The Olive Media Olive 2 is a network audio player to bridge the gap between computer and hi-fi.
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You interact and select tracks from your music collection on the Olive Media Olive 2 through a black and yellow-themed screen interface, with text showing in white; behind the scenes, the Olive uses a Linux operating system. The graphical user interface could be slow to update as menu items were selected, and while we usually got to where we wanted to go eventually, it was neither slick nor intuitive.
If your New Year’s Resolution includes something along the lines of “be better organized,” choosing a task manager might be in order. Linux doesn’t lack for task managers, but good ones are few and far between. To help LWN readers boost productivity, we’ve picked a few to look at.
Avatar (2009)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Shrek the Third (2007)
X-Men The Last Stand (2006)
King Kong (2005)
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)
Gladiator (2000)
The Matrix (1999)
Titanic (1997)
Both companies are largely (or in the case of Amazon – almost entirely) powered by Linux. In addition to these, it relatively safe to say around half the internet runs on Linux powered Apache servers.
I think I’ve covered just about everyone who uses technology at this point in some form or another. Does anyone still think you haven’t uses something Linux powered at least once in your life? No? Good.
Does anyone else know of some other common places Linux is used by the masses or another large retailer/company that is Linux powered that I missed?
Bharata B. Rao, one of the speakers at the 11th LCA, is an exception – he has come to Wellington straight from Bangalore and is just recovering from the jetlag. (His talk is titled “Using performance counters to optimize task placement on multi-core systems.”)
Rao, who is in his mid-30s, works for IBM as a senior staff software engineer in the India Software Labs Systems Group. What’s more, he writes code aimed at the Linux kernel.
Midway through the week that comprises the 11th Australian national Linux conference, the two co-organisers, Andrew and Susanne Ruthven, say they are extremely pleased with the way things are working out.
Shane Geddes is one of the first batch of students to enrol in New Zealand’s first high school that uses only free and open source software – the Albany Senior High School in Auckland.
It takes a lot of courage to set out on an unexplored course, especially when it comes to academia. There is nothing to compare with the withering scorn that one earns from this community if one sets out on an ambitious course – and then fails miserably.
Glyn Moody – Hackers at the end of the world. Rebel code is now 10 years old… 50+ interviews over a year – and could be considered an archaeology now I probably haven’t down the keynote justice – it was excellent but high density – you should watch it online
Glyn talks about open access – various examples like the public library of science (and how the scientific magazine business made 30%-40% profit margins. The Human Genome Project & the ‘Bermuda Principles’: public submimssion of annotated sequences. In 2000 Celera were going to patent the entire human genome. Jim Kent spent 3 weeks writing a program to join together the sequenced fragments on a 100 PC 800Mhz Pentium processor. This was put into the public domain on just before Celera completed their processing – and by that action Celera were prevented from patenting *us*.
Corbet took his typical potshot at Ubuntu, saying that LKML is now friendlier than the Ubuntu mailing lists. Thankfully two other speakers today (mako and mjg) mentioned the Ubuntu Code of Conduct as being both important and effective in the Ubuntu community. In my opinion, there seems to be an ever-growing trend of LWN.net attacks on Canonical and Ubuntu. I think I’ll dedicate a post on that topic soon.
The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future. Mako explored the concept of anti-features as deliberately included functionality or a lack of functionality that users hate so much they will pay to have them removed. Some classic examples included the gator spyware that was included with free version of p2p software on the windows platform – with a spyware-free version available for a fee.
LCA2010 delegates are invited to to make donations to the Life Flight Trust and be in to win an exclusive once-in-a-lifetime experience on Saturday 23rd January.
This year’s Linux.conf.au gathering has placed more emphasis than ever on the broader impact of free and open source software (FOSS), and how the models it utilises could benefit society in all kinds of other ways. It’s a fascinating argument and a worthwhile goal, but it’s still hard to escape the feeling that it’s not being tailored well for the non-geek community. The way the case is being presented at LCA 2010, Joe Blow won’t want to know.
New Zealand will begin a test of a homegrown free and open source desktop solution next month, with the Horizons Regional Council to be one of the guinea pigs, according to the president of the country’s open source society.
Linus Torvalds himself is known to attend – and was in Hobart for the first time last year – and multinational software companies like Google use LCA as a hunting ground for fresh talent.
The Birds of a Feather sessions include topics such as installfests and how to run them, Linus standard operating environment development and MySQL Sandbox.
I agree with Vincent Danen that wondering whether Linux is ready for the desktop is silly, even irrelevant — wider usage tends to foster growth in related sectors (think cloud computing and virtualization). But Koenning’s made a particularly strong (and strangely parallel) point that encouraging “non-technical” end users to use open source software is a great way to ease vendors into supporting non-proprietary platforms.
Three New Zealand government agencies will begin a pilot next month to replace their existing Windows desktops with machines running Linux and other open source software.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Horizons Regional Council and NZ Post will all begin trialling the use of Linux desktops in February. NZ Post’s open source plans were outed by Computerworld in August last year.
A quick visit to Ubuntu.com, and I found Buying Ubuntu on CD and DVD. This links to authorized distributors all over the planet, and their pricing is rather different than WashingtonCD. For example, at On-disk.com CDs and DVDs are under $5.00US, and couple bucks for shipping. (WashingtonCD is not an authorized distributor.) Canonical will ship you a CD edition for free. Really free, not free + money.
Don’t wait, folks, get your unauthorized no-cost Windows killer for only $20 + $6 shipping now!
Lenovo’s Ultra portable Skylight smart book, is also powered by efficient cell processors most of us have never heard of. It runs on a Lenovo user interface on Linux, although you wouldn’t know it when using it. One battery charge gives you 11 hours on the go. It has WiFi and always – connected cellular 3G. It basically bridges what has been missing between smart phones and Netbooks.
The ASV Roboat has made a name for itself in many robotic sailboat competitions, and now a real research project is in store for the Linux-powered vessel.
Robotics company Willow Garage is giving 10 of its robots free to researchers in return for a promise that they will share their development efforts with the open-source community.
Any system administrator worth their salt has some kind of system for collecting and maintaining information about all the systems they’re responsible for. Gathering that info by hand, especially when the systems are inherited, can be time-consuming. Or you could try out boxinfo, a Perl script that gathers most or all of the information you’d want in a few easy steps.
The A8T84140-AMC is supported under Linux 2.6 and is supplied with RPMs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. The card is compatible with the PICMG AMC.0 base specification with options for compact, mid-height and full-height versions, enabling the card to be installed into any AdvancedMC slot in an ATCA carrier or a ?TCA chassis.
This Linux-based IBM solution provides staple collaboration tools such as email, file sharing, and remote access and affords peace of mind through automated network security features, data protection, backup and recovery. With Engate, Lotus Foundations Start will offer a security suite that proactively protects SMBs from a diversity of email-borne threats.
There is much afoot regarding netbooks, as they continue to evolve and find their place in the computer world.
People criticize and laud netbooks in seemingly equal proportions. Some say they are inexpensive and provide just enough processing power for the average user.
Chromium hacker Hexxeh has released a faster, USB-bootable build of Google’s Chrome OS called Chromium OS Zero. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica interviewed Google’s Engineering Director for Chrome OS, Matthew Papakipos, regarding the past and future of Chrome OS.
Hexxeh’s final build of Chromium OS Zero follows earlier, well-regarded releases of versions including Chromium OS Diet and Cherry. Based on the open source Linux Chromium code that Google began to release in late November, with the goal of releasing a final Chrome OS for netbooks later this year, Chromium OS Zero promises major speed improvements “for many users,” according to Hexxeh’s blog announcement.
Today we are proud to announce a new operating system, a port of Google’s famous Android platform for the x86 (32-bit) architecture. Simply named Android-x86, this Live CD Linux distribution is designed mostly for the Eee PC netbooks, but can also run on any other 32-bit (x86) platform. The current stable version of Android-x86 is based on Android 1.6 (Donut) and it’s powered by Linux kernel 2.6.29 with kernel mode-setting (or KMS for short) enabled. It has support for the EXT3, EXT2, NTFS and FAT32 filesystems, and can be run directly from the CD (yes, no installation required)! But, if you like it and you want to install it on your hard drive or on a USB stick, we have a short tutorial for you at the end of the article.
To that end, on February 10, 2010 the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Initiative will host a Strategic Planning Session for lawyers active in support or adoption of free and open source software. At this meeting our legal community will consider what legal issues we anticipate may arise and what foundations we might be able to lay to support continued rise of free and open source software.
Forget lofty ideals about the open-source community: most Linux kernel code is written by paid developers at major corporations.
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During a presentation at Linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, LWN.net founder and kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet offered an analysis of the code contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24 2008 and January 10 2010. (The kernel serves as a basis from which individual distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian or Red Hat are developed, though these will often add or remove specific features.)
As with the previous article, four journal sizes are tested to understand the impact of journal size on metadata performance. The four journal sizes are:
* 16MB (0.0032% of file system size)
* 64MB (0.0128% of file system size)
* 256MB (0.0512% of file system size)
* 1GB (0.2% of file system size)
Geany was just the text editor I was looking for after switching from Windows to Linux. I wanted a lightweight, nimble application with functionality that would serve my writing needs when a full-fledged word processing app wasn’t necessary — for me, most of the time. I found it in an IDE designed for programmers.
Nearly five months after the release of the first beta, the Skype for Linux developers have announced the availability of the second beta for version 2.1 of their Linux Skype client. In addition to several localisation updates and bug fixes, version 2.1.0.81 of Skype for Linux adds a number of new features that have been available on Mac and Windows editions of Skype for some time. The full release for Windows is currently at version 4.1 and for Mac OS X is at version 2.8.
Pytone is a curses based Jukebox program with advanced features like crossfading, multiple players (libmad,xmms,mpg321/123), prehearing with a second soundcard, search functionality, logging, mixer functions and an English and German interface.
On Ubuntu, the default text-editor Gedit works great, and has a few extra features that make taking plain-text notes a bit more convenient, like a side-bar file browser so you can easily open multiple files, and automatic time/date insertion if you’re keeping a journal.
It’s called Ubuntu tweak and you can get it from http://ubuntu-tweak.com/. The new version of Ubuntu tweak (0.5) came out about 2 weeks ago and has some improvements in it so go ahead and grab it from their website.
Back in 2008, I looked at Boxee on the Apple TV. Boxee, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a free and open-source media center app. It is now also available in beta form for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
I thought this was a good time to take a look at the last. This is not a formal review, just some initial thoughts on my experience with it. Please do not forget that Boxee is labeled “beta,” so if you try it out you may run into some bugs.
Boxee has great things on the way — some we can’t tell you about yet — but here’s one we can: video on demand in the form of the Boxee Payment Platform, bringing one-click payment for shows that will hopefully be worth your money.
The idea that Linux users would want to play old MS-DOS games might seem strange to some, whats even stranger for me is the fact that this task needs similar software to do exactly the same thing under the latest Windows versions.
After month of development, QuantZ is now available for Linux. For the record, QuantZ is a fun and innovative 3D puzzle and action game. In QuantZ you have to control a cube with your mouse and launch marbles onto it, create explosions of color, chain reactions and try to clear the cube using as less QuantZ (Marble) as possible!
According to the announcement, beginning next month a limited number of developers will be invited to begin working with the Kindle Development Kit, which includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.
The Haiku operating system, an open source remake of BeOS, has gained support for running a number of KDE applications, including the KOffice productivity suite. This was made possible by a native port of Nokia’s Qt development framework to the Haiku platform.
The first day of Camp KDE is behind us, with the first of the many presentations being well attended. A full summary of the talks lives behind the break, and videos will be online shortly. If you are in the San Diego region, feel free to join us for Camp KDE for talks and training.
The second day of Camp KDE was filled with many more interesting talks. This day’s talks were of the more technical nature versus the first day, and the KDE team took notes. As usual, the talks were recorded and videos will be available soon. A detailed rundown of the second day of talks are behind the link.
I have always been searching for some amazing stuff from the linux world.And this time i was thunderstruck by one of them and that is Nimblex Linux.It is a linux distribution that allows the users to select whatever they need from a long list of programs.The linux is so overwhelming that it is worth a nobel price.It enables us to create a custom cd from a mere 200 mb cd.It is based on live scripts .After you select the modules you need you can make an .iso image and save that to your harddisk.It is termed as the new wave of linux.
There is no shortage of Linux distros. For dozens, if not hundreds, of different tastes, there is a distribution made for you. And now, there is even a version of Linux that doesn’t even look like Linux at all. It looks like Windows XP.
I like Debian for being somewhere in between a beginner’s distro and an advanced distro. Many of the high-end, menial chores required by Crux et al. simply evaporate in Debian, and at the same time Debian doesn’t seem to “push your face in the plate” like Ubuntu sometimes can. You’re still responsible for managing a lot of what happens with your system … kind of like Arch.
Looking from a FOSS point of view, the inclusion of proprietary software within the Ubuntu library will be of concern to some. I can understand that point, however we have to be realistic. Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux distro, it has a legion of very happy users who champion the product. Unfortunately Canonical is a company and its a company that needs to generate revenue to stay in existence. If Canonical could “live” off good will and praise then it would probably be the most valuable company in the world. I have often said there is a place for proprietary software and if by offering titles that were traditionally the mainstay of a Windows platform will bring new users to Linux, then bring it on.
If you have ever introduce someone to Linux, you will know that they always ask “Will this software work? Will that software work?”. If you say “No they won’t work”, they instantly loose interest. For example, I have been asked if Photoshop will work when I try to get my friend to install Ubuntu. When I told him that it will not, no amount of convincing from me that Gimp is a great alternative could move him. However, if Windows (or Mac) users get to use their favorite applications in Ubuntu as well it will increase the number of Ubuntu users greatly.
From Canonical’s point of view too this makes a lot of sense. If they make paid softwares like Photoshop available in their repository, they are effectively acting as an online store. This can potentially be another revenue source for them.
I’ve finally got Plymouth up and running on Ubuntu Lucid. Well, up and partially running – I only get to see the new Plymouth at shutdown, but considering I have an Nvidia graphics card and only installed Ubuntu Lucid in VirtualBox so far, I’ll take what I can get.
Let’s take a look at the Ubuntu Lucid Plymouth themes (already included in Lucid). I should have made this post about the “Solar” theme only, as it’s the only one which is nice, the others are either static or just a “glow”.
The Ubuntu “Help and Support” system may be getting a overhaul in time for Lucid.
Developers feel the majority of users are either simply unaware that the help system exists or find it overly complicated to navigate and draw information from.
These videos can be a great way to demonstrate the power of Linux/Ubuntu to family members, friends or the hardened Linux sceptic. What better way to prove your OS is good looking, useable and feature-filled than to show your good looking, useable and feature-filled desktop?!
Most VPM’s are forged from hardened versions of Linux on a diet due to flash drive size constraints. USB 3.0, SLC flash, and larger flash drives have all, but removed this limit and embedded versions of more full featured, user friendly versions of Linux are popping up. While it may seem extreme, maintaining corporate intellectual property and securing assets from disgruntled employees can mean big bucks in today’s bleeding edge world. Look for the rapid proliferation of ideas like this in the years to come.
Operating system support was not detailed. However, other network appliances from Lanner, such as the FW-7580 announced last month, have supported Linux, Windows, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.
There has been a fair bit of hand-ringing recently about free and open source software’s impact on mobile phones and other consumer devices. Lysandra Ohrstrom of the SFLC last week celebrated the increased use of FOSS on devices available at the Consumer Electronics Show, but lamented the fact that often the user does not get to “share, tinker, and adapt the devices”. Meanwhile Bradley M Kuhn recently warned that “we are in a very precarious time with regard to the freedom of mobile devices” while Glyn Moody questioned whether it is healthy that most Android applications are closed-source.
Android is an application framework on top of Linux. We will look at the details of the layers of the framework, shortly. It is supplied as open source code, but does not bind the user with the constraints of the GPL ” there is no requirement for developers to make public any code developed using Android.
Believe it or not, this electronic guitar is actually a Gentoo Linux box, running a 500MHz AMD Geode processor, an 8.4-inch, 800×600 LCD touch screen with an SSH server and a MIDI output. It is made of milled, solid plastic, and could probably be hooked up to Rock Band. But that is to rob it of the romance.
The Cool-er is based on a Linux OS and we’ve been informed that the entire OS will be made GPL in the near future, allowing developers to chop and change the firmware to add the features they require. It supports PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, TXT, HTML, PRC, JPG and MP3, so you’ll be able to view images and listen to music if you choose. Annoyingly, the Cool-er uses a 2.5mm headphone jack instead of the standard 3.5mm jack – although an adapter is included.
Nokia’s N900 is a Linux-based mobile device with a number of advanced features, including application multi-tasking, built-in VoIP support, stereo speakers, graphics acceleration, video output to a TV, and more.
I have had my N900 for about one month now. During that time I have enjoyed several “Wow!” moments. For example, being able to use the web just as if I was onha my desktop, including heavy javascript and flash sites such as Google Maps, Google Docs, GMail, Photobucket, etc. was amazing to me. Being a Linux user for many years, I really enjoy having access to a terminal application with access to root and to tools like the vi text editor. Being able to use Python to develop right on the device and to be able to use my own old Python programs, such as 7Squeeze, gave me that very warm feeling of validation. But, the N900 had one more big Wow! moment in store for me, one that I truly did not expect.
The first bugfix release for version 4.6 of Qt GUI toolkit, acquired by Nokia in 2008, is now available. Similarly, an update for the cross-platform Qt Creator development environment, version 1.3.1, is also available to download. Both combine numerous fixes with performance enhancements and revised documentation. Qt 4.6.1 contains more than 90 changes, whilst debugging (especially under Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’) and the C++ editor have both been revised in Qt Creator. Both technologies are available on the Qt project’s Git resource under the open source LGPL 2.1 license.
Entourage Systems is taking pre-orders for its dual-display, Android-based “Entourage Edge” e-reader, bundled with DataViz’s Documents To Go. In other recent e-reader news, Spring Design’s “Alex” will access Borders’ e-book store, Samsung announced two e-readers, Amazon announced a new Kindle DX model, and Amazon is broadening its Kindle self-publishing platform.
People who like to try new cell phones on a regular basis should brace themselves; this year, Motorola’s going to do its best to make it rain Android devices. In an interview today, one exec committed to releasing something like two dozen smartphones based on the mobile operating system.
Motorola this week unveiled its first Android phone for the South Korean market. The phone, called the Motoroi, looks similar to the Motorola Droid handset in the U.S. or the Milestone in Europe but without the slide-out keyboard.
You are probably already aware that Google has launched the Nexus one, aka “the Google Phone”.
The reviews are mixed from what I have read so far.
Early in the rumor mill — way back when there was first talk of a Google-backed device — the thought was that perhaps the Google phone would be “free” but laden with advertisements. The idea being that if you let Google display ads to you morning, noon and night on your mobile phone, you could enjoy free… everything.
HTC hopes it can encourage a wider audience to choose the Tattoo by offering customisable casing. At the point you buy you can choose pre-defined colours or use your own imagination and customise with your own designs. We couldn’t test this service before writing, but it sounds promising.
Without good usability none of this matters, of course, and there is both good and bad news on this front. In general we found working with the Tattoo comfortable enough. Its screen is a bit small at 2.8 inches, and its 240 x 320 pixel resolution is the lowest we expect to see from any finger-friendly smartphone. But for the most part it was good enough.
Schneider (pictured right, next to Flash Gordon) married up Javascript with the iPhone’s inbuilt support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open-source competitor to Flash, which hasn’t taken off to the same extent as Flash, due to the fact that Adobe had years of head-start in terms of getting the software installed on virtually all PCs.
Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies. I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases and a real community behind them. At first glance my final list read like a cast of manga characters with names like Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly, OpenNebula, RabbitMQ and Zenoss. However they all seem to benefit from a strong development ethic, a growing community of users and the ability to address challenges associated with cloud computing.
Both BT’s open source innovation capability, Osmosoft, and its open source governance unit, the Open Source Operations Team, aim to operate in as transparent a manner as possible. In support of this we contribute to initiatives such as FOSSBazaar and the European Legal Network, and where possible publish information about how we deliver using F/OSS technologies and how we implement the associated governance.
I am pleased to officially announce the 2010 revision of Nuxified.org, an alternative outlet for all Free Open Source Software users and fans. This revision proves that there’s still plenty of life behind this site and is a token of my continued interest in maintaining and improving it.
