Still, many people use multiple operating systems now, and so few use Linux as one of their choices. Among other reasons why Linux can function as a great sidekick to the more prevalent operating systems is that it’s more secure. If you’re going to jump into, say, an online banking app, why not do it in Linux, where the hackers and script kiddies aren’t?
Additionally, many Linux distros instantly get you going on tasks instead of staring at hourglasses and are streamlined for quick results. It has long been a presumption in the Linux community that for it to really succeed, it has to be the sole OS on everyone’s desktop. Why does it? The answer is that it doesn’t have to do that.
I’m already contemplating adding a Linux distro to the VMware-based system I’m running, and evaluating which one to use. It makes lots of sense.
The 451 Group has published another open source strategy Spotlight report, this time turning our attention to longtime Linux server vendor Hewlett-Packard, which continues to dedicate resources to Linux and other open source software communities, but which also has a lower profile than others known for their open source contributions.
HP has long been a big supporter of Linux and other open source software, particularly through its testing, certification and support of Linux on its ProLiant x86 and now Integrity IA-64-based servers. But despite its top market position, the company has also historically been overshadowed by others similarly supporting Linux and open source.
[...]
HP recognizes that users and customers – in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, and among other early adopters – no longer need to be convinced on Linux. What they need now is guidance on adapting their strategy and effectively incorporating Linux and other open source software.
More is available in the HP Spotlight report, which is available to existing 451 Group clients. Non-clients, as always, may apply for trial access via the same link.
Even as Dell ships millions of Windows 7 systems, the PC giant is making a bold statement on its web site. Indeed, if you look hard enough you’ll find Dell stating that “Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft Windows.” Moreover, Dell quietly says it plans to ship Ubuntu 10.04 systems in mid-2010. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
Visit Dell.com/ubuntu and you’ll find a “Top Ten” list of “things you should know about Ubuntu.” Item number 6 on Dell’s list states:
* “6) Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows® The vast majority of viruses and spyware written by hackers are not designed to target and attack Linux.”
Karen, Bradley and Aaron talk about SFLC’s motion for default judgment against Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a defendant in the ongoing lawsuit concerning GPL violations of BusyBox.
This week on KDEMU I talk to Nuno Pinheiro the overload of the Oxygen effort (not the element), we talk about Oxygen, Plasma and the KDE-Artists wallpaper contest!
In this special episode of Linux Outlaws, we review the Google Nexus One phone and pit it against the Motorola Milestone and Samsung Galaxy and as a bonus Fab also gives you a big list of his favourite Android apps.
Linux, by being truly open, lets hardware vendors and network operators offer an attractive code base that they can build their own applications and services on top of to more equally balance profits. Those include app stores, online music services, and add-on hardware.
Does Linux have a shot at challenging Apple’s dominance? We’ve seen this movie before. There was an Apple of the business computing market not so long ago. Sun Microsystems’ high-end servers made the company a darling of information technology departments, Internet startups, and Wall Street investors in the late ’90s and 2000. Linux was the underdog. A decade later, Sun no longer exists and Linux and Windows rule the data center.
The control and flexibility that hardware vendors and network operators gain with Linux, plus the ability to share research and development costs and move faster, make Linux a powerful choice for mobile computing development. The computer industry is seeing a seismic shift wherein longtime Microsoft partners such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard are making huge bets on Linux, relegating Windows to a lesser role. This was inconceivable a decade ago.
Apple has set a high bar, no doubt. But if you don’t believe Linux can beat an entrenched market leader, just ask the folks who used to run Sun.
Bentley: Your study found that it would cost $1.4 billion for a company to build the Linux kernel from scratch today, and $10.8 billion to build an entire Linux distribution similar to Fedora 9. Can you explain how you reached those figures?
McPherson: The conclusions were reached by using David Wheeler’s well-known SLOC tool, SLOCCount, which makes use of the industry standard COnstructive COst MOdel (COCOMO). This methodology takes into account lines of code written, the appropriate number of labor years, and salary adjustments for inflation. We wanted to come up with a real number based on the one thing you can quantify in open source — code. We used a well-regarded methodology and tool that had been used before. Instead of making random projects, we thought this was the best way to approach it.
Bentley: Why the Fedora community distribution and not another?
McPherson: Fedora is the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which represents a large percentage of the Linux market. This provided us with a very relevant model to assess. Also, David A. Wheeler had used Red Hat for his study in 2002. OpenSuse and Debian/Ubuntu would, of course, also be great targets for this study. We may do that at a later date. We also would like to use an embedded distribution.
[...]
Bentley: Do the findings have added significance in light of the current economic climate?
McPherson: I think so. Linux has always been a lower-cost alternative to Windows, but this report illustrates its economic impact on technology innovation. It’s exciting to see how the collaborative development model is fueling a new category of devices and technologies that would be at least a decade into the future if it weren’t for Linux. Let’s remember that in software, time is money; oftentimes time is more important than money. For a company like Google or Intel to be able to make use of this code that has taken years to develop, drives innovation and keeps costs low for consumers.
For testing we used a ZaReason Verix notebook that we are currently reviewing. This notebook that is based upon an MSI MS-1656 has an Intel Core i7 Q720 processor, 6GB of system memory, an 80GB Intel SSDSA2MH08 SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M GPU. We loaded Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on this powerful notebook with the Linux 2.6.35-rc1 kernel while continuing to use X.Org Server 1.7.6, GCC 4.4.3, and the GNOME 2.30.0 desktop.
TestDisk is a great tool for recovering files from a broken disk. My wife’s hard drive crashed yesterday and it turned out to be a corrupt boot sector. I booted to a Kubuntu Live USB and was able to use TestDisk to recover the MBR from the backup (it was NTFS which keeps a backup at a different part of the drive) and copy the files I needed to a USB key.
Desktop publishing applications are different from word processing programs. Desktop publishing isn’t a sit-and-start-typing task; it requires more input from the user in terms of page layout, spacing and how elements are arranged. This might require a little more learning on the user’s part, but if you’re on Linux and desktop publishing is your thing, Scribus provides a robust set of options.
Backups are a crucial aspect of any PC users work. No matter if you are a home user who uses the PC for home banking or a data center administrator who depends upon backups as the go-to failsafe for petabytes of company data, without a backup you could find yourself dead in the water.
[...]
If your Linux machines need a solid, GUI-based backup, you need to look at LuckyBackUp. Its flexibility and ease of use cannot be matched in any GUI-based Linux application. And just because LuckyBackUp is geared toward ease of use, doesn’t mean it can’t handle larger jobs. If your server has a GUI, LuckyBackUp can easily take care of that as well.
To begin with, let us highlight the key functions within the game. Every time you run a game, a piece of software that is called the game engine loads itself into the memory. The game engine is like a kernel for the game. It will manage all resources, levels and your in-game progression. Everything that you see, hear or do, is managed by the engine. The engine itself is a collection of services that provide these capabilities.
