05.06.13
Posted in Bill Gates at 2:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Billions of dollars not enough, still mining for pennies
Summary: Gates and fellow ‘one-percenters’ gain trillions of dollars in wealth (during a so-called recession) by robbing the rest of society and physically harming it for profit
Despite being funded by Bill Gates (through his proxy) for bias, The Guardian had this to say then other day:
The giants of the green world that profit from the planet’s destruction
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Purists will point out that no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires – foundations that continue to invest their endowments in fossil fuels today. It’s a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them all: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least $958.6m – nearly a billion dollars – invested in just two oil giants: ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites can both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously in some areas?
There are more examples of this kind, such as tobacco and polio, Gates habitually pretends to embrace one side while actually, for profit, embracing the opposite side with his wallet. He really likes to mess with politicians’ minds so that they foolishly give taxpayers’ money to him and fellow plutocrats (we provided many examples ranging in their nature), who according to some statistics gained 6 trillion dollars in the economic ‘recovery’ while others (the lower 99.9%) lost a lot of money. Transfer of wealth and power is what this whole “crisis” really is and what our reader called “pocket pool” helps show how Gates perceives heads of highly-advanced nations. He treats them like inferiors, like tools. The real leaders or the world are those with obscene amounts of money and now they try to abduct the education (indoctrination) establishment in addition to the fourth estate, the media. The non-Koch-owned media is full with reports about the Koch brothers buying the press these days, but little attention is paid to much bigger bribery (for self censorship and propaganda) by Mr. Gates.
On a positive note, as time goes by more people get the guts to chastise Gates for what he is really doing under the guise of ‘charity’. He got $7 billion richer last year alone. So much for an economic ‘crisis’ and a giveaway of wealth… █
“The rich worry over their money, the poor over their bread” –Vienamese proverb
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ESOP has successfully stopped illegal Microsoft deals that make a nation dependent on Microsoft at the expense of this nation; UK still too slow to respond to such state-sanctioned corruption
EUROPE continues to suffer from a large-scale passage of wealth (from the middle and lower classes to the super-rich, sped up by false panic and austerity) and many continue to ignore the causes as well as the symptoms. I tried to explain this to some younger people today, but most are distracted by fashionable consumption and the daily struggle for survival; studying and activism are luxuries to them. Some cannot even find or keep a job.
At the end of last month there was a Web riot over the UK’s broken sites which require those in a tough position (usually unemployed) to use old Microsoft Windows. As Glyn Moody framed it: “Remember the bad old days when the UK government forced people to use Microsoft software in order to interact with it online? Remember how we thought the UK government had finally moved on, recognising that it should use truly open standards allowing citizens the freedom to adopt whatever software they wanted, not least through the fine, open standards-based Gov.uk site?”
“At the end of last month there was a Web riot over the UK’s broken sites which require those in a tough position (usually unemployed) to use old Microsoft Windows.”Well, “Benefit Claimants Must Use Ancient Microsoft Software,” as Moody’s headline clearly states.
The situation in South Korea is even worse due to ActiveX.
How did they end up in this position in the first place? Well, one component of it is corrupt procurement which specifies Microsoft brands rather than technical requirements (we gave examples before). There has been a “9% increase in no-bid contracts since 2009,” says the corporate press and of course it involves the public sector:
At the start of his first term President Obama asked federal agencies to cut back on noncompetitive contracts, calling them “wasteful” and “inefficient.” Things didn’t work out as planned.
Over in Portugal, which suffered a lot of Microsoft bidding/no-bid corruption, these practices are being challenged now [via] and ESOP is behind it again:
Straight from the press release, ESOP, a Portuguese association of open source companies, challenged in the Fiscal and Administrative Court of Almada, a public procurement, 31A2012 for licensing and maintenance of Microsoft software, launched in September, last year, costing about 550.000,00 €.
The court decided it was indeed illegal and decided in favour of the accusation.
We need to do the same thing in the UK, but Microsoft has far too much political power here, as we showed in dozens of posts. What’s needed is a movement with capacity to pressure the government over rigged bidding, unfair pricing, neglect of national sovereignty, and so on. We need a British ESOP. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Vista 8, Windows at 1:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Building fences
Summary: UEFI Restricted Boot continues to be blamed for impeding the growth of free operating systems amid widespread Vista 8 dissatisfaction
The truth of the matter is that “Windows 8 is making only marginal progress and Windows RT continues to flop,” says the Associate Editor of InformationWeek.com, which is a Microsoft-friendly Web site. Even Windows boosters hardly ever denied that Vista 8 is a flop. They just blame others, e.g. OEMs, the users, etc. Mr. Pogson points out that Microsoft is creating a new breed of lock-in and OEMs are still part of it. With UEFI Restricted Boot, which distros are still just trying to catch up with, Microsoft has even upset some rather Microsoft-friendly entities, as Ravi reminds us. The Linux Foundation says that “this has raised concerns that Microsoft Secure Boot will make it difficult to install Linux or other operating systems on a Windows 8 computer.”
The very notion of a “Windows 8 computer” is rather sickening. Microsoft wants to impede general-purpose computer architecture. A Linux and BSD proponents site says that Vista 8 is the “most important reason to switch to [GNU]\Linux” and UEFI has a lot to do with it. The site’s author starts by stating:
As somebody who fully embraces the Free Software principle, I have no need for Windows 8 in my environment. Never used any version of Windows, and never will.
Previous versions of Windows were bad enough, but Windows 8, with its Restricted Boot requirements, have made dual-booting a Linux distribution with Windows 8 on store-bought computers a royal pain in the rear end.
Developers mostly reject Vista 8 and even Linux critics (masquerading as “advocates”), lean on the FSF for support. To quote:
The Free Software Foundation has taken recently to running a rather aggressive campaign.
Go to the website and judge for yourself. I hope the information helps you to make an informed decision that includes switching away from Windows to Linux.
“A hedge fund whose purpose is to influence boards sees potential in Microsoft and wants it to bring Office to more platforms,” according to a new report on which our contributor remarks as follows: “The office format monopoly is what ties people to Windows and helps keep the Windows monopoly. Here is pressure to break that.”
Windows on portable devices is a failure as Windows RT never took off and one pundit wrote:
The Web usage numbers are in: Windows RT can’t get traction, and Lenovo doesn’t believe RT ‘is what businesses want’
From the same site we pull this other criticism:
iOS and Android work well enough on a smaller screen, but Windows 8 will not
This is an area where Microsoft has been trying to make embedded chips Linux-hostile, especially with companies like ARM involved. This never worked because Microsoft lacked inertia in the area, but what about the desktop? A formal antitrust complaint has been lodged. █
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05.05.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Kernel Space
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Last month’s release of FreeNAS 8.3.1 adds new functionality that allows system administrators of the open source-based network attached storage solution to encrypt entire disks while using ZFS. ZFS has been the primary filesystem for FreeNAS since FreeNAS 8, and has supplanted FreeBSD’s UFS as the project’s focus. The new security functionality applies only to ZFS and is the first time that FreeNAS has supported encryption.
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Linus Torvalds is now releasing the second major new Linux kernel milestone of 2013. The Linux 3.9 kernel includes new features that will make the open source operating system faster and more efficient than ever before.
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Sometimes I wonder about the experience level of all us Linux users. Are we mostly a collection of new users or are most Linux users hard core geeks? Well, much like the user-base of individual distros or even the ecosystem as a whole, pinning down the distribution of experience levels across Linux will never anything more than some kind of guess. Today, I’d like to venture another.
I’ve mentioned before, but it bears repeating that my crystal ball of choice is a good poll. What better way to find out what folks’ experience level is that to just ask. I simply named the poll I’ma Linux: and offered various levels for tickable answers.
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I have been noticing some ads for the Linux Foundation appearing on the web…
Such advertising is one of the things that is needed to generate demand for FLOSS everywhere. The Linux Foundation may get a deal from Google or they may be able to afford the price. We bloggers can help by providing links to various organizations and individuals producing FLOSS. Every bit helps.
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Jon Masters summarises the latest news from the Linux kernel community as the final 3.8 kernel release approaches and preparation for 3.9 begins
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Applications
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Last but not least, gThumb 3.2.1 now allows users to use the second mouse button in order to drag the image, in the image viewer component.
gThumb is available in most Linux operating systems. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) features an older version, 3.0.2.
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Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.
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They have stated that the Alpha will start rolling out around the end of May, if you haven’t purchased a version that enables you to get in on the Alpha you better do it sooner or later as they will probably remove the chance!
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When I first found out that Unity was supporting Linux, I was very much looking forward to adding one more platform to my programming kung-fu belt. I had already purchased Unity 3.5 Pro, iOS and Android licenses…and was crushed to discover I would have to pay for another license to get Unity 4 Pro. My interest in the Linux port ceased…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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It’s been ages since I last took a look at Elive. A development release has just come out so now is a good time to take a peek at it.
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This is the translation of an article by Roberto Ferramosca, published in Italian on lffl.org, a great Italian Blog about Linux and Open source.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We are happy to announce that KDevelop 4.5.0 is now available. For those who don’t know, KDevelop is an IDE for all those developers who want to integrate the tools they need for developing, in a comfortable and simple solution. We have a focus on C++ and CMake, but you can find it useful when using other languages such as PHP and Python.
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There are many ways in KDE to find and launch an application or access files – the simplest being krunner which can be invoked by alt+F2. However, if there are any new KDE converts they might want something like Unity’s Dash or Gnome’s Activities overview.
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Today’s Distrowatch Weekly brought the news that a new distribution has been added to the official Linux database. You know what that means. It’s time to boot ‘er up.
SolydXK is a Debian-based distribution aiming to easy to use, stable, and secure. Founders believe SolydXK would be suitable for home and small office settings. SolydXK comes in two flavors: SolydX featuring the Xfce desktop and SolydK featuring KDE. SolydXK began life as a variant of Linux Mint Debian with KDE, but later broke away and became its own distro. Its inaugural release came just two weeks ago and was promptly put right smack on this month’s cover of Full Circle Magazine. SolydXK 201304 features Linux 3.2.39, Xorg 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, and Firefox 19.0.2.
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Ah, yes, it’s that old argument again. But this time there’s a twist. Everyday Linux User is asking visitors to his site which distributions they might save. His list isn’t exhaustive, but his early results are proving interesting.
Gary Newell, proprietor of Everyday Linux User, says he continues to see that old complaint that there are just too many distributions that are merely re-spins. So Newell asks, “Imagine that tomorrow the world decided there can only be a limited number of distributions. Which distributions would you save?”
I have a little trouble with his poll choices. His theory is about “re-spins” but yet he included some distros I consider grandfathers and some that were forked so long ago they are now their own full-fledged distributions. But as it is, it’s still an intriguing question and his early results are proving interesting as well.