The slogan marking this revision is a “FOSS Clique” translating perfectly to a “community of people interested in Free Open Source Software”.
CompTIA — a large association serving the IT channel — has longstanding relationships with Microsoft and the traditional software industry. But one of CompTIA’s new board members could help to drive open source solutions across the IT channel. Here’s the scoop.
Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland’s apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly “stealing” code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale “theft” of code from another website. Of course it’s not “theft” it’s copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with. No surprise really but the damage to their name may have already been done. There’s more to discuss here than Microsoft’s already tarnished reputation though. The issue raises some important points in favour of free software and points to why more if not all code should benefit from free licencing.
At this week’s AsteriskWorld conference, Digium will officially launched Asterisk Exchange — an online marketplace that allows customers and channel partners to piece together solutions involving Asterisk (the open source IP PBX). If successful, Asterisk Exchange could expand the ecosystem for alternative VoIP and unified communication solutions. Here’s the scoop, including a FastChat video with Digium CEO Danny Windham.
Pika Technologies announced a GSM Module for its open source Asterisk- and FreePBX-based IP-PBX device. The dual-channel GSM Module for the Pika Warp Appliance for Linux enables PBX developers to offer connections to one or more GSM cellular networks, offering backup and LCR (least cost routing), the company says.
Modern PBX phone systems often have lots of capabilities that end-users never actually see, since they don’t actually directly use the PBX — they use the phones that the PBX enables. That’s a situation that VoIP vendor Digium is aiming to change with the new release of Switchvox 4.5.
Switchvox is Digium’s commercially licensed VoIP IP PBX and was last updated a year ago for enhanced unified communications collaboration services. Digium itself is best known as the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Asterisk IP PBX effort, which also serves as the base for Switchvox.
The final development milestone of Firefox 3.6 has been released to web and is currently available for download for users of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Mozilla will release Firefox 3.6 on Thursday, the Mozilla Foundation said Wednesday.
The exact time for the Firefox 3.6 release will be on Thursday, Jan. 20, at 9:30 AM Pacific time, according to a note on the Firefox 3.6 “coming soon” page.
Just when you think you’ve got all the Firefox add-ons you’ll ever need, the developer community is busy dreaming up more. Here’s five add-ons you’ll love that also might solve some problems you didn’t even know you had.
Mozilla Labs has rolled out a major update to Bespin, an open source text editing engine that is built with standards-based Web technologies. The project has undergone a “reboot” with the aim of improving the ease with which it can be used and enhanced.
Bespin 0.6, codenamed Ash, reflects the significant effort that went into the architectural overhaul. The code is more modular and is designed so that virtually all of the core functionality is implemented in plugins. The developers have also made it considerably easier to embed Bespin in webpages, an improvement that will lower the barriers to adoption.
Early on in the first year of this blog, I got to investigating the use of Drupal for creating an article-based subsite. In the end, the complexities of its HTML and CSS thwarted my attempts to harmonise the appearance of web pages with other parts of the same site and I discontinued my efforts. In the end, it was Textpattern that suited my needs and I have stuck with that for the aforementioned subsite.
The Daemon series is an exploration of a could-be-now, constantly connected society. Suarez has taken cutting edge technology and inserted it into everyday life. It’s a great exploration of where our society might be headed. In many ways it reminds me Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother. Cory’s young-adult novel is a great primer for hacker and maker culture. Daemon serves a similar purpose providing a primer for what a networked society that is structured like MMORPG will look like.
Admit it, when many of you think of open source you assume software. But new concepts of open source in hardware and design promise to transform many industries. Open Source’s allure of faster, more agile development, quicker innovation and accelerating evolution of technology doesn’t apply to software alone.
The first time I heard of open source hardware was when both my friend Brad Feld and Fred Wilson wrote about Bug Labs in their blogs. I was intrigued by the idea but didn’t quite grok it. I knew that if Brad and Fred invested in it there must be something to it and I would watch it develop. But the idea seems to have some legs.
Today we’re officially announcing the brand new jQuery Forum. We’ve been using mailing lists, and subsequently Google Groups, over the past 4 years to manage the discussion and community around jQuery. That particular solution has simply not been able to scale to our discussion requirements both in terms of participation and in managing spam.
Sauce Labs has released Sauce IDE, a record and playback system for Selenium tests that allows individuals new to Selenium do automated application functional testing on multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera and multiple operating systems, all without writing any code.
I’m going to attempt to answer the number-one most common technology question on the web, and hopefully do it so I can just link people here. Wish me luck, I’ll need it!
(3) Of all things, you’re trying to sell me design in .NET/ .ASP. Now, can anyone see Idiot’s mistake? Ah, yes, in the second row. A website about Free-and-Open-Source Software? Hosted on a Linux server? With an email address with the word “Linux” right in the string? With numerous posts about coding in Python and PHP? Yeah, that does raise a red flag, doesn’t it?
Open source has bought us some great products, but even if you’re a programming genius, working out how to get involved in a project can be challenging. The TeachingOpenSource.org site offers a wealth of material to help you learn the basics.
I had done my best to sort out the why’s and wherefore’s of Google’s first consumer OS effort in my initial launch coverage but I still had many questions about the past, present, and future of the project.
[...]
EB: The way that we’ve thought about this for a while is if you read the Chrome OS blog post that we did in July, and you read the Chrome browser blog post that we did in September in 2008, they’re very similar. They’re essentially the same thing. And the reason is because when we were building Chrome the browser, we realized that everyone is spending their time online. So essentially we were trying to build something that mimics this operating system feel—there’s a task manager in Chrome, and that was one of the early additions to Chrome.
The publishers are claiming that Google is purposely degrading its results (and they can prove it!) and at the same time complaining that they can’t compete against those degraded results. Wow.
The calculator didn’t dehumanize math. The automobile didn’t dehumanize walking. And Google, most certainly, has not dehumanized intelligence. It’s only enabled it to do much, much more.
Top Chinese search engine Baidu.com has sued its U.S. domain registrar over a hack that took down the Web site, alleging negligence by the U.S. company, Baidu said Wednesday.
An internal audit found the FBI broke the law thousands of times when requesting Americans’ phone records using fake emergency letters that were never followed up on with true subpoenas — even though top officials knew the practice was illegal, according to The Washington Post.
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.
Millions of motorists’ personal details have been sold to ‘parasite’ parking firms and even rogue clampers by a Government agency in a trade generating £43.9million so far.
This kind of error is unforgivably stupid. Not only is it irresponsible, there’s no conceivable excuse for this kind of administrative incompetence. Even worse, it makes it less likely that people will serve as magistrates in the future.
Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.
Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. “I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post,” said Mr Chambers, 26. “I’m the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine.”
Warren Buffett opposes President Barack Obama’s proposed levy on financial institutions because firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. already repaid bailout funds, he told CNBC.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York paid French banks 100 cents on the dollar to settle trades with American International Group Inc. in November 2008, the same month an AIG competitor negotiated payments of less than a third of that to retire similar bets.
The hearings into the roots of the recession aren’t scaring Wall Street. What’s really frightening is public anger at the industry shows no signs of abating, and Lloyd Blankfein, the man leading the charge to turn that around, is only making matters worse—and possibly putting his job at risk.
According to the Post, “Goldman officials refuted the claim that Goldman was delaying the bonus information in order to avoid a PR flap, saying the delay was more the result of the bank changing the timeframe of its discussions with employees.”
It’s the biggest bank robbery in American history, but the banks are doing the robbing. I mean, just go through the facts. What, overnight in 2008 they turned Goldman Sachs, that venerable investment bank – how about casinos that gambled and lost – into a bank holding company. Why? Well, so that they could borrow at ridiculously low rates and they could be given approximately $10 billion dollars to put them on the road to gambling.
Hank Greenberg, former chief executive officer at American International Group Inc., said Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is responsible for the collapse of the insurer during the economic crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Hundreds of banks issued warrants to the government in return for government aid under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, after a credit crunch caused financial markets to seize up in 2008.
Yves here. Admittedly, it is much easier telling Americans that the pursuit of lucre is a false god when most of the country is broke. But more is that FDR from the very outset set himself up as an opponent of rule by the banking classes. He depicts them as failures and calls them unscrupulous and selfish. By contrast, have were ever heard Obama even hint that bankers were less than ethical? Let’s see, last December, he called them “fat cats“! Ah yes, of course, everyone knows a cat will steal a sardine if you aren’t watching. Yeah, that Obama sure knows how to dress those bankers down!
As we discussed at greater length earlier this week, this new “get our money back” idea is pure three card Monte. Put the spotlight on the TARP so everyone will ignore all the other massive subsidies that the banks have gotten, continue to receive, and are abusing. Those who claim many banks have “paid back the TARP” are missing (more likely choosing to obfuscate) the point: the TARP calculus grossly understates of the gives and the gets here (although as we have said before and will say again, Obama’s focus on the TARP is pure political expediency).
As the Chinese government expands what it calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run news media reported Tuesday.
Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their “patriotism.”
Last November in Beijing, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched Robin Li, the CEO of Google’s main competitor, Baidu, parade onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the 2009 “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.”
The rhetoric was all about the “strength and confidence of the Chinese Internet” and “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” The reality is: China’s annual “self discipline” award is for private sector censorship.
A Vietnamese court today convicted four activists of trying to overthrow the communist government and sentenced them to up to 16 years in prison for promoting multiparty democracy.
How do the above fines compare to other crimes? Gapers Block uses the Illinois Criminal code to find that file-sharing is worse than arson, child abduction and second-degree murder, among others. This just shows how ill-conceived laws are sometimes, and copyright and patent law unfortunately provides too many examples.
Notably, in the category of recorded music (the realm of active copyright lobbyists) both countries show a declining compounded annual growth rate. But Canada’s decline is projected to -1% whereas its American counterpart shows -4.7%. Similar comparisons to U.K (-3.9%), France (-7.4%), and Germany (-1.9%) all place the Canadian music scene as more stable. This, despite the state of our copyright law.
How do you deal with an entrenched content industry that tries to pump its twisted values down your throat with ludicrously illogical emotional appeals? Well, one way is to fight fire with fire by making your own emotional appeals, and trust to the viral amplification of free culture distribution to get the message out. This is the essence of the “minute meme” idea from Question Copyright, and animator Nina Paley has fired the first volley with her one-minute animation “Copying Is Not Theft.”
This week we released a new album, and it’s our best yet. We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here. We hope you’ll like it and comment on it and pass the link along to your friends and do that wonderful thing that that you do when you’re fond of something, share it. We want you to stick it on your web page, post it on your wall, and embed it everywhere you can think of.
We may soon finds out – at least for the metal genre. Metal label and digital distributor Metalhit has dropped the prices on 95% of its album releases and catalog to $5.25. The company represents dozens of underground metal labels and artists.
Update: Aaaaaaaaaaaaand, let the backtracking commence. Verizon is apparently now claiming (to Broadband Reports) that it was all an exaggeration and that Verizon only said that it “reserved the right” to kick users off:
I’m not aware that we’ve ever terminated anyone’s account for excessive consumption, although we reserve the right to do so. Verizon has no bandwidth caps. That part of the CNET story is wrong. I did not say “we’ve cut people off.” I said we reserve the right to do so.
Update 2: And, again, Broadband Reports comes through. It has a new update with Verizon now claiming that, no, it has never kicked anyone off its network for file sharing accusations. It might want to tell its spokespeople that for future reference.
Fortunately, Judge Gertner is an eminent Constitutional Law scholar, and has demonstrated time and again that she is anything but lazy, and that even when the lawyers in the case do a lousy job, she and her staff will actually do the research and find the applicable law.
I haven’t always agreed with her decisions, and the major body of her work in the consolidated RIAA cases has been very helpful to the RIAA, but she has demonstrated time and again that she is the best lawyer in this case. -R.B.]
For Bono is probably the person least likely to say “we need to find a way to have many more artists and performers make a decent living, while allowing people on below average wages, and their children, to enjoy as much music as they like within their weekly budget”. Or he might say it, in a sudden rush of blood to the head, but is surely least likely to do anything to make it happen.
The trial will see Virgin monitor about 40 per cent of its customers — none of whom will be informed of their participation. Virgin insists that the system seeks only to determine the amount of file-sharing traffic that infringes on copyright and that it will disregard data that can finger individual users.
We just announced our event line-up for 2010 and the Call for Papers for CollabSummit. I’m very excited we’re offering the continuation of events that have been with us for awhile (CollabSummit, Kernel Summit) along with the second year of LinuxCon.
The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it’s paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabrielle took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.
During a mini-conference on Wave at Linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, Google showed off its forthcoming Extension Gallery for Wave. While you can currently browse through a basic list of extensions and add them manually, incorporating an Extensions gallery link into Wave itself (which is already active on a small number of test accounts) is much simpler. The same approach certainly proved helpful with Chrome’s Extensions feature.
But in remembering this, it brings to mind what new Linux users may be going through…and more to the point, what we probably need to remember in teaching them.
Sure, we speak the language…it’s second nature for us. We think nothing of a file system with identifiers such as .etc and .var. Sudo apt-get and sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list rolls off our fingertips as if we were navigating the simplest of tasks. Some find the /.init/.d folder and subsequent commands second nature.
The Open-PC project initiated by KDE board member Frank Karlitschek has released the specifications for its first computer. The desktop with dual-core Atom processor is due to arrive in February 2010.
Otherwise, the 5-inch tablet will have multi-touch compatibility and a customized version of the Android 1.6 operating system. The device will be available in a few colors, including pink, black and red. It is also known the Mini 5 will have a 5-megapixel camera, and there is the possibility of a secondary, front-facing camera, though this is not confirmed.
Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and Tier 1 vendors like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell have all had good lines of OEM Linux servers for several years now. IBM even puts Linux on mainframes. Traditionally these vendors have relied on Red Hat and SUSE Enterprise Linux, and mainly targeted the enterprise.
Now Ubuntu is showing up in OEMs everywhere, giving us more options than ever. Here is a roundup of five different OEM Linux servers for different tasks and budgets, from the home network to the mainframe.
However, there are other backup systems which are designed to be graphically managed. One of the most respected ones which does not seem to be straight out of a horror movie is called Bacula and is designed to pull the teeth out of your backup woes.
There are way too many Linux backup solutions available to mention in one article which is starting to creep up on the longish side so I leave you with a list of A-Z backup solutions thoughtfully provided by LinuxLinks.
Somewhere, at some point, you’re going to have to confront a new operating system. When you do, you’re going to appreciate the comfort of cross-platform applications (a fact not lost on the Ubuntu folks, who are trying to ensure popular but proprietary applications run on the open-source operating system).
Wicd is a wired and wireless network manager for Linux. Since, it doesn’t have gnome-dependencies it can be used on almost all the Desktop Environments and hence is a popular alternative to the default Network Manager. All the wicd users will be happy to know that wicd 1.7.0 is out now. Although the new version has released within 6 months of the last release 1.6.0, it still brings some new features.
This device is a real treat for the Linux and non Linux user alike. For Linux users uploading pictures and or video from this camera is as simple as plugging the camera into your system the system detects the camera and gives you the option to view the pictures.
One app I didn’t replace is Pidgin. Kopete works fine for me now (it used to complain that my password for MSN was wrong when it wasn’t), but it doesn’t have a couple of features I want. One I can forgive is that it doesn’t allow you to save and use other people’s moving smileys. However, I want to be able to cycle between chat-tabs using ctrl-tab, something I couldn’t even find in the Kopete shortcuts. That means that at the moment, I’m staying with Pidgin.
Aside from perhaps the web browser, an email reader is likely to be the first application configured on a new computer installation. And, if you are using a desktop, the default choice is likely to be KMail if you are using KDE, or Evolution if you are using GNOME.
Both KMail and Evolution are thoroughly modern email readers, with few differences in general functionality. However, if you had to choose between them, what parts of the user experience might change your mind?
To suggest an answer, I retraced the steps I made eight months ago when I moved from GNOME to KDE, comparing the two mail readers in everything from their interfaces to their features and configuration settings for accounts, contacts, message sending, and other functions. The result was a clear but not unqualified winner.
The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd.
KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth.
There are a few things in KDE’s desktop shell which have not changed for a very long time. For example I remember that the first KDE version I used (that was a 3.x with x << 5) had the same control module for window decorations as the one we will have in KDE SC 4.4. The interface displays a dropdown list with the names of the available decorations, a configuration panel for the selected decoration and a preview. This results in wonderful tabs inside tabs user interfaces – just look at the Oxygen configuration in 4.4.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #176 for the week January 10th – January 16th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx Alpha 2, Ubuntu Developer Week, Ubuntu User Day, new Ubuntu Women leadership, and Free Culture Showcase.
Just a quick note to inform you all that the day has finally come. Really! The Linux Mint 8 KDE Release Candidate was recently leaked and can, as of this writing, be downloaded either directly or via a torrent. If you download the torrent, please seed to at least 1.5x (150%). We will, of course, have a full review upon the return from CampKDE.
A new “Hardware module” was added to the Community website. This module allows you to register your hardware and to search for hardware devices based on multiple criteria.
Customizing and theming, or “skinning”, your open source browser is about to get easier, thanks to the integration of Personas in the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 release.
The Personas engine, which enables users to easily change the way the browser looks, had previously been available as a Firefox add-on, but will soon become part of the default browser itself. Other popular Firefox add-ons, including Weave and Prism might one day follow suit, as well as a new technology for add-ons called Jetpacks, Mozilla said.
The first two course books have just been published online for what is intended to become a university master programme on free and open source software and open standards.
The online master programme, Free Technology Academy (FTA) is organised by the University of Agder in Norway and two of Europe’s open universities, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain and the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands. Coordination is handled by the Free Knowledge Institute, based in the Netherlands.
Like in many countries, the first steps into open data came from the research and the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) communities. WikiMedia France and OpenStreetMap.fr are probably the most popular open knowledge projects in France. Early websites like Mon-Depute.fr — a vote monitoring project created by an archivist — or droit.org — a very active project from l’Ecole des Mines on legal publication — helped a lot to make democratic data available. Our work at Regards Citoyens on parliamentary activity with NosDéputés.fr and on electoral data is a new step for French open data for democracy and civil society.
Did I mention I hate flash? I do. It crashes a lot, and is overall a bad thing for the web, in my opinion. But I do enjoy watching videos on the web, and unfortunately, up to this day, flash is what most sites use to show videos. Months ago I read a couple of blog posts with nice hacks to make Firefox able to play youtube videos without using the flash player. Some recent discussions with colleagues at work got me itching to try my hand at something similar for Epiphany.
When a camera has been placed in location X, law enforcement’s resources flow away from X and towards Y. Often, as a result of this decision and the failures I’ve outlined here, a crime committed in X goes unsolved, with all the suffering and disappointment for victims that goes with that, because of the wholly false reliance that has been placed on those cameras.
I think this demonstrates the total pointlessness of the full-body scanners that are set to invade our privacy and humiliate passengers at our airports.
While children and families are being subjected to smirking staff with body scanning surveillance, everything these expensive machines should catch goes sailing through.
So there we have it: “sheer practicality” is all that stands between our current situation and the biometric data of every man, woman and child in Britain catalogued on a government database. Moreover, the 20-digit code is as close an approximation to the ‘actual genetic material’ as is possible. This is poor trickery by the government; the infringements upon our privacy remain in full view.
EXTRACT: The [US] report is an insult to Italian democracy, and to European farmers, food producers, retailers and consumers. It is also riddled with misinformation. (item 2)
NOTE: Over the last couple of years, GM supporters have gone all out to try and break down global resistance to GMOs, yet if anything they seem to be losing ground. Nowhere is this more the case than in Europe where the miniscule amount of GM crop cultivation has actually been shrinking, and a series of countries have introduced outright bans.
As the dreaded autumn wave ends and official deaths remain relatively low, the backlash against the H1N1 pandemic response is in full swing. Claims range from a massive overreaction by health authorities to a conspiracy cooked up by big pharma. But while swine flu may have boosted profits for vaccine manufacturers, the reality of the pandemic is more complicated.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday reversed its much-criticized position on BPA safety, saying it was concerned about the chemical’s effects on fetuses, infants and children.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is backing off its much-criticized position defending the safety of a ubiquitous chemical ingredient in plastics called Bisphenol-A (BPA). FDA now says it has “some concern” about the effects BPA has on the brain, behavior and prostate gland in fetuses, infants and children, and is offering the public tips on how to avoid the chemical.