Once the engine is loaded, it uses the rendering subsystem to set your screen and start the game interface—legal screens, intros and menu systems. Using this rendering and the game logic through the game engine, you begin your gaming session.Every thing that you see is taken care of by the rendering engine. So, we will look at a rendering engine—OGRE 3D to be specific.
This morning KDE e.V., the legal organization backing the KDE community, launched its Supporting Membership programme under the slogan “Join the Game”. The Join the Game programme strengthens the bonds between KDE e.V. and the wider community and provides a more sustainable and independent source of income for KDE activties. By becoming part of KDE e.V. as a Supporting Member you can help to keep the KDE servers running, fund developer meetings, let developers organize and attend conferences and trade shows and protect the legal interests of the KDE community — this is all handled by the KDE e.V. in support of the KDE community.
Today, KDE has released the second beta version of what is to become KDE SC 4.5.0 in August 2010. KDE SC 4.5 Beta2 is targeted at testers and those that would like to have an early look at what’s coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer. KDE is now firmly in beta mode, meaning that the primary focus is on fixing bugs and preparing the stable release of the software compilation this summer. Over the last two weeks, roughly since the first beta, 1459 new bugs have been reported, and 1643 bugs have been closed, so we’re witnessing a lot of stabilization activity right now. More testing is in place, however, while the restless developers continue to create a rock-stable 4.5.0.
I only used Amarok lightly on KDE 3, so I am not equipped to answer claims that the recent releases still lag behind the 1.x releases (although I might some day investigate by looking at Pana, a project whose purpose is continue the development of Amarok’s first version.
However, with five releases, Amarok’s second series is approaching maturity in its own right. Although some of the newest features are less than perfect I appreciate the Amarok team’s constant efforts to improve the application, and to accommodate a variety of user styles. Despite a few imperfections, it remains my music player of choice — and the 2.3.1 release simply reinforces my preference.
Following some lengthy discussions within the GNOME community, release manager Vincent Untz has published a summary of the new modules to be included in the next major release of the GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix. GNOME 3.0, scheduled to arrive in September of this year, will not include the GNOME Activity Journal, formerly known as GNOME Zeitgeist. The Activity Journal allows users to locate documents chronologically and supports tagging and relationships between groups of files. According to Untz, it will not be included because it “needs more integration with the rest of the desktop and the overall GNOME design; right now, it feels too much like a stand alone application.”
I’m pretty excited because I got my first BD-ROM drive last night from NewEgg, a LITE-ON iHOS104-06. That means I can do some real testing, ripping and playing around.
I know I said I would review Xubuntu next, and keep PCLOS Gnome for the July edition of SaGeek MAG, but I wanted something other than a Gnome Distro to review for the MAG, and I only had the 10.04 RC available of Xubuntu, not the final release. Hence PCLOS 2010 Gnome it is for tonights review.
Well how did it perform?
[...]
PCLinuxOS is good, but not good enough. The Gnome edition especially needs some sanding on the edges, and then some polish on top of that. I would recommend the KDE edition over the Gnome edition any day, but as far as Gnome based distros goes it loses out to some really serious competitors, and this is reflected in my comparative scoring.
There are many little touches that give me hope for the future of PCLOS, help menus, auto installer for OpenOffice – little things that might just make this the next best Gnome distro to arrive. Right now it just falls short of Ubuntu’s 3/5 Q-rating.
I must say I’m impressed with the latest Fedora. I haven’t met any deal-breakers for me yet, but then again, I’ve only used it for a week. Still, there’s much to like.
Power management in Ubuntu is a largely poor effort – particularly as Ubuntu stretches it’s leg in the field of mobile computing devices; users need a more coherent and accessible way to control power settings. Users currently need to use 3 (!) applets in-order to manage the oft-most power-related used features of screen brightness, CPU performance and battery life indication.
Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, a company executive said.
Tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011, said Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice president of OEM services. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface.
Firefox will surely remain available in the repositories, so there will be an open door for everyone who, like me, is more comfortable using it. My concern is that Canonical is apparently sacrificing some of its original values, like security and reliability, in favor of the “flavor of the month”. I didn’t understand the excessive push on social interaction tools and now I don’t understand getting rid of an Internet browser which has been their flagship for so long, which is also an industry standard. Do they think popular is better? Hard to tell, but with all the bugs pending fixing, I find it funny that they actually waste a second thinking of replacing the Internet browser.
It really sounds great when canonical announces new Version of Ubuntu . Personally i always look forward for new things and changes . In this post i am going to discuss about new changes in Ubuntu 10.10 which is going to happen .Till now only alpha-I version have been released .
OMG, what? My refrigerator, that thingie that keeps all them foods and whatnot cool and edible can run Linux? Well, definitely. And in this article, I will show you how.
These days it’s hard to get excited about anything short of the most innovative solutions. Still, it takes time and effort to stay on top of it all and then be prepared to sell it internally to your organization. Linux, largely due to its roots in the open source community, consistently leads the market with rapid innovation and feature-rich development.
Sure, FOSS is fun, but is it profitable? Or is it just a spare-time hobby? There are actually two sides to FOSS: FOSS as free and open source software for a set of tools and platforms; and FOSS as a methodology for the development of software. One cannot exist without the other. And the reason for the superiority of FOSS tools is precisely because they are the result of FOSS methodology.
The FOSS software development/deployment methodology — a child of the Internet, and which is based on openness, sharing and collaboration — is also a powerful tool to develop ‘soft skills’ like the ability to communicate, search for and find solutions, and to think out-of-the-box. Over a long time, I have noticed that people who actually participate in projects following the FOSS methodology are eminently better programmers and far better at communicating, solving problems and collaborating, than people who follow the ‘closed methodology’.
So you’ve decided to use some open source code in your organization, company, or enterprise. What’s the same or different about maintaining open source versus traditional software. Here are ten things to consider:
1. The term “maintenance” can be considered one component of “subscription, support, and maintenance” or it can be used more generally to mean “now that’ve I’ve installed this software, how do I make it do what I want, patched, and updated?”.
Earlier this month, the OSI board held elections for the organization’s committees. Board members interested in working on OSI initiatives such as membership, education, policy and economic development, outreach submitted their candidacy to the board. Based on the slate of candidates, the board voted the following chairpersons to lead each OSI initiative for the next year.
Going back 5 or 6 years, Brazil tried to free itself of Microsoft’s stranglehold on the software it used. It put a big push into supporting, using and lead development in open source software technology.
Much the same way it supported the use of bio-fuels like ethanol, this has led to Brazil being less dependent on Microsoft and other closed source software. Additionally, a booming open source development community has been fostered and cultivated.
Ingres have made Ingres VectorWise generally available to download for free evaluation or commercially licence and say that an open source release for the accelerated database technology should be expected by the end of the year.