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New Releases
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Previous versions of ExTiX were based on KNOPPIX/Debian. Version 7.0 of ExTiX was based on the Swiss Linux System Paldo. Version 8 of ExTiX was based on Debian Sid. Version 11 of ExTiX was based on Ubuntu 12.10.
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Linux Kernel 3.8.8 (3.8.10 available through updates, 3.9 available in hours) with BFQ iosched and ZFS, GNOME 3.6.3, KDE 4.10.2, MATE 1.6 (thanks to infirit), Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 4.0, production ready UEFI (and SecureBoot) support and experimental systemd support (including openrc boot speed improvements) are just some of the things you will find inside the box.
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The GParted team is proud to announce a well-tested, stable release of GParted Live.
This release includes another critical bug fix for a potential crash that might cause loss of data while moving or copying a partition. We strongly recommend that all users of GParted Live 0.15.0-x and 0.16.0-x upgrade to GParted Live 0.16.1-1 to avoid data loss.
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We are happy to announce a maintenance release for Manjaro 0.8.5, released two weeks ago. With this update we adjusted or install medias to the new repository structure we have now. This will ease the installation of Manjaro Linux for new users a lot. This release features pacman 4.1 and includes all updates from the 25th April 2013. Also we fixed slight issues we found in our initial release of Manjaro 0.8.5.
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Simplified page-management with Kajona 4.1 “simplicity”
Five months after the initial release of Kajona 4, the first update v4.1 focuses on simplicity.
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Good morning, everyone! It’s Day Two of Linux Fest NorthWest, so I’m going to be heading out shortly, but I’m going to elaborate a little bit about what made it into Descent|OS and what didn’t for this release.
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Screenshots
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aptosid is a full featured Debian sid based live CD with a special focus on hard disk installations, a clean upgrade path within sid and additional hardware and software support. The ISO is completely based on Debian sid/main, enriched and stabilised with aptosid’s own packages and scripts and adheres to the Debian Social Contract (DFSG).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In the past couple of weeks I have taken a look at two of the more popular Linux operating systems.
Last week I tackled Debian and before that I tackled openSUSE.
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Paris the 15th of April 2013: Mandriva S.A. has released a host of security fixes as well as new addons for its server platform, Mandriva Business Server.
Fully integrated with Mandriva Business Server, the Mandriva Proxy-Cache is based on the Squid proxy project and allows the filtering by white and black lists, as well as on an user basis. Specially packaged for the Mandriva Business Server, Mandriva Proxy can be purchased on Mandriva ServicePlace and will install on top of Mandriva Business Server in just a few clicks. Mandriva has also released a dedicated ssh management addon that lets administrators handle their users’ ssh keys in an elegant and straightforward way. It is available free of charge on the ServicePlace.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is renaming and rebuilding its open source JBoss application server. The new name is WildFly and with it will come a faster and more transparent development process.
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The UK government’s love affair with open-source technology has given software house Red Hat a shot in the arm, we’re told.
The company boasted that its government and system integrator business has grown in the “high double-digit rates” over the last three years. Red Hat, which offers various flavours of the open-source operating system Linux, said subscriptions for its software make up the majority of its revenue from Whitehall.
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Fedora
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The Korora Project is a Linux distribution which hails from Australia and has been offering a friendly Linux since 2005, when it was based on Gentoo. In 2010, it switched over to Fedora and became a remix – now the developers have released Korora 18, “Flo” based on Fedora 18. Actually, the developers just renamed the beta release as final as they found no major issues during the beta period. Korora 18 comes in two flavours with a GNOME and KDE desktop.
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Debian Family
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After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code name “Wheezy”).
This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.
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The release of Debian 7.0, also known as Wheezy, has taken place – the community-driven and built Linux distribution’s most visible change is a new updated look with GNOME 3.4 and the GNOME shell as the default desktop. But there are important changes behind the scenes which will make Wheezy easier to work with and simpler to use to create private clouds. In all, the developers have worked for just over two years, since the release of Debian 6 “Squeeze”, to produce the new stable version of the distribution.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Raring Ringtail, the newest Ubuntu release, is landing with a thud, based on early reviews. It might have some appeal for businesses, though. “In essence, they’re aiming for a more predictable experience, and I think that could make this a potentially interesting offer for businesses that want to get out from underneath the cost and upgrade cycle of Windows,” said tech analyst Charles King.
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Canonical released version 13.04 of its popular Ubuntu Linux distro, introducing a Developer Preview SDK for creating apps that run on the desktop as well as Ubuntu Touch-based smartphones and tablets. Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) offers a more lightweight memory footprint, faster boot, lower power consumption, faster graphics performance, and the debut of Canonical’s MIR display server.
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With the recent release of VMWare ESXi 5.1 and the associated fully featured web client management (which we may cover in a later article), Linux in general is getting closer and closer to the ‘do anything’ desktop operating system we have all wanted it to be for some time. Maturity breeds integration and although we have always had any number of tools to manage our command line servers, our Windows desktops and Mac OSX or other Linux graphical environments separately, we were lacking in a tool that put all the pieces together and managed our connections for us. There are several tools that are attempting to integrate system management, today we are going to talk about one, the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client”.
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Mark Shuttleworth made the controversial decision to move Ubuntu Linux to the Unity interface back in 2010. It’s a decision that provoked lots of argument, but with the Ubuntu 13.04 Linux release out this week, Shuttleworth remains confident he is moving in the right direction.
In an exclusive video interview with Datamation, Shuttleworth reflected on the difficult decisions and transitions he has had to make with Ubuntu Linux. Overall Shuttleworth stressed that he deeply cares about the community and its opinions as Ubuntu Linux continues to evolve.
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Canonical has announced today, April 25, the immediate availability for download of Ubuntu Server 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system, along with Ubuntu 13.04, and all the other flavors.
Ubuntu Server 13.04 includes the Grizzly release of OpenStack software, which delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system.
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Every six months, Ubuntu Linux comes out with a new server release. It is however only once every two years that one of those releases is labeled as an Long Term Support (LTS) release.
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Ubuntu has changed a lot since its early days, as we noted earlier this week. So, too, has what we could call the Ubuntu brand, or the image of the operating system as Canonical presents it to the world. And with Ubuntu 13.04 about to debut, this seems like a particularly appropriate moment to consider how Ubuntu and Canonical as brands have evolved over time to become what they are today.
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A modest update, bringing no major enhancements but adding polish to the Ubuntu desktop
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Canonical is banging the drums for Raring Ringtail, or Ubuntu 13.04 — the much awaited new version, which is available today following beta testing. As the Unity interface and other enhancements to Ubuntu have rolled along, many users have become used to more resource-intensive versions of Ubuntu, but version 13.04 actually offers reduced memory footprint, in addition to a number of other notable features.
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Now, here is a treat for all you Hadoop and Ubuntu lovers. Last month, Canonical, the organization behind the Ubuntu operating system, partnered with MapR, one of the Hadoop heavyweights, in an effort to make Hadoop available as an integrated part of Ubuntu through its repositories. The partnership announced that MapR’s M3 Edition for Apache Hadoop will be packaged and made available for download as an integrated part of the Ubuntu operating system. Canonical and MapR are also working to develop a Juju Charm that can be used by OpenStack and other customers to easily deploy MapR into their environments.
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Once a symbol of openness and freedom, Ubuntu partners with the Chinese regime
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Reader Ollie Terrance wanted to get the look and feel of Ubuntu phone on his Android device. With a little help from Buzz Launcher and Widget Locker, that’s exactly what he did.
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The email mentions some of the changes we can expect in Saucy Salamander. The development version incorporates new versions of GCC and boost. GCC (short for GNU Compiler Collection) is a compiler system by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. Saucy Salamander will use GCC 4.8 as the default compiler, which means it will have improved C++11 support, AddressSanitizer, and a fast memory error detector, among other things. The email also mentions that updates to Glibc and binutils will follow later during the development cycle.
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News about the Ubuntu Touch OS have been received like a breeze of fresh air, mostly by those who are already Ubuntu fans, or by those simply bored with the Android experience and who would like a change of scenery, without switching to a different ecosystem / operating system. Others have received the news concerning Ubuntu on smartphones / tablets with little interest, but that’s mainly because the OS’ wide release is set for late this year, or early 2014.
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The Unity desktop has been seen as an attempt by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth to position Ubuntu as an OS not only for desktops, laptops or netbooks, but also tablets and smartphones, with the same interface across devices. Shuttleworth says that Unity has buy-in from users, developers and OEMs, such as Dell, Lenovo and Acer.
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Flavours and Variants
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An enlightened versions of Ubuntu, Bodhi is an incredibly lightweight and highly customisable distro using Canonical’s base. Is Bodhi crippled from this, or much better?
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Xubuntu 13.04 has been released yesterday, along with the other Ubuntu flavors. Xubuntu uses Xfce as the default desktop environment and is a great alternative for those who prefer a traditional desktop layout with a panel on top, panel applets and so on.
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CalAmp unveiled a 4G LTE cellular router and gateway for AT&T networks that runs embedded Linux on a 400MHz ARM9 processor. The LMU-5000LTE is equipped with LTE, HSPA, and EVDO routers, a 50-channel GPS, and multiple I/O, and features fleet tracking, as well as user-programmable PEG (Programmable Event Generator) monitoring software.
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Artila Electronics has announced an ARM9 micro-box computer with eight isolated RS-485 serial ports and two versions of preinstalled embedded Linux, enabling boot-up from data flash in the event of NAND-boot failure. The Matrix-516 is equipped with a 400MHz Atmel AT91SAM9G20 SOC (system-on-chip), 64MB of RAM, dual Ethernet ports, and two USB 2.0 ports.
The Matrix-516 appears to be a variation of the company’s Matrix-518, substituting eight 2.5KV-isolated RS-485 ports for the earlier model’s RS-232/422/485 ports. As far as we can see, this is the only difference, aside from the lack of the previous model’s audio out.
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XBMC is a media center application that started its life as a project to turn the first-generation Xbox into an audio and video powerhouse. The project has since been ported to run on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and other platforms, and we’ve even seen it running on low-power devices with ARM processors such as the Pivos XIOS DS Media Play.
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WinSystems has introduced its first ARM-based single-board computer (SBC), based on Freescale’s 800MHz i.MX6 processors. The SBC35-C398 series SBCs are available in single-, dual-, and quad-core versions with varying display, expansion, and I/O capabilities, feature extended temperature operation, and are supported with embedded Linux and Android OS builds.
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When developing systems or devices based on embedded Linux or Android, does it make sense to use commercial development tools? In this guest column, Brad Dixon, Director of Open Source Solutions at Mentor Graphics, suggests several reasons why commercial development tools and support can potentially save time, resources, money, and opportunity costs.