The Tea Party money bomb has also blown up Obamacare, the President’s muddled health care reform plan. While many pundits point to local issues that helped Brown win, the fact is that Brown ran hardest against Obama’s health care bill, and won despite personal appearances in Massachusetts by Obama and Bill Clinton, and despite a desperate but failed Democratic effort to beat back the insurgency.
The explanation for Wall Street’s high pay lies elsewhere. Most of us are paid based on what we produce or, more realistically, what our employers produce. By contrast, Wall Street compensation levels are tied to the nation’s overall wealth. Investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and many other financial institutions trade stocks, bonds and other securities for their own profit. They also advise mutual funds, pension funds, endowments and wealthy individuals on how to invest and trade.
President Obama’s proposal to tax bailed-out banks offers taxpayers a momentary thrill of retribution, but it’s not likely to change Wall Street’s risky behavior.
The fees would be imposed on about 50 of the largest banks, based on their liabilities. Among the targets are Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc. – firms with assets of more than $50 billion.
They robbed Americans of their future. They cost perhaps a generation of hard-working people a decent pay check. And they left millions of people with empty 401(k)s, with some seniors being booted from their retirement homes because there was no money left. And, yet, they still don’t get it–or maybe they truly don’t care.
Wall Street is threatening to sue the president over his quite modest proposal to tax the banks who created the greatest economic crisis in the past 50 years…
They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
Figuring that out means asking the likes of Blankfein or Dimon basic yet pointed questions such as whether their business model was, and possibly still is, broken. That didn’t happen. Instead we got Commissioner John Thompson asking Morgan Stanley’s Mack for suggestions on ‘how to think about innovation and managing the risks associated with innovation.’
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today. He cited his strong statutory authority to go after the firms that had a role in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. His team was tackling securities fraud, accounting fraud, financial discrimination and fraud related to the stimulus bill. It was an impressive list, but what was not impressive was the first case he touted – Bernie Madoff.
In 2005, Trijicon won a $660 million, long-term contract to supply the scopes to the Marine Corps. Spokespeople for the Army and the Marine Corps denied knowing about the biblical markings, even though numerous discussions have appeared about them in Internet talk forums and on YouTube since 2006.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama’s signature financial reform, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), was in trouble in the Senate.
Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) was considering dropping the idea of creating an independent, stand-alone consumer protection body, empowered to crack down on banking abuses, in order to get a regulatory revamp passed this year with bipartisan support. Dodd is apparently considering shrinking the CFPA into a division of an already existing federal agency (no doubt one with a proven track-record of failing consumers.)
A code which will act as the model for Ofcom, the UK regulator, to supervise the new copyright enforcement measures against peer-to-peer downloading, has been drafted by the UK government.
The Digital Economy Bill provides for the regulator, Ofcom, to supervise the new copyright enforcement measures targeting Internet users. The measures, which occupy over one third of the Bill, initially target peer-to-peer users, but in fact, the scope of the Bill looks set to go much wider. (I am still in the process of analysing it, but this is my current view.)
Florian from the UK Open Rights Group writes in with news of an upcoming set of workshops to help people who care about civil liberties and the open and free Internet talk to their Members of Parliament about the terrible Digital Economy Bill…
Oh dear. I hadn’t seen this post of Barry’s before he retweeted it. Um, how do I put this politely? Barry, you messed up.
Prof. Geist tries to taint the recording industry as blatant copyright infringers, without ever delving into the industry wide accepted custom for clearing mechanical rights. The pending list system, which has been around for decades, represents an agreed upon industry wide consensus that songwriters, music publishers (who represent songwriters) and the recording industry use and rely on to ensure that music gets released and to the market efficiently and the proper copyright owners get compensated.
But Barry, the recording industry are blatant copyright infringers. Or at least they sure give that impression. Let’s see:
Cher sues UMG over royalties
JoJo Sues Record Label
TIMBALAND SUES RECORD LABEL
Courtney Love Sues Record Label
Allman Brothers Band sues record company for $13M
Eminem Sues Record Label Over iTunes Royalties
Beatles to sue record label
Eurovision star sues record label over contract dispute
Smashing Pumpkins sue record label over use of songs in Pepsi promotional deals
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.
Today I was informed by Peter Murray, Lorra-Lea’s assistant, that she had talked with CBS’ Vice President of Business Affairs, and “there are so many issues with those shows, that even if we took the time to figure it out, we still almost certainly wouldn’t do the deal.” So that’s it. Access to the Jack Benny television masters is sealed.
In 1964, James Aubrey told Jack Benny that his weekly television series was terminated with the words, “YOU’RE THROUGH, OLD MAN!” Sadly, 46 years later, CBS has repeated the sentiment by condemning these shows to permanent silence.
For a while now, we’ve tried very carefully to not make the mistake that is common in the press (and among politicians) to assume that “the recording industry” (i.e., the record labels) is “the music industry.” The two are quite different. In fact, by almost every measure, the music industry has been thriving over the past few years, while the recording industry is in rapid decline. And yet, the two are regularly confused.
The term ‘music industry’ is a misnomer. In reality the ‘music industry’ is not one industry, it is several independent industries. This is an important distinction because if we say that there is a “crisis in the music industry” it suggests an equal amount of misfortune for everyone (musicians, the recording industry, the live-music industry, Internet radio, etc.) and in fact this not true. Misuse of the term ‘music industry’ distorts the reality of the situation. For example:
* The RIAA occasionally misrepresents itself as being a figurehead for the entire “music industry” when in actuality it is a trade organization for a group of labels in the recording industry.
* Peter Jamieson, chair of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), attempted to speak about the “The Music Industry Crisis” at an industry convention in the UK in September 2003, but instead outlined issues particular to the recording sector.
[...]
While it may be difficult to completely eradicate the term ‘music industry’ from our everyday vernacular, journalists and media outlets should certainly be more conscious not to say “the music industry” when they specifically mean to say “the recording industry”.
By monitoring and managing Linux systems, MSPs, VARs and IT support organisations can extend the services they offer and earn more revenue, says the firm. This new development also enables them to replace the more complex and costly monitoring systems they may be using to manage Linux devices while getting all the benefits of one consolidated monitoring and management system.
Virginia Tech’s newest musical ensemble has a problem with one of its songs.
A faint cough can be heard on the track “Citadel,” briefly interrupting soprano graduate student Chelsea Crane’s vocals. It seems only the most discerning listeners would take notice of the small blemish, but to composer Ivica Ico (pronounced Ee-zo) Bukvic, it is deafening.
“In a song so serene, a cough sounds like an explosion of nuclear proportions,” he announces to the students in the room. His playful tone belies what the perfectionist composer considers a serious problem.
Among the many conferences and conventions held in the Open Source world, a select few stand out from the pack. Among these is the annual linux.conf.au, which brings hundreds of Linux and Open Source advocates together each year for a week of learning, networking, and more than a little fun.
I’ve followed with interest the NOSQL movement, and was interested to hear from Josh (of PostgreSQL Experts Inc.) what I expected would be a “relationalist” point of view.
LXC uses existing Linux kernel facilities to group processes within containers into control groups, which can then be used to control access and scheduling of resources (network, CPU, storage, etc.). Each resource type has a namespace similar in principle to what chroot() provides for filesystems. Since all of the hardware is visible to a single kernel, there can be a great deal of flexibility in how resources are allocated. For example, a given network device and CPU can be dedicated to a container.
Linus Torvalds was bitten by a penguin while holidaying in Australia. It’s widely believed this encounter encouraged Torvalds to select Tux as the official Linux mascot.
The Wellington conference has been going on for 11 years and is one of the largest in the world to be held on the subject. More often, the conference is hosted by Australia, and this is the second time the New Zealand is getting to play host.
Mark Osborne is not a technical person. That’s the first point he made when he stood up to deliver his presentation on The Open Source Secondary School at the 11th Australian national Linux conference this morning.
He is an English teacher and the deputy principal of Albany Senior High School in Auckland which opened its doors in 2009. It has the proud distinction of being the first state-funded senior high school to exclusively use open source software for every need.
In a blog posting by Matthew Helmke, a member of the Ubuntu Forum Council, Helmke wrote, “We are trying to gather preferences for the apps that users would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu. While we all believe in the power of open source applications we are also very keen that users should get to choose the software they want to use. There are some great apps that aren’t yet available to Ubuntu users and Canonical would like to know the priority that users would like to see them.”
Still, Ubuntu is hedging its bets. Helmke carefully spells out that “This is not about applications to be included by default, but merely things that we may attempt to make more easily available for Ubuntu users to install for themselves from official repositories.”
In a official post on the Ubuntu Forums, user Matthew (a official Canonical employee?) asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in the upcoming versions of Ubuntu.
While we don’t normally talk much about ReactOS, the free software operating system that was started some twelve years ago to provide binary compatible with Windows NT, there is a new proposal to abandon much of its Win32 subsystem that has built up over the past decade and to create a new Windows subsystem that in large part is derived from Wine code.
The operating system devised by him, LinuXP, has minimal hardware requirement and was built using Linux and WINE, an open source software which allows you to run Windows programs like Microsoft Office and Notepad.
Next is our friendly penguin friend sporting an “IBM Client for Smart Work” label. Get yours starting tomorrow at the Lotus Knows challenge immediately upon entering the exhibit hall at the bottom of the escalator.
The underlying Linux operating system for the system is based on a flavor of Linux that was created by Net Integration Technologies (NiTIX), which IBM acquired in 2008 to get the core autonomic management software that would eventually give rise to IBM Lotus Foundations.
Ever get tired of Windows people proclaiming how their operating system has device support for this, that, and the other thing and Linux doesn’t? Well, now you have a perfect come-back. The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0 is out and only Linux has native support for it.
With Ubuntu 10.04 basing off the Linux 2.6.32 kernel and this distribution release being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release that will be maintained longer than normal Ubuntu releases — and other vendors using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel for their enterprise updates too — this kernel will live on longer as well.
The 2.6.27-stable kernel tree is still living on, as a “long-term” stable release. But, I do have to warn users of this tree, the older it gets, the less viable it becomes. Not all bugfixes are being backported to this kernel version due to massive code changes in the over 2 years since this kernel has been released. I am doing my best to backport fixes that I become aware of, and I encourage anyone who does fix any types of bugs in the main kernel tree to let me know if the change should be applied to this older kernel version.
The Linux Foundation® (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that it has finalized its event schedule for 2010, which includes its Collaboration Summit, End User Summit, LinuxCon, Japan Linux Symposium and Linux Kernel Summit.
It will take about two or three years for the ext4 filesystem, that has been adopted as the default by some community GNU/Linux distributions, to be routinely deployed on production systems, according to senior Linux kernel hacker Theodore Ts’o.
As the results in this article show, there are some dramatic performance drops with the EXT4 file-system that have occurred since this evolutionary file-system was marked stable in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. Most of these drops are occurring as kernel developers work to improve the reliability and safety of this file-system, as we have shared numerous times now. Some of the biggest hits have occurred with the read performance in test scenarios like IOzone between the Linux 2.6.30 and 2.6.31 kernels where the performance was severely dampened. In the Linux 2.6.32 kernel due to EXT4 fsync changes, the PostgreSQL performance was slaughtered with pre-2.6.32 kernels being five times faster.
Bartlett is one of those top programmers who still retains an air of humility. Once you’ve been around the block with FOSS types, you’ll notice that, as with the masses, it’s the empty vessels that make the most sound.
The Nautilus file-manager included in Ubuntu is… well.. crowded. We already saw some changes developers are taking to tame to the vast areas of wasted space and useless buttons in our over-view of Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 and prior to that we drooled over a ‘Simplified Nautilus’ – which is sadly no longer updated.
When I first started using Ubuntu some 3 years ago, I found it really hard to get applications similar to the ones I used in Windows. After browsing for a long time, I made this amazing discovery. You don’t have to look for “similar” apps, you can have even better apps here in Ubuntu/Linux. Here are some of my all time favorite and most sought after multimedia apps for Ubuntu.
The people at Opera Labs are being very careful with this release, and taking much time before going so far as to call a delivered product a beta. Another build, 3199, has been released as alpha, dropping the pre- from the moniker.
I came across a lengthy interview with the Arch Linux team, and having been using the distribution for the last several months, I thought I would write about my experiences and what makes it great for me.
As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while already know, Kubuntu was previously my distribution of choice. To me, it was the perfect KDE distro and gave me the best that KDE had to offer with each release.
When talking about the state of Fedora 13 features last week following our early Fedora 13 benchmarks, the Btrfs system snapshot feature was marked as being 0% complete. However, the Fedora 13 feature list has been updated and this feature is now deemed 80% complete.
There has been an effort underway within the Debian development community to pull the FreeBSD kernel within this distribution to provide an alternative to using the Linux kernel. In essence with this Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project you have the standard Debian package set providing a GNU user-land with a GNU C library, but the FreeBSD kernel is running underneath. The Debian project has also been working on Debian GNU/Hurd to effectively do the same thing but with the GNU Mach microkernel. But unlike Debian GNU/Hurd, with the release of Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will reach a release status. With the Debian Squeeze release being just two months away we have decided to provide the first public set of benchmarks that compare the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD performance to that of Debian GNU/Linux. We have tested both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Debian with the Linux and FreeBSD kernels.
As you are probably aware, in Lucid the platform team is working and re-planning in three separate milestones. Last week we passed the first such milestone, Alpha 2. The desktop team then re-planned for the next milestone, Alpha 3. This posting provides a chance to understand those plans. Note that these work items are documented in detail on the relevant blueprints.
Lubuntu combines Ubuntu with the “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment”, more commonly known as LXDE, which provides a “fast-performing and energy-saving” working enviroment for users and it perfectly suited to low-power hardware.
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Not having had many preconceptions regarding LXDE/Lubuntu i found myself presently surprised. It was pleasent to look at, pleasent to use and although i doubt i would switch from GNOME to LXDE it can give excellent performance to those who would benefit from doing so.
Were my netbook still alive (needs a new charger!) i would have loved to have put Lubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 through its paces on more modest hardware. I would be especially interested to see how it stacks up against Xubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1… but for now i think Lubuntu is a very worthy entrant into the pantheon of *buntu!
This crazy guitar is actually an open source MIDI system using a sexy touchscreen with multi-touch and reactive fretboard. The result? Let’s just say while you probably won’t get much cherry pie playing this thing, the guys at Information Society will definitely invite you into their trailer at the Iowa State Fair this year.
If you don’t believe me, then check out the video after the jump. You will note this guy is shredding on the Linux-powered Misa Digital Guitar, and there are no strings, just a light-up touchscreen.
The manufacturers of the telephone, which was scheduled for launch in China on Wednesday, are Motorola and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, and China Unicom would have been the carrier, a Google spokeswoman said.
Google is not the leading search company in China, and it’s revenue from China is minor compared to its business elsewhere. Thus the affects on China’s search industry, and Google’s revenue stream are predictable. So this post takes a look at some unknowns, what might happen to Android in China if Google were to officially leave the Chinese market.
Numerous consumer-focused tablet and slate computers were on display at this month’s CES show in Las Vegas, many of them loaded with Android, but few of them were actually shipping. Camangi announced its WebStation in October, and the device now appears to be shipping, joining only a few others in the 7-inch or larger tablet category for consumers, such as the Linux-based Archos 7.
Although Android will see the most growth in terms of LG handsets, the company will continue to offer Windows Mobile phones, which have previously dominated its mobile phone line, and will also introduce more Linux models, according to the story.
Movidius has announced that its Myriad mobile phone media processor supports the Android operating system.
The Linux-based Android operating system developed by Google is growing in importance in the smartphone market and chipset suppliers clearly recognise the necessity to support it in their silicon.
In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline-catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang. Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and 11 other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes 14 defendants.
The Disney Ptex library is now available to the public community of texture artists, lighters and modelers. The new open source library supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (including quad and non-quad faces), Loop subdivision surfaces and polymeshes (either all-quad or all-triangle). Also, several data types are supported including 8 or 16-bit integer, float, and half-precision float. An arbitrary number of channels can be stored in a Ptex file. Arbitrary meta data can be stored in the Ptex file and accessed through the memory-managed cache.
Misys Open Source Software says its Connect Exchange application was successfully tested at the Chicago IHE Connectathon, paving the way for an open source, standards-based platform for exchanging health info. Such a platform could represent an important step in moving medical data away from paper records and toward digital files.
The OpenRouteService team at the University of Heidelberg has responded to the catastrophic situation of victims and destroyed infrastructure following the earthquake in Haiti by providing recovery forces with a new version of its live routing service.
At 17, Elizabeth Garbee is quite a veteran of the various Linux conferences, having spoken at the Australian conference thrice, beginning in 2005 in Canberra.
Recently Norway’s own broadcasting company (NRK) went to open standards by choosing ODF file formats over that of those provided by Microsoft’s Office products. This is not really that groundbreaking considering how much other parts of the world opt to embrace open standards while here in the U.S. we cling to what’s easiest. But it did serve as a reminder that changes are coming in what users want from their software.
Clearly, there is significant interest in open source software as a potential cost saving, among other advantages. The key is making sure that legacy headaches among issues of software trust and familiarity. It’s an unfortunate mindset that is not only a problem in the corporate world, but in everyday homes as well.
The Philippine Trade Training Center (PTTC) is inviting interested manager/owners/ HR managers/web enthusiasts in a two-day Basic Web Design Course using Joomla open source software.
There are a number of other firms and/or Open Source projects that would be good buys/plays which would form the other portions of the “Google Security” stack.
It’s important at this point to note that Google’s code is not copyleft. It supports the Apache license, which is compatible with GPLV3 but not with GPLV2. Google understands the need to provide opportunity for software beneath its cloud layer, and for ongoing help in maintaining the cloud.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog, Oracle and Sun expect that the European Commission will approve the acquisition of Sun Microsystems some time this week. The report which cites sources close to both companies, comes as the 27th of January deadline for the Commission’s decision approaches and suggests that the official announcement of the successful acquisition will be issued in early February.
Vanilla Forums, an open source community forum software technology, has raised a $500,000 (CAD) Series A funding. Vanilla Forums was a Techstars summer 2009 company.
Maker Culture? It’s people taking things — food, entertainment, technology, politics, and even science — into their own hands. That’s a simple definition and it’s exactly where 45 Canadian journalism students began their journey in early September. That’s when Wayne MacPhail, the instructor of the online journalism courses at both Ryerson University in Toronto and the University of Western Ontario in London, introduced us, his students, to the idea of Maker Culture. We discovered that a lot lies beneath that simple definition.
The Groovy-Eclipse developers have delivered version 2.0 of the plugin for developers who want to work with Groovy and Java in the Eclipse IDE. The new version is the culmination of work which began in May 2009 to create a more integrated, incremental compilation process. This has resulted in what the developers call an “almost completely rewritten” plugin.
NO they aren’t strange art installations or odd Christmas decorations.
The mysterious black poles that have popped up along Hounslow High Street are in fact part of a council and police partnership to keep us safe, and are to hold new CCTV cameras.
Police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
The office of India’s National Security Advisor, M.K. Narayanan, and other government offices in India were targeted by hackers believed to be from China, according to a report.
Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him’.
Last week saw a flagrant attack on civil liberty mounted in the name of peace. A man who likes to walk around with a rucksack was told that he may have to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The rucksack, in this case, was not the cause of this draconian warning. It contained no bombs, real or fake. The problem was what the man, Stephen Gough, wore underneath the backpack: nothing.
A British environmental campaigner who was arrested in India during a crackdown on terrorism for carrying a satellite phone without permission will tomorrow hear if he will be released after a week in custody.
The Attorney-General sent a furious letter to the Defence Secretary a year before the invasion of Iraq warning that he saw “considerable difficulties” in giving legal approval for war, it emerged this morning.
Lord Goldsmith complained to Geoff Hoon that he had put in a “difficult position” by the Defence Secretary’s public claim that Britain would be entitled to use force without a specific United Nations resolution.
In a previously secret letter released by the Iraq Inquiry this morning, Lord Goldsmith said that he had given no opinion on the legality of military action.
“I think you should know that I see considerable difficulties in being satisfied that military action would be justified on the basis of self-defence,” he wrote.
The US military has taken control of the only airport in Port-au-Prince and is facing criticism for diverting some aid planes. Doctors Without Borders says five of its planes carrying surgical teams and equipment weren’t allowed to land and were diverted to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. US forces also turned back a French aid plane carrying a field hospital. Al Jazeera English aired this report on Sunday.
THE CARIBBEAN Community’s emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising Heads of Government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission Friday to land at that devasted country’s aiport, now under the control of the United States.