It became obvious that like any social network, open source has its own code of conduct that needs to be adhered to. Whether you think of it as business environment or community process, people that are part of a particular social network do not appreciate individuals (or companies) that diverge from these agreed-upon “rules.”
Award-winning editor Chris Gill utilized Lightworks to edit Neil Marshall’s latest adrenaline-fused thriller, Centurion.
Building upon blockbuster buzz, including Centurion, EditShare recently announced plans to make Lightworks into the most advanced Open Source editing solution available in the industry. Beginning in Q3 of this year, a free Lightworks download will be made available to all users.
Customers will be able to familiarize themselves with the Lightworks editing system and its multitude of features including: true shared projects, instant save, 3D editorial functionality, Universal Media File support, native RED editing, native 2K support with DPX and RED, dual outputs, and a format-independent timeline.
The European Union’s top Internet official took aim at Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, warning that governments can accidentally lock themselves into one company’s software for decades by setting it as a standard for their technology systems.
EU Internet Commissioner Neelie Kroes, in her previous post as EU antitrust chief, fined Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in a lengthy row over the company’s refusal to share some data with rivals and the tying of a Web browser to a best-selling operating system.
She now says she wants to draw up detailed guidelines for European governments to encourage them to require other software, especially programs based on open source code that is freely shared between developers.
Malta’s public administration wants its institutions to increase their use of open source software. In a directive published early last week, the government says it also wants to share more of its own applications by publishing them using the European Union’s open source licence (EUPL).
Today on Capitol Hill, Americans for Prosperity, the corporate front group founded and funded by David Koch of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries, hosted an event to urge the passage of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution to gut the Clean Air Act’s power to regulate carbon emissions. Several Republican Senators came to the AFP event to encourage support for the resolution, which was drafted by lobbyists from the coal and oil industry.
After the event, ThinkProgress spoke to one of the speakers, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), about his support for Carly Fiorina (R-CA), the U.S. Senate candidate to emerge from the primary last night. Inhofe gave Fiorina an early endorsement, and his nephew, Fred Davis, created the infamous “demon sheep” ads for Fiorina’s campaign.
It took Jérôme Kerviel, the celebrity rogue trader who stands accused of losing billions of euros at the French bank Société Générale, 10 minutes to make it through the scrum of microphones and journalists outside a courtroom Tuesday.
As disclosed earlier, Australia’s Basis Yield Alpha sued Goldman today for failing to “disclose material information knowing that, by this omission, information that they did disclose was rendered misleading.” That lawsuit opens the way for every single investor who ever bought a CDO from Goldman as a primary issuer (not in the secondary market). As we have pointed out previously, Goldman and BP will soon be competing over which firm has more active lawsuits against it. On the other hand, Goldman may offset some costs by IPOing the largest corporate litigation firms, as their partners will soon be rolling in the dough. While completely impossible, the mutual conflicts of interest in the risk factors of such a prospectus would make for a comic book all on its own.
Disbarred attorney Scott Rothstein, whose seemingly unlimited wealth bought palatial homes, exotic cars and mega-yachts, was sentenced Wednesday to 50 years in prison for operating a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme using faked legal settlements.
In addition to generating some laughs and populist outrage during a contentious Senate hearing in April, Goldman Sachs’s infamous “shitty deal” is also turning into a major headache for the embattled firm.
Today, Goldman was sued for securities fraud by an Australian hedge fund, which claims that it was suckered into buying $81 million of toxic subprime mortgage securities, which led to the collapse of the fund, according to a lawsuit obtained by Huffington Post.
Basis Yield Alpha Fund claims that Goldman engaged in a “series of fraudulent and deceitful acts or practices” and “put profits before integrity,” according to its complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. The fund is seeking to recover more than $1 billion in total damages.
Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months are much more likely to report having emotional distress than people who have been unemployed for a shorter period, according to new Gallup survey data.
The nation’s largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting can take place on a systematic level for years without being stopped, even after it begins to affect the modern-day equivalents of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. What 10 years ago was a cheap stock-fraud scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn has become a major profit center for Wall Street. Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them.
The fee issue is emerging as one of the biggest battles in the issue as House and Senate lawmakers look this month toward a conference agreement to resolve scores of differences in the legislation. Congress is planning to approve the overhaul package, stretching more than 1,500 pages, before the Fourth of July recess.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln beat back a ferocious Democratic challenge from Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in Tuesday’s Arkansas runoff, holding off the hard-charging lieutenant governor whose campaign became a priority for unions and the progressive movement.
Lincoln’s victory presented a stinging rebuke to organized labor, including the Service Employees International Union and to progressive groups such as MoveOn.org and Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which poured millions of dollars into television ads, phone calls and ground troops in an attempt to upend the two-term incumbent.
The career path for congressional aides with an eye for big money used to be clear: Toil in anonymity for years in a Hill office before cashing in with a lobbying gig or heading to a Wall Street powerhouse for a consulting job.
Now it’s the revolving door in reverse.
Capitol Hill has become a magnet for some former financial industry executives, who have traded high-flying jobs for the grind of congressional hearings and committee markups. Some are taking Hill salaries that would have been a mere Christmas bonus on Wall Street. One former Lehman Brothers analyst still calls his buddies in the trading pit in New York. Another who did work for the defunct investment giant landed a spot in a congressional office — as an unpaid intern.
In this week’s feature interview we chat with Adrian Lamo. Best known as the “homeless hacker,” Lamo is in the news again over his decision to inform on US Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of the so-called “Collateral Murder” video published by Wikileaks in April.
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, discusses Specialist Bradley Manning’s arrest for passing classified information to Wikileaks, the unfortunate negative connotations of the “whistleblower” moniker, how Obama has decriminalized torture, 260,000 possible sources of embarrassment for the State Department and the Obama administration’s eager prosecution of whistleblowers.
CMRIT students, meanwhile, are preparing to work on ORCA, a screen-reading software used by the visually challenged on Ubuntu (Linux) which needs further enhancements. “We are also creating a whole new desktop environment for engineering students to work entirely on Gnu-Linux,” Abhinav said.
MSRIT conducts Mukthi, an annual developer event to work with GLUGs from across the City and interact with those working on specific platforms. CMRIT also holds monthly events to create an environment of learning for students.
Senthil believes the activities would stand the students in a good stead in finding jobs. With companies like Google and Fedora coming out to select interns to work with them for a sizable scholarship, he said interest in Free Software would soon spread to other colleges.
The Linux now seems to make swift inroads to hyped product segments including tablets, smartphones, and TVs, cited related reports. Based on the number of products running Linux unveiled at Computex, market watchers are stating that Linux has a long way to go ahead.
There is a chance that Linux will really take the lead in many areas: tablets smartphones, and TVs, analysts say. One of the major indications is the increasing number of new tablets in the market, running Android Linux or other embedded Linuxes.