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Mentor Graphics announced a version of its Sourcery Codebench GNU toolchain and IDE (integrated development environment) that incorporates electronic system-level (ESL) tools for emulating hardware environments, both pre- and post-silicon, on embedded Linux targets. “Mentor Embedded Sourcery Codebench Virtual Edition” integrates trace/debug, hardware analysis, and simulation tools and APIs.
The new Virtual Edition product combines the company’s Sourcery CodeBench and Sourcery Analyzer tools along with its Vista Virtual Prototyping and Veloce2 Emulation Systems platforms.
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Gumstix has upgraded its Linux-ready DuoVero and Overo computer-on-modules (COMs). The OMAP4430-based DuoVero Zephyr adds 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth to the DuoVero design, and the Overo TidalSTORM is based on a TI 1GHz OMAP3730 processor, and doubles the RAM to 1GB compared to the previous Overo Tide.
Gumstix has been upgrading and revising its Overo line of tiny, Linux-focused COMs since the first ARM Cortex-A8-based Overo Earth arrived in 2008. It is now doing the same with its newer, Cortex-A9-based DuoVero modules, which similarly use Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci OMAP system-on-chips (SOCs). As before, both new COMs measure 2.28 x 0.67 inches (58 x 17mm), feature dual 70-pin expansion connectors, and are supported with open-source Linux development kits, including Yocto Project build system support.
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The market for cheap single-board computers is becoming one of the most surprisingly competitive spaces in the tech industry. On the heels of the million-selling Raspberry Pi, a variety of companies and small groups started creating their own tiny computers for programmers and hobbyists.
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From the user’s point of view the small cheap computers have huge advantages like price, performance, portability, and running FLOSS operating systems. Underneath that, in the chip itself is a magical combination that used to fill an ATX box with components. For x86/amd64 all of those components were managed well except the graphics which were closely guarded secret places where FLOSS was often second best because the manufacturers did not produce FLOSS drivers and were often not cooperative.
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The Meld developers have announced the immediate availability for download of the 1.7.2 version of Meld, a visual merge and diff utility targeted at developers, featuring a handful of improvements, bug fixes and updated translations.
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It’s an obvious thing but in case you didn’t notice, the price of IT using multiple sources of software and hardware competitively priced is good for you and everyone else on Earth.
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Phones
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What a difference a decade makes! Ten years ago, Wintel would have been the only way to go for the IT ecosystem but it was too expensive. Now Kenyans have the choice of small cheap computers running */Linux and are loving it. Wintel need not apply.
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Ballnux
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Samsung has claimed that it is likely to run out of its new Galaxy S4s and is facing overwhelming global demand.
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Android
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Rumour loving Digitimes reports that several major vendors, including Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Acer and Asus will launch Intel based convertibles sometime in the third quarter. Lenovo will lead the way and it will introduce its first Android based notebook a bit earlier, in May.
Intel is rumoured to be targeting the sub-$500 market with Android based convertibles. Pricier designs, such as Haswell based Ultrabooks should cost at least a couple of hundred more and they will feature Windows 8 rather than Android. In terms of hardware, the convertibles will have to feature a completely detachable keyboard that will allow them to transform into a tablet. With a completely detachable keyboard, the whole concept sounds a lot like Asus’ Transformer series of Android devices.
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Sony’s Xperia S AOSP experiment was well-received, though it was eventually moved away from the AOSP main branch to Sony’s own GitHub, owing to the limitations of what could be done with the hardware. Sony software engineers Johan Redestig and Björn Andersson want to help continue that work with Sony’s latest. The Xperia Z project will help developers and tinkerers interested in making contributions to Android, and to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro platform do so using essentially a vanilla Android OS installation on the device, albeit starting out on Sony’s own GitHub, and not as part of Google’s own main AOSP project.
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The military has high-tech equipment to track sniper fire, using microphones carried by soldiers or stationary mics mounted at strategic points. Now that technology is getting shrunk so it can be used in the hands of civilian bodyguards with Android phones.
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A free Android app is a great thing – if that app is really worthwhile. And fortunately, the number of free apps for Android is always growing, fueled in part by developers offering freemiums designed to entice you to try the app and then opt for the paid version because, hey, you actually like it. Other developers are looking to cash in on the BYOD trend, so they are offering freebies to individual users in the hopes that you’ll push your boss to let you use it for work too (but your boss will have to pay for the enterprise version). Other apps are of the open source, free and wild ilk, and still others are apps by developers looking to do something good for others.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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YouGov’s Quarterly Tablet Tracker for Q1 2013 reveals consumers now see Android devices as equal in quality to Apple’s, deeply cutting into the iPad manufacturer’s share of the ‘premium’ tablet market.
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OpenStack isn’t just a way for tech giants like HP and IBM to mimic Amazon’s wildly successful cloud services. It’s also a teaching tool.
Created little more than three years ago by NASA and cloud computing outfit Rackspace, OpenStack is an open source project in the truest sense of the term. Hundreds of developers are now contributing to the project, and these developers span myriad different companies, including not only HP and IBM, but the networking giant Cisco, virtualization kingpin VMware, and myriad startups. And then there’s Dinkar Sitaram, a professor at the PES Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India who’s using OpenStack to immerse his students in the ways of open source software.
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Cenatic, Spain’s open source centre, has published a model to help calculate cost savings that are possible by switching to open source software on desktop PCs. The model evaluates costs by taking into account the size and complexity of the organisation, Cenatic says. “The methodology is based on our experience with migrations and open source methodologies.”
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Stick With Open Source – The software that powers many businesses, often also labeled “enterprise”, is equally as bad. Closed source, license restricted, and unbelievably expensive, enterprise software will cause more problems than it is worth at some point. Case in point, we once ran our entire stack on IBM’s WebSphere. The databases, the java application server, the web server, and the load balancer. The load balancer used a kernel loadable module that would break every time we patched the server, and we would have to go back to IBM to have a new binary built before we could patched in production. IBM’s turnaround time was normally around a week or so, but for a load balancer, it was completely unacceptable. Own your datacenter, own your software, don’t let a vendor tell you what you can and can not do, leave that up to your imagination.
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This local client had decided to abandon Microsoft and change out their office systems for new hardware with new operating systems. Thus already requiring retraining and all that comes with such a change. Of course, I made the pitch for Linux with all FOSS. In general, they only use their systems for e-mail and creating quote documents for clients. Under FOSS systems, the e-mail is covered with any number of FOSS e-mail applications, while the quote documents are covered with LibreOffice to create PDF files. One of the systems does run accounting software for billing and payments. But they do not do their own payroll, so LedgerSMB would work for their billing and payments accounting system.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Bug bounties–cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs–have been steadily on the rise for several years now, ranging from FOSS Factory’s bounty programs to the bounties that both Google (for the Chrome browser) and Mozilla offer. In fact, Google has been setting new records with the bounties it offers for meaningful bugs. And now, in a post on the Chrome blog, Google has confirmed that it has paid out more than $31,000 to a single security researcher who identified three Chrome bugs.
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Mozilla
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At the beginning of this year, the folks at Mozilla rolled out the 1.0 version of the Firefox OS Simulator, which provided folks–especially developers–an opportunity to try out the company’s promising new mobile operating system. The simulator worked on computers rather than mobile devices, and many developers used to get a taste of the new platform.
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Rust, the new programming language being developed by the Mozilla project, has a number of interesting features. One that stands out is the focus on safety. There are clear attempts to increase the range of errors that the compiler can detect and prevent, and thereby reduce the number of errors that end up in production code.
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The Mozilla developers have now released the latest version of the Firefox OS simulator. Designed to allow developers to create and test applications for Firefox OS without having to try and get their hands on the limited supply of application-creator-oriented Geeksphone developer preview phones.
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Earlier this week, I covered the imminent availability of the first phones for sale based on Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile platform. The company has already detailed the first five countries that will offically get Firefox OS phones, but the very first phones–aimed at developers–arrived for sale this week and sold out nearly instantly. Mozilla partnered with Spanish start-up Geeksphone to move the phones, and the speed with which they sold could be a very promising sign as Mozilla reorganizes its staff and strategy around mobile phones.
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Mozilla is a perennial favorite of the open source world, a poster child for success. Today Mozilla introduced Heka, which they describe as “a tool for high performance data gathering, analysis, monitoring, and reporting”. Gathering performance statistics of web servers is part of the day to day work of a sysadmin, so an announcement from Mozilla in this space is sure to be interesting.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The European Union is funding a consortium of researchers, academic organisations, and others to come up with ways to improve decision-making speed and quality when it comes to real world data sets. The AXLE Project is being run by the AXLE Consortium – comprising the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the University of Manchester, the University of Ljubljana, and Portavita – and is coordinated by PostgreSQL experts 2ndQuadrant.
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There’s more — much more — to the Big Data software ecosystem than Hadoop. Here are four open source projects that will help you get big benefits from Big Data.
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Security is improving in the open source OpenStack cloud platform, but more work is needed and is still being done. That’s the message coming from the recently formed OpenStack Security Group (OSSG) at the OpenStack Summit in Portland this week.
OpenStack is a multi-stakeholder effort with broad participation from some of the biggest IT vendors in the world, including IBM, Dell, HP, Intel, Cisco and AT&T, as well as Linux vendors Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical. It is being deployed by well-known companies such as BestBuy, eBay, Comcast and Bloomberg.
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Databases
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Some consolidation in the world of open source database startups: SkySQL, a provider of open source database solutions, is merging with Monty Program Ab, the creators of MariaDB, an open source database technology that is used by Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and other services. The merger is also a reunion of sorts: both companies employ key people from MySQL, the database company that was bought by Sun in 2008, and in turn became a part of Oracle. Monty Program was founded and led by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder of MySQL.
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SkySQL last week signed a merger agreement with Monty Program Ab forming one of the industry’s newest and perhaps most logical business agreements.
SkySQL is a provider of open source database solutions for MySQL and MariaDB users, while Monty Program is the creator or the MariaDB open source database itself.
NOTE: MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system, which in itself is a open source Relational DataBase Management Systsem (RDBMS) formerly championed by Sun prior to Oracle days.
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More bad new for Oracle owned MySQL, which is heading in the direction of OpenOffice. Wikimedia has completed the migration of the English and German Wikipedias, as well as Wikidata, to MariaDB 5.5.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Continuing along in the vein of exploring all the options in datacenter virtualization, my journey has led me, unavoidably some might say, to Joyent’s SmartOS. SmartOS is a decedent of Solaris, one of the first Unix systems I learned on over a decade ago. Being based on Solaris, and on account of a number of other features, SmartOS is definitely a horse of a different color.
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Healthcare
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Tobacco giant warned of loss of jobs in UK before packaging rules were dropped, and anti-smoking camp also cites possible fear of Ukip
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Business
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Funding
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The Software Freedom Conservancy has started a fundraising campaign to create an open source, free software accounting system for non-profit organisations (NPO). Conservancy’s goal is to raise $75,000 to fund a developer for one year to first evaluate existing technologies and then build a solution designed for non-profit accounting on the best available open source system.
