hire hit the news a few months ago, when people noticed that she jumped from being a point person on PIPA to working directly for the MPAA. Swartsel’s name may also be familiar. We tangled with her last summer, when she bizarrely took to the MPAA’s blog to attack reporter Janko Roettger for accurately predicting that bad economic news might lead people to seek out unauthorized sources of movies, rather than paying through the nose for authorized versions. Now, the MPAA’s former boss had said the exact same thing, but according to Swartsel it’s somehow “intellectually dishonest” to point out what might happen. Swartsel also was the one who flat out mocked the concerns of tech entrepreneurs concerning SOPA and PIPA. Turns out she did all this as a “consultant” to the MPAA — and they thought she did such a bang up job that they’ve hired her full time as “director of global policy.”
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ACTA
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A lobbying letter, attributed to the IFPI, the international arm of of the recorded music industry, and circulated by a coalition of rights-holders, attempts to wear the mantle of the moral high-ground in Europe’s political battle over ACTA. This wolf in sheep’s clothing also appears to have access to documents which have been denied to civil society.
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This week, Members of the EU Parliament will be back in their home districts to meet with their constituency. This is an important opportunity for EU citizens to get in touch with their elected representatives, and make sure that they understand how dangerous and illegitimate ACTA is. Next week in Brussels, many decisive meetings will take place in the committees of the EU Parliament regarding ACTA.
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ACTA (“Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”) is a proposed new international law establishing international enforcement standards against counterfeit goods and pirated intellectual property items. ACTA was negotiated as a “trade agreement” which means that it was negotiated in private without open involvement of all the stakeholders. There has been no formal opportunity for input from people other than those who were lucky enough to be invited into the private discussions.
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02.20.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s Friday. That’s the perfect day to have uncovered this weird gem: This week, Rebecca Black got her own version of Linux, RebeccaBlackOS.
She’s not the first teenybopper to get her own open source operating system either. RebeccaBlackOS follows Hannah Montana Linux and Justin Bieber Linux.
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According to Reuters, Li said Baidu was looking to work with more smartphone vendors to expand the reach of its Linux-based Yi mobile platform.
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Desktop
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They don’t seem to have alphabetical order in mind but they certainly do give space to GNU/Linux. So much for the FUD that GNU/Linux is somehow not ready for consumers. Look at all computers sorted by “Best Sellers”…
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My thoughts on why businesses and individuals need to start thinking about switching away from proprietary (and high maintenance) software like Windows, and look at open source and free software inste… Read more »ad like GNU/Linux. All articles are based on real world and everyday experiences with Windows and GNU/Linux, for both business and personal use.
Recently I’ve had the pleasure of replacing yet another Windows XP computer with Fedora Linux (version 16). The user is a relative of mine, and finally became tired of dealing with malware every month or so by simply browsing the web. So at his request I put Fedora Linux on the PC and wiped XP away from it for good. He had already used GNU/Linux on other PCs.
As stated in a previous post, I came across some issues with Fedora 16 and Gnome 3 with a previous deployment, but this time I knew what to expect. After installing Fedora 16 which took about 25 minutes or so from start to finish, I immediately changed Gnome to Fallback Mode to keep the desktop environment familiar to Gnome 2. My personal thought is that the Gnome 2 look and feel is much better suited for a desktop PC.
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Server
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CSC reports that the new contract authorizes a transition from the current mainframe environment to a new z Linux platform, which the vendor claims will: lower costs through enhanced operational and energy efficiency; improve service through a simplified, integrated environment; and augment risk management via strengthened resiliency and security features.
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The SGI ICE 8400 platform with AMD processors is a completely open platform optimized for HPC workloads and runs an off-the-shelf Linux operating system for application compatibility. Although the ICE platform is able to comfortably support multi-petaflop sized installations, design considerations allow cost effective solutions down to a half rack. Single- or dual-plane integrated InfiniBand can be cabled into four different topologies, including hypercube, enhanced hypercube, all to all, and fat-tree, allowing flexible network customization for a variety of workloads.
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Kernel Space
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The proper fsck utility for the Btrfs file-system remains M.I.A. while a contribution from an independent developer introduces LZ4 compression support to this next-generation Linux file-system.
Last month at SCALE 10x the lead developer of Btrfs, Chris Mason, told the crowd that an error-fixing Btrfs.fsck tool was imminent since the file-system is going production-ready in Oracle Linux (Mason is an Oracle engineer) and had a deadline of 14 February.