Mr. Lanci emphasises that going Open Source is critical to the future of computing. He confirmed that Acer’s much-talked-about notebook PC (that will run on Google’s Chrome Operating system) is indeed on the anvil. “We are working closely with Google on this,” he said. He had earlier announced that Acer’s yet-to-be-named Tablet PC will also run on the Open Source operating system Android. “Android is very good, particularly in terms of Internet browsing and connectivity. It is efficient and light enough not to overload the CPU. Also, from the consumer point of view, Open Source is the most sensible option,” he said reiterating his commitment to Open Source products. “It is no longer just a Wintel world,” he added.
Acer, the Taiwan base computer manufacturer is set to showcase their new Netbooks that are incorporated with the Google Chrome Operating System. According to the computer manufacturer they will be launching and showcasing their Chrome OS powered netbooks at a tradeshow the Computex Taipei show on June 1-5.
I quickly discovered that as far as an operating system and GUI, Ubuntu/Gnome is every bit as good as the Windows I know so well and it stacks up fine to the desktop Mac we have, too. The Mac is slicker, but for a home PC, I don’t care. What I want is …
1) Software, preferably free– stuff that I need (word processor, HTML editor, etc.) and apps that I want (games, mostly). Ubuntu had all of this in droves, out of the box, though it wasn’t perfect (more on that soon).
2) The ability to easily find my files and figure out how to organize apps and data.
3) Speed. (The Mac seems to have both Windows and my Linux machine beat on this, but its also got the newest, most powerful hardware)
Linux Against Poverty is currently collecting used computers, which they will refurbish and donate to kids who don’t have a computer at home. Last year, the effort rebuilt more than $35,000 worth of computers, and the group has raised their goal to $50,000 this year. (Austinist is a media sponsor of this year’s event.)
Dell and Terascala today announced the Dell | Terascala HPC Storage Solution, a storage solution for Linux clusters designed to enable efficiencies in high-performance computing environments by scaling to support massive amounts of data.
In part, he added, that’s because, as unfunded university researchers, he and Cox are running their experiments on Linux computers, and Nvidia’s GPUs are the best option for that operating system. Plus, he said, Nvidia is offering the research team a powerful software stack that helps with coding the GPUs.
IBM has also goosed its Parallel Environment for Linux with a V5.2 release, adding in more parallel programming APIs and providing an Eclipse plug-in that lets the HPC Toolkit to snap into Eclipse and garb information from the Parallel Environment as HPC applications are running to allow them to analyze and then tweak the apps to get better performance out of them. PE for Linux V5.2 is supported on Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 on IBM’s own Power Systems machines and runs on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.4 on x64-based servers. It will be available on June 11.
Ciena is open sourcing a technology called the Dynamic Resource Allocation Controller (DRAC) under the GPLv3 license. DRAC provides a solution for abstracting network resources and enabling users to provision dynamic on-demand lightpaths.
Research and education organizations can now accelerate development of dynamic and on-demand end user control of network resources for high performance network applications
SingleOS ( http://www.singleos.com ) announced that it completed the integration of IP based virtual hosting service with cPanel/WHM in its Fuscan EHA (fuscan.com/enterprise-hosting-automation) cloud automation platform. EHA is an automation layer part of Fuscan Linux Cloud (fuscan.com). It enables running different hosting automation software on top of the Fuscan Cloud platform.
Never underestimate the power of Linux developers with a goal. TurnKey Hub, which makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to leverage Amazon EC2 and the cloud at large, is worth keeping an eye on as it matures more fully.
The survey showed that European cloud providers are running infrastructures that are much closer to those of traditional enterprises than the global providers. Many of those providers use open source, with 56% of servers running Linux, 81% of organisations standardising on Apache, or a mix of Apache and Microsoft’s IIS, and 69% standardising on MySQL.
Google’s Chrome OS — the operating system that moves all apps and data into a web browser — will provide remote access to “legacy PC applications” through a mystery process the company calls Chromoting, according to an email from a Google employee.
Google has paid out its highest sum yet, $2,000, for the discovery of a vulnerability found in its Chrome browser. The recipient is developer Sergey Glazunov, who found a DOM method-related means of circumventing the same origin policy. Details of the vulnerability are not yet publicly available, but it is likely that it could allow a web page to access content from other web pages. Google classifies the risk as high. Update 5.0.375.70 for Windows, Mac and Linux resolves the problem.
Google Chrome OS has set itself quite a hard-to-reach goal, namely to make everything a web app. Google has said from the beginning that there will be no native applications for Chrome OS except the Chrome browser itself. While web apps today are capable of amazing things, nobody, not even everyone at Google, believes that they can replace any native app and OS capability out there.
When it comes to open source, nothing is more known than Google’s Android operating system, and Samsung has just announced their new Android device. Following the upcoming Android smart phone Samsung i9000 Galaxy S handset, there is a new Galaxy series device: the Galaxy Tab.
Linus Torvalds has commented in the past that he thought that the Linux kernel was too bloated. To date though, not much (if anything) has been done to combat Linux bloat, but that might just be changing with the upcoming Linux 2.6.35 release.
[...]
I’ve heard kernel developer Andrew Morton answer questions about how to address Linux bloat. Basically his standard answer is that if someone wants to tackle the problem they should go out and do it.
It’s an attempt to port the file system of Open Solaris into a version of Linux, and was created by the good people at the Lawrence Livermore Lab.
The problem, as Brian Behlendorf (above) noted at Github, is that the licenses are incompatible. ZFS must be offered under Sun’s CDDL. Linux, of course, is licensed under the GPL. You can’t combine the two.
It would be like, as the late Richard Pryor noted in one of his best monologues, trying to mix regular milk with low-fat. It would explode.
There are some kludgy work-arounds, Behlendorf noted. You can implement ZFS in a user space with FUSE, making it a derived work. Or you can modify and build it separately from the Linux, then build the combination yourself. But this is very hard.
Last week we provided an introduction to the Linux system logs. (See Logs: Your Linux System’s Lovable Worker Bees.) Now, what will you, as a system administrator, use to watch logs? Logwatch, of course. As so many others have succinctly put it, messing with log files is a royal pain in the backside. Logwatch makes the experience of keeping track of system activity almost painless for you.
Syntheway have introduced Harmodion for Windows and Linux operating systems. They describe it as a Drawbar organ and free-reed aerophone instrument emulation, such as Reed organ, Harmonium, Accordion and Bandoneon among others.
Several tools exist to help you recursively batch-convert an entire directory structure into a second format, including SoundConverter. SoundConverter can batch convert and entire directory structure in a single pass, preserving tag information in the output files and gives you the option of saving the results in the same directory as the original files, or in a separate location. As with Replay Gain, though, this is a time consuming process that you will not want to sit and watch (and which may even slow down doing other work, particularly on single-processor system). Best to start it overnight and wake up the next morning with a fresh batch of audio waiting for you.