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Donay, a Dutch startup that’s officially launching at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 NY, wants to make it easier for companies and users to provide incentives to open source developers. Say your company is using a popular open-source application, but you find a bug or need a new feature. Currently, there is no easy way to pay open source developers for their work and, Donay argues, that makes it hard for companies that don’t have in-house development shops to get bugs fixed or new features added.
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Google Summer of Code selected Bloomington as a participant for a second year.
Bloomington will be participating as a mentoring organization to student programmers through the company’s Summer of Code Initiative.
Bloomington was the first city government establishment to participate in Google Summer of Code in 2012.
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Project Releases
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We are about to ship Eucalyptus version 3.3 – and there is no end to our pride and excitement!
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The developers of ack have released version 2.0 of their grep-like tool optimised for searching source code. Described as “designed for programmers”, ack has been available since 2005 and is based on Perl’s regular expressions engine. It minimises false positives by ignoring version control directories by default and has flexible highlighting for matches. The newly released ack 2.0 introduces a more flexible identification system, better support for ackrc configuration files and the ability to read the list of files to be searched from stdin.
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Public Services/Government
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Open source technology should be used to help commoditise government IT to move from cost-heavy bespoke systems to the more competitive end of the market, Tariq Rashid, IT Reform, Cabinet Office has said.
He also warned that by using customised IT solutions, or trying to aggregate demand to drive discounts, government departments were losing their power as a customer and missing out on the fierce dynamics of the commodity market.
Rashid made his comments while speaking at the Open Gov Summit 2013 in London today, where he also reiterated the Cabinet Office’s current approach to IT – specifically, the drive towards user need, agile development and sustained value.
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Openness/Sharing
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Building on the ground-breaking work of billionaire genius Tony Stark, the first Linux-powered Iron Man suits may soon be within the reach of homebrew builders.
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Open Hardware
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One of the smallest quadrotors in the world is also fully open source. Is it a toy, a development, platform, or both?
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On Saturday, as part of their weekly activities, the GNU Linux Users’ Group (GLUG) of the BMS Institute of Technology, Bangalore, celebrated Hardware Freedom Day.
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Programming
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Cut to a polite, well dressed assistant at a counter with a big sign saying ‘End of Show Department’ behind him.
Assistant Well it is one of our cheapest, sir.
Chris What else have you got?
Assistant Well, there’s the long slow pull-out, sir, you know, the camera tracks back and back and mixes…
As he speaks we pull out and mix through to the exterior of the store. Mix through to even wider zoom ending up in aerial view of London. It stops abruptly and we cut back to Chris.
In the last tutorial we saw how to model the position on a chess board. However, the interface was pretty basic. It looked like this:
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The developers of the Ruby on Rails web framework have announced that the first Rails 4.0 release candidate is now available “just in time for the opening of RailsConf”. Rails 4.0 is the first Rails release to prefer Ruby 2.0 and has a minimum requirement of Ruby 1.9.3. The release candidate includes over 1300 commits made since February’s release of the first beta of Rails 4, all landing on top of the numerous changes made since Rails 3.2. The Rails team hope that developers can “give this release candidate an honest try”.
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According to the April 18 court filings, a forensic analysis of computers used during redistricting indicates multiple files were deleted just after Republicans were instructed to turn them over to Democrats — but before they had actually done so.
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Last September, the research group Project New America tested more than thirty messages on “sporadic, less likely voters who lean Democratic” to see what would motivate them to vote. “One of the most powerful messages across many different demographics was reminding people that their votes were important to counter the extremists who are kicking people off of voter rolls,” the group wrote in a post-election memo.
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Health/Nutrition
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The extended comment period on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review and approval of AquAdvantage genetically engineered (GE) salmon ends April 26. As more comments flood in, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) reports that documents disclosed through a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) “raise serious questions about the adequacy of the FDA’s review of the AquAdvantage Salmon application.”
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Security
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A former employee of Hostgator has been arrested and charged with installing a backdoor that gave him almost unfettered control over more than 2,700 servers belonging to the widely used Web hosting provider.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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So the fact that Karzai received money from the United States, presumably in order to do things the U.S. wants him to do…
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If you were watching the CBS Evening News on April 25, you heard anchor Scott Pelley say, “The Obama administration says nerve gas has been used, and that is something President Obama has called a red line that cannot be crossed.” Moments later reporter Major Garrett weighed in to say, ” The White House says it cannot definitively prove the Assad regime used chemical weapons.”
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There was a crackdown by the security forces on peaceful rallies held by civil society organisations in West Papua to protest the handover of West Papua by UNTEA to Indonesian administration. Fifty years ago on the 1 May in 1963, the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) transferred administration of the Dutch colony of Netherlands New Guinea to Indonesia. From the moment Indonesia took over the administration from UNTEA, the oppression of the West Papuan people began and 50 years later the oppression continues and so does the struggle of the West Papuan people for self-determination During the crackdown two people were killed and three seriously wounded in the town of Sorong. In Timika fifteen people were arrested for simply raising their national flag, The Morning Star and six were arrested in Biak.
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DALLAS – April 25 – During the opening dedication ceremony of the George W. Bush Library & Policy Center in Dallas, Texas, Dennis Trainor Jr. of Acronym TV and Gary Egelston of Iraq Veterans Against the War wearing Bush and Cheney papermache impressions, were brutally arrested for walking off the curb. The Bush and Cheney characters were in the custody of CODEPINK Co-founder Medea Benjamin, dressed as a pink police, who was forced back to the sidewalk while the Dallas police dragged Trainor and Egelston to the ground. “It was an appalling use of brutal force immediately. What happened to a warning or a request ‘Sir, hands behind your back’?” said Medea Benjamin, who is still recovering from the whiplash of the event.
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Cablegate
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Iceland’s Supreme Court has ruled that Valitor (formerly Visa Iceland) must pay WikiLeaks $204,900 per month or $2,494,604 per year in fines if it continues to blockade the whistle-blowing site.
The court upheld the decision that Valitor had unlawfully terminated its contract with WikiLeaks’ donation processor, DataCell.
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A leader of the notorious “hacktivist” group Anonymous UK was cleared at the Old Bailey today of twice raping a woman inside the Occupy London camp.
Malcolm Blackman, 45, had been accused of attacking the woman after she passed out drunk in her tent on the steps of St Paul’s.
In another incident he was said to have tied her hands behind her back with cable ties before forcing himself on her.
Blackman admitted keeping a “tally mark” of all the women he had slept with at the camp.
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Nigel Evans is fully entitled to the presumption of innocence; and the media seem more inclined to give it to him than they did to Malcolm Blackman, linked to Anonymous. In this particularly disgusting piece of journalism by Paul Cheston of the Evening Standard, the vicious liar who brought false accusations against Blackman is referred to as “the victim” – not even the alleged victim, but “the victim” – even after Blackman was found not guilty.
[...]
It is particularly sickening that Blackman’s name and photograph has been published everywhere in relation to horrifying and untrue accusations of binding someone against their will with cable ties and raping them. This terrible publicity will follow him everywhere for the rest of his life. The deranged or malicious person who fabricated this story in court continues to have their identity protected.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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BP’s cement contractor on the drilling rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 announced Monday that it is trying to negotiate a settlement over its role in the disaster, a focus of trial testimony that ended last week.
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Opponents of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline packed a State Department public hearing on its latest environmental analysis of the pipeline to warn that it is all risk for the United States, with no reward.
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Bee populations have been declining rapidly worldwide in recent years — in the U.S., they have declined by almost 50 percent just since October 2012, according to The Ecologist. The problem is complex, with possible culprits including certain parasites (like Varroa mites), viruses, pesticides, and industrial agriculture. But two studies published in early 2012 in the journal Science suggested a particularly strong connection between the use of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids and the decline of both bumble bee and honeybee populations.
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) suffered a big defeat in North Carolina today when a bipartisan group of legislators killed a bill to repeal the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standards, which require utilities provide a certain percentage of energy from renewable sources. ALEC typically operates in the dark but has expressed rare public support for the North Carolina effort.
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To date, 11 cities have announced their divestment, and student and community organizers are working on active divestment campaigns in cities and on University campuses around the country. Madison joins San Francisco, CA, Richmond, CA, Berkeley, CA, Bayfield, WI, Ithaca, NY, State College, PA, Eugene, OR, Santa Fe, NM, and Boulder, CO in committing to divesting, along with Seattle, WA, which committed to divestment last fall.
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Finance
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Missouri is the latest front in the attack on organized labor with so-called “paycheck protection” bills moving through the legislature, with backing from the usual array of corporate interests. But according to the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, the bills primarily disadvantage workers while preserving privileges for corporations.
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An array of right-wing organizations in North Carolina are arguing loudly for Governor Pat McCrory to radically alter how corporations and people pay taxes in the state — and the not-so-hidden hand behind the effort is North Carolina millionaire Art Pope, a close ally of the Koch brothers, who funds the groups and has been appointed as North Carolina’s Budget Director.
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Last week, Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and David Vitter (R-LA) introduced the first bipartisan legislation aimed directly at putting an end to “too big to fail” financial institutions and preventing future bailouts of America’s behemoth banks.
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Opponents of the budget provisions say rent-to-own companies prey on people already deeply in debt or those who have language barriers, while charging hefty interest at the rate akin to payday lenders. Bishop Listecki says it’s a method to keep those already struggling month-to-month in economic servitude. “If someone wants to pay seven times the amount for an item, they are more than welcome to pay more than seven times for the amount for the item,” he said. “The difficulty is when you are not told when you are paying seven times the amount.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The right-wing network funded by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers is being revamped after the 2012 elections, starting with a new nonprofit called the “Association for American Innovation” that will act as a hub for funnelling undisclosed spending towards the Kochs’ political projects. With ambiguous IRS rules and a deadlocked Congress, they might get away with it.
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Six influential state tax studies by anti-tax organizations including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), are “deeply flawed,” include “highly inconsistent findings” and constitute “ideologically charged pseudo-social science published to further the interests of corporations and rich people,” according to a major new report released by Good Jobs First, titled “Grading Places: What Do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us?”
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More than forty bills introduced in the Missouri state legislature echo American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation, and at least 60 legislators are ALEC members, according to a new report from Progress Missouri.
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is centrally involved with pushing environmentally destructive legislation on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, today complained that “Earth Day has been a largely somber event” when it should be “a celebration of the wonderful achievements humankind has made in cleaning and greening the planet,” wrote Todd Wynn, ALEC Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force Director.
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When reporters pay tribute to rather than scrutinize the powerful people they cover, it’s what’s known as a “beat sweetener”–a story in which the reporter kisses up to a subject in hopes of gaining easier access down the line.