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Here, I’m going to introduce an alternative load distribution algorithm for Linux kernel scheduler. This technique is named as “The Barbershop Load Distribution Algorigthm” or BLD for short and will be refered as BLD from here on. As it’s name implies, it only tries to distribute the load properly by tracking lowest and
highest loaded rq of the system. This technique never tries to balance the system load at idle context, which is done by the current scheduler. The motivation behind this technique is to distribute load properly amonst the CPUs in a way as if load balancer isn’t needed and to make load distribution easier.
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This was the conclusion of the 2012 Linux Jobs Report released yesterday, which surveyed more than 2,000 hiring managers. The survey was conducted by IT job specialist Dice together with The Linux Foundation. The latter is a non-profit foundation set up to promote, protect and advance Linux.
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CUPS 1.6, which is currently in development, will no longer include some features used in many Linux distributions. An Intel developer has presented patches that may allow the kernel to use an efficient power management feature by default.
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Graphics Stack
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The initial code push has taken place for the Lima Project, which is the open-source ARM Mali graphics driver that’s under development.
The Lima stack development is sponsored by Codethink and its lead developer is veteran X.Org developer Luc Verhaegen. Phoronix was the first to break the news on the project last month.
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The xf86-video-openchrome driver has seen its first proper release in quite a while. The xf86-video-openchrome 0.2.905 release has support for new hardware and features.
The OpenChrome driver is rarely worked on today by the small open-source VIA community, but the new 0.2.905 release that’s now available introduces VX900 support, VX855 X-Video support, X.Org Server 1.12 compatibility, and assorted bug-fixes/tweaks.
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After several attempts that ultimately failed, this weekend Eugeni Dodonov published a patch-set as “Another chapter in RC6 saga…” where he hopes the Sandy Bridge RC6 power-savings (and performance boosting) support is finally reliable to enable by default.
For those that aren’t familiar with Intel RC6 at this stage, you must read more Phoronix articles as it’s been routinely covered in past months. To get up to speed, read SNB RC6 On Linux 3.1 Is Both Good & Bad where it outlines the power-savings abilities of this hardware feature, which allows the Intel graphics processor to be dropped into a lower-power state. At the same time as conserving precious energy, RC6 can also boost graphics performance as Phoronix benchmarks have shown in other articles.
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After laying out plans earlier this month at FOSDEM for releasing Wayland 1.0 this year, Kristian Høgsberg has now written a more detailed message to the Wayland developers that outlines some of the TODO list and other plans for making Wayland 1.0.
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One of the less talked about features of Mesa 8.0 is its ability to handle MLAA, which is short for Morphological Anti-Aliasing. But how does MLAA on the open-source graphics drivers affect the OpenGL performance and is it worth it for boosting the image quality through this anti-aliasing technique? In this article are some benchmarks of MLAA under Mesa 8.0.
Morphological Anti-Aliasing support for Mesa was worked on last summer as part of the 2011 Google Summer of Code with X.Org. Lauri Kasanen was the student developer responsible for bringing MLAA to Mesa. Unlike many GSoC projects, he was successful in his summer project. In fact, he had MLAA Mesa code ready for testing in July well before the August deadline. In August the support was ready for merging, which also included the Gallium3D post-processing support and ROUND support for the various drivers.
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Applications
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VLC Media Player 2.0 is a major upgrade to the extremely popular video player, which comes with the ability to open more formats, experimental Blu-Ray support, faster decoding on multi-core CPUs and mobile hardware, and professional High-Definition and 10-bits codecs.
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At Broadcast Video Expo (BVE) 2012 Facilis Technology , a leader in advanced shared storage solutions for post-production and content creation, will debut version 5.5 of its TerraBlock Shared Storage System featuring the Facilis Shared File System for Linux. Delivering improved compatibility, value, scalability and performance, the new software release also includes integrated server spanning and mirroring, Adobe Premiere Pro project sharing and a new capacity expansion product called TX16.
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Linux has a few solid RSS readers, but there is one app that stands out from the pack: the feature-filled, customizable RSSOwl.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE 4.0, the latest version of KDE desktop environment, was released recently. On this occasion, we reached out to the founder of KDE project, Matthias Ettrich who started the KDE project back in 1996. Almost 12 years down the line, he’s now working at Trolltech, hacking Qt. Here is what the KDE-Man had to say…[The interview was conducted in 2008. KDE is gaining popularity so we wanted to refresh the memories.]