Pink, Bunnies and Unicorns are what you will most probably find in a little girl’s room and certainly not in a Linux distro. But now there is Fluffy Linux with all the pink-ness (if there is such a word), bunnies, unicorn and, of course, fluffiness you can find.
The Sabayon Linux developers have released the GNOME and KDE variants of version 5.3 of their Linux distribution. Sabayon, named after an egg-yolk based dessert, is derived from Gentoo Linux and is aimed at providing a “complete out-of-the-box experience” while being both stable and versatile.
· Announced Distro: Parsix GNU/Linux 3.5
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.5
· Announced Distro: Mandriva Linux 2010.1 RC2
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1
· Announced Distro: Pardus Linux 2009.2
· Announced Distro: Untangle 7.3
· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 5.3
· Announced Distro: Ultimate Edition 2.7
The following is not a rumor, it’s something that will (finally) become reality in future releases of the Ubuntu operating system. First of all, let me offer you a simple example: I want to reinstall my Ubuntu system and I have to back up a part of the settings from various applications (such as Firefox’s bookmarks, passwords and settings; Filezilla’s site manager list; some Pidgin files; Thunderbird’s RSS feeds; VirtualBox settings and virtual hard drives; and some other files), not to mention that I have to remember and reinstall most of the applications I use, how I arranged the shortcuts on the AWN dock, and many other desktop settings. How long will this take? A lot of my precious time!
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced today that it has extended and revised its Hardware Certification Programme for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs). Canonical has made the changes to better align certification with the manufacturer’s needs and also to encompass the broader spectrum of use cases for Ubuntu as it becomes a more established part of the OEM ecosystem.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu UK Community are jointly hosting an event aimed at introducing Ubuntu direct to UK businesses.
Ubuntu is extremely popular with desktop users and widely used in UK datacentres as a server technology. The ‘Ubuntu In Business’ event provides a forum for IT professionals to get a clearer idea of the potential of Ubuntu and understand the applications, services and training options that abound for this product in desktop, server and cloud environments.
The event itself will provide an introduction to Ubuntu at both a practical and strategic level to how companies are deploying it today and to the applications companies can deploy on it. In keeping with the hands-on feel, attendees will be able to view product demonstrations while networking with Canonical, partner and community representatives. The event will conclude with a panel discussion where they can quiz a variety of open-source advocates on the value of pursuing an Ubuntu strategy in their organisation.
Teleca brings its best-in-class services in Open Source software development, integration, customization, and testing to the unifying force in Mobile Linux.
Apparently what Hurd was really trying to say was that HP is excited about using webOS as the foundation for all types of smaller web-connected devices, and smartphones are just a part of that universe — a part HP intends to pursue. Phew.
Fodale: The report is a look at the next generation of open source, Linux-based smartphones. I am working on another report now that brings in other mobile devices, such as netbooks, media tablets and multifunction Internet devices. Essentially, this report is a deep dive looking at Linux. It’s huge, it’s all over the place. The report is a deep dive on the top five or six Linux distributions for mobile phones.
But, first, let me take you through the hardware. The N900 is a bit thick, because of its sliding keypad. There is no rocker button on the keypad and no pointer to control either. There are four arrow keys for scrolling around the web page. It is also a touch-screen handset, and a stylus is tucked into the keypad just in case you have oversized fingertips to press the application shortcuts and widgets.
This smartphone is driven by an ARM Cortex A8. It has 1 GB memory just for applications and a whopping 32 GB to store up to 7,000 songs or 40 hours of DVD-quality video. If that is not enough, you can still add another 16 GB with a microSD.
The most sought after mobile manufacturer, Nokia, has finally decided to end the eager wait of the people for N900. It has successfully launched the N900, in India which is supposedly the first Linux Maemo 5 operating system based handset with a processor of ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX530 graphics, and is said to be available in the market by the end of June 2010. Nokia N900 is set to be at price Rs. 30,639 in India.
Like Japan, South Korea has a wireless industry that’s typically leaps and bounds ahead of just about everywhere else in the world — but the country has never been a Symbian or Android stronghold, so it’s actually not much of a surprise that two big recent releases are just now heading over there this Summer.
Like ARM, MIPS is not a processor manufacturer, but rather a seller of (ARM incompatible) processor designs, which have, up to now, been used largely in the embedded field. An Android port aimed primarily at set-top boxes has been in the works for some time, however plans are now afoot for the first mobile device. At last week’s Computex PC trade show taking place in Taiwan, MIPS, together with mobile phone specialist SySDSoft, has announced an implementation of the LTE mobile telephony standard for MIPS processors.
You might call mobile Linux the little operating system that could, or at least is able to since the introduction of Google’s Android OS helped push mobile Linux into the top ranks.
As Joel pointed out back in January Michael Dell showed a glimpse of the Dell Android tablet then known as the Dell Mini 5. The device launched this past week on O2 in the UK and is officially known as the Dell Streak. The folks at Engadget picked one up and posted a full review of this 5 inch display tablet. The Dell Streak should be launching here in the US in July for around $500. With my new Sprint HTC EVO 4G sporting similar specs and a 4.3 inch display for $200, I have to wonder if the slightly larger display will appeal to many looking for an iPad alternative.
For Sven Killig, running Android 2.2 wasn’t enough. No sir, this dude wanted even more power for his Nexus One, so he went ahead and penned a few lines of code that have allowed his Googlephone to act as a USB host.
I eventually settled on MinBuntu, a custom version of Ubuntu 8.04 that had been tweaked to support the HP Mini 2133. But a funny thing happened over the past few years — a number of other Linux distributions have been updated to add support for most netbooks, including those with VIA processors.
Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, a company executive said on Wednesday.
Tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in next year’s first quarter, said Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice president of OEM (original equipment manufacturer) services. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface.
Google, by making its Android software open source and allowing anyone to develop anything without all of the cloak-and-dagger secrecy and restrictions found in the Apple camp, is bound to emerge as the platform of choice sooner or later. Adding to this momentum is the fact that Android will be running on devices from multiple manufacturers and carriers; and that around 57% of Android’s apps are free compared with only 25% of Apple’s, according to analytics from Distimo, a website that monitors app stores. In the world of technology, the two essential ingredients for product success seem to be choice and the f-word – “free” – and Google offers both.
A recently leaked image of a Sony Ericsson Android smart phone is gaining plenty of attention. The device is rumored to be a new handset that will not only have the Google open source operating system, but it will be able to be used as a mini tablet and also as a mini netbook.
These are made possible by a few basic features of the Android devices. The slide out QWERTY keyboard is the first part, while the large 5 inch display and the tilting upper face of the device make up for the whole ensemble. In many ways, there is plenty to be excited about with regards to the new Android device –if it turns out to be true. For now, we can expect plenty of focus on their new device.