Beat sweetener was written all over John Broder’s April 30 New York Times profile of new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, “a woman of untamed energy, competitiveness and confidence in the boardroom and on a mountain trail.”
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The inflammatory statement that Israel should be “wiped off the map” attributed to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “was never made” by him, a distinguished Canadian economist says. in a recently released book entitled: Towards A World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War.
To begin with, says Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa, the words were not those of Ahmadinejad when he uttered them on October 25, 2005.
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The following night (4/24/13), Fox “liberal” Bob Beckel was on to defend his plan to halt all student visas for Muslims for the next two years–a policy that he defended in part because Muslims have never condemned any terrorist acts.
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The billionaire industrialist Koch brothers have spent tens of millions for decades on a long-term plan to reshape the legislative, executive, and judicial branches according to a corporate-friendly form, and may now make inroads into what is often referred to as the fourth branch of government: the press.
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Censorship
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UK PRIME MINISTER David Cameron envisions a world where pornography is unavailable on WiFi connections in public places.
Cameron told the Telegraph newspaper that people ought to be able to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea without having to face images of boobies, or worse.
“We are promoting good, clean, WiFi in local cafes and elsewhere to make sure that people have confidence in public WiFi systems so that they are not going to see things they shouldn’t,” he said.
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INTERNET GIANT Google has published its latest transparency report and revealed that governments are making more and more demands of it.
Google publishes its transparency report quarterly. It says it does so to be as open as possible. The reports usually make for chilling reading.
This report is no different, and shows that the numbers of requests to remove or censor content or pass along user data have increased again.
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Privacy
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Nick Clegg this morning announced on London’s LBC radio that “What people dub the Snoopers’ Charter, that’s not going to happen”. He went on to say that mass snooping on citizens was “not either necessarily workable nor proportionate”.
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Today we visited Facebook in London, launching a new campaign for a strong Data Protection Regulation.
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Following Nick Clegg’s rejection of the Snoopers’ Charter, our new report brings together leading Internet experts, lawyers and campaigners to offer credible, less intrusive alternatives to the Home Office’s Communications Data Bill. The authors make a call for more targeted, more transparent and more accountable surveillance laws and offer a number of useful recommendations for how to achieve this.
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The Senate has advanced legislation that would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant from a judge before they could access someone’s email or other data stored in the cloud.
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Civil Rights
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In the wake of the recent harsh prosecutions of Aaron Swartz and Andrew Auernheimer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Watt’s experience provides a look at life after a felony hacking conviction and what he calls the “near-impossibility of thriving in a post-conviction life.” It was these post-conviction prospects that friends of Swartz say drove him to commit suicide in January before his trial for downloading academic documents.
[...]
Watt, like Swartz, was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann in Boston
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After being targeted by a police raid on a web host previously owned by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, Sweden’s #2 torrent site took just three weeks to come back online. Taunting the authorities with their return, Tankafetast rented cinemas and launched a clothing range but for the police there was clearly unfinished business. An admin of the site has now been arrested and questioned. The site, however, remains fully operational.
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After The Pirate Bay’s new Greenland-based domains were suspended earlier this month, the world’s largest file-sharing site has found a safe haven in Iceland. From now on TPB can be reached via ThePirateBay.is without the imminent threat of another domain suspension. The Icelandic registry informs TorrentFreak that they will not take action against the domain unless a court order requires them to do so.
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The U.S. Government has just submitted its objections to Megaupload’s motion to dismiss the case against the company. Megaupload’s lawyers have pointed out that the Department of Justice is trying to change the law to legitimize the destruction of Megaupload. However, the Government refutes this assertion and asks the court to deny Megaupload’s motion, fearing that otherwise the entire case may fall apart.
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Send this to a friend
05.04.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We’re so busy seeking release from Windows that we overlooked all the ways Linux had already freed us
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Linux interest, despite FUD, is on the rise. You can take a look at the numbers in Distrowatch. When I migrated to Linux in 2009, it took Ubuntu 2249 visits to be the first distro ranked. Today, the 3rd position has 189 visits more than that. Back in 2009, the last distro had 73 hits. Today, the 100th position is counted with three digits and has almost two times that number of visits.
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In a victory for the free software movement, the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has started to switch more than 40,000 government PCs to open source.
All the computers will be migrated this year. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source will help save €30 million per year.
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ENTERPRISE MESSAGING VENDOR Icewarp claims that it is not hard to sell Linux to firms that have been using Microsoft’s software products once they become open to change.
Icewarp, which produces a messaging and collaboration server that rivals Microsoft’s Exchange and Sharepoint servers offers its daemons on both Windows and Linux. However the firm told The INQUIRER that in certain regions firms are very keen
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The FreeType font rendering engine has been enhanced with a new rasterizer for Compact Font Format (CFF) fonts, contributed to FreeType by Adobe and Google. The new rasterizer details were included in the latest changes file for the beta version 2.4.12 of FreeType. The new engine is said to be “vastly superior to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next release”.
Currently though, the new engine is disabled by default and has to be enabled at build time. The code itself is described as a “mature beta”. Google explains that CFF fonts place more of a burden for working out the display trade-offs on the rasterizer, more so than TrueType, and the new Adobe CFF engine for FreeType brings a higher quality engine to the open source font renderer, which is better able to make the appropriate trade-offs for a wider range of displays.
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Depending on how you pay for it, you’ll probably have to part with at least fifty quid for Windows 8, and double (or more) for OS X, and they come with almost no software compared to the average Linux distribution. Yet almost all Linux distributions are free as in zero-cost.
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Desktop
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After a decade of looking for the “year of the Linux desktop”, many Linux columnists have given up. Some say it isn’t coming, while others claim that Linux has simply failed on the desktop.
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Plenty of specialized companies out there sell PCs with Linux, but Dell is one of the very few mainstream contenders to have done so over the years. After some spotty initial offerings, it’s taken a different approach with its latest Linux PC. Rather than try to sell Linux hardware to the masses, which the company has said typically requires support, it’s focusing instead on developers, a savvy group that tends to need less help.
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Although many people think of them as older participants in the portable computing market, the fact is that Chromebooks based on Google’s Chrome OS first went on sale in June of 2011–not long ago. In a recent post on the state of Chromebooks, I noted that prices in the $200 range for Chromebooks like the Acer system shown here are attracting users, but also noted that market share numbers are not showing these system making a big splash.
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When you get right down to it, nobody cares about Operating Systems. Nobody wants to install an Operating System, with minor exceptions including your average ‘Gear Head’ (me) who likes to get grease under his finger nails and tinker with all manner of different technologies. I am in the minority.
So, when you walk by that Chromebook at Best Buy, realize that it’s in the brick and mortar setting because it comes pre-installed. That is a must for any operating system to become wildly popular. You can’t succeed otherwise. It doesn’t matter which GUI you like. Not pre-installed? You are losing in the bigger game played by Microsoft and Apple.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The XFS file-system with the forthcoming Linux 3.10 kernel will have an experimental feature for CRC protection of meta-data.
The XFS file-system pull request for the Linux 3.10 merge window was submitted on Thursday to the kernel mailing list.
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Applications
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With animation soaring higher into 3D imagery, there’s something to be said for old school 2D hand-crafted images. For those who are so inclined, Pencil Animation shows a lot of promise as a drawing tool. It’s easy to use and provides lots of options. Installation, though, can be a bear — and we’re not talking Yogi. Lack of developer support is also a drawback.
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After years of waiting, there is finally a publicly available beta of the Lightworks high-end non-linear video editing software.
Lightworks was originally supposed to be on Linux around 2011 but there were numerous delays and the project finally went into alpha last year but it was very restricted in terms of access. It’s not too open but Linux development has continued.
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That’s extra sad, because Blender has gone the way of Gimp – insane. I loaded up the latest version of Blender, and discovered – for the thousandth version now – that every single menu, button, command, keyboard shortcut, and function has been rearranged pointlessly AGAIN!!!!!, meaning I would have to sit down AGAIN!!!!! and devote solid, monastic concentration to learning AGAIN!!!!! a completely new Blender interface for a month before I could produce anything with it. This has been going on nonstop for a decade now. Forget it, I have better things to do with my time than waste it with silly games by the sour trolls of the Gimp and Blender teams. Can’t WAIT for those two projects to choke off. So sad any other projects have to go.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Here’s the thing about Surgeon Simulator 2013; I didn’t like it very much at first. Not this full version, anyway. I loved the original free release – a silly joke game, primed for Youtube Let’s Plays, in which you play as a floppy surgeon’s hand, with keys controlling each finger. You perform open heart surgery on a guy. The joke is that it doesn’t go very well, even when you succeed. It’s pretty hard to fail, because it’s more of a toy than a game. If you do fail, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the only level, so why are you playing really? To have fun, probably to make videos of it, or to hurl comically-rendered bodily organs around.
I booted up Surgeon Simulator 2013 proper, tried the first op (the same one I’d already played) and failed within two minutes. In the free version, I could last up to ten quite comfortably. I tried again. Failed again. I couldn’t cut the stomach out. I don’t even remember the free version having a stomach stem. I hacked at the stomach stem with a bone saw. The guy died. I tried again. I drilled through his ribcage and pierced his lungs. In the free version, he’d have shrugged this off. I guess he’s gotten more fragile since then. He died, of course.
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Valve, the company behind Steam and several games on the platform, has released a beta version of their critically acclaimed, physics-based puzzler, Portal, for Linux.
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Closure, an indie game developed by the Eyebrow Interactive studio, is available on Steam for Linux with a 66% discount.
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Portal, an innovative single-player game developed and published by Valve, will soon arrive on Steam for Linux.
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Every now and then in Linux gaming, it pays off to pick up an old favorite and see how it’s come along. Last time I visited SuperTuxKart, it was a dinky thing with about four tracks, no powerups, and disgusting “burp” sound effects. Maybe it was 2004?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Every function should have at least four good alternatives. This is where you come into play. Please help us to improve the study with your ideas for alternative metaphors. These can be quite diverse and from different contexts. So every input is appreciated.
Once we have found sufficient metaphors for each of these functions we need to create icons to these metaphors that fit in one icon set. And at this point we need your assistance again since we are not designers but usability experts. Icons should be redesigned to not have any biases because of the color, style, etc. It does not need to have a really fancy design with 3D effects or the like. But the layout must not influence users decision which one to choose in the upcoming test.
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In the general discussion about “lightweight” desktop environments I have read a few times that one should disable Compositing in KWin. That’s done in Kubuntu’s low-fat settings package and also something Jos talked about in the context of Klyde.
I have never seen an explanation on why Compositing should matter at all. It mostly boils down to “OpenGL is evil” and “I don’t want 3D”. So let’s leave the “educated guesses” behind us and have a proper look to the question whether Compositing matters for “lightweight”. (Remember: lightweight is a buzz-word without any meaning.)