Consequently, the Caricom ’assessment mission’, that was to determine priority humanitarian needs resulting from the mind-boggling earthquake disaster of Haiti last Tuesday, had to travel back from Jamaica to their respective home destinations..
Cuba has sent ten tons of medications. Since 1998, Cuba’s health cooperation with Haiti has made it possible for 6,000 doctors, paramedics and health technicians to work there. Besides, 450 young Haitians have graduated as doctors from Cuban colleges, free of charge, in the past 12 years.
A Christian group calling themselves Faith Comes by Hearing is sending not food or medicines to the needy population of Haiti, but 600 solar-powered digital Bibles that speak and proclaim the gospel in Creole.
The war on terror? Here it is. The casualties of that war? Here they are. And now, as spotlights swings towards Sana’a and political packs yelp excitedly about Yemeni training camps, Pakistan’s problems suddenly fade from view. Other countries must hear the tough talk. One pair of pants and the west wallows in hysteria before ordering stops, searches and profilings for hapless doctors who keep health systems going. One pair of pants against 3,021 violent deaths. Is that what we mean by proportionality?
The dreaded shipworm is moving into the Baltic Sea, threatening artefacts of the area’s cultural heritage. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, suspect that the unfortunate spread is due to climate change, and are currently involved in an EU project to determine which archaeological remains are at risk.
There has been a massive surge in illegal ivory trading, researchers warned last week. They have found that more than 14,000 products made from the tusks and other body parts of elephants were seized in 2009, an increase of more than 2,000 on their previous analysis in 2007.
Pity executives at genetically modified seed giant Monsanto. Not only are they having to knock heads with Department of Justice lawyers over the company’s business practices, but some of their most-cherished PR talking points are being obliterated by researchers.
In the past few months, we’ve learned that its much-vaunted technologies don’t really increase yields after all; and aren’t really all that promising for adapting to climate change.
People here have one thing to thank Somali pirates for: Better fishing.
In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia’s coast and scooped up the ocean’s contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.
The E-Commerce Directive protects service providers from liability for material that they neither create nor monitor but simply store or pass on to users of their service. The Directive is implemented in the UK by the E-Commerce Regulations.
But rather than just demand the takedown of the specific content in question, the judge ordered the sites taken down completely, and even a Facebook group closed. That’s way over the line and goes well beyond what the lawsuit was about. It was great to see the EFF take up the case, but it’s a shame to see others miss the bigger picture.Esahc writes in to point out that Vivek Wadhwa has penned a column for TechCrunch blasting the EFF for defending these sites. I can understand why Wadhwa is upset about the sites. The sites are undoubtedly racist and despicable. They are also ignorant and economically illiterate. Some of the posts are, clearly, hate speech, and inciting violence against certain individuals.
One of the biggest issues facing individuals and corporations choosing to adopt public cloud computing (or any Internet service, for that matter) is the relative lack of clarity with respect to legal rights over data stored online. I’ve reported on this early legal landscape a couple of times, looking at decisions to relax expectations of privacy for e-mail stored online and the decision to allow the FBI to confiscate servers belonging to dozens of companies from a co-location facility whose owners were suspected of fraud.
Maybe it’s because I was schooled in political science, not computer science. But frankly I’ve been surprised by the extent to which some respected commentators have focused on trashing Google for lacking purity of motive. As if that were some kind of brilliant revelation. Of course Google’s actions are motivated by self-interest.
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In the United States, Google’s policy positions are frequently aligned with free speech activists and the open source/free culture community – as they go head-to-head against traditional telcos and media companies in policy fights over copyright law, Net Neutrality, the evil secretive and scary ACTA trade agreement, and other issues. In Italy, for example, Google executives are facing criminal charges because the Italian government wants to hold Internet companies like Google more directly liable for what users do on their services, which encourages a global trend that would inevitably result in companies having to massively increase the extent to which they track, police and censor users – which in turn not only has serious implications for human rights and free expression but also drastically increases Internet companies’ overhead, making their business model much less sustainable. This isn’t just a problem in Italy.
The telecom package pushed the European legislation process to its limits. Hopefully Kroes won’t make the same mistake as Reding and make proposals that can be easier processed and reviewed. Some stakeholders are still clouded by the fog of war. But we also have a very nice technical overview of the process.
With comments due last week on the FCC’s proposed new net neutrality rules, we’ve already covered some of the filings, while noting the problems of carving out a special exemption for copyright. But, of course, that special exemption for copyright means everything to an entertainment industry that has no interest in adapting its business models. Both the RIAA and MPAA filed their own comments, which were pretty similar, and equally misleading. The RIAA’s filing (pdf) repeatedly referred to copyright infringement as “theft” (you would think lawyers would know the difference) and insisted not just that there should be a copyright exemption, but that the FCC itself should require ISPs to act as copyright cops. The MPAA’s filing (pdf) is almost a carbon copy of the RIAA’s. There is very little difference between the two.
Separately, with so much pressure coming from other countries, we wondered if Canada would be able to resist implementing ever more draconian copyright laws, which would be a serious drain on the Canadian economy. So far they have resisted, but the pressure from outside continues to be fierce. We recently noted that US lobbyists and lawyers were insisting that Canada needed to be dragged into the 21st century, and now European trade negotiators are pushing hard on Canada to change its copyright laws despite no actual evidence of any problem with existing laws.
There have been rumors for a while that, despite the NY Times massive failure with its last attempt at a paywall — which drove away users in bunches, pissed off NY Times writers and did little to help the bottom line — the NY Times might consider going back down that cursed road. And now reports are leaking out that the braintrust at the NYT has made a decision and it’s to kill off whatever value the NY Times’ online presence may have had by putting up a paywall designed to piss off users and take itself out of the online conversation.
Tom Silverman (TommyBoy Entertainment) tells Rick Goetz (Musician Coaching – great blog by the way) that in 2008, 1,500 releases broke the “obscurity line” (sold over 10,000 albums).
Oxford University has decided to ban the music streaming application Spotify because it uses P2P technology. Although Spotify is completely legal, the University has banned the application because the underlying P2P technology allegedly turns it into a bandwidth hog.
The Swedish ISP TeliaSonera is refusing to comply with a court ruling ordering the company to hand over information identifying the owner of SweTorrents. Instead, it has appealed the decision, arguing that the verdict is in violation of the European data retention directive and claiming that SweTorrents doesn’t host any copyrighted files.
The upcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals, shows how copyright has outrageously criminalized the use of sampling, which has been disproportionately popular in hip hop music. In this, it calls to mind the racially disproportionate impact of drug laws on minorities…
X-Rite, Incorporated (NASDAQ: XRIT), the world leader in color management, measurement and communication technologies, today announced that it has developed a new software development toolkit (SDK) for its Hubble non-contact laser-guided colorimeter.
There are reports coming in that 2009 was a turn-around year for the PC with 90 million shipping in the 4th quarter. Acer surpassed Dell globally in units shipped. Netbooks are still climbing with huge share in China, particularly. “7″ did not drive sales… That means a lot of GNU/Linux system were released upon the world. It was the Year of GNU/Linux on the desktop.
Wellington sported a grey visage this morning, a time of day when geeks are normally sleeping off the effects of late-night hacking sessions and the excessive intake of coffee.
Berkus’ talk, at the “Business in Open Source” mini-conference this morning, was titled “Ten ways to destroy your community” and described in detail how a proprietary company could go about killing an open source community which it had acquired.
January brings with it the southern-hemisphere’s summer and Linux.conf.au. This year, the conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Capital Cabal, a team of volunteer organisers lead by Susanne and Andrew Ruthven.
The theme for my morning, on the first day of the conference, was version control. The conference day was divided into mini-confs covering different topic areas, but this was a common theme of the sessions I attended in different mini-confs.
Also attending the conference with his latest “RepRap” open source 3D printer is Vik Olliver, one of two Kiwis on the eight-person international project.
At the more familiar ICT core of open source, Linux, Jonathan Courbet will give an update on recent developments in the Linux kernel and Ted Tso will talk about the filing system associated with Linux in its current version, ext4.
Pfeiffer, who organised the Foundations of Open Media Software workshop in Wellington in the week before the conference, got the assistance of a few people from the group and arranged for transcoding of the video from a proprietary format to the open Ogg Theora/Vorbis format.
Around 40% of delegates are from Wellington and other parts of New Zealand, 40% are from Australia with the remaining coming from various countries around the world.
Open Source Society president Don Christie said a variety of topics would be discussed at the conference with a focus on technical development and raising the profile of open source software.
From Chrome OS Diet to Cherry and now the latest, Zero, Hexxeh has been the primary source for Chrome OS build releases ever since Google released the Chromium code to the masses in November. They’ve been popular mostly because they work with a lot of existing hardware, plus the builds are small enough to fit on any USB drive. We got a chance to ask some questions of Hexxeh, who just released Chrome OS Zero a few days ago and talks about how he got started, future job prospects and some technical features in his latest version.
Most photography related workflows have already gone digital, and for most people, the internet is already the best medium for sharing their work.
If you take even a small number of photographs, you are sure to find sending them via email a rather unpleasant way of sharing. If you are into photography, odds are you already use a service such as Picasa Web Albums of Flickr for storing your images.
In windows there is the registry, the registry is a database which keeps all your settings. If you want to change anything not in a menu (or in a menu) you need to use the regedit program Or a script.
In Linux there is no such thing as a registry.
In Linux everything is a file
All configurations are in text files, and everything in Linux is treated as a file. This is a much simpler approach which makes it very easy to change things in Linux. In Linux even your filesystem itself can be viewed as a file.
Only one month after the 5.0 release, Amahi 5.1 is already released. Amahi Linux Home Server is a server targeted for home and home office environments.
CSIRO will spend up to $5 million on a Linux-based high performance computing system to help boost research efforts at the Pawsey Centre for SKA Science in Perth.
The Pawsey High Performance Computer (HPC) will be used in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, which will use a telescope 50 times more sensitive than current instruments and about 3600 antennae spread over thousands of kilometres to peer into deep space.
On the plus side, the Linux-based NX OS is modular, so a problem with any particular process won’t bring down the entire system. That’s a big improvement over monolithic IOS, and should enhance stability.
Arista’s EOS also runs on Linux, and does more than any other switch tested to make Linux features available to users. This isn’t just piping command output to any Linux program, handy as that is. The command set also allows network managers to drop into a Bash shell and run virtually any Linux command – including applying bug fixes without a reboot, a unique feature in this test.
Juxtapose that with what a 10-year-old encounters in 2010. Basically everything Just Works (even Windows most of the time). Want to install Linux on a random desktop or laptop? The vast majority of the time you won’t even have to download a single driver. Want to write some cool script? Chances are that someone already has, and you can find the code in Google. Copy, paste, and you’re done.
According to Paul, Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90% of the desktops at Weta Digital. He notes that his cluster is in fact an Ubuntu Server cluster, and not RHEL as he has seen reported in the media.
The latest release of the Linux kernel, 2.6.33 is expected to be out by the beginning of March and among its new features is a reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia graphics chipsets.
Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel contributor, co-founder of LWN.net and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition, will give Linux.conf.au attendees a full update on the Linux kernel at the conference on Wednesday. He told Computerworld version 2.6.33 is “pretty well along in production”.
News comes along thick and fast these days, and to keep on top of it all a feed reader is essential. Most news services and blogs worth their salt utilize RSS (really simple syndication) feeds to make gathering this information easier. Once you have your feeds from all of your favourite sites set up, you never really have to manually visit the sites ever again: instead the news is brought straight to you. So, with Newsbeuter 2.1 out just last month, I took the opportunity to try out the latest version of my favourite terminal-based feed reader and catch up with the lead developer Andreas Krennmair.
We love Puppy Linux in every form. Puppy is fast and light on its feet. The addition of games is a fun way to take advantage of the nimble Puppy platform. If you are a fan of 80’s style arcade games, Puppy Arcade is probably the best platform for you. Running your games in RAM, without ever touching a hard drive, will be a cinch with the ease of Puppy Linux.
If you are new to Linux and want to experience the sheer speed and fool-proof power of Linux, Puppy is the way to go!
What was your first computer? For me I started my computing life with a ZX Spectrum. A rubber keyed marvel with a massive 48k memory. It makes me feel rather old to think that there are a generation of computer users who have never experienced loading software from tape.
It was only fitting then that my first experience of emulation came some years later when I owned an Amiga 500 and a Spectrum emulator. Moving on some years, my first emulator on the PC was the Windows binary Genem which only reached v0.19 and has been discontinued since 1997.
I saved the best for last. I have long believed that applications like OpenOffice.org should have support for tabbed word processing. It just makes sense. Why should tabs be limited to web browsers or file managers? With KDE, you no longer have to wait on individual application developers. The KWin window manager itself supports tabbing.
Simply right click on a window’s title bar and select “Move to window group”. Then, select the window you want to group with it. Almost like magic, the two windows will become one, and there will be two or more tabs in the title bar. But this feature is not only limited within applications. You can group any application with any other. You could group a Firefox window with a Konqueror one and compare website rendering, which is useful for web design. KDE’s window specific features also now give you the ability to set how you want new windows of an application to group. For example, my OpenOffice.org documents now automatically open in new tabs rather than new windows.
Nepomuk, the “social-semantic desktop” framework named with a cute half-dragon namesake. It’s an amazing set of technologies, but there are two huge challenges for it in 2010. If we conquer those challenges together, we will be laughing.
KDE has added new dimensions to our repertoire over the last few years. A move towards greater awareness that we are part of a larger free culture movement that has taken hold in various ways and form around the world is one such shift. It hasn’t changed what we do (create client-side software with all the trimmings) but it has changed some of how we do it and what we include in our software.
Gnome Shell is the future window manager for UNIX-like operating systems running the Gnome desktop environment. It is slated to be part of the Gnome 3.0, which will probably be released sometime next year. However, this does not mean you cannot try Gnome Shell now and get the first impression of what it ought to be.
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Gnome Shell is a handsome beast, there’s no disputing that. In fact, I don’t think anyone will argue the good looks, the blend of colors, the smooth integrations. Even old times like me have to cede that.
Slackware is the oldest Linux distribution still with us and has a loyal following among those long term Linux users who pine for the old fashioned virtues of simplicity, straightforwardness and lack of bloat.
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Volkerding still largely runs Slack as a one man operation. This has its drawbacks and its virtues. Packages are only updated if they require little or no tweaking to raise their performance, and some, such as GNOME, have been dropped, because they require too much configuration.
Jobbik is not a new Linux distribution, but a political party, hell bent on making Hungary an open source powerhouse, if wins the upcoming general election, in April.
This is an awesome news, because the other parties always favored proprietary software use in governement, paying only lip service to open source solutions.
I’ve always had a good deal of respect for the various flavours of BSD. Each of them holds down an interesting niche in the open source community and I generally enjoy using them when I have the opportunity. So it was with a good deal of excitement that I read about Jibbed, a live CD based off the latest version of NetBSD. I, admittedly, have had little experience with the operating system whose claim to fame is the ability to run on anything, even a toaster, and this seemed like a good chance to see what was new in NetBSD.
The Jibbed web site displays a clean and easy-to-navigate layout. It’s very easy on the eyes and contains lots of useful information on the project. This includes some frequently asked questions (and answers), a Wiki and ways to contact the developer. By the time my download was done and checked for errors, I was already feeling hopeful about this project. The Jibbed image file is medium in size, weighing in at about 465 MB. For my safari into Jibbed I used two physical machines, a LG laptop with a 1.5 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM and an ATI video card. I also used a generic desktop box with a 2.5 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM and a NVIDIA video card. To round out the experiment, I set up Jibbed in a virtual machine too.
Earlier today Lyz Krumbach sent an email to the Ubuntu Women Project mailing list announcing that the Ubuntu Community Council had appointed me as the interim leader of the Project. I was speechless! I appreciate those of you who gave testimonials for not only me but for Melissa Draper and Penelope Stowe as well. Melissa and Penelope both have some amazing goals and vision for the team and I can’t wait to see the team adopt and incorporate all these as we update and follow the roadmap to a successful growing Ubuntu Women Project.
On the surface, trying to write a comparative review of Linux Mint 8 (Helena) and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic koala) would seem like a pointless exercise. After all, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. So what’s the point? Well, as in cases such as this, where one product is based on another, there begins to emerge – at some point – a product differentiation. In the case of Mint and Ubuntu, that differentiation has been apparent almost from the first year of Mint’s existence.
MontaVista® Software, LLC, the leader in embedded Linux® commercialization, announced BAE Systems Bofors in Sweden has selected MontaVista Linux to power their new naval and artillery gun systems. The use of a commercial quality embedded Linux provides for rapid development, combined with the long-term support required for military applications.
It seems like a lifetime since we first reported on the announcement of the open source Pandora handheld project: since then the machine’s release has been beset by all manner of issues and has missed several tentative ‘deadlines’ over the past year or so.
Of course, the fact that the team behind the console isn’t a massive multinational corporation but rather a small group of enthusiasts who have full-time jobs in addition to this little undertaking doesn’t help matters, but the good news is that the Pandora’s troubled genesis is about to come to an end.
The Nokia N900 mobile computer may just have a 3.5-inch display and a 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, but it does have a PowerVR SGX graphics processor that is capable of providing OpenGL ES 2.0 support, albeit through a binary-only driver. While this hardware is not much, it is enough for some gaming even with the ioquake3 engine. The ioquake3 engine, which is the free software project founded around the open-sourced id Tech 3 engine, is used by games like World of Padman, Tremulous, Urban Terror, and other free software games. Now thanks to the world of Oliver McFadden, an ioquake3 port is running — and running quite well — on Nokia’s N900.
With Google currently concentrating on its own Android operating system, support for Google Maps on the Maemo 5 operating system isn’t official. However, because the Nokia N900’s operating system is Open Source, it’s easy for individuals from the Maemo Community to come up with their own software. The result in this case is a browser-based Google Maps application.
British scribe Paul Carr is not one to mince words. For him, Google’s newfound morality around censorship and China is too little, too late. Four years too late, to be precise. And I agree with him — up to a point. Morality has to be absolute; it cannot be used as a tool of convenience. That said, and despite being a born cynic, I’m actually unable to view Google’s decision through the same lens.
According to NBC Bay Area News, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was on the set of an education program called “NBC Class Action” when he was asked an entirely innocent question: what is your favorite gadget?
Those who’ve tested a Nexus One phone have raved about the phone’s ability to isolate a human voice from the racket of the big city. Much of the credit goes to a chip, the Audience A1026 voice processor, hidden inside the phone….
Motorola has unveiled a new smartphone Motoroi to be powered by Google’s Android version 2.0 in Korea. It features 3.7 inch touch screen, WVGA (480X854) display and a 8 megapixel camera with Xenon flash.
The report cited the examples of Linux, which it called the pioneer of open source software, and ARMS processors, which are rivalling Intel’s hegemony in the netbook space, also noting that the Bluetooth technology and Linux both emerged from Scandinavia and not from the Silicon Valley.
EL: How do you view the impact of the growth of the open source community on the overall communications industry?
AP: Open Source has enabled many new a creative applications to come to market at very affordable price points; expect the trend to continue. SIP has been a tremendous enabler for the open source developers, allowing interoperability between open source and commercial products that would be otherwise very difficult. For AudioCodes, open source applications have created opportunities for our media gateways that are needed to connect these applications to the PSTN, user desktops or other existing equipment.
Koha developers, contributors, and users might sum up the past year with a bastardized comic book tag line: “With great adoption comes great growing pains.” Many now, however, hope the worst of it is ready to be shelved away.
Koha, incidentally, was my first introduction to how great the open source developer community is. I was installing it on my home machine — to see how it stacked up, and to file away for a later date when licenses were begging for renewal. While I wasn’t someone with much say in renewing proprietary licenses on the consortia level, I was very impressed with how Koha worked. I was more impressed, however, when I pondered aloud on my personal site why I was having such a problem with a Perl script, that then-release manager Chris Cormack left a suggestion in my comments as to where things were going wrong.
Escarpod, the third party Open Source podcast gatherer and player, originally written for UIQ and available for S60 in beta form for a while, is now the source of a Contribution Proposal to the main Symbian Foundation code base. Effectively, this means that future Symbian devices should have a podcast client, in the wake of Nokia choosing not to contribute their own proprietary Podcasting application. Read on for links and more information.
An update to the Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate is now available. This second release candidate is available for free download and has been issued as an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 Beta and Release Candidate users.