Mr Brown’s caution may be partly explained by Arm’s unsuccessful attempt last year to bring its chips to the traditional PC markets with so-called “smart books”. Smart books are cheap laptop computers that have long battery life and constant internet connectivity because they run on low-power Arm chips and a Linux-based operating system, such as Google’s Android.
While dozens of prototype smart book models were the focus of last year’s Computex and the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas this year, device makers were never really sold on the concept and few became actual products.
Arm last week joined forces with IBM and chip companies Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments to create Linaro, a company that will accelerate the development of Linux software for devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and digital TVs.
The last point is interesting, because it clearly only really applies to PCs running Windows, with their almost daily patches. Although not immune to security problems, GNU/Linux systems do at least avoid the vast amount of malware that routinely afflicts Windows, with the knock-on benefit that they don’t need to be left on overnight for such anti-virus updates.
EDA and IP vendor Synopsys Inc. announced the open source availability of its Interconnect Technology Format (ITF) for parasitic modeling and the formation of a technical advisory board (TAB) under the auspices of IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO).
According to Grynzspan, what started as a protest against Microsoft of sorts motivated thousands of Brazilians to contribute with the development of open-source tools. This market is now very well developed and is hugely attractive – particularly for cash-strapped countries such as the UK – however the Brazilian government needs to do more to unlock that potential and promote it to prospective buyers.
The half-day will conclude with a panel of Canonical staff, partners and community members and chaired by regular The H columnist Glyn Moody, discussing “The Benefits and Pitfalls of an Open Source Strategy”. The event will be held at The BrickHouse, Brick Lane, London, and registration is free.
Plus, there are some fun mashups Ogden has in mind—things that he hopes to be testing sooner rather than later. How about a map that shows every bar in the city—sourced from licensing data—along with the nearest Max or bus line. Sound like something you might be interested in? It’s on the way.
NASA and Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII) plan to explore interoperability opportunities between NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform and Japan’s NII Cloud Computing Platform.
While there still seems to be some consternation and confusion among many IT departments as to exactly where cloud computing based services will ultimately be of most use, the unusually named open source cloud provider Funambol is firmly of the belief that rich media over mobile devices holds the key.
If there is one aspect of mobility that has yet to live up to user expectations, it’s the ability for data to be accessible in near real-time across multiple devices.
Imagine if you were trying to glue two glass rods together. Each of the glass rod ends is shiny and smooth, and the glue can’t get a good grip on the glass. It might hold for a few minutes, but eventually the glue will lose its grip. If you could take a bit of sandpaper and rough up the surfaces, the glue could get a better grip, and the rods might stay glued together.
Consider the same analogy with software: With two pieces of CSPS software you can’t “sand” them to make them integrate better. Any integration has to be done with the provided APIs that you have (if any). With FOSS software, you could change the source code of the two pieces and get them to integrate better. You can formulate a better integration than if the software was “closed.” This is the core of the argument around ROI: the ability to change the software to meet your business needs.
CSPS advocates will argue that the companies that produce the software can integrate it for you. I find it hard to believe that large software companies will allow the types of integration that will be mentioned in the following ROI examples.
Use these test suites to your advantage, as simulators like them can also help create an organic “buzz” around the project as well. Include the developers’ names on the open-source software license, too. That will also help.
Is getting your very own YouTube channel a measure of success these days? It doesn’t really matter for a robot that has no emotions, although that does not rule them out from getting their own channels either – case in point, the Qbo open source robotics project that comes with their very own YouTube channel you see above, depicting the stereo camera calibration method for the curious.
U.S. congressional anger over China’s currency and trade practices boiled over on Wednesday as senators vowed to pass legislation soon and lashed out at President Barack Obama’s administration for failing to get tough with Beijing.
The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges-and that this should be achieved efficiently and, whenever possible using open source software.
But this idea of sharing, which is so critical to the advancement of science, is almost anathema to nationalistic aims that fuels so much government nanotech funding. So all of these huge government investments that are supposed to put one country or region ahead of all the others is almost diametrically opposed to the sharing of these facilities. The rub will be that the nanotechnology advancements that these various governments are seeking will not come about through this race to put your region ahead of all the others but sharing your facilities with all the others.
At the beginning of this year we announced a revised approach to our education plans, focusing our activities to support of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. In order to do so we have worked hard to increase the amount of information available on our own site – in addition to a new Education landing page and our OER portal explaining Creative Commons’ role as legal and technical infrastructure supporting OER, we have been conducting a series of interviews to help clarify some of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today’s education landscape.
Thanks to the Internet, it’s easy to engage in big issues – environmental crises, oppression, injustice. Too easy: all it takes is a click and that email is winging its way to who knows where, or that tasteful twibbon has been added to your avatar. If you still think this helps much, try reading Evgeny Morozov’s blog Net Effect, and you will soon be disabused (actually, read it anyway – it’s very well written).
In answer to that last question, no and yes: I don’t think we should regard this as old-style rental over the Internet, but a new kind of sharing where people spread the cost of rivalrous goods. However you look at it, though, it is going to be big.
Yesterday the UK parliament heard that studies at the University of Texas have shown that homeopathic remedies kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells intact.
The revelation came from David Tredinnick, who continues to use his position as a public representative to argue for more NHS spending on complementary and alternative medicines.
To my mind, the fact that this study was mentioned in parliament, and the statement that homeopathy can kill cancer cells is now a matter of public record, is a spectacular failure. But it is not a failure of politics or politicians: it is a failure of science.
People who find out they have high genetic risk for cardiovascular disease are more likely to change their diet and exercise patterns than are those who learn they have a high risk from family history, according to preliminary research. The findings, from a personalized medicine study at the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, a non-profit research institute based in Camden, NJ, suggest both a potential benefit of genetic testing–inspiring patients to get healthy–and a misunderstanding of the power of genetics.
Last year colleagues and I wrote Database State, a report for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which studied 46 systems that keep information on all of us, or at least a significant minority of us. We concluded that eleven of them were almost certainly illegal under human-rights law, and most of the rest had problems. Our report was well received by both Conservatives and Lib Dems; many of its recommendations were adopted as policy.
It may not surprise you that a company with a tree as its logo spends a lot of time in the forest. But it may surprise you just how involved it is and the level of commitment it has made.
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In a partnership with GreenNet, a Japan-based nongovernmental organization, Timberland plans to restore the desert’s grasslands by developing irrigation and planting new shrubs and trees while educating the local population on more sustainable farming practices.
On Tuesday, “oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit Mississippi shores for the first time,” covering about two miles of Petit Bois Island’s beach. And that meant more tone-deaf greenwashing from dirty energy lobbyist-turned-Governor Haley Barbour, as reported in this Think Progress repost.