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KDE community offers one of the the most advanced desktop environments around, Plasma Desktop. But it is not limited to the desktops, KDE has developed technologies for every class of devices, whether it’s PCs, netbooks or tablets. The community develops software packages which are cross platform and are used on different platforms – some of the most notable KDE applications include Calligra suite, DigiKam, K3b and much more.
I run KDE Plasma Workspaces on all my devices – Plasma Desktop on my PCs, Plasma Netbook on my, as obvious, netbooks and laptops and Plasma Active on my Nexus 7. The reason I chose Plasma over others is the features and functionality it offers which are missing from every other desktop environments.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We just launched KDE Sutra, a KDE magazine by Muktware, to celebrate our 3rd anniversary. Aaron Seigo, the Plasma project leader, has written the introductory column for the magazine launch. Here I present to you Aaron Seigo! — Swapnil Bhartiya (editor KDE Sutra).
KDE is a community with over fifteen years of history during which time it has consistently produced one of the premiere Free software desktops. It is one thing to make a new software project sound and look exciting; it is another to maintain interest and excitement across fifteen years. It is one thing to gather a group of developers to scratch a collective itch; it is another to evolve that into a thriving community encompassing thousands of participants and dozens of companies with a healthy and vibrant culture while managing generational turnover.
Yet all of those efforts pale in comparison to keeping the technology itself relevant for that long. Who uses computers, how they use them, what computers look like and their capabilities shift from year to year, let alone decade to decade.
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Hi everybody, after over a year of silence, I have something new to announce: I will make a new release available of the KDE SC on Windows tomorrow. There have been several problems in the past year that spoiled new release attempts, beginning with a build server leaving together with Nokia and ending with our web server which hosts the original binary releases. But these problems have been solved and so there we are. I hope this will make it also more obvious that KDE on Windows isn’t dead yet ;-).
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Members from the Plasma team assemble a couple times each year to get some face time with each other. This is good both for team building and for making large strides forward in the technology we maintain and work on. When we get together on our own, rather than as part of a bigger event, we call the events “Tokamaks”. We held the sixth such meeting last week in Nürnberg, Germany where we were hosted by SUSE with additional support coming from KDE e.V.
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KO GmbH announces extensive support services for Krita, the award-winning graphics application. Krita is an advanced paint application with a complete set of professional paint tools that can handle extremely large images effortlessly. It is particularly well-suited for special effects work in the movie industry.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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With the first GNOME 3.10 development release due this week, the first GNOME 3.10 development snapshots (v3.9.1) of the GNOME Shell desktop and Mutter compositing window manager were checked in.
GNOME 3.10 is tentatively set to be released on 25 September while this is the first development release due this week (GNOME 3.9.1). With just a little more than one month since the GNOME 3.8.0 release, there isn’t too much to look at for the 3.9.1 packages.
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The folk at Packt Publishing sent me an e-copy of GNOME 3 Application Development Beginners Guide a month or so ago.
I’ve been putting off this review because I don’t think this is an very good book and it’s hard to write bad reviews.
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One of the comments that is quite often made on Reddit and in other Linux forums is that there are a lot of distributions that are just re-spins of Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE etc.
Diversity is great and it is good that people put the effort in to creating a distribution.
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A Turkish distro that’s been on hiatus for a couple of years, is this latest version a long awaited sequel, or a disappointing reboot?
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We pit six Raspberry Pi operating systems against one another to find out which one is the king of the tiny computer distros
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GParted, a partitioning utility for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, is now at version 0.16.1.
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A rather long time ago (around a year and a half), I wrote a post about a system I was making which was supposed to be a cloud-based OS, named CosmOS. I didn’t really develop it that much, as I had a rather vague sense of what I wanted to do with it, and I immediately had problems with implementing the most basic concepts. Most of the idea was actually quite boring, and had already been developed by others. But since I had gone through all the trouble of making a tool for creating it (relinux), I decided to try it anyways, and just radically changed the whole design. And I did. I also found that I couldn’t have used the same name, as CosmOS was already the name of at least two different OS’s, and it was also the name of a directory of linux OSs (among other unrelated usages), so I kind of got that I had to change the name.
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New Releases
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The OpenWRT team has released version 12.09 (code name: Attitude Adjustment) of the Linux distribution for routers. As was the case in the beta version, Attitude Adjustment no longer supports Linux kernel 2.4. This affects older router models with just 16MB memory and slow CPUs (200MHz), such as Linksys WRT54G models. Attitude Adjustment does now run on Ramips routers and the mini-computer Raspberry Pi (bcm2708), however.
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It’s available new iso images of SparkyLinux 2.1.1 “Eris” MATE Edition.
On the beginning of April, the MATE team published new version of MATE environment 1.6.
SparkyLinux 2.1 MATE Edition features MATE 1.4. It can be a little difficult to make clear upgrade of MATE, so I decided to make new iso images, which provide full system updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Fedo..uh, I mean, Mageia chairman, Anne Nicholas, today announced the final release date for Mageia 3 – again. Nicholas said they didn’t want to say they’d release when ready for fear they’d sound a lot like Debian. Yet Mageia 3′s release schedule is starting to look a whole lot like Fedora 18′s.
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Gentoo Family
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As ever, you are welcome to choose between Calculate Linux Desktop featuring either KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) or XFCE (CLDX), Calculate Directory Server (CDS) for server solutions, Calculate Media Center (CMC) should you need any and, last but not least, scratch versions for those preferring minimal installations: Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s Gluster open-source community has been all about its namesake, the GlusterFS, but now it’s expanding to cover other open-source, software-defined storage technologies.
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Fedora
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It’s been about three months since the release of Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow,” but this week afforded the first glimpse at the next version of the popular Linux distribution.
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Is heartwarming to see people writing Free software and is understandable newbie developers will create less than perfect applications, still there are some apps which should never be written, and in this category I include the “scripts” supposed to install and do “everything” on your distro, from installing Flash and codecs to… $DEITY knows what.
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Debian Family
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Twenty cities around the globe, ranging from Bangalore in India to New York in the USA, will be hosting parties this weekend. More are expected to announce they are joining in as the week progresses.
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The next release of Debian GNU/Linux, 7.0 or “Wheezy”, is less than a week away now — so I decided to take one last look at a pre-release build.
My intention was to see how it looks and works in general, how it gets on with installation on various systems of mine, and whether and how it is working with GPT partitioning, UEFI BIOS, and Secure Boot.
For this test, I downloaded the netinst image of the daily build on Saturday, 27 April. There are a lot of ISO images to choose from when downloading Debian; I generally take the net installer image because it is the smallest download and it gives me the most flexibility when installing.
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Derivatives
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In my neck of the woods the Internet doesn’t get any faster, and my six year old dual-core AMD computer still holds up nicely. I don’t like Gnome 3 and I don’t care about Ubuntu’s run everywhere there is lots of memory vision. Linux is all about choice, and I do have plenty of them.
In this article I’ll take a look at Debian. Debian is one of the oldest distributions still in active development. It is a popular distribution for personal use among software developers, it is also the most popular Linux web server platform. Debian has a great community and the amount of software packaged far exceeds any other Linux disto out there.
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The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release announcement:
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Sometimes people ask me why they should use Ubuntu Server. It’s an understandable question, after all, Ubuntu gets a bunch of attention on the desktop (and more recently mobile), but people tend to forget that Ubuntu is an excellent server distribution, quietly humming along helping to run some of the world’s coolest companies at scale.
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It’s that time again for a new Ubuntu – should you be raring to go with it, or is it a case of more of the same?
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Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail was released a few days ago. It comes with many pre-installed applications for several purposes. However, these applications won’t be enough for some users to be able to effectively use Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail. So, here’s a list of recommended applications for Ubuntu 13.04.
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The Ubuntu Team originally approved some final modifications for the 13.04 release. After getting us all excited about the massive number of new Smart Scopes, the original approval was then retracted. Either way, I felt the need to inform everyone about the upcoming changes. Though unfortunately we must wait for 6 months for the Ubuntu 13.10 release.
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Or maybe it should read the other way around, unremarkably remarkable. Which one is it? Well, I don’t know, take a look and judge for yourself. Now, the mandatory two paragraphs of introduction. For me, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal was a fairly big flop. And it was nothing short of a disaster on my high-endish machine, where the Nvidia graphics stack was bonkered.
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Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) is now out, but it has been release without an important update for Unity, which didn’t made the cut before the launch day.
The biggest feature of Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) should have been the Smart Scopes, a collection of scopes for Unity (like the existing Music, Video, and so on). The developers have decided that this feature is not ready, and Ubuntu 13.04 has been skipped.
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What’s more important: Ubuntu’s success in cloud computing or on mobile devices? The answer is both, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth. During a quick conversation with The VAR Guy at the recent OpenStack Summit, Shuttleworth said Ubuntu — a popular Linux distribution for PCs — must succeed both in the cloud and mobile worlds because they are the two biggest IT waves empowering customers today. Plus, he added, the world wants a Google Android alternative.
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Carla hails from Italy and enjoys being the guinea pig for new ideas and kickstarting new projects and efforts on the team. She’s been a wonderful contributor to our ubuntu autopilot tests project, happily helping lead the charge towards automating our favorite desktop applications.
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Now that we know the codename of the next major release of the Ubuntu operating system, and that the development cycle will start tomorrow, May 2, we are happy to announce that the release schedule has also been published, as a draft, on the Ubuntu Wiki.
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Ubuntu 13.04: The Linux desktop for everyone (gallery)
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Flavours and Variants
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“I think we can all appreciate what products like the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi can do for today’s youth,” said blogger Robin Lim. “Understanding how something works is important. These single board computers can even be the basis for some really creative school and commercial grade projects, which go beyond plugging them to a keyboard and monitor.”
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A US engineer is trying to sell the idea of an open source drone detection system built out of shedloads of Raspberry Pi kits.
The Drone Shield, which is designed by John Franklin, will cost around $60 to $70 to set up. It will combine a, a signal processor, a microphone, and analysis software to scan for specific audio signatures and compare them against what known drones sound like.
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When the Raspberry Pi first came out, the board-only design got a lot of people desiring a case to go with it. Since then, a few companies and Kickstarters have popped up to supply cases to those that want them. With many different designs on the market, it’s hard to know what to go for, and mainly comes down to how you plan to use the case. SB Components have created a simple case that is suitable for many uses, at a price that reflects the Raspberry Pi itself.
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A new open source XBMC Media Centre player has been unveiled this week in the form of the new The Little Black Box, which has been designed to specifically run XBMC.
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USA Technologies (USAT) announced a cashless payment device equipped with near field communications (NFC), a magnetic card reader, and support for a variety of contactless payment standards, including Mifare. The ePort G10 runs embedded Linux on an ARM9 processor, and offers an LCD screen plus serial, USB, and Ethernet connectivity.