But here is the part that really bothers me: this is making OSS acquisitions look very dangerous and dicey. JBoss is finally making a ton of money for RedHat (>100MUSD/yr) but after 3 years, a few false starts and fumbles. It was a steep learning curve on both sides. But, so far the MySQL situation is a disgrace and just looks like a huge mistake. Hopefully the VMWare crew does a better and more discreet job of successfully integrating an OSS company.
MySQL founder Michael “Monty” Widenius is spearheading an energetic attempt to stall Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. His concern is that once Oracle buys Sun, it will decimate MySQL. Should we be worried?
Sometimes you just can’t say it in 140 characters. And sometimes, a blog post is just plain overkill. Luckily you can manage your blog and microblog with one interface, at least as long as you’re using WordPress and Twitter Tools.
Buytaert’s attention primarily is on Drupal 7 right now; the community has been working on it for two years — with this week’s Alpha release a significant milestone — and he’s very proud of the results. “We made hundreds of changes,” he says, which impact end-users, site builders, and developers. His favorite new features for end users are “some massive usability improvements,” Buytaert says. Acquia hired well-known usability experts, with the result of look-and-feel improvements, additional navigation features, and better underlying information architecture.
One thing that governments and large organizations seem to miss about FLOSS, though, is that, instead of paying for licences for software or not, they should consider actually participating in the generation of FLOSS by hiring some coders.
There has recently been a flurry of activity in the Open Street Map community to improve maps of Haiti to assist humanitarian aid organisations responding to the recent earthquake.
In particular mappers and developers are scouring satellite images to identify collapsed and damaged buildings/bridges, spontaneous refugee camps, landslides, blocked roads and other damaged infrastructure – to help NGOs and international organisations respond more effectively to the crisis.
Former Wikimedia Indonesia executive director Ivan Lanin always keeps in mind an interesting quote on the nature of the collaborative movement of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Last year, when an ambitious Fort Lauderdale lawyer named Scott Rothstein decided to hire someone to develop political strategies for businesses seeking government contracts, he turned to none other than Ken Jenne, the disgraced former sheriff who had just been released from jail.
That kind of coziness between lobbyists, politicians and businesses seeking big-dollar deals while working at the edge of the law and beyond is at the core of the wave of scandals that have beset Broward County.
In the past two years, five elected officials have been indicted, six cops have gone to prison and a town manager has been convicted of stealing $500,000 — plus the once-mighty Rothstein facing charges that he engineered a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, the largest fraud in South Florida history.
What’s going on in Broward? Interviews with activists, politicians and academic observers offer several explanations: An uncommonly intense relationship between lobbyists and public officials, voter apathy, possible prosecutorial indifference, and a diminishing number of trained eyes watching what’s happening.
New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.
As if the journalism job landscape weren’t terrifying enough, now you’ve got to think about learning to code. It’s yet another new media skill you’ll need to stay ahead of competitors.
Lord Mandelson has repeatedly said that spending on such subjects should be strongly tied to stuff which is likely to make money. We have pointed out the difficulty in knowing this in advance before, and John Naughton does similar in The Guardian using the example of lasers which moved from being esoteric tools for quantum physicists to an integral part of hundreds of different products from DVD players to barcode scanners.
Today in the Observer, business columnist John Naughton describes in exquisite detail the blinkered pig-ignorance of Business Secretary Peter Mandelson’s plan to de-fund basic research in favor of “prioritising research that would contribute to Britain’s future prosperity.” That is, he’s only going divert funding to those small, incremental technologies that have well-understood, overhyped revenue models, leaving out the visionary basic science that has historically accounted for the largest payouts for industry and government. If Mandelson’s criteria had controlled spending 50 years ago, no one would have wasted money on go-nowhere egghead flights of fancy — like the laser.
Why are we in a War on Terror at all? Why not a War on Earthquakes, which kill hundreds of thousands more people each year than some goose with incendiary BVDs who was on a suspect-list anyway?
The United Nations needs to specify the role of the United States whose military forces are controlling the main airport in Port-au-Prince, capital of quake-hit Haiti, a French official said Monday.
Privacy campaigners are continuing a legal challenge against random laptop border searches by US customs amid concerns there may be a racial bias in those delayed and inconvenienced by stop and search powers introduced as part of the war on terror.
A teenage girl who appeared topless in a “sexting” cell phone picture that was distributed among her middle-school classmates should face child-pornography charges, a Pennsylvania prosecutor argued before a U.S. appellate court on Friday.
The paper also lays out plans for electronic defence of the UK. The opposition would establish a Cyber Threat and Assessment Centre (CTAC), building on the work to set up a Cyber Security Operations Centre in Cheltenham, although this is not yet operational.
Google recently announced in an important change of policy that it will stop censoring search results for queries coming from China. That is interesting in its own right, but is not why I am writing this article.
According to their corporate blog post, what prompted this change of policy was the discovery of “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [Google's] corporate infrastructure originating from China”. They found similar attacks on “at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses”.
GeneWatch UK has published two excellent documents which should be on on the reading list of everyone with an interest in the government’s plans for the National DNA Database. Below are the recommendations concluding the 5-page GeneWatch UK Parliamentary Briefing on the Crime and Security Bill (doc). This document is timely as the second reading of the bill has been tabled for this coming Monday.
At least 51,100 people have also demanded to have their personal information hidden from users of ContactPoint amid persistent fears that it is unsafe.
The investigation by The Daily Telegraph has led to renewed criticism of the delayed £224 million computer system, which is meant to protect young people by creating a single register of their contact details.
When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’s travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
If you haven’t taken a look at the gallery recently, the number of photos is rising weekly. And if you haven’t got your stickers yet, just get in touch with an address and the number of stickers you want and we’ll send them straight out, free of charge!
Google is investigating whether one or more employees may have helped facilitate a cyber-attack that the U.S. search giant said it was a victim of in mid-December, two sources told Reuters on Monday.
Unidentified hackers are running an ongoing cyber-espionage attack targeting US military contractors
Booby-trapped PDF files, posing as messages from the US Department of Defense, were emailed to US defence contractors last week. The document refers to a real conference due to be held in Las Vegas in March.
A new analysis by James Hansen et al. concludes: “The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend.” The authors show how regional short-term temperature fluctuations help explain the “gullibility” with which some people have been “so readily convinced of a false conclusion” that the planet has stopped warming. The NOAA National Climatic Data Center’s annual summary posted on January 15 says: “The 2000-2009 decade is the warmest on record, with an average global surface temperature of 0.54 deg C (0.96 deg F) above the 20th century average. The years 2001 through 2008 each rank among the ten warmest years of the 130-year (1880-2009) record and 2009 was no exception.”
NOTE: At the end of last year Monsanto was declared Forbes’ company of the year, because its seeds “resist weeds and pests and make life much easier for farmers.”
[...]
Gore said a side effect of relying on neonicitinoids for plant bug control “is that we are starting to see some tolerance in cotton aphids. We’re starting to hear lots of complaints from consultants across the Mid-South.”
For its Topic A feature last Sunday, The Post invited a panel of political operatives to offer their advice to the Democratic Party on strategy for 2010 [Sunday Opinion, Jan. 10]. Improbably, one of the operatives asked was Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s longtime chief strategist.
The deeper concern here is the how McCain put the country at risk by believing himself and his judgment to be presidential material. Clearly, McCain did not put his “country first.” His number one priority was on pulling a desperate PR stunt to help him attain the presidency at virtually any cost. The overall interests of the country were maybe second, or somewhere further down the line.
Many relief organizations are soliciting donations to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti using hotlines and Web sites that prompt people to use their credit cards. While most of the money people give will make it to the designated organizations, credit card companies are charging a two to three percent “transaction fee” or “charity processing fee” that gets subtracted from the donations. These hidden fees –which are estimated to amount to hundreds of millions of dollars — are helping credit card companies profit significantly from the Haitian tragedy.
Thanks to this hidden fee, American banks and credit card companies are making huge profits — somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 million a year — off of people’s charitable donations, according to a Huffington Post analysis.
Italy proposes mandatory licenses for people who upload video
Italy’s Berlusconi regime, already known around the world as an enemy of free speech and popular access to the tools of communication, has now floated a proposal to require Italians to get an “uploader’s license” in order to put any “moving pictures” on the Internet. The government claims that this is required as part of the EU’s product placement disclosure rules, which is about as ridiculous assertion as I’ve heard this month.
It’s the dawn of a new year. From our perch on the frontier of electronic civil liberties, EFF has collected a list of a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we think will play a significant role in shaping online rights in 2010.
Ed posted yesterday about Google’s bombshell announcement that it is considering pulling out of China in the wake of a sophisticated attack on its infrastructure. People more knowledgeable than me about China have weighed in on the announcement’s implications for the future of US-Sino relations and the evolution of the Chinese Internet. Rebecca MacKinnon, a China expert who will be a CITP visiting scholar beginning next month, says that “Google has taken a bold step onto the right side of history.” She has a roundup of Chinese reactions here.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a human rights watchdog, called on Turkey today to reform or abolish its restrictive Internet policy.
“At present, 3,700 Internet sites are blocked in Turkey, including YouTube, GeoCities, and Google sites,” said Miklos Haraszti, an OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.
Some Facebook users sending messages about the Haitian earthquake may have been a bit dismayed at times this week to find that they’d been booted off the site for suspicion of spamming.
The price of sending text messages via the nation’s largest wireless carriers has skyrocketed in the last few years, jumping from five to twenty cents, per message, both directions. If not on a bulk plan, that’s a forty cent fee every time someone sends or receives a 160 character, 140 byte communication. It’s a pretty dandy profit margin when you’re charging (by some estimates) around $1,310 per megabyte for a service that doesn’t actually cost anything to provide — given text messages travel over tower control channels for free.
A new wave of cash demands connected with allegations of illicit file-sharing are being received this week. In response, consumer group BeingThreatened has produced the most informative handbook ever created, empowering those wrongfully accused to refute the claims against them and hold onto their hard-earned cash.
The Pirate Party may have won two seats in last June’s European Parliament elections, but it’s hard to see that in practice. Despite the Lisbon Treaty going into effect just over 6 weeks ago, there is still no news of when Piratpartiet may fill their second seat.
Josh Knowles, one of my fellow Austin-native friends from way back, told me recently that his firm’s iPhone game, Critter Defense, was pirated more than bought. I was naively shocked to hear that piracy even happened in the iPhone world. But of course it does: so long as you unlock your phone and surf the piracy sites. I was reminded of that conversation over beers by Jeff Bertolucci’s piece today on the same topic, quoted above.
It looks like at least one government department, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP), is starting to get a clue about the digital economy, and the fact that constantly harping on about *online* file-sharing misses the bigger picture:
Today sees the publication of the first comprehensive review of currently available national and international research into consumers’ attitudes and behaviours to obtaining and sharing digital content offline. Much of this activity infringes current copyright law in the UK.
It seems there’s an online comic book called “I Am Googol”. In the story, the leather-clad super heroine has an extraordinary brain that enables her to process more than one googol of data per second – which sounds a bit lame to us as super powers go, but she would be great at splitting the bill in a restaurant. The character’s creator, Sylvaine Francis, says she was born when she found the word and its definition “completely at random” one day.
Sylvaine has some rather ambitious plans to turn “I Am Googol” into a movie but, without wishing to rain on her obvious enthusiasm for her creation, a ranking of 1,634th on the Webcomic list and 140 Facebook fans – including, for the purposes of research, your humble author – seem hardly likely to have James Cameron beating a path to her door.
Unfortunately for “I Am Googol” and her creator, trying to file a trademark registration for the comic book character has attracted the attention of Google’s lawyers.
“Eradicate piracy”? This man either knows nothing about the technology or nothing about people. Seeking to eradicate “piracy” is about as sensible as seeking to eradicate “drugs” or “terrorism”: it shows yet another politician happy to mouth platitudes without any thought for their real consequences, which would be nothing less than declaring war on hundreds of millions of European computer users. The next few years are beginning to look grim.
Collective property is collectively owned private property or private property for collective purposes. Among them, there are common property and public (state) property. All designations of private property are basically valid here. There are various forms of collective property, for instance stock corporation, house owner community, nationally-owned enterprise.
Free goods (also: Res nullius, Terra nullius or no man’s land) are legally or socially unregulated goods under free access. The often cited „Tragedy of Commons“ is a tragedy of no man’s land, which is overly used or destroyed due to missing rules of usage. Such no man’s lands do exist yet today, e.g. in high-sea or deep-sea.”
Now a second document has leaked, though it is not currently available online. The Wire Report reports that an EU document dated November 16, 2009, features candid comments about Canada and the EU strategy. The document, called a “Barrier Hymn Sheet” leaves little doubt about the EU’s objective:
Put pressure on Canada so that they take IPR issues seriously and remedy the many shortcomings of their IPR protection and enforcement regime.
Having viewed the document, I can report that it goes downhill from there, promoting the key message that Canadian laws are inadequate, while liberally quoting a report from the Canadian IP Council and discredited counterfeiting data.
The acquittal of OINK.CD admin Alan Ellis has caused a firestorm of confusion across the net, with comments flying fast and furious claiming just about anything you can imagine, and a lot you probably couldn’t imagine. The problem is that so far we don’t know a lot. After the initial raid the police and prosecutor in England went silent, and to the best of my knowledge some of the major pieces in the case (like the original search warrant) are still not available for analysis.
Anthony Biedenkapp was the first of a few of you to send in a blog post from DJ Shadow where he complains about the state of the music industry. While I disagree with an awful lot of what he writes, it is worth reading. It is thoughtful and obviously from the heart.
The majority of developers still write code on Windows PCs, but when they deploy apps, almost one in four targets Linux as their primary deployment operating system. And while 5% of developers have moved to a Mac as their primary development machine, most of them are targeting Linux or Windows as a primary deployment operating system, not OS X.
Linux’s popularity has grown as more developers build Web applications and shift their focus to the server components, especially in the Java/Web space. The economies of scale when deploying to a LAMP stack, or Linux/Apache/Tomcat or Linux/Apache/JBoss combinations, make Linux on the server an attractive proposition. This is especially true in environments making heavy use of virtualization, since developers don’t have to stop and ask, “Do I have a license for that image I just created?”
Linux and windows have very different ways of storing their installed program settings. Before windows 95 came along they used to be very similar. With Linux all program settings are stored in individual configuration files. These are often well commented files which can be changed to modify the default behaviour of programs. Pre-windows 95 these type of files were called *ini files and served the same purpose. Current versions of windows use what is called a registry database which is a single file where all program settings are centrally stored. There are advantages and disadvantages to these two methods. I will discuss each one. First of all I will ramble on about the windows method.
TM has a golden opportunity to reverse that trend: if it were to introduce the systems with Linux pre-installed, the students would realise that it a viable – and completely workable – alternative to Windows. And that OpenOffice.Org is a genuine alternative to MS Office. Firefox and other browsers easily match IE and the new Thunderbird 3 is an excellent mail program.
Earlier this month, RealNetworks announced the acquisition of Linux-based solutions provider Varia Mobile, feeding speculation the company plans to introduce cloud-based content services.
Finding a quick solution for your problems in any distribution is the main reason to make you rely on it. Therefore, the major distributions have many ways to provide support to their users. Among them, IRC support provides a way to communicate quickly and more interactively with users.
[...]
The numbers of IRC nicknames may reflect the actual number of the users for each distribution. Ubuntu, the most popular distribution, has the largest number of IRC nicknames over the six days. Mandriva has the smallest number of IRC nicknames. The activity of channel is an important thing and all distributions show that you can find an active support channel any time you want help.
Your editor, not generally known for his good sense, has long made a tradition of putting together a set of Linux-related predictions at the beginning of each year and posting them for the world to see. There is no particular source of inside knowledge behind these predictions, and no real reason to give them more credence than is merited by much of the material found in one’s spam folder. Still, it’s a fun exercise in pondering how things could go and trying to guess what the important themes will be.
6. Open source technology. Purist geeks may point out that the concept of “open source” technology developed in the late 1990s. But it was in the last decade that the model spread beyond software code. How many things have been “wiki’ed” since Wikipedia launched in 2001?
Australia’s national Linux conference has a reputation of being among the better technical conferences held every year and geeks look forward to the annual event.
The open source software conference linux.conf.au, taking place in Wellington all this week, will cover a healthy mixture of technical, social and even “small-p” political topics — as well as allowing open source enthusiasts to chew the fat.
Tomorrow morning, the third major North American KDE event will start with an introduction by Jeff Mitchell and Aaron Johnson. At 11:00 a keynote by University of California San Diego professor Philip Bourne will introduce us to the university’s Open Data initiative and after a lunch we’ll get going with the various presentations.
This week on Linux Outlaws we talk about Google’s Nexus One, Nat Friedman leaving Novell, Palm opening their App Catalog, Microsoft collaborating on SVG, Fab reviews the Motorola Milestone (Droid) and much more…
One potential key to the Ubuntu community’s goal of a 10-second boot time is its technology called “Upstart,” which the community describes as “an event-based replacement” for its current boot management code, which will handle “starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running.” In the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft and PC makers have approached the boot-time issue in a number of disparate ways and approaches, including so-called “instant on” technology as well as hibernation and other similar features. Upstart will be baked right into Ubuntu, and Lucid Lynx will provide the first, best look at how it all does. We decided to give it a whirl with the Alpha version. Installed on a PC built with an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 at 2.80 GHz and 2 GB of RAM, Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 produced a boot time of 20 seconds. While that’s twice as much time as Shuttleworth is shooting for, it’s still pretty good. When Windows 7 Ultimate was installed on the same PC, it registered a 30-second boot time. (For measure, we also installed Fedora 12 Linux on the PC, and it took a little longer than Windows 7, but with more security features to load.)
If you have just upgraded and have an old PC or laptop lying around then I strongly recommend before you get rid of your old machine that you install Ubuntu and give it a try. I think you will be very pleased and very impressed. I know I was.
For more than a decade, I had been a big fan of Microsoft Software, especially Windows and Office (just a fan, not a fanboy). Once in a while, when a new distro Linux comes out, I used to try it for a day or two and forget about it. And if I had to use it for a long time, I used to do create a virtual machine for linux, which again never lasted more than few weeks.
QUESTIONS that I get in the mail show that quite a number of Windows users are curious about what to expect when they make the jump to Linux.
While answering one such question this week, I realized that I’ve already written quite a bit about how things are done in Linux as opposed to Windows, but that these snippets were scattered over many columns over the last three years. I thought it might be useful to gather that information in one column, where it might help more Windows users to make the switch to Ubuntu Linux.
Having read about the super-computing power required to make the 3D film “Avatar”, and that the O/S on that system was of course Linux, I went to see it. Well, to be honest, I was going to see it anyway with my wife and granddaughter. On a previous blog someone asked whether GNU/Linux gets any mention in the credits.
In addition, IBM is trying to get customers to use mainframes for more functions. For some years it has offered specialised add-on processors at considerably lower prices, to run a greater variety of programs, mostly based on Linux, an open-source operating system. And last year IBM started bundling mainframes with applications at a discount.
Future Hosting, an Internet solutions provider serving SMBs and enterprises internationally and developer of Future Engineer™, today announced it has adopted Ksplice Uptrack™, a new technology enabling upgrades and maintenance on Linux servers without the need to reboot the system.
Asus has prototype Android and Chrome OS smartbooks in its labs and is currently deciding whether to release an ARM-based device alongside its Intel-based Eee PC netbooks, the company’s chairman has told ZDNet UK.
The folks at Google and in-fact lots of other major companies have a knack for hiding Easter eggs within their products. We have covered several such Easter Eggs in the past.
However, we can across another Easter Egg in Google Chrome where users can teleport goats from the Task Manager. This is basically available on version 4.0.266.0 of the Linux version of Chrome.
For Linux and Windows XP/Vista/7 operating systems, 3M plans to offer a multi-touch driver and software utility, and will offer communication protocol documents for customers who wish to develop their own drivers.
Dallas-based Entrust, a developer of digital identification software, said today that the firm has added support for Linux Red Hat in its Authority Security Manager product.
With version 2.6, the Linux kernel became fully preemptible. The preemption configuration options determine how often the schedule() function performs a context switch. The CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE option was the standard behavior of the kernel prior to version 2.6. Under this mode, kernel processes are not subject to preemption. The CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY option allows a kernel process to be voluntarily preempted. While the CONFIG_PREEMPT forces preemption, except in those cases where a kernel process is holding a lock. Only one option is selected.