As ThinkProgress noted, the appearance of oil onshore led Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to shift his upbeat rhetoric about the approaching oil, acknowledging that “this could turn out to be something catastrophic and terrible.” But after Barbour visited Petit Bois Island yesterday and saw that the oil that came ashore had “been washed away by storms,” he returned to the positive spin, saying, “I don’t think the island was hurt one iota.” Barbour even downplayed concerns about animals being suffocated by the oil in the ocean, comparing it to humans being covered in toothpaste
I have obtained a copy of the almost-600-page BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico as of June, 2009, thanks to an insider. Some material has been redacted, but these are the three main takeaways from an initial read. The name of the well has been redacted, but if it’s not Deepwater Horizon, then there’s another rig still out there pumping oil and aimed at Plaquemines Parish.
In 2008, the Supreme Court gave Exxon Mobil a $2 billion gift by reducing the punitive damage award from $2.5 billion to $507.5 million for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The Roberts Court’s willingness to invent a rule capping punitive damages against Exxon does not bode well for those hoping to hold BP accountable for this most recent disaster.
Fortunately, human beings are not money-making robots. The truth of the matter is that human beings are actually multi-dimensional beings: All beings have a selfish side. Their happiness comes from many directions, not just from making money.
Wages are rising and the supply of surplus labor in China is vanishing. On these points, just about everyone agrees — although the lightning speed at which it is happening is a source of surprise. But why it is happening is a topic for great debate. In the case of Foxconn, China’s largest employer, a cluster of suicides sparked a media frenzy and international embarrassment. In the case of Honda, good old-fashioned labor organization — strikes! — resulted in a wage increase.
Please see the attached document regarding a possible boycott of Nature Publishing Group journals by UC faculty. We urge you to read this important update, which has been jointly prepared by the University Libraries and the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. Please contact me directly with your comments and concerns.
Mikel Maron reports on an interesting development in the OpenStreetMap community of volunteer mappers — the Russian OSM community is debating whether Russian military installations should be removed from the OSM dataset, on security grounds.
Perhaps it is because the Chinese authorities see things the same way that they have blocked Twitter through much of the past year. Through the past 48 hours, of course, they have blocked Foursquare, apparently to avoid the possibility of even a virtual “demonstration” in Tiananmen Square on the 21st anniversary of the crackdown there. (My Beijing friend Kaiser Kuo archly noted via Twitter: “Finally, the freakin’ GFW does something good and blocks Foursquare. No more ‘mayor of blah blah’ messages in my Twitter stream!”) How this part of the dissent/control balance will swing in the long run is impossible to say. It’s all reminder number five million that today’s Chinese system has big, big strengths and big, largely self-imposed limitations.
The UK Government has discovered that BitTorrent is the cheapest and most effective method of sharing large files with the public. As part of the UK Prime Minister’s transparency initiative, the Treasury has today released several torrents with details on how the Government spends the public’s money.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) may hamper the fight against climate change by inhibiting the diffusion of green technology, according to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII).
Behind closed doors, the European Union, United States, Japan and other trade partners are negotiating an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA will contain new international norms for the enforcement of copyrights, trade mark rights, patents and other exclusive rights.
Linux Live USB Creator or “Lili” is a Windows app that allows you to make a persistent USB Linux distro. Now I will admit that it’s been a while but the appliciations that are available in Linux to do this task would fail better than half the time…problem is, they wouldn’t fail until you had 30 minutes invested in the process. It was frustrating to say the least.
Back in February 1999, IBM announced it would work with Red Hat to support Linux. By May 2000, Linux moved from being an experiment on mainframes to being a fully supported option. And in 2001, IBM announced it was spending a billion bucks that year on Linux. It wasn’t that big an expense; as Bill Zeitler, IBM’s senior vice president and group executive for eServer at the time, explained, “We’ve recouped most of it in the first year in sales of software and systems.”
The HTC Evo has arrived on Sprint’s nascent 4G network. The Android smartphone can use the carrier’s latest high-speed cellular network in the small number of places where coverage is available, or rely on 3G when 4G isn’t around. HTC loaded the big handset to the gills with features, but early reviewers claim to have spotted a few bugs in the soup, most of which could be fixed through updates.
This talk is by Michael Dorrington on the alternative kernels of kFreeBSD and Hurd to Linux for the GNU System. The talk will explain what a kernel is and its role in a system, it will explain the GNU and Linux in GNU/Linux, it will then investigate GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/Hurd including showing them running. If you are interesting in Linux or Free Software or GNU or FreeBSD or Hurd then this talk should be of interest to you.
A group of open source software developers working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have implemented a native Linux port of Sun’s ZFS filesystem. Although the code is functional and available for download (but not production-ready yet), it cannot be merged upstream or shipped in binary form with the Linux kernel due to a licensing conflict. Sun distributes the OpenSolaris source code under its own Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is incompatible with GNU’s General Public License (GPL).
On the same-day as publishing new Gallium3D benchmarks of the ATI R300g driver, we have more Gallium3D news to share. Zack Rusin has just announced a new Gallium3D branch that provides support for “Stream Out” with this advanced graphics driver architecture.
Ok, so I was supposed to do this last Friday, but I wanted to get ‘a few more patches’ merged in before closing things down. And, some of those patches were more of an adventure in merging than others. I’m hoping the devPrivates adventure will be resolved this week; as expected, many bugs were found after that code landed and I’m grateful to those of you who helped find and fix them quickly.
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Beyond that, I’d like for people to consider the tree closed to large-scale changes as we prepare for the 1.9 release. There are a couple of additional cleanup patch sequences floating around and I think we should plan on leaving those for 1.10 unless they fix actual bugs.
One good thing about Linux system is that you can change almost every single aspect of the system. Dislike the dull wallpaper? Change it. Not happy with the default splash screen? Change it. Getting bored of the default panel menu (the place where you access Applications, Places and System)? You can change it as well.
In Gnome based system, there are several panel menu applets that you can use. Some of them are great eye candy for spicing up your desktop while others are small and fast and aim to improve your productivity. Let’s see what choices do you have:
A server log is a log file which is created and updated by a server. A common example is an access log generated by Apache (open source web server software), which provides a history of web page requests. However, Apache does not only capture information to that access log. There is also information captured in its error log as well as a process id file, script log and a rewrite log.
PhotoRec is licensed under the GNU GPL. It was created by the same team that developed TestDisk, an app that recovers lost partitions and makes non-bootable disks bootable again.
One of the hiccups in Bordeaux, a for-profit, costs-$20 implementation of Wine that allows for easy installation of a variety of Windows applications in Unix/Linux environments, is that while installing the IrfanView image editor is clickably easy, users are on their own when it comes to the IrfanView plugins.
What this exercise has shown though is that Linux does not need to stand back to Windows as far as UI design is concerned. There are areas of improvement for sure. The beauty of Linux, of course, is that you, the user, can take this information, figure out better ways of doing it, and actually have a reasonable chance of suggesting it to your favorite Distro and have your suggestions adopted.