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Phones
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Note, as the market is expected to be very near exactly 1 Billion new smartphones sold this year, you can take those numbers and convert multiply the percentages by 10 to get the number sold. So for China, 27% means 270 million smartphones this year as the Chinese market size, and for North America 13% means 130 million smartphones sold etc. Yes, China alone this year will see approximately twice as many new smartphones sold as in all of North America. And Asia accounts for almost exactly half of all new smartphones sold this year, led by China, but including the rich parts of Asia like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong etc, and then the Emerging World parts of the ‘Rest of Asia’ ie India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines etc etc etc. Half of all smartphones sold this year will go to Asia.
[...]
(This are based on 2012 numbers, expecting the ratio to be very similar this year, with the exception of if there is a major economic collapse that suddenly kills sales).
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Android
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Barnes & Noble seeks to revitalize its Android-powered Nook tablet line over arch-rival Amazon’s Kindle tablets by adding Google Play and full Android app support.
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Ready to start programming for Google Glass? The tools are out there. While only a handful of Google Glasses are out, Google quietly released its Android-based core kernel code.
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We’ve built a full market risk analytics platform for capital markets—with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, such as a declarative calculation engine, a flashy HTML5 GUI, and a comprehensive analytics library—and we’ve released it under the Apache 2.0 License. And, our key customers and users at the moment are some of the world’s most secretive technologists: hedge fund managers. To an outsider, this may look like a curious combination.
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Last week North Bridge Venture Partners and Black Duck Software released the 7th Annual Future of Open Source survey. Previous years’ surveys have generated interest industry-wide, with implications that cross industries and ecosystems.
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Events
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Whew. That drive from Felton-to-Bellingham-and-back gets longer and longer. But it goes without saying, of course that it’s well worth it. The 14th annual Linux Fest Northwest was a success and while they take a break before getting ready for next year’s event — April 26-27, 2014, at Bellingham Technical College — I’m going to make my reservation at the Hampton Inn right now so I don’t forget.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The basic idea behind prefetching is to speed things up for the user. An algorithm is involved that guesses which resources are likely to be accessed by the user in the recent future.Think of Facebook’s login page for instance. The most reasonable assumption is that the user will enter the username and password, and then click on the login link. If you prefetch some of the information you may speed things up for the user in the progress if a prefetched resource is indeed accessed.
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Samples of FinSpy, part of the FinFisher surveillance software suite sold by Gamma International UK Ltd to government organizations, have been found disguised as Mozilla’s Firefox browser, according to a report published Tuesday.
The report, written by academic research group Citizen Lab, documents the spread of offensive computer network intrusion capabilites — hacking tools — marketed by Western companies.
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The former Opera Software designer accused of leaking trade secrets to Mozilla denied the charges yesterday, but confirmed that the lawsuit takes aim at a search revamp he worked on while a consultant for the maker of Firefox.
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Spanish online phone seller and Telefonica partner Geeksphone announced the availability of the first two developer phones running Mozilla’s Linux-based Firefox OS distribution. The $194 Peak smartphone offers a dual-core, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and a 4.3-inch IPS display, with 8- and 2-megapixel cameras, while the $119 Keon has a 1GHz Snapdragon S1, a 3.5-inch HVGA display, and a 3-megapixel camera.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Swapnil: MySQL became the default database of a majority of projects and companies around the globe, what made MySQL so popular – what characteristics did it have? Was it it’s open source nature, technological superiority or marketing by Sun?
Monty: MySQL was widely popular long before MySQL was bought by Sun. (This was one of the main reasons why Sun wanted to buy MySQL).
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The open source OpenStack cloud platform is being built by a diverse and large group of vendors and developers. Among those vendors is Linux leader Red Hat, a company that is no stranger to being part of a multi-stakeholder open source effort, like the GNOME Linux desktop, for example.
Helping to lead Red Hat’s OpenStack efforts is Senior Principal Software Engineer, Mark McLoughlin. McLoughlin isn’t just a leader at Red Hat, he was also the leading contributor by code commits to the recent OpenStack Grizzly release. In an exclusive video interview with Datamation (see below), McLoughlin explains how his years of experience in the GNOME desktop community prepared him and Red Hat to help OpenStack to succeed.
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Databases
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Godfather of open source databases facilitates a merger to quicken development, growth.
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When Oracle bought Sun, one of its reasons was to gain control of MySQL, the most popular open-source database management system (DBMS). It didn’t work. Some of MySQL’s founders and top programmers had already left to create the MySQL fork, MariaDB, while others started SkySQL, a MySQL and MariaDB support company. Now, the old core MySQL developers have rejoined forces.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Between January 15th & April 27th 3,002 bugs were reported – I’m serious, no lie, over 3,000 bugs reported! Thanks (partly sarcastic?) to our fantastic users for reporting problems when you find them. This period covers 103 days (so about 29 bugs per day reported). Just maintaining our unconfirmed count would have been a tremendous success…..but, WE DID BETTER!
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Education
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Thanks to alumni and faculty of West Virginia University’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, students with an interest in software development will now be able to fund their education through an Open Source Scholarship.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Business intelligence could be one of the most essential but little-known secrets that drives executive decisions in the marketplace.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD Foundation was so successful in raising funds last year that it has been able to considerably expand its activities.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.4.13, another bug fix release in a series of stable of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software. With this release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.
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I have been developing free software for a long time, originally as an independent freeware author in Windows (oh the stories I could tell you there) and more recently in Linux. Why do it? And what are the values and principles that are most functional when working for free? I thought I would take some time out to share the strategies I have developed over the years that make this work.
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This week the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman (RMS) gave two presentations at the Technical University of Denmark. The events were organized by KLID.
On Wednesday the topic was Copyright vs. Community. Discussing the history of copyright, how it is being extended and (mis)used, and how Richard Stallman proposes to reform copyright.
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Project Releases
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After one whole year of hard work, toil, tears and sweat from all our awesome contributors the latest release of the Open Build Service(OBS) is ready for you. Version 2.4 adds support for yet another package format, secure boot signing and appstream app stores. It also brings a constraint system to better match build hardware to build jobs and includes a lot of speed improvements. OBS 2.4 is the latest, greatest and rock solid release that is already used by our reference server since January. We strongly recommended to update to this version.
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Public Services/Government
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Using open source software solutions helps public administrations to regain their power as customers, says Tariq Rashid of the IT Reform group at the UK Cabinet. It helps them to move from expensive unique IT to the commodity competing end of the market.
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“Over the last ten years, Open Source has become unremarkable. I think that’s a great achievement. We no longer argue about whether it’s secure or not, or whether it’s safe to use. We focus now on how best to use Open Source to get the best value for every tax dollar,” said Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector Group.
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75% of the 8600 respondents share news via email, compared to 55% who share stories via Facebook or Twitter.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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I in no way doubt that next year will be a celebration of the city’s stouthearted fortitude. I have no doubt that people will arrive in droves to witness “the spirit of freedom prevail.” But I do think we need to separate the bravery of those who will gather in 2014, and what the security imperatives will undoubtedly be. We need to critically examine what’s proposed and, if necessary, raise our voices in protest.
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building movements now against the militarization of the police force.
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The point is that shifting spending from the military to other types of government spending would be more broadly beneficial to the economy. It’s hard to imagine many people on the left who wouldn’t support this. So why is it portrayed as a “quandary”?
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But McCormick was just small beer. He was the unauthorised con. The authorised con involved more money by a factor of twenty million; it was a multi trillion dollar con involving entirely fake and planted evidence as a justification for a war in which millions were killed or maimed, the infrastructure of a modern country bombed back to the Middle Ages, and vast personal fortunes made in the arms, mercenary, military support, banking and oil industries.
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Cablegate
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Prenda Law’s litigation campaign against people allegedly sharing obscure pornographic films on BitTorrent hasn’t been going well. A growing number of judges has taken notice of accusations that Prenda stole the identity of a Minnesota man named Alan Cooper and named him CEO of the litigious shell company AF Holdings. Prenda’s lawyers have invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering potentially incriminating questions about how Cooper’s signature wound up on AF Holdings legal documents.
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Finance
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Oh, are we getting ripped off. And now we’ve got the data to prove it. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7%) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Meanwhile the rest of us — the bottom 93% (that’s 111 million families) — suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each.
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The two New York-based banks will pay $247 million to almost 224,000 borrowers, the Fed said today in a statement. The checks — meant to compensate borrowers who may have been mistreated in foreclosures during 2009 and 2010 that relied on improper documentation or faulty procedures — range from $300 to $125,000, depending on the how much harm may have been done.
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Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) sued its former vice president of emerging markets, Agostina Pechi, claiming she stole the bank’s trade secrets in a bid to win clients for her new employer, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS).
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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interesting piece (4/21/13) about the libertarian-right Koch brothers’ interest in buying the Tribune Company. Why would profit-seeking businessmen want to buy money-losing newspapers? Chozick reports that “the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas.”
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The Week magazine turned the Caucasian Tsarnaev brothers into non-whites.
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It is worth asking questions about how different communities or societies react to violence. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States bombed and occupied Afghanistan, based on the argument that the government of that country had tolerated the presence of Al-Qaeda and thus must bear the retribution. As a result, many thousands of people who had nothing to do with terrorism were killed.
Or on to the invasion of Iraq, which was sold as part of a “Global War on Terror” following the 9/11 attacks as well, even though there was never a connection between Iraq and the terrorist attacks. So why did the United States invade Iraq? Tom Friedman explained it to Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.
To Friedman, there was a “terrorist bubble” in that part of the world, and “we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick…and there was only one way to do it.”
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The West Fertilizer Co. explosion last week in West, Texas, took the lives of at least 14 and left scores injured and homeless. But the story was largely obscured by blanket coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. More than that, says legendary EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, a guest on this week’s CounterSpin, what coverage there was often obscured the real story. Here’s a transcript of Kaufman’s appearance:
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Censorship
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Where money talks, the politicians and the mainstream media do not.
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Privacy
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Joint letter sent to BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk by ORG, Privacy International and Big Brother Watch, asking ISPs to stand up for their customers.
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Three privacy groups have written to ISPs to demand that they stand up for their customers and warn them about the Snoopers’ Charter.
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“The Company” is a term that insiders have long used to refer to the CIA…
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A recent, practical example: The Boston bombers
This story recently came up that Russian intelligence warned the FBI about the Boston bombers. And yet, if you read the text, there’s disagreeing comments from government employees at all levels: “Yes they did.” “No they didn’t.” “I saw that but I thought it was that other guy’s job.” Even more mind–blowing, is the headline Boston Bombing Suspect’s Name Was in US Terrorism Databases!