While a blitter module was introduced for Gallium3D that uses the 3D engine for blitting, this doesn’t help those without blit support that are still running the “classic” Mesa driver stack. Over the night, however, blit support has arrived for the ATI R600/700 Mesa driver. This support arrived in the form of three commits (1, 2, 3) that increase the driver’s code-base by around 2,000 lines of code.
For those that prefer wicd to NetworkManager or other programs for managing network connections under Linux, a new release of the Wireless Interface Connection Daemon is now available. Wicd 1.7.0 is arriving just about six months after the release of wicd 1.6.0, but this 2010 release does bring some new features.
Since the collection of awesome GIMP brushes that I showcased a few months ago was quite popular, I decided to put together another wonderful list of brush sets that I’m going to share once again to all of you.
Gábor Horváth has been developing the raw photo converter RawTherapee single-handedly, on Linux and Windows, since 2006. The application has been freeware the entire time, with Horváth accepting Paypal donations through the project’s web site. Consequently, although there are significant changes in the 3.0 alpha release announced on January 4th, it was arguably bigger news that the project was switching to the GPLv3.
One of the greatest advantages any Linux user has over other platform user is the diverse range of applications available for almost any task. Name it and there’s an app for that (hope I don’t get sued by Apple). Below are 5 music players for the Linux platform (Ubuntu being my base) you probably did not know about.
You will be surprised at what you can create with this open source drum machine. Add this to your stable of open source recording tools to piece together an entire open source recording studio.
Razuna Ltd. today announced the general availability of Razuna 1.3.5, a major upgrade to the world’s most advanced open-source Digital Asset Management System. Razuna has seen major adoption at organizations throughout the world, and is free to download and use. Razuna is based on a completely open source stack and has been downloaded thousands of times since its release.
Recently I found a site with HTTP Content-Disposition header tests and their results. First that was only tested with Konqueror 3.5.8 from an ancient Knoppix CD, which the author quickly updated after I pointed him to the openSUSE 11.2 KDE Live CD.
The admins and editors behind the Italian KDE Portal and forum are proud to announce the availability of the new KDE Italia site.
By announcing the availability of both the new site and the forum (which is on the official kde.org forums now), the KDE Italia team invites everyone to visit and have a look. There’s not much there for now, but content is growing every hour thanks to the dedicated team working on it!
The Turkish GNU/Linux distribution Pardus 2009.1 has been released. Pardus is a Linux distribution developed as a product of the Pardus Project, by Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), which is under the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) and by volunteered contributors. It is named after the Latin (and scientific) name for the Anatolian leopard, Panthera pardus tulliana.
Pardus 2009 really rubbed me the right way. Pardus 2009.1 was just an confirmation of what I thought the first time around. I use GNOME in my everyday work and it’s a real treat to explore such a great looking and behaving KDE distro. I’ve used many KDE distros but this is one of my favorites because everything flows so well, looks good, and is overall just easy to use. These are all big factors in getting newbies on board and keeping them there. Overall, definitely worth a look for basic Linux users and newbies.
OpenXange 2010 is an “only open source softwares” version of Xange, a Fedora based Operating system. Its actually a combo of Fedora, KDE and only Open source softwares. This is the first release of Open Xange. Xange, previously known as Vixta is aimed to be similar to windows in look and feel but since its based on Linux, its far more awesome than windows . Open Xange can prove to be a good alternative for windows users, worth trying out.
The current Fedora 13 feature list with detailed explanations and status information is available from the Fedora Project Wiki. Yesterday we also delivered the first Fedora 13 benchmarks from a nightly build. The final release of Fedora 13 is expected in May while the first Alpha release is expected to arrive in early March.
I took that as a sign to return to the OS I’ve used on more machines and probably for more time than any other: Debian GNU/Linux (Debian uses the GNU, so I will too, for the moment anyway).
I started running Debian Etch soon after it went stable in April 2007, and in December 2009, I again returned to the Stable branch of Debian, now Lenny (yes, every Debian release is named after a “Toy Story” character)
The Ubuntu-Women project “is a team functioning under Ubuntu to provide a platform and encouragement for women to contribute to Ubuntu-Linux” Women are generally under-represented in Free/Open Source software and this project seeks to get more women involved in free software in general and in Ubuntu in particular.
The project was founded in 2006, according to the project wiki and it is currently quite active. There is a mailing list, an IRC channel (#ubuntu-women at irc.freenode.net), a forum and even its own planet.
You can install the default Ubuntu OS images or create your own to be virtualized. The node controllers are where you can run the virtual machine (VM) instances of the images.
Ordinarily Ubuntu and Debian won’t even install on 16Mb of memory — the installer program (yes, even the floppy-based installer program) crashes and burns without 32Mb of memory. In fact, neither OS will even boot without 20-30Mb of memory, regardless of how you get the system on there. (It’s always possible that different architectures have different memory demands; perhaps a different machine could boot on less.)
What is weird is that, I can’t decide whether I want to use Debian or Ubuntu. Debian Squeeze is pretty awesome because the modifications are minimal, and it’s always updating but after a while I did get some major updates and it became really slow all of a sudden, and I wasn’t really into it anymore. So I reinstalled Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, and it’s surprisingly the same slowness as an aging Debian Squeeze installation. I think these installations get slow because of the dependencies being install from the beginning of use. But, it’s hard to tell. It could also be due to upgraded packages which have different configurations. I’m not entirely sure.
Remember the Ylmf that we mentioned few months back, the one that tries to bring XP interface to the Ubuntu? Well, English version of it is now ready for download. All the usual Microsoft Alternatives have been included – Openoffice (in place of Microsoft Office), Pidgin (in place of WLM) and so on.
Linux Mint 8 x86_64 (with Mint’s improved GNOME desktop) recently came out. So my nephew and I got together for an installation fest. I didn’t have much data on this computer, because I had already been planning for this ever since the other one died in October. We did our backups, then I stuck the LiveCD into his Inspiron and tested out the desktop. It recognized that there was a proprietary driver available for his WiFi card. We didn’t try the driver out, but everything seemed good in LiveCD mode, except one thing. His one year-old laptop’s hard drive is bad. Not having any funds to replace it, we went ahead and installed on it, but everything we did was a struggle.
* Upgrading Ubuntu is not safer than upgrading Linux Mint. It’s equally risky.
* Ubuntu doesn’t mention the risks involved in package and release upgrades. Their policy is to fix whatever gets broken and to assume that the regressions caused on your system will get solved by future upgrades.
* Linux Mint insists on these risks and recommends a prudent approach to upgrades. Our policy is to avoid possible regressions by being selective on the updates we recommend to you.
* Upgrading Ubuntu is easy, and easier than upgrading Linux Mint. It shouldn’t be though, and if there’s any risk involved in you braking your system, then the least we can do is to write a long boring post about it, to make you think twice about doing it, and to throw warning signs at you before you click on the shiny button
While my initial plan for January was to stick with Windows 7 and perhaps try out Fedora 12, a bad DVD interrupted the Fedora install progress. Out of sheer convenience, I’d planned on running Linux Mint in a VM and had pulled the ISO earlier in the week. “Aha!” I thought. “I’ll install this instead of Fedora and see what’s what.”
Puredyne is a GNU/Linux live distribution aimed at creative people,
looking for tools outside the standard. It provides the best
experimental creative applications alongside a solid set of graphic,
audio and video tools in a fast, minimal package. For everything from
sound art to innovative filmmaking.
But what OS is in the box? Unsurprising perhaps is the dominance of Linux in this space. I should perhaps say unsurprising to me, as it does appear to have achieved a level of “de facto” status among many of my old programming colleagues.
The VIA M’SERV S2100 supports Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 Foundation, along with Linux distributions that include Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 2 and FreeBSD. Sales are so far reserved for OEMs and system integrators.
Based on Linux, users can run a number of programs including YouTube, Flickr, e-mail clients, web browsers and more. It’s being touted as a netbook/projector. There’s also a USB port, A/V output, a SM/MMC card reader and internal memory (though its not clear how much).
If Android is in a washing machine, then I have Linux and everything that is available to Linux in that washing machine … just think of the Folding at Home scores you can rack up if we linked the neighborhood washing machines up!! Think about all the data that will need to be stored when they start tracking wash cycles of a particular garment via RFID!!!
Enea Optima 2.2 features new capabilities for rapidly developing complex embedded multicore applications including enhanced profiling, analysis and memory management.
As you would correctly guess Exchange and the accompanying ActiveSync are proprietary software, and though you may not have heard of SyncML (unless you’ve read my previous blog) it is the exact opposite of Exchange — that is, a platform-independent and open standard for synchronizing data. To be crystal clear, SyncML has been partially realized on the N900 (Exchange is fully supported out of the box) but is lacking a key feature. From the Maemo Sync Wiki:
The N900 provides SyncML over Bluetooth and USB but not IP.
LG announced that more than half its new smartphones will use Android, the common operating system among the Nexus One, Droid, G1, and so on.
Windows Mobile seems like Windows Stationary, as Microsoft’s Version 7 of its operating system seems to be MIA. In the interim, the business ecosystems of the iPhone and Android and even Moblin continue to grow and perhaps flourish. Capturing huge marketshare is what Microsoft is all about, so I find it head-scratchingly strange that Windows Mobile is so far behind.
Over the past 2 years, I’ve seen a lot of 7 inch mini-notebooks with ARM or MIPS based processors. Most run Windows CE or some flavor of Linux. This week I came across a model running Google Android, which is the first time I’ve seen that OS on one of these generic netbooks. I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Chinese network equipment vendor ZTE has joined the growing number of phone manufacturers using Android. It plans to launch smartphones based on the operating system in the first quarter of this year, it said Thursday.
The Nokia N900 is a 3.5-inch smartphone running the Maemo 5 OS, which is an operating system based on Linux. It’s also the first Nokia device to run the OS and as a result has gathered a great deal of praise.
The world’s top cellphone maker Nokia said on Tuesday it has opened a version of its software store for its flagship N900 model, which runs the Linux operating system.
Open Source means that you never have to wait for any company to release software in a rigid fashion. We are talking about the Nokia N900 and the Maemo platform.
Jolicloud is a respin of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), with the addition of significant new functionality through a slick and shiny menu system which incorporates a point-and-click method for system updates and the adding/deleting new software. The system itself runs solidly and is fully functional, but the overall effort feels like it needs a further push to make it something truly new. The “MyJolicloud” feature will appeal to new users and recent Linux converts as it makes adding new programs incredibly easy, and concentrates an array of content in one easy to use place.
Another case that is still ongoing is a family who will be going to Africa for a couple of months in the coming summer. They wanted a sturdy portable system to take along which they could use to unload and view pictures from digital cameras, keep trip logs, and perhaps access the internet when and if possible. Once again the Mini-Note came out, but this time it will be “for keeps”. I reloaded Mint, so they would be making a clean start, made sure the packages they would need were on it, and gave them a brief introduction to it.
Mr. East is sure that going forward various versions of Linux will provide similar experience.
[...]
“If you look at what’s been accomplished in 18 months to two years and compare that to the 25 years of the Wintel monopoly, it’s clear that the consumer experience on Linux-based desktops … in a relatively short period of time is catching up quickly,” said chief executive officer of ARM.
The ARM CEO concedes to the fact that the PC market is rightfully aimed at x86 chips, but says that the mobile segment is still ARM’s territory. He also believes that versions of the Linux operating system will provide an experience similar to Windows, seeing how, according to him, consumers aren’t concerned with the OS as long as the device performs well and has a working, comprehensive interface.
if you’re looking for a more detailed overview, YouTube member a1mega has posted an 8 minute video showing the netbook running Windows 7 Starter Edition as well as Jolicloud, a custom Linux distribution designed for netbooks.
The Boxee beta brings the best media the Internet has to offer and your personal media all under one roof. The interface to watch TV on Internet is clean and easy to browse with a remote, but works great with a mouse and keyboard if you don’t have one.
When I think about the challenges we face in America, which we are all coming to realize are a lot bigger, a lot more complex, and a lot more unavoidable and non-negotiable than we ever let ourselves believe in the past, and I look at the arguments against action that amount to “it’s too difficult and too costly,” I’m reminded of the truly democratic approach that Estonia demonstrated in 2008, and I wonder: what can we not do if we function as a community? The Gource visualization of the Cobbler project shows just how powerful a few visionaries and a strong community can be.
Globally, open source BI solutions are in huge demand, with interest picking up in a huge way during the recession. Open source BI products from vendors such as Pentaho and Jaspersoft have evolved from being community-driven tools to being backed up by support from professional service vendors. In India, awareness levels are low and the market is at a nascent stage. However, the potential for adoption is huge—especially among SMEs—a market that is made of over 6 million Indian enterprises, contributing to 42 percent of India’s total exports.
Although event processing platforms is robust and proven, there is still constant innovation in the space. Although the efforts of open source projects Esper and Cayuga are admirable they both miss the importance of simplicity through graphical event languages and powerful development tools. They also aren’t proven for mission critical usage, or optimized for the high performance, low latency demands.
When one single governing body gains absolute control over something, it is only a matter of time before that governing body increases its power tremendously. Many times, it does this in order to avoid vice, but counterintuitively, only ends up creating more of it in the process. Take any modern established proprietary software company that started out in the 60’s or 70’s for example.
Progressive Technology Federal Systems, Inc. (PTFS), an industry-leading library solutions provider and developer of the ArchivalWare digital library and content management software, has announced it will acquire LibLime, the global leader in open-source software solutions for libraries. The transaction is expected to close before the end of January 2010.
“PTFS has supported ILS solutions for 15 years and is committed to resolving community differences and advancing Koha open source library technology. At a time when many libraries are experiencing budget cuts, PTFS’s LibLime division plans to significantly enhance this highly cost effective library automation alternative,” commented John Yokley, PTFS CEO.
Entrepreneur and Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton manages to keep a foot in both the open source community and the iPhone community. While Urban Airship focuses on building out iPhone infrastructure for developers, Kveton is also well known for working with Oregon State University to start the Open Source Lab – the first state-wide open source development curriculum. Coupled with the fact that O’Reilly’s OSCON and the Linux creator Linus Torvalds call the region home, Oregon’s developers understand the value of shared knowledge and community. When asked how the open source movement has shaped Oregon’s entrepreneurs, Kveton replies, “Portland has a live free or die attitude. We engage in community and unlike other groups we really share our knowledge.”
Systems on Chip LLC, an Atlanta based wireless design firm, announced today the launch of Wireless Open Source, an online forum designed to allow developers to fast track wireless cellular hardware and software product development with minimal time and cost.
One issue that gives IT organizations cause for pause when it comes to open source is the whole issue of support. In particular, when it comes to open source applications, some IT organizations fret that the level of support they get from open source vendors in terms of help with the underlying operating system and middleware is not as deep as it is in comparison to providers of proprietary applications.
A leader in operating global companies, Mr. Mann directed the expansion of Siebel Systems in Europe in 1995, building its sales and marketing operations across the region. Prior to his role at Siebel, he was Vice President at Legent, where he executed strategy to realize European revenues of $175 million.
Open source was an incredible calling card that we could use to determine what customers were interested in. Now we just needed to figure out how to harvest that interest. It worked for MySQL as a startup, but how would these techniques apply in a bigger company like Sun? Pretty well, as the graph below illustrates.
We achieved more than 100-fold growth during the year in terms of top-of-funnel raw leads as well as qualified BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) and pre-BANT leads. And while there was sometimes skepticism that online marketing activities could generate real revenues, we finished calendar Q4 with a sales-accepted pipeline value that would be on par with what you might see in a 5- to 10-year-old startup company.
The Asterisk community is seeing new developers join at a rate of almost 60 per cent a year. The adoption rate for open source is nearly 80 per cent in some countries.
As open source telephony continues to grow in popularity today, and as the number of open source IP-PBX (News – Alert) deployments outnumber PBX installations in North America, questions over why this is occurring, and how businesses can benefit have evolved.
The Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) and Open Source Order Sets (OSOS) are pleased to announce a new partnership that could help improve patient safety and quality in health care for Ontarians.
This week, experts convened at the WorldVistA Community Meeting to discuss strategies for aligning open-source health IT systems with federal regulations on the certification and “meaningful use” of electronic health records, Modern Healthcare reports.
Having bolted the open source Ehcache Java caching software it bought to its Java application clustering environment, Terracotta has now added the Quartz job scheduler it acquired as 2009 was winding down.
Genuitec will introduce on Tuesday a version of its MyEclipse IDE for use with the popular open-source Spring Framework for Java development, sans the backing of the major developer of the framework itself, SpringSource.
SpringSource wants the Eclipse community to take over ongoing development of its dm Server.
The chief commercial sponsor of the open source Spring Framework project announced on Tuesday that a proposal to make dm Server part of the Eclipse Runtime Project had already been submitted to Eclipse.org under the project name “Virgo.”
With the growing amount of biomedical data available in public databases it has become increasingly important to annotate data in a consistent way in order to allow easy access to this rich source of information. Annotating the data using controlled vocabulary terms and ontologies makes it much easier to compare and analyze data from different sources.
[...]
We have therefore created a Java front end to the Ontology Lookup Service, called the OLS Dialog, which can be plugged into any application requiring the annotation of data using controlled vocabulary terms, making it possible to find and use controlledvocabulary terms without requiring any additional knowledge about web services or ontology formats.
Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced that since its inception last April, uptake of the open source Eucalyptus cloud software is rapidly increasing, with downloads directly from the Eucalyptus website reaching more than 15,000 per month, across 120 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Eucalyptus is also shipping as the built-in open source cloud with every copy of the Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition Linux distribution, further extending Eucalyptus’ market reach and helping establish it as the standard for secure, on-premise, private cloud computing.
Cloud computing has the potential to transform how government agencies tap into IT services, and open source is an underlying technology in several of the early government clouds that have been developed.
We have yet to see the federal government issue a position on open source clouds, but it’s clear that agencies have a green light to move ahead with open source and cloud computing. It’s only a matter of time before these two trends come together in the form of open source clouds.
National Geographic rebuilt the site internally using an open-source framework called “Django.” This approach lets the developers plug new modules easily into the site, like upcoming community and social media features. It also allows other developers to work with the company to advance new features.
There seems to be a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding open source content management these days. Last week, I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at a British Computer Society Open Source event but was rather surprised by the lack of agreement about Open Source Software (OSS).
Alfresco will ship software to integrate its content management software with IBM Lotus software, in particular team collaboration and content management tool Quickr. The 451 Group thinks users will prefer lighter-weight Alfresco over FileNet
However, lest anyone think that Jahia is looking only at large public sector organizations, they also signed a partnership agreement with Los Angeles based enterprise technology agency Oshyn, Inc. to enable both companies to deliver dynamic web content management to Fortune 1000 companies.
“The Kaltura open source stack empowers developers to augment any web platform and content management system to include tightly integrated video functionalities and work flows,” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman and CEO.
Exactly nine years ago, I released Drupal 1.0.0. When I shared my hobby project with the world, I expected no more than a dozen people to actually use it. It took a large community of people to make Drupal successful, but today, Drupal has hundreds of thousands of friends. Thank you to everyone who has been and is contributing to Drupal. Rock!
Open source learning content management system ATutor has been updated to version 1.6.4. It now includes support for the IMS Common Cartridge Lite 1.0 content interoperability standard.
In this particular case, Symphony is powered by XSLT and it is an open source release – those who are knowledgeable and kind enough can contribute to the project as much as they wish in order to make this content system even more approachable.
To get a peek at one potential future for Firefox, install the Strata40 theme and the experimental StrataBuddy add-on. Like one of those classic Superman comics that had Supermen from across time teaming up to defeat a dastardly villain, the add-on provides the interface tweaks while the theme gives Firefox the look you’re looking for. Several other add-ons are also recommended to complete the experience: AppTabs, which is similar to FaviconizeTab and lets you shrink a tab down to its favicon; Fission, which merges the progress meter into the address bar; and Tab Progress Bar, which sticks a progress meter in each tab. Users should note that the key feature in Tab Progress Bar is also available as one of many in Tab Mix Plus, and that the two add-ons are incompatible with each other.
Find In Tab is an awesome FireFox addon that adds a tiny option to CTRL+F command to search through all open tabs:
* Clicking the “Find in Tabs” button on the find bar will search for text in all open tabs, and show a list of search results.
* Clicking any of the results will jump to the tab on which it was found, and scroll directly to the highlighted text.
Mozilla is now readying the release of their open-source project, Prism, which will make it even easier for you to turn most web pages into applications usable directly from your computer.