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I have switched Linux Mint 12 KDE to the Netbook desktop, and as always it looks nice and is a pleasure to use
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After trying the openSUSE beer at FOSDEM, which is specially brewed at a small Bavarian brewery near the Nürnberg SUSE office and where many of their developers reside, I began wondering if other Linux distributions were represented by beer, what beers would they be? Continue on for this enjoyable weekend article where the leading Linux distributions are described in terms of beer.
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Sabayon 8 XFCE is a Gentoo based distribution that comes with XFCE desktop version 4.8 and makes Gentoo a whole lot easier. Gentoo Linux is a more advanced based distribution that has been around a long time which is focused more on advanced users with compiling your own packages (programs) in order to run.
Sabayon, takes a different approach and takes the hard part out of Gentoo and makes it easy with the latest version in Sabayon 8.Sabayon comes as an installable LiveDVD and is available in 32 bit and 64 bit flavours. Installation did not take that long and was not complicated. The configuration was pretty easy and had you setup your keyboard, select your timezone and so forth.
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Like a lot of stories, there is more to it than meets the eye. And while on the surface, this is a story about a Linux distribution, there are some life lessons that can be found in it.
As with many other people, my life saw a lot of dramatic changes in the year 2001. For me, it started in January 2001. I should have been keeping in mind the words of wisdom from the world champion athlete Dan Millman. He wrote The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and other books. One of his statements is all accidents can be attributed to one of three reasons:
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Finnix 104
· Announced Distro: Scientific Linux 6.2
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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There are not so many distributions in the Linux galaxy which have names directly showing the purpose of the distribution’s creation. I honestly do not think that Bodhi is going to enlighten anybody or Fedora can stay on your head. As opposed to these, PCLinuxOS directly says that it is a Linux operating system intended to be used on PCs.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has announced key steps towards more open and interoperable cloud computing with the promotion of its Deltacloud API to a top-level Apache project and an extension of its partnership with Amazon Web Services that enables hybrid cloud operation of Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.
The moves were announced as part of a Red Hat webcast where the company hammered home the need for an open approach to cloud computing that allows customers to expand easily, enables portability between clouds, and avoids a lock-in to proprietary architectures.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It is always exciting when new versions of Unity are released since they bring along bug fixes and new features. Well Unity 5.4 was released on Friday. Let’s go through some the features and bug fixes it comes with.
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“Open source” is a term most often applied to software, and it’s become increasingly common in both the business and consumer worlds.
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Energy Micro and Pengutronix will be demonstrating µClinux for Cortex-M3, embedded Linux running on the energy friendly EFM32 Gecko range of microcontrollers at this year’s Embedded World Show. This new port of µClinux features the latest version 3.2 Linux kernel, and gives embedded designers all of the cost and time-to-market benefits of using an open source embedded operating system, while maintaining low current consumption of just 1.6mA when in idle mode. Energy Micro, the energy friendly microcontroller and radio company, assisted and supported Pengutronix to complete the port to the Giant Gecko MCU range, the industry’s leading family of low-energy microcontrollers.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s Latest release of Android version 4.0 typically referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich has definitely changed the way in which people visualize smartphone. Essentially the most spectacular thing concerning the Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich is it provides almost as good consumer experience in smartphones as in tablets.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The recently announced KDE Spark Tablet has an ARM Mali 400 as its graphics processor, which right now is backed by a closed-source user-space driver but that’s changing thanks to the Lima driver that’s providing a reverse-engineered open-source ARM Mali driver. Here’s a demo of the Lima driver’s Limare stack running on the KDE Spark Tablet hardware.
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Conclusion: The Nook Color hardware makes a nice tablet with a really sharp screen at a reasonable price. There seems to be a catch about the version of the Nook Color that you get. Apparently some will NOT boot from the SD card. Research this before tryin it. My Nook Color has Model# BNRV200 and Software 1.2.0. More here. Apparently, you want a Nook Color with a ROM (Software) version prior to 1.4.
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I just want to show how you could join the 2012 International Mother Language Day by celebrations by contributing to a FOSS project with your friends and relatives.
In this century ICT plays manor role in various fields including education sector. There are many tools have been localized but most of them not let you in to the project to contribute as a localizer. So where you could contrinute to a softwrae on behalf of your own language or community?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has released an experimental version of the Chromium web browser with support for the company’s new Dart programming language. Dart, which is Google’s attempt to improve on JavaScript, has thus far not enjoyed much support outside of Google, but the company continues to push forward with its own efforts.