What if CISPA had been in place? It probably wouldn’t have helped much. Another stack of papers would have gotten shuffled around without getting read. Maybe it would have put the right dot on the right map. If it had, doubtless three other things that demanded attention would have been ignored instead.
Call it “Penguin Pete’s Law of Surveillance”: It doesn’t matter how much data you collect. What matters is having the eyeballs to read that data.
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Civil Rights
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U.S. Naval medics are forcing tubes down the noses of detainees at Guantánamo Bay in order to feed them against their will. The U.N. has said this violates international law. When does “suicide prevention” become torture?
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Apparently the Embassy commissioned these essays from Bahrainians to mark the occasion. Extraordinarily, they have published two essays from pro-despotism propagandists. If they had published two balancing essays from the majority community, I would have viewed the inclusion of the fascist views as wrongheaded but defensible. As it is, this is an appalling disgrace to the foreign office.
Here are some genuine press stories the Embassy might have noted, but didn’t:
Bahrain doctors jailed for treating injured protesters
Teenager Killed in Bahrain on Protest Anniversary
Bahrain Protest Crushed By Security Forces
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DRM
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The World Wide Web consortium is considering a proposal to specify standards for HTML extensions to implement Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The proposal is supported by Netflix, Microsoft, Google and the BBC.
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Today a coalition of twenty-seven organizations released a joint letter to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web’s standards-setting body, condemning Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME is a proposal to incorporate support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) — the systems used by media and technology companies to restrict watching, sharing, recording, and transforming digital works — into HTML, the core language of the Web.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Novartis has been in the news lately for the lawsuit filed against it by the US government for kickbacks it allegedly gave to doctors for prescribing certain drugs. As we noted about that case, it should be no surprise that this sort of activity happens, given that the incentive structure we’ve created with patents is so extreme. Here’s one example of at least some principled doctors striking back against Novatis. Over 120 cancer researchers and doctors have published a paper calling out Novartis specifically for its pricing on the cancer drug Gleevec (marketed as Glivec outside the US). The doctors point out that it can cost over $100,000 per year for Gleevec currently. And, Novartis has been continually jacking up the price. There had been concern when the drug was first introduced a decade ago, that it was priced way too high at $30,000, leading the company’s then CEO, Daniel Vasella, to acknowledge the complaints, but to argue that it was “a fair price.” Well, now the company is pricing the drug at more than three times what it thought was a fair price, and it should be no surprise that people think this is outrageous profiteering by abusing a government granted monopoly to charge way more than any fair market price would allow.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, OSI, Patents at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft’s sting is deceivingly called “Microsoft Open Technologies”
Summary: Microsoft continues to blackmail, damage, demonise etc. — thus isolating FOSS (Free Open Source Software) projects and marginalising the development community/ies — while claiming to have embraced “openness”
The OSI’s president would not characterise Microsoft as Satan, he is just realistic about the company’s real intent. His predecessor was the same as the OSI was barely ever infiltrated by Microsoft moles, thankfully enough (I can think only of two exceptions, Denise and Matt). The OSI is about to get a new board and hopefully enough Microsoft’s entryism attempts will be kept at bay (OSI was infiltrated by Microsoft only in the licence sense). Microsoft successfully infiltrated other FOSS authorities which it rendered defunct upon joining. Yes, we have examples, but these are not worth revisiting right now.
Currently, Microsoft tries a man in the middle approach and Phipps knows what Microsoft is really up to. He writes:
Microsoft Open Technologies is plenty busy. But Microsoft still hasn’t explained why a separate entity was needed
Phipps is more blunt in his blog. He calls this scam “Microsoft Firewall” and says:
On its first anniversary, I remain convinced that the motivation for Microsoft’s wholly-owned open source & open standards subsidiary is primarily to isolate Microsoft from the open source community.
Well, what Microsoft calls “openness” is actually extortion, blackmail and sabotage; taxing GNU/Linux and controlling it. This is all just a branding and marketing exercise for Microsoft. Fernando Cassia shows that the Microsoft-funded SUSE, as expected, is sidling yet closer to Microsoft right now, handing yet more control over GNU/Linux to the sociopath:
Since we shared the stage at OSBC last year, our joint efforts have also delivered the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center, which facilitates Linux server patching through Microsoft’s management tools, as well as support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers and openSUSE images on Windows Azure Virtual Machines.
Obsidian makes a mistake too.
Microsoft is not being nice to Linux. Putting aside extortion with patents, which is a RICO Act violation, there is technical sabotage. With Vista 8 it is suppressing Linux boots (through UEFI restricted boot) and it has real impact on Free software adoption. As Mr. Varghese puts it, there are untold complications:
Linux does not have this capability. Those Linux distributions that have developed a means of booting on secure boot-enabled systems need to disable hibernation in the kernel. Or they can do as Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, has done and remove the hibernation option from the user interface.
Thanks to SUSE folks who helped take restricted boot mainstream (kernel-embedded), we are all bound to suffer for years to come. Hardware is being made Linux-hostile with the flawed assumption that Linux will cope.
‘Open’ is how Microsoft paints itself whilst doing the very opposite; the company tries to immune itself from criticism using newspeak. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security at 4:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New Skype antifeature enables remote control of computers and Skype attracts patent lawsuits, too
The Microsoft-controlled Skype is not the same software it used to be. The architecture has been revised. Microsoft Skype is legalised malware and it abducts the computers of people, Microsoft Windows not being a prerequisite, gaining access to the connected camera, microphone, files, etc.
Based on this article, it is getting yet uglier:
After six malicious takeovers of his Skype account, a frustrated security researcher has posted his attempts to get Skype’s help. Here’s how to protect yourself.
The update says “Skype has not responded to request for comment, yet email and comments relate more instances of account hijacking with the same technique.”
And later on comes a face-saving response which does not actually address the subject. Microsoft does nothing to alleviate the fears.
Speaking of Skype, VirnetX, which we covered here many times before (the context being patent litigation against Microsoft) is suing Microsoft over it, citing patent violations. To quote the Indian press:
According to research firm ISI Group, most of VirnetX’s revenue has come from a 200 million dollars patent-infrigement-related settlement reached with Microsoft in 2010.
It is unlikely that Skype will be sued out of existence, but either way, whatever weakens it will do society good. The FSF has done a lot of activism against Skype for a reason. It’s high priority on the kill list. █
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Posted in Patents at 3:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It’s about scope, not scale
Summary: New examples from Internet news sites which show how the debate on software patent is being warped to focus on small players (trolls) and not large ones whose parasitical existence resembles that of trolls
THE DEBATE regarding patent reform is being derailed somewhat. It got reshaped by stakeholders with lobbyists. We addressed the subject several times recently, in posts such as:
- Regulators Target Patent Trolls But Lose Sight of Patent Cartels
- Patent Trolls Increasingly Recognised as an Issue, Taking Attention Away From Software Patents as Key Issue
- Patent Trolls and ‘Royalties’: Distracting From the Real Issue Which is Software Patents
- The Notion of “Software Patent Trolls”
An unnamed author in Rupert Murdochs’ press ran a poll on patentability of software. Well, two thirds say “no” to software patents, but the total number of votes is low and thus it is easy to rig (real public opinion may be more hostile towards software patents). Is this a fair introduction?
The first patent for software in the U.S. was awarded in 1968. The question of whether patents should be granted for software has been debated ever since. In recent years, with the numbers of software patents and lawsuits involving those patents both growing rapidly, the debate has intensified.
Fair enough. It is worth adding that much of the world deviates from the US on this and suffers far less litigation such as troll atacks. Here is yet another article which focuses on trolls rather than software patents. It says:
Most of us are familiar with the famous Norwegian fairy tale, “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” where three hungry goats must cross a bridge to find more grass to eat. The problem is, underneath that bridge is a ferocious troll who wants to eat each one as it passes by.
This is not the main issue though; scope is the root of this issue. The Microsoft-run Nokia is still fighting to ban Android in Europe using patents which are probably invalid. Remember that Nokia is not a patent troll but a zombie patent portfolio currently exploited by Microsoft.
Nokia will have to start legal processes in each country as there is no such thing as a worldwide enforceable [patent] injunction.
See the article “Nokia could get the HTC One banned in Europe” and this one too. There is no injunction but a lot of intimidation, typical Microsoft FUD. Nokia is being used like a patent troll in this case, it is not just being used to arm patent trolls. So why talk about patent trolls as the principal or only issue? Perhaps because the government is still run by and funded by large corporations. It’s them who call the shots.
The FTC has been notified by Linux and Android players, spoiled by misplaced focused and with further idiocy from Google which just strengthens software patents. B&N says the patent system is “broken” (more on that another day), whereas Google continues to liaise with the USPTO and dodge criticism of software patents.
Here is one wiser suggestion from a US Senator who at least identify the root issue correctly:
A U.S. senator has announced plans to introduce legislation that would expand patent law to create a method to challenge software patents, much like the one currently available to review covered business method patents.
It is a move welcomed by some members of the technology community, including Google, Inc, who believe there should be more rigorous review of what software is eligible for patents.
Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, plans to introduce the bill on Monday, his spokesman Max Young said on Wednesday.
Contrariwise, some continue to bicker about trolls. Here is a new example:
In the decade since it was founded in Dallas, IP Nav has established itself as a global leader in the increasingly lucrative business of “patent assertion,” offering clients the ability to “maximize the value of their IP assets.” Put more bluntly, it’s a patent troll, shaking down companies by threatening them with lawsuits over patents that they or their clients are squatting on. They are a big problem in the tech world, and IP Nav is a big part of it. Rackspace, the San Antonio-based cloud computing firm, recently called the company “one of the most notorious patent trolls in America.”
Ask what type of patents they use. Therein lies the real issue. It is worth noting that the world’s largest patent troll (which spawned from Microsoft) is lobbying with a new ‘study’ that Mike Masnick covers as follows:
Giant Patent Troll Intellectual Ventures Does ‘Study’ To Show How Much Everyone Loves Patents
Apparently Intellectual Ventures’ attempts to improve its dismal reputation as the worlds largest, most obnoxious patent troll don’t seem to involve finding a legitimate business to be in, or actually doing something to help the world, but rather to ask some execs some loaded questions to produce a study pretending that execs really love patents and think they’re great for innovation. The thing is, the study also shows that the execs they asked are somewhat clueless about patents or how they’re being abused today.
Masnick concludes by saying: “See, next time why not ask them something a bit more accurate, like how they feel about “companies who go out and buy weak, broad patents on obvious things, and then use them to demand cash from companies actually competing in the market?” Or, rather than call them “patent licensing companies” call them by what everyone knows them as: patent trolls.”
This strategy is not unique to patent trolls. Some dying companies, Nokia for instance, do something similar. The important thing is to discuss the patents and not those who use them. The patents are the root cause. Their issuer is the key culprit and it is often controlled by large corporations such as IBM. █
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