But now that MySQL looks destined to be owned by Oracle, people are worried that Oracle won’t put much energy into the project. MySQL was designed to be a replacement for Oracle’s bread and butter products, so it is obvious that as the new owner, Oracle won’t be working too hard to put itself out of business, thus the only real question is how much less effort will be put into MySQL. Since MySQL was published under the GPL, it would be very hard for another company to commercialize it, which will limit the chances that a well funded fork could be created. MySQL’s future growth looks pretty small, or at least much smaller than it could have been under a different owner.
Michael Widenius, the creator of the MySQL database, said he is turning his vocal campaign against Oracle’s planned takeover of Sun Microsystems to China and Russia because the European Commission appears set to clear the deal.
Thrift, Hive, and Cassandra join about 20 different technologies we’ve released as open source including Scribe, Tornado, a new JavaScript Connect library, and Three20 for iPhone development. We’re excited to continue working on great open source projects and to support the ASF with funding, source code, and developers. There’s plenty more to come.
KonaKart is a Java / JSP / XML based solution with easy to use java APIs and a SOAP Web Service interface that allow you to quickly integrate eCommerce functionality into your existing systems. The customizable parts of KonaKart are Open Source and available under the GNU LGPL.
The Macraigor Eclipse Ganymede/Galileo + GNU Tools Suite is an implementation and packaging of the Eclipse Ganymede/Galileo platform, CDT (C/C++ Development Tooling) 5.0.x, and DSDP (Device Software Development Platform) 1.0 plug-ins, and a program called OcdRemote that provides an interface between Eclipse, the GDB debugger and a Macraigor On-Chip Debug device.
Most of the eBook Readers at CES use free software in locked-down devices that restrict customers’ access to certain publications, prevent them from sharing, and violate their privacy. Telecommunications companies have harnessed Android in the battle for a larger share of the smartphone market and collaborated on applications with FOSS programmers while preventing customers the right to chose between carriers. These companies have a vested interest in limiting the functionality of the devices they sell so consumers buy the next model in a couple of years, rather than improve the one they already own.
Normally we would have used a BSD/MIT/Apache license for software that we develop. This is what we’re used to, with most of our developers having been active in the Apache community for years, we’re all very familiar with the philosophy behind this license. When we announced that Nexus was going to be released under a GPL license, some of our colleagues wanted to know how a group of Apache participants decided to use the GNU Public License? When we started Nexus, the plan was to create a commercial product. We hadn’t thought about creating Nexus as a commercial product built atop an open core. Once we got into the effort, we soon realized that creating a commercial-only product with a team full of open source developers wouldn’t be very fun. When you develop a commercial product, you limit yourself to a small group of developers working in an isolated environment. It didn’t take us long to remember that close-source development isn’t as productive (or interesting) as developing a product out in the open, and as we like working with other developers, we very quickly decided to take the hybrid, open-core approach to Nexus.
We thought for a long while before selecting the GNU Public License (GPL) for Nexus and we made it clear right from the start why we chose the GPL. We knew that we would invest heavily in Nexus. Even though the people involved with Sonatype are traditionally users of Apache style licenses, we didn’t know how our business would evolve and we wanted to choose a license that would offer adequate protection for that investment. We were honest and upfront about it. We chose a more restrictive license first this allows us to adapt and use a less restrictive license in the future if we think it is appropriate for the community.
There is a lot to say about the tons of new features, usability enhancements, bug-fixes and other important updates for this new 4.6 release of the free Datacenter and Cloud Computing Management System openQRM. Full steam ahead the openQRM team, now backed by its new main sponsor openQRM Enterprise GmbH, worked hard to get openQRM even more “enterprise-ready”.
KnowledgeTree™, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software, and CAPSYS®, a leading provider of web-based document capture and capture process management software, today announced the commercial availability of a release module that integrates KnowledgeTree’s commercial SaaS and on-site editions with CAPSYS CAPTURE™.
In the official letter issued Jan. 7 from the state CIO’s office, the policy establishes the use of OSS in California state government as an “acceptable practice.” Farley doesn’t know of any other states with similar OSS policies, but he said it’s consistent with policies done by the U.S. Department of Defense and the UK government.
Canada’s government is not only in a good position to “open source” the delivery of services through technology – it’s already doing it, according to a public policy entrepreneur.
Just two days after California approved open-source software for use in state offices and agencies, Montana’s governor has received a request to rip and replace existing statewide contracts with Oracle and Microsoft and instead go with open source.
The Middle East government of Jordan had signed a deal with open source database specialist Ingres to promote the use of open source software in the country.
The Government of Jordan and open source database management company Ingres have signed an MOU to promote open source software adoption in the country.
A number of members of the European Parliament are about to start an informal cross party working group on ‘new media, free and open source software and open information society’. The intergroup is expected to begin in February, with the support of the European People’s Party (EPP), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (Alde) and the European Greens.
Furthermore, a recent Expert Group Report on the Future of Cloud Computing produced with the support of the European Commission DG INFSO recommends that the European open source movement should work strongly with industry to support commercial cloud based service provisioning.
Open standards have been made mandatory for the IT systems of Hungary’s public administrations. The Hungarian parliament voted in favour of amendments prescribing open standards, to a law on electronic government services, on 14 December. The changes received 197 votes in favour, one against and 146 abstentions, according to the Open Standard Alliance, a Hungarian advocacy group that lobbyed in favour of the amendments.
So, nearly a year later what has happened? One thing for sure is that UK government contracts haven’t been flooding to open source companies – in fact there’s no sign of any going to them.
It’s easy to dismiss Powell’s musings as sour grapes from a company not benefiting from lucrative government contracts except I’ve also heard the same thing from an executive fromanother leading open source vendor, one who didn’t want to be identified, but who was equally scathing about the government’s procurement policy.
For me, now that all the technical layers have become so easy and so low-cost and so interoperable, the next layer that really needs to be worked on is the legal layer. So at Creative Commons I think we are trying to solve a lot of those problems at the legal layer. I think that things like that friction are a part of that ecosystem. Once those problems are solved and a lot of that friction goes away, another explosion of innovation is going to happen on top of that, which I think will be good for society, good for business, and good for venture capitalists, and interesting too. So that’s what we are trying to do at Creative Commons.
Indiana University in Bloomington will be developing new library software to manage digital collections thanks to a $2.38 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The university will lead a partnership of libraries in the Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE) project to develop “community source” software that will be made available to libraries worldwide. Other participants include a consortium of Florida institutions, the Triangle Research Libraries Network, the University of Chicago, and others.
Pedal enthusiasts are known tinkerers. They gather online at sites like DIYStompboxes and Build Your Own Clone to trade schematics and debate over the finer points of stompbox design.
Well before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, even before Ada Lovelace programmed Charles Babbage’s imaginary Differential Engine, English had shown the way toward an open source future.
To my surprise, that is all that it takes. The QGtkCallbackBridge is a trivial QObject that calls the given function pointer with the QObject::sender() and the given data pointer when signalled. The QGtkEventFilter is not much more complicated. It simply filters out the event in question and triggers the given function pointer in much the same way. I’ve created a factory for the event filters, as I want them to re-create something looking like the original GdkEvent structure. There is actually one event filter class for each type of event, just so that this code can be added.
Python 2.7, expected to be the last major version of the 2.x series of the dynamic language, was released as a second alpha earlier month by the Python Software Foundation, with the final release set for June.
Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, released the Alpha version of its source code for OSL, its Open Shading Language, it was announced today by Rob Bredow, Chief Technology Officer of Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Last decade, known by many as the Naughties or Noughties, set the stage for a number of key software development trends. Here is a list of some of the hottest trends that impacted software development.
[...]
2. The Rise of Open Source Software (OSS)
Open Source Software reached critical mass in the decade of the Noughties. The open source model caught on like wild fire among developers and quickly became adopted by entrepreneurs looking to build companies by providing services for these OSS technologies. And it worked. Marc Fleury founded JBoss around the JBoss application server and later sold the company to Red Hat for more than $350 million. Rod Johnson founded SpringSource around the open-source Spring Framework and last year sold it to VMware for $420 million. VCs saw an opportunity and began to get behind the best and the brightest. And organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation sprang up to, among other things, foster community involvement in various open-source projects. Although the ASF was founded in 1999, it saw some of its best days in the Noughties.
A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information.
David Nutt, the scientist sacked as a government adviser by the home secretary, today defiantly launched his own independent committee which he says will provide the definitive scientific verdict on the risks of drugs.
Of course, the economics with food is quite a bit different than with content. With food, each “free sample” has a direct cost in that the same items cannot be sold. With content, the argument in favor of using “free” is even stronger, because you are just giving away copies — and each copy is free to make and distribute, even if the original copy cost money.
Some things are the same no matter what operating system you run. Mac, Windows, or Linux user chances are you use Adobe Reader to read PDF (Portable Document Files) and Adobe Acrobat to create them. So it is that, no matter what you’re running on your PC, you need to update your copies of Reader and Acrobat.
Terminal 8 was cleared for several hours and thousands of passengers had to be rescreened after the breach, which happened shortly after 3 p.m. (2000 GMT), American spokesman Charley Wilson said.
The Transportation Safety Administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which has jurisdiction over the three major metropolitan area airports, ordered the evacuation. Passengers who had boarded also had to get off their planes.
…they were beckoned by two police community support officers (and) asked why they were not in school and then quizzed about damage to a nearby fence.
They politely told the officers they knew nothing about the fence, but instead of simply being allowed to carry on playing they were given an official ‘stop and search’ form which they had to sign themselves.
Their parents have now been told the youngsters’ details will now go on a police database.
At present, scrapping ID cards and rolling back the database state stands at an impressive number 2 in the voting, which is very encouraging. It would be good to see reduce the use of statutory instruments (a tool by which some of the most intrusive and repressive legislation has been introduced to Britain in the past decade) and expanding the scope of the Freedom of Information Act (a suggestion from our friends at the TaxPayers’ Alliance) also make the top 5.
If anything was settled by Tuesday’s Detroit News-WJR panel on climate change and fuel economy standards, it was that the opinions on global warming aren’t settled.
Some smart people on both sides of the issue exchanged opinions during the discussion at the Detroit Athletic Club. They weren’t crackpots or fanatics. And yet they have looked at the climate change evidence and come to different conclusions.
I searched high and low for more inforation to no avail. This is very significant that the SEC is looking into those very derivatives which we have written about, that are impossible to evaluate and also based on bad math.
Lawmakers are probing the circumstances around AIG’s payments of $62 billion to major financial institutions who were counterparties of AIG, including Goldman Sachs, to settle the full value of credit default swaps.
A House panel slated to look into the collapse and bailout of insurer American International Group has widened its probe, adding former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to its list of invited witnesses.
Regardless of how one chooses to characterize the bankers’ behavior — arson or extreme road rage — the commission is rightly trying to determine exactly what role the bankers played in causing the financial meltdown. (Three other bankers testified at the hearing: Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America.) The ten-member commission expects to issue its report in December.
With Goldman expected to announce record bonuses the financial institution has attempted to blunt the anticipated criticism by shifting bonuses from cash to stock and by considering requiring certain employees to make mandatory charitable contributions. But whatever the steps, providing a straightforward explanation of the compensation practices will not be one of them.
The Associated Press reports that the six biggest banks will reap a $150 billion 2009 bonus bonanza, a mere 8.5% less than what they received in the record year of 2007.
During yesterday’s opening hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington, a panel of Wall Street CEOs continued to defend their bonus practices. They are just fortunate they don’t live in Great Britain, where the government has already imposed a new windfall tax on bank bonuses. Scratch London from the list of places where unhappy U.S. bankers might flee.
When Judge Richard Posner, the prolific conservative intellectual, released his book “A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression” last year, you might have thought the final verdict was in: Capitalism caused the economic downturn and high unemployment.
The chairman and CEO of investment giant Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Wednesday that his company engaged in “improper” behavior when it made financial bets against $40 billion of securities backed by risky U.S. home loans it was selling to investors as safe products.
New rules to be introduced by government decree will require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web, opposition lawmakers have warned.
The Kankakee County Farm Bureau wants to stop net neutrality. So does the Erie Neighborhood House, along with Downtown Springfield Inc, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Will and Grundy Counties, and the mayor of North Chicago.
The organizations all share several things: they are located in Illinois, they want the FCC to focus on broadband adoption rather than net neutrality, and… they all have connections to AT&T.
On the 5 – 6 January 2010 they used the Flickr API to search for and display images of snow scenes in the UK – amongst those images displayed was one of mine which is clearly marked on Flickr as “all rights reserved”. They did not seek my permission for the use of my image. I am assuming they used the API without applying a filter on the licence type, this also means that other UK photographers may have had their copyrighted work used without permission; might be worth checking if you had any refers from the Independent on those days.
In recent years, we’ve definitely pushed increasingly draconian IP laws on those countries. So until we see more serious pushback (and Brazil is really the only major country I can remember that has been proactive on that front — India and China have appeared more willing to claim that they’ll move toward US-style IP rules) it’s difficult to believe this is really happening just yet.
Reports from Costa Rica indicate that final approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States is languishing in the Legislative Assembly due to concerns over the copyright provisions. The CAFTA copyright provisions are similar to those found in the other major U.S. trade agreements concluded in recent years: DMCA-style protections, ISP liability, and copyright term extension are all part of the package.
It’s looking more and more likely. Linux is everywhere, creating jobs, lowering IT costs, and serving as poster child for the open-source business and development movements.
This momentum isn’t lost on Microsoft, which has revived its anti-Linux charm offensive. Speaking at CES, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and services division, overlooked Windows Mobile’s dismal market performance to sneer at mobile Linux, claiming that Linux in its current form is not “really sustainable.”
In 2009, we heard a lot about Nehalem and Telsa. AMD and AMD/ATI were not taking a nap. Their efforts are paying off and as the following video will illustrate, they have some great technology to offer the HPC crowd. Indeed, AMD has been a big supporter of OpenCL and has now released the ATI Stream Software Development Kit with OpenCL support. The promise of OpenCL is portability across processors and GP-GPU’s (not cluster nodes, however). The SDK from AMD/ATI has beta support for both x86 processors and ATI video cards. As you can see in the second half of the video, OpenGL has arrived.
Chrome OS is supposed to be about speed and ease of use. “We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast,” says Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of product management. It should be so fast that it will be able “to boot up like a television,” according to Pichai.
The eighth annual KDE PIM developer meeting in Osnabrück, Germany started out with an extended snowball fight among the Scottish, German and Dutch contingencies. That actual work was being done was evidenced by enhancements to Akonadi, KDE 4.4 and 4.5, and planned further development of the Kontact groupware client.
The eighth annual meeting of the KDE groupware faction was all in the spirit of mobile devices. KDE Kontact is to be ported as fast as possible on mobile platforms such as Maemo 5 and Windows Mobile, if things go according to the plans of the Kolab Consortium under the auspices of Intevation and KDAB. Kolab has recently been releasing repeated new versions of the Windows port of KDE Kontact, the latest with a one-click installer.
The open-source Amazon-like compute cloud under development at NASA’s Ames Research Center could become a means of hosting websites across the US government.
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Nebula is based on Eucalyptus, an open source project meant to mimic Amazon EC2 inside private data centers. Eucalyptus is bundled with the latest version of Ubuntu. That’s why Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth calls it Karmic Koala.
This past year I’ve had the good fortune to review an eeePC powered Netbook, the Fit-PC, and the Plug Computer. All were new, capable, and progressively smaller Linux machines. Readers may also recall my increasing interest in the Arduino micro-controllers. Although the Arduino doesn’t run Linux, its development environment is easy to use and particularly well suited for Linux notebooks.
We are currently looking for two contractors to come and work at Canonical to write some upstream code to help GNOME applications fit into the full Ubuntu desktop experience. This is an awesome opportunity for talented GNOME developers and a a great way to dip your feet into the Ubuntu development team.
The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit.
If any community within the open source realm lives and breathes outreach, it’s Ubuntu. There are days that teams devote solely to bug triage (today, incidentally, is gnome-power-manager hug day), along with the obligatory launch parties, a community-building Open Week and the more technical Ubuntu Developer Week.
At CES, OpenPeak unveiled a prototype of its Intel Atom- and Moblin Linux-based Home Energy Manager (HEM) energy monitoring device, and announced partnerships with Direct Energy and GE. OpenPeak also announced that the OpenFrame IP phone upon which the HEM is based was certified with the ZigBee Alliance’s Smart Energy Certification.
PLX Technology announced a Linux-ready NAS 7800 system-on-a-chip (SoC) family for home network attached storage (NAS) devices. The low-end NAS 7820 and NAS 7821 and the high-end NAS 7825 offer dual ARM11 processors clocked to 750MHz, network security engines and a variety of hardware acceleration engines, says the company.
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A Linux-based SDK (see farther below) is said to support connections to multiple computers, smartphones, digital photo frames (DPFs), Internet radio sites, and more.
The EETimes Group says ESC Silicon Valley 2010 will add to the show’s already extensive bevy of instructional tracks with a new one called “Designing with open source software, including Linux and Android.” The track includes separate “Jumpstart” sessions on Linux, Android, and device drivers in general, as well as sessions on debugging Linux device drivers, real-time development with Linux and Android, using Android beyond handsets, and building a connected device with open source software.
Touch Revolution is shipping an Android-driven touchscreen subsystem that OEMs can “drop in” to microwave ovens, washing machines, printers, IP phones, and more. The Nimble NIM1000 module comprises an embedded board with a Marvell/ARM PXA310 clocked to 806MHz, and a 7-inch, WVGA projective capacitive touchscreen, says the company.
The Android community released the SDK for Android 2.1, which ships with Google’s new Nexus One phone, and the Motorola Backflip phone is rumored for a March AT&T launch. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel that drives Android, as well as numerous devices, desktops, and servers, was released in a WiFi-focused Linux 2.6.33-rc4.
Open source appliance maker Vyatta has unveiled the 3500 networking appliance family, which combines routing, firewall and VPN functionality. Vyatta claims the appliance offers 10 Gbps networking capability at 1/20th the cost other ‘name-brand’ networking appliances. But are solutions providers and their customers really ready for open source network?
Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, an affiliated corporation of Virginia Tech, has announced that it has licensed the source code of GenoCAD to the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Google, on the other hand, has done wonders with its Android OS which is now right up there with the likes of the iPhone and is getting better all the time. Android will, without a doubt, be in the headlines throughout the coming year as Google takes other mobile makers on head-to-head.
But open source will also start appearing on devices other than just mobile phones. Google’s Chrome OS and the Moblin OS are just a couple of the viable, Linux-based, alternatives for netbooks that will start to become important in the coming year.
A couple of years ago Linux look poised to take over the netbook market but Microsoft managed to claw back its dominance in this market with Windows XP.
This time around Microsoft may not be as lucky. There are indications that Linux now has its second wind and, together with a strong mobile phone presence, is ready to give Microsoft a serious fight in the ultra-portable space.
In the past I’ve started my Firefox with many open Tabs. The negative Side from that, is that this eats many RAM. But now I’ve found the ultimate Firefox Extension for that. The Name of this Extension is “TooManyTabs”. First of all you have to define Categories.
The striking thing about the exercise was that an easy majority have moved the database for this to MySQL on Linux with holdouts on Solaris (mostly also MySQL), HP-UX, and various Microsoft configurations – but the unexpected thing was that none of the Unix people had any difficulty either understanding it or doing it; while the Wintel people equally unanimously wanted meetings, paperwork, “a better understanding of the requirements”, and in something like three out of four cases additional monies from their bosses before they could see about getting it done.
Every clone of a Mercurial repository can act as a consistent, fully functional repository itself. This is a very useful property of a DVCS; one that you can take advantage of to make development a lot easier, especially for teams that are dispersed in multiple places of the globe.
It’s interesting to compare the interest over time in various software development methodologies and practices. Google Trends is a great tool for this, although it’s not without limitations, especially since so many programming terms have other meanings.
The fourth Javaday – the Italian technical event for Java developers organized on a volunteer basis directly by members of the Java community in Rome – will take place in Rome on Saturday 30th of January.
Today’s adversaries are different. There are still governments, like China, who are after our secrets. But the secrets they’re after are more often corporate than military, and most of the other organizations of interest are like al Qaeda: decentralized, poorly funded and incapable of the intricate spy versus spy operations the Soviet Union could pull off.
Editor’s Note: A blogger with the PBS’ NewsHour asked former CIA analyst Ray McGovern to respond to three questions regarding recent events involving the CIA, FBI, and the intelligence community in general.