The new development preview version of the Chromium browser, the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser, contains the Dart Virtual Machine. This release, which Google is calling “Dartium,” can be downloaded from the Dart language website. At the moment it’s available only for Mac OS X and Linux. Google says a Windows version is “coming soon.” Keep in mind that this is a preview release and intended for developer testing, not everyday use.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla, the folks behind the Firefox web browser, launched a project last year to create a totally open mobile operating system, and now that dream is nearly a reality. Boot to Gecko (B2G) is built entirely with standards-compliant web technologies like HTML and JavaScript. It gets its name from the Gecko rendering engine in Firefox, which is also the platform that will run B2G. Android has a number of things in common with B2G, for instance it is open source, and uses some of the same underlying technology. Designing the entirety of a mobile operating system on web standards is a risky proposition, but B2G does have some advantages over Android.
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Project Releases
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The VLC team has announced the release of VLC 2.0, code named, Twoflower. VLC 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC. The latest version of VLC offers faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs.
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Just weeks after the first release candidate, the VideoLAN developers have officially released version 2.0 of the VLC media player for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. VLC media player 2.0, code-named “Twoflower”, is a major reworking of the VLC application, bringing playback improvements and experimental support for playing Blu-ray discs, albeit without menus.
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The lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, has released version 1.3 of the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is the first major update of the user interface based on code from the GNOME shell and which was first considered “stable” with version 1.2. In Cinnamon 1.3, all panel components are applets which means, for example, that users can remove a menu or window list and replace it with alternative third-party applets. All applets can also be moved using drag & drop so that users have even more control over where to position them.
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Public Services/Government
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The European parliament is currently consulting on a wide-ranging draft European Commission regulation on European standardisation. Voting in the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, which is spearheading the legislation, is set to take place in March. The initiative is intended to create a comprehensive, effective, broadly applicable standardisation system. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has criticised the proposal as paving the way for standards which are poorly compatible with open source software.
A reform of the existing piecemeal European standardisation framework is, according to an FFII paper on the Commission’s proposal, long overdue. Their analysis claims that current regulations are not designed for specifications for software interfaces or data formats. According to the FFII, the proposal would mean accepting standards from international consortia licensed under FRAND (Fair Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms and conditions.
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Standards/Consortia
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There’s a big stink going on right now. Someone found out that Google was setting “third party cookies” (for their advertising servers) in Apple’s Safari browser, which defaults to not loading third party cookies (which I’ll get to in a moment).
Now it appears that someone using Safari on a Mac that expected privacy somehow, is suing Google. (The PC World article on the first link has a more accurate technical description of what’s going on)
In short, someone found a bug in Safari, and now Google is being sued and is under investigation by Congress. We know how much Congress can be expected to know about the internet based on their hilarious to horrifying attempts to regulate it as many of them uttered things like “I don’t know how this here internet thing works, but they tell me….” or the late Senator Ted Steven’s infamous “series of tubes” comment. To say nothing of the fact that Congress flip flops between mandatory tracking for all and bullshit “consumer privacy concerns” such as this one. (For those concerned with the former, the bill is called HR 1981, but a more fitting name would be HR 1984)
If this was a bug in Firefox, it would be fixed. If it was a bug in Chrome, it would be fixed.
Somehow, Microsoft and Apple users seem to think they can use proprietary secret software when they’re not allowed to know how it works. Software, which has a history of many bugs, with vendors that typically take weeks/months/years to patch them once they’re made public. These companies also slip back doors into the software for various government agencies.
Apple was recently caught with a back door that they put into iTunes, it remained there for 3 years, undetected, which facilitated man in the middle attacks. (A government could use this to run a counterfeit iTunes server and load malicious software onto the victim’s computer. The article calls it a flaw, but we know what was really going on, and that it was likely just moved.).
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Security
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Finance
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A smiling former Goldman Sachs computer programmer was freed from prison Friday after a surprise ruling from a federal appeals court reversed his conviction on charges he stole computer code.
“Justice occasionally works,” declared the beaming programmer, Sergey Aleynikov.
He said he “just jumped all over the place” at 6 a.m., the moment he read and repeatedly reread an email from his lawyer informing him that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan had reversed his conviction. The words were, he said, “‘We won!’”
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According to an article in the Arab News, Shariah-committed imams declined to issue its religious approval (fatwa) for the Goldman Bond derivative because the “use of proceeds” to fund Goldman’s non-Islamic business is forbidden, according to Shariah finance laws.
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