Marc Hall, a junior member of an infantry unit, wrote the song in protest at the US army’s unpopular policy of involuntarily extending soldiers’ service and forcing them to return to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, fuelling a global culture of excess that is emerging as the biggest threat to the planet, according to a report published today. In its annual report, Worldwatch Institute says the cult of consumption and greed could wipe out any gains from government action on climate change or a shift to a clean energy economy.
It has been more than a year since all hell broke loose on Wall Street and, remarkably, almost nothing has been done to prevent all hell from breaking loose again.
In fact, close your eyes and you could be back in the wilds of 2007. Bankers are still making wild bets, still devising new derivatives, still piling on debt. The big banks have access to money almost as cheaply as in 2007, courtesy of the Fed, so bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.
The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have an established love-hate relationship with the Internet. Perhaps more hate-hate. The recording and motion picture industries are still struggling to find their footing and adapt to a world where MP3′s replaced CD’s, and where streaming movies are replacing DVD’s.
Dating back to the early days of Napster, the RIAA and MPAA have lobbied for legislation and leveraged the court system to combat online piracy. In its filing on net neutrality with the FCC, the RIAA wrote “we encourage the FCC to stay its course and explicitly support, encourage, and endorse ISP efforts to fight piracy.”
EFF
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is urging individuals to join its petition to convince the FCC to remove language from the proposed net neutrality guidelines which provide a legal loophole for the entertainment industry to “hijack the Internet.”
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should avoid adopting strict net neutrality rules that would limit broadband providers’ flexibly to “address” illegal online file sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America said in comments filed with the FCC on Thursday.
Internet service providers should have authority to block subscribers from sharing music and other files without permission of the copyright owner, the RIAA said. “ISPs are in a unique position to limit online theft,” the RIAA said in its comments. “They control the facilities over which infringement takes place and are singularly positioned to address it at the source. Without ISP participation, it is extremely difficult to develop an effective prevention approach.”
Why is an intellectual property treaty being negotiated in the name of the US public kept quiet as a matter of national security and treated as “some shameful secret”?
Solid information on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been hard to come by, but Google on Monday hosted a panel discussion on ACTA at its DC offices. Much of the discussion focused on transparency, and why there’s so little of it on ACTA, even from an administration that has made transparency one of its key goals.
Well, Ambassador, a lot of Canadians don’t think U.S. Intellectual Property Laws are in the best interest of Americans or Canadians either. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 comes to mind. Do you have any proof (specifically peer reviewed studies) proving that the DMCA has any benefit to the citizens of the United States? And if you don’t have any proof, when do you intend to provide it?
The Linux Foundation says that the market for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent over the past five years. In response to this trend, the foundation is launching a Linux job board to help connect employers with potential candidates for Linux-related jobs.
An anonymous Best Buy customer told us in December that the Geek Squad refused to honor his extended warranty on his laptop because he had installed (horrors!) Linux.
I have been busy installing an operating system to the repaired Laptop.
Firstly I went with Ubuntu as I already had that installed to an external harddrive and could just boot it up but it needed about 2 days of upgrades added to it.
The 2 days were for the amount of downloads needed.
I upgraded and left it overnight only to find my installation was scuppered next morning.
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I think you need to be prepared to look through forum posts to get the most from Linux as it is a learning curve but once you have your internet set up looking how you want, a few handy programmes, one or two small games and have personalised your desktop, it is very satisfying and ofcourse, free.
So now we have an older computer that, if formatted with a less process intensive operating system, can last 2-3 more years. We have access to Ubuntu Linux as a free download with installation guides. We have the comprehensive OpenOffice application that will let users perform office functions like a professional. What do we do now? Obviously, the standard computer user cannot install and configure an operating system they have never even heard of, much less used. This is where a geek becomes a super hero. The equation is an easy one:
Old Computer + Ubuntu Linux + OpenOffice + Geek Super-Hero = A Win for the Environment and the Less Fortunate
The newest member of the Ext file system, Ext4, became an official part of Linux last year with the release of the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. Since then, it’s become the default file system in some popular Linux distributions such as Fedora, and it’s now available on all distributions.
Ext4 enables faster disk performance and better drive space management than its predecessors. While it also includes journaling, you can turn that off for a modest speed boost. I’m sure Google was also interested in it because even without disabling journaling, Ext4 is a very fast file system, and it supports file systems of up to 1 EB (exabyte) and up to 16 TB (terabyte)-sized files.
There hasn’t been a whole lot to report on in regards to LM_Sensors, the main sensor monitoring package and its kernel drivers for thermal/fan/voltage polling on Linux. It was nearly a year ago that LM_Sensors 3.1 was released, but since then we have run into plenty of new hardware (such as the ASRock ION 330HT-BD and ASUS Eee PC 1201N) that is not yet supported by drivers for LM_Sensors. While this does not improve the hardware support, a new sensor configuration utility has been unveiled for LM_Sensors.
As is often the case, one purchase often begets another. So, on to buy a decent, but relatively inexpensive condensor mike (after shelling out too many $$$ on the mixer). I end up purchasing an MXL 990 condenser microphone with a shock mount for $49.00US. Then a proLine desktop mic stand, model MS112 ($29.99US). Finally, I purchase assorted cables and adapters.
Currently, Ubuntu developers are planning to ship Ubuntu 10.04 with PiTiVi, a different editor. I wouldn’t bet any money on this decision changing before April, but I’ve read good things about OpenShot and thought it would be worth a try, even if won’t be included in Lucid by default.
I should also make clear that I’m no video-editing professional. The extent of my work in this realm has mostly been limited to stringing clips together in Windows Movie Maker back when I was still using XP.
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Overall, OpenShot is a highly usable and stable application for basic video editing. I’ve yet to try PiTiVi to see how it measures up, but hope to do so in the near future.
So, after a couple weeks break, it’ll be on to a new feature cycle! I already have some ideas for what new features to work on, but if you have more ideas feel free to pipe up. I won’t be able to commit to adding any and everything thrown my way, but who knows, something might pop up that wasn’t on my radar. I’ll put up a target feature list on the gitorious wiki when I’ve narrowed them down to something manageable. (There will be periodic 1.0.x releases containing bug fixes and translation updates till the next feature release.)
A significant part of the IT expense of most businesses comprises the cost of acquiring and running enterprise applications. Would it not be better to have the same applications your business relies on at a much reduced cost but with higher productivity? Read on to find out 5 powerful open source enterprise applications you could try in your business establishment today.
One of the many great things about using UNIX or a UNIX-like operating system is the ability to tailor your environment to your liking. If you want a full-fledged GUI with all the bells and whistles then Gnome, KDE, or LXDE are probably for you.
But, if you want something less resource intensive that offers a greater degree of control then Fluxbox Window Manager is what you’re looking for.
I’ve been using the GNOME Shell preview available in Fedora 12 this week and I’m really enjoying it. I was testing out some candidates for updates to the free drivers for my ATI Radeon HD4850 (and the stuff that went with them) already, and decided to see what happened when I picked GNOME Shell. At F12 release time, my graphics card wasn’t quite ready for GNOME Shell use. But now I get the whole kit and kaboodle!
Gnome Shell recently introduced a new notification system. Sadly it seems like GNOME Shell is going to duplicate a lot of the efforts from Canonical. Besides the notification system the application indicators also have similarities.
I’ve been using Parted Magic to work on my disks, and after recently replacing my old 1.x live Parted Magic CD with 4.6, I’m enjoying the little things that PM brings to the project.
For instance, when you turn networking on with DHCP and the DHCP server to which you’re connecting doesn’t transmit nameserver info, Parted Magic uses OpenDNS to supply you with DNS lookup so you can actually use the Internet while in the live environment.
By the end of 2004, I’d been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I’d lived with periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when I couldn’t even get X11 started — for the sake of using a distribution that maximally respected software freedom.
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Twelve days in, I am very impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now available upstream as well. This isn’t the distribution I left in 2004; it’s much better, all while being truly community-oriented and software-freedom-respecting. It’s good to be home. Thank you, Debian developers.
But having been an Ubuntu user for several years, I don’t think I could ever go back to Windows and be happy. As for OS X, I’m too frightened away by Apple’s high prices and obsession with controlling users to consider that route.
The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named “Lucid Lynx”. The latest development milestone is the second of three planned alpha releases, which will be followed by two beta releases and then a release candidate.
A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, due for release in late April this year. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS development.
“HAL” unfortunately isn’t the heinous supercomputer from Kubrick’s film 2001, but Ubuntu’s Hardware Abstraction Layer between Ubuntu’s hardware and software. It has now disappeared entirely from the current Ubuntu 10.04 test version, it’s function being taken over among other things by DeviceKit. The advantage to this, according to the official announcement, is that Ubuntu has a faster boot and startup from hibernate time.
Overall, there are both good and bad performance improvements for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures. You can run your own tests though if you wish using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.
Finally, appointment of a team leader is an unusual request for a team to make to the Community Council, but as a team we found ourselves in the unique position of being a four+ year old team that never had a formal leader and having largely been organically grown with no formal “membership ranks” or process for voting for a leader. A huge thanks to my fellow Community Council members for their consideration and support during this process.
OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09.2 is released. This is a Linux distribution for network routers, like the Linksys WRT54G, or the Asus WL-500g and a lot of other routers. This distribution adds a lot of new functionality to routers, like improved ipv6 functionality.
This YouTube video chronicles some experiments I did using a low-cost Fresnel lens and a homemade cardboard container. My goal in this experiment was to find a way for people to comfortably and portably view the outstanding Inkscape screencasts by Richard Querin and HeathenX which they generously distribute for free. Inkscape is a free vector drawing program that is equivalent to Adobe Illustrator. It runs on all major platforms: Linux, Macintosh and Windows. Here is why I love Inkscape and why you’ll love this program, too. (Thanks, TogrutaJedi)
The Jordanian Government announced the first ever agreement between an international company and a government to promote open source adoption.
Jordan’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and Ingres Corporation have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to achieve the widespread use of information technology and communication, particularly open source technology from Ingres, throughout the local software infrastructure in the country.
Matt’s statement suggests, and he confirmed in a follow-up, that it is harder to build a community with a restrictive license. The obvious argument against that statement is the number of community projects based around GPL code: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, Samba, Drupal, Gnome, and KDE for example.
Clearly the GPL does not prevent vibrant community development projects. The important point about those projects is that they are the result of true development communities, however, rather than a vendor-initiated effort to create a community.
# Is it good code and is it well architected?
# Who are the founders, contributors, and users?
# What are the motivations and behavior of each?
# What is the form and governance of the community?
Started by Richard Stallman in 1983, the GNU Project is a mass collaboration project for open and free software that has flourished even to this day. Stallman followed up the GNU Project with the creation of the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to further support the free software community.
The GNU Project has resulted in a huge amount of open source software over time and gave birth to the GNU General Public License (GPL), arguably the most popular open source license model out there. And when the Linux kernel arrived, GNU software made it into a complete OS.
For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption. As the project has run out of money, my involvement is at an end, so it’s a good time to reflect on what the project has achieved so far.
The new version 1.0 from OpenOffice.org Thumbnail plugin has been released. OpenOffice.org Thumbnail plugin is a plugin for KDE file managers (Dolphin and Konqueror) to preview OpenOffice.org files (Open Document Format) as Thumbnails. You do not need to install OpenOffice.org for it to work (it only uses KDE API).
Norway’s national broadcasting and TV facility NRK is intent on using the Open Document Format as a standard and is therefore changing its clients over to OpenOffice.
Norway appreciates free standards. After the government a year ago recommended Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora next to their commercial alternatives MP3 and H.264 as standards for audio and video files, this year it focuses on ODF as the standard document format. According to the governmnent’s Reference Catalog for IT Standards, the recommendation should become binding in January of 2011.
Open Solaris is getting better and more refined by the release, there’s no doubt about that. Small problems are gradually yet persistently solved. This is extremely encouraging.
On the other hand, compared to most Linux distros, Open Solaris is still about 2-3 years behind when it comes to usability and hardware support. More programs would be nice, as well as the ability to solve common desktop usage problems more easily. 64-bit architecture would also be great, considering the fact Sun pioneered the 64-bit usage.
Like most folks these days, I practically live in my Web browser. After completing the Week in the Life of a Browser Test Pilot project last week, I found that I spent more than 45 hours using Firefox actively in the span of seven days. And that includes the weekend, when I didn’t touch my primary workstation (where the test ran) at all.
When spending that much time in a program, you want to use it as effectively as possible! Here’s how I make Firefox work for me.
Firefox has made changes to the way it develops the world’s most popular browser. Instead of providing incremental updates after every few days, for a change the guys at Firefox have decided to release the next stable release of Firefox as a major release, not a minor one.
If you’ve been following the development of Firefox, you know that Mozilla separates security updates, which usually happen every couple of weeks, from feature updates, which are usually separated by months.
The good news is that it looks like the Obama administration is looking to go in the other direction. The EFF points us to the news that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is looking at ways to have this requirement go beyond just NIH and require public access for all federally funded research, including from organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF). OSTP is asking for comments and input on the idea — and it’s an idea that makes a ton of sense. It seems likely that journal publishers will protest, but hopefully common sense will prevail and federally funded research will become open, accessible and available to everyone.
We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.
As part of FCC’s Open Internet tour, I got invited into one of the many group meetings the FCC has been holding, along with Nicholas Reville of Miro and Cara Lisa Powers of PressPassTV.org.
Nicholas talked about how difficult it would be for Miro to attract video producers if they had to worry that carriers might block or slow their traffic. Why not instead go to one of the Big Brands that can afford to pay the tariff? Miro — an innovative, public-spirited non-profit — would be unable to compete.
That is the question currently puzzling the Department of Health. Back in May the government signed contracts with two suppliers – GSK and Baxter – to supply 90 million doses of H1N1 pandemic vaccine.
For anyone paying attention to the larger trends in the video game market, this could hardly have come as a surprise. A few days ago, Gamestop, a key packaged goods distributor for EA, announced a similar miss. While Activision was setting sales records with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, EA had no major hits — although, in fairness the COD:MW2 revenue was probably just filling in a sinkhole at Activision created by a music game business that has fallen off a cliff. EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again.
Civil libertarians hoped that the Obama era would see a renewed commitment to privacy protections. But their dreams are being dashed. Congress seems likely to recess without adjusting aspects of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the year, which means that the existing law will be temporarily extended. Elements up for reconsideration include roving wiretaps in foreign intelligence investigations that are not targeted to a specific communication mode or person and “section 215” ability to seize business or other records in a presumptive terror investigation.
Different bills to reform these and other powers have come out of the Judiciary Committees of the House and Senate. The House version is slightly better in terms of demands it makes on law enforcement and intelligence agencies to have defensible reasons for their searches and seizures. But the controversial provisions will survive, even if slightly circumscribed.
The policy of random laptop searches and seizures by U.S. government agents at border crossings is under attack again, with a pair of civil rights groups seeking potential plaintiffs for a lawsuit that challenges the practice.
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Last year, a document surfaced on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Web site that authorized U.S. agents to seize and retain laptops indefinitely. Government agents belonging to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is a part of DHS, were also authorized to seize electronic devices including portable media players and cell phones and inspect documents in them.
Stories of poor TSA security screenings are not new – several days ago we wrote about a man who passed through a Milwaukee checkpoint with shotgun shells. In this “TSA screw-up of the day”, we head to Gallatin Field, serving Bozeman, Montana.
Blair was determined to disarm Saddam, Campbell said. Blair’s message to the US in April 2002 was he would try to do it through UN resolutions. However, “if the only way is regime change through military action then the British government will support the American government”, Campbell said, describing Blair’s view.
Global warming is causing climate belts to shift toward the poles and to higher elevations. To keep pace with these changes, the average ecosystem will need to shift about a quarter mile each year, says a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley.
For some habitats, such as low-lying areas, climate belts are moving even faster, putting many species in jeopardy, especially where human development has blocked migration paths.
Advances in agricultural technology—including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops—have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech companies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.
The health dangers from nuclear radiation have been oversold, stopping governments from fully exploiting nuclear power as a weapon against climate change, argues a professor of physics at Oxford University.
The ancient Nazca people, who once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru, literally fell with the trees they chopped down, new research has concluded.
The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion, according to a study published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.
Iceland was plunged back into crisis after its president refused to sign a bill promising to repay more than €3.8bn (£3.4bn) to Britain and the Netherlands after the collapse of the country’s Icesave bank in 2008.
Let’s sum it up. There was massive fraud and criminal activity for self enrichment led by the very people that are testified at the FCIC hearings. Leading the cartel and earnging the most amount of money over the past three years was Lloyd Blankfein.
Blankfein faced tough questioning during the hearing from former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, who heads the commission. Angelides, at one point, asked Blankfein whether a practice of betting against some of the subprime mortgage securities Goldman was selling to investors was a conflict of interest.
He replied that Goldman didn’t have a legal obligation to disclose when it was betting against the securities it was selling.
“We are not a fiduciary,” he said.
A simple brief summary of the financial and banking crisis explained for the lay person:
1. US Government encourages an unprecedented build up of private sector debt by promoting asset price bubbles in residential and commercial real estate thru artificially low interest rates and reduced Capital Requirements. US Government underwrites loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
2. Banking Industry creates complicated security bond investments (CDO) to spread the risk of default on the loans to multiple parties. Essentially the US Government, thru the Wall Street Banks, provided the credit for the loans and then packaged the loans into Bonds to be sold to other institutions sold worldwide such as Hedge Funds, Pension Plans, Governments, and other large Financial Institutions.
3. Banks then created Insurance to protect against a drop in value of these bonds called Credit Default Swaps (CDS). These unregulated Insurance Policies were bought by varies institutions that held the bonds to protect them in case the bonds dropped in value.
4. SEC ignores risks building in system.
5. Ben Bernanke is named Federal Reserve Chairman in October 2005.
6. Hank Paulson resigns from Goldman Sachs and is named US Treasury Secretary in July 2006.
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
The Florida Bar has a new attorney advertising rule that aggressively regulates attorney speech on the Internet. Florida Bar Rule 4-7.6 Indeed, the new rule regulates attorney speech so aggressively that it might even apply to this blog post. Until recently, the Florida Bar considered all attorney websites and web communications as information provided upon the request of a prospective client and did not apply its attorney advertising rules to them. But now the Florida Bar has extended its substantive advertising rules except for its filing requirement to all “Computer-Accessed Communications” by Florida attorneys.
As Google considers withdrawing from China, the BBC looks at the highs and lows of internet access and freedom in the most populous country in the world.
More comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) proposed net neutrality rules rolled in before the midnight deadline Thursday night, and while there were no major surprises from companies like Comcast and groups like the Open Internet Coalition, Google and Verizon once again joined forces to submit a filing that outlined the points on which they agree.
Three US universities have agreed not to use Amazon’s e-book reader the Kindle until it is easily usable by blind people. A fourth settled a complaint from blind people’s advocacy groups by saying that it will strive to use accessible devices in future.
VOICE OVER IP AND CHAT OUTFIT Skype has been pressing its case in favour of net neutrality to the US Federal Communications Commision (FCC).
Skype, which is based on its own proprietary technology, depends on net neutrality to survive. If the telcos and some ISPs get their way, Skype punters will probably be identified as filesharers and get throttled to within an inch of their lives.
Skype told the FCC that net neutrality was “about growing the broadband ecosystem and preserving a borderless, open Internet” and that it would “promote investment, jobs and innovation.”
Two recurring points that Metalitz raised were that the secrecy in the treaty was a requirement of foreign negotiating partners, and the US’s hands were tied; and that the treaty wouldn’t require any of the “advanced” nations to change their law (he repeated the oft-heard unfounded slur that Canada is a rogue nation when it comes to copyright law).
Both of these points are simply wrong. The country demanding that ACTA be kept secret is the good old US of A, whose strategy for this is being driven by former entertainment industry lawyers who have found new homes as senior officials in the Obama government (the Democrats are terrible on copyright, sadly — we can thank Bill Clinton for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). These lawyers are Metalitz’s old pals, his colleagues in the decades he’s spent winning special privileges and public subsidy for his rich clients.
The lobbying group for the top four recording companies wants to make sure that when regulations on Net neutrality are adopted, they don’t impede antipiracy efforts.
That’s why the Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday asked the Federal Communications Commission to “adopt flexible rules” that free Internet service providers to fight copyright theft.
We were just explaining why it appeared that Alan Ellis, the admin for OiNK had not actually violated any UK laws, and it looks like the jury agreed. Ellis has been found not guilty. I have to admit that I’m really surprised by this, but it is certainly a good thing.
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