As previously mentioned in this blog — and as I tell anyone who’ll listen to me — I go back and forth between the two top desktop environments with Fedora on my Fujitsu laptop — the even numbers, as it turns out, have been GNOME and the odd (with nothing to read into this, honest) have been KDE. Since we’re now at Fedora 13, it’s KDE time.
For those Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox and IceWM fans out there, I do have machines in the Jungle Room — the lab at Redwood Digital Research in Felton, Calif., named after the same room at Graceland — running those desktops. While I’m a huge fan of Xfce on the machines that run it, I normally don’t stray too far from GNOME and KDE.
Moving right along, though, in those instances where I use KDE on the laptop, I’ve always been impressed with the number of programs that KDE includes when downloading the KDE version of Fedora. This time around, it occurred to me that maybe I should give some of them a chance — rather than just downloading the programs I’m used to (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) during the post-install phase — I should give the K its due.
We’ve received a number of excellent designs and now it is time to pick the best. The judging panel will include four members of the KDE promotion team and you.
Of course, there are also a lot of KDE related talks in the presentation tracks:
* What Is Special About the QML Declarative Language? by Daniel Molkentin, Thursday 10:30, Europa I
* Beyond Groupware: Thinking Differently About KDE PIM And Kolab by Paul Adams, Thursday, 11:00, Berlin I
* KDevelop 4 – Schneller C++ Programmieren by Milian Wolff, Thursday, 11:30 in Europa I
Greetings! Second week of the KDE at openSUSE blog. We are now on PlanetSUSE as well, so hello to all its readers. And since you did not get the last post: this blog is a short summary of what’s happening at openSUSE regarding KDE and it tries to give all those that bring KDE to the openSUSE users the credit they deserve.
Two months ago, the GNOME Foundation started a fundraising campaign to get money to hire a part-time system administrator. Actually, we started this effort much earlier, but we made it much more visible with this campaign. Thanks to all the donors and to Canonical, Collabora, Google and Nokia, we were able to reach our objective. It was actually too fast for me and I wasn’t even able to blog about the campaign in time! Once we realized the money was there, we moved on to the next steps — actually, we had those steps ready in the past, so it was mainly a matter of making sure everything was still okay.
Qubes is an open source operating system based on Linux, which is designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Its unique selling point is that all applications that are run on Qubes is sand-boxed from each other.
This is achieved by way of virtualization of all applications using Xen Hypervisor.
Computer systems usually provide OS security in three basic ways, namely -
1. Security by correctness,
2. Security by obscurity, and
3. Security by isolation.
We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.4. Continuing with our goal to make VortexBox the universal server for any media player we have added full DLNA support to VortexBox. DLNA is the future of media sharing and many players such as PS3, Windows 7 Media Player, and Samsung televisions support DLNA. Now you can easily serve your music and video files to all these devices.
The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Threeh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!
Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.3 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated, it’s there: you will find outstanding amount of new applications and features, like XBMC, KDE 4.4, GNOME 2.28, Linux Kernel 2.6.34, and so forth.
So, come on, go catch it, it’s half a DVD away from you!
I run Kubuntu on my other desktops and laptops, so I made the UNR boot flash drive using Kubuntu’s Startup Disk Creator. Ubuntu has this utility as well — it’s dirt simple to use. Just download the UNR iso image and follow the Startup Disk Creator instructions.
Is there a market out there for completely open source computers, where even the design of the hardware components is shared in community fashion? That’s the question that Qi Hardware’s Ben NanoNote laptop is trying to answer. According to Linux News, you can now order the systems for $99. Linux is on board, and all aspects of the hardware design are open and free for tinkerers to modify.
Development on the Sitara AM3715 is supported not only by the BeagleBoard-xM, but by a more fully featured TI TMDXEVM3715 evaluation module (EVM). According to Crane, the current Linux BSP (board support package) will be followed by a Windows CE BSP in the third quarter. An Android version will come “relatively soon,” he added.
The current Linux version offers a BSP based on Linux kernel 2.6.32, and provides a graphical user interface, graphics, applications, demonstrations, and development utilities, says TI.
At presstime, HP had yet to respond to a request for OS details, but it would seem that all four new printers are based on Linux. The e-All-in-One printers are not, however, the WebOS-imbued printers that HP recently said it planned to offer in the future. (HP’s pending acquisition of Palm and its Linux-based WebOS operating system is expected to be completed soon.)
As far as we know, this is indeed the first dedicated desktop Internet radio to run Android. In fact, touchscreen-based Internet radios of any kind, such as the Linux-based Sensia from Pure, are still fairly novel.
Intel’s barking up all kinds of trees (ones planted by Qualcomm, NVIDIA and ARM) with its Moorestown Atom platform, and while it’ll be quite some time before we see an Atom Inside sticker gracing the face of a smartphone, the company’s making sure the world sees what it has ramped up so far with reference builds here in Taipei.
In an article over at Chinitech.com, it is being reported that the television set pictured to the left is the fist set in the world to have the Android platform built into it. Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL has reportedly been working in their labs since 2008 to integrate Android with one of their displays, with this unit being the product of their efforts.
Linux-based IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) have been around for several years. Some, such as the Myka Ion, offer full web access over the TV in addition to access to video-on-demand sites.
An internal screen shot is being passed around showing T-Mobile’s Cole Brodman pledge of “no phones left behind” when it comes to the latest Android release and their flagship phones.
Motorola has confirmed its plans to launch a full twenty Android based smartphones this year, with a range of devices running MOTOBLUR like the FLIPOUT and some packing hardware QWERTY keyboards.
Motorola announced a Europe-destined version of its Motoroi phone called the Milestone XT720, offering Android 2.1, 720p video capture, HDMI, and an eight-megapixel camera with xenon flash. Meanwhile, Motorola is also prepping a somewhat similar “Droid Xtreme” successor to its original Droid for Verizon in the U.S., reports claim.
Android is ready for prime time. It’s not going to beat the iPhone – not yet – but it’s ready for mainstream users. Which is probably why they’re shipping 65,000 of them a day. FroYo will only make this readiness more evident. The hiring of Matias Duarte, formerly of Palm, only underscores Google’s commitment to improving the UI.
The Linaro group seems to be answering this demands. IBM, Samsung, TI and Freescale can be considered the ‘hardware roots’, while Ubuntu, MeeGo and Android communities can be considered leaves, but what this tree lacked is a trunk. Linago might be that trunk that will enable quicker time to market. It is the node at the cross that was missing. The other two notable hardware makers working together with the software community in the MeeGo environment also got the message. What we’re basically seeing is a trend towards consolidation in ‘foundations’ in which competitors cooperate instead of consolidation in one company. This marks an important step in a quicker time to market, the much needed step to advance in the direction of the ultimate goal: Linux world domination.
There are plenty of open source email clients already on the market, but there’s always room for more. Roundcube is a free and open source Web mail application that contains full support for HTML and MIME messages, IMAP folder management, and more.
Today I got a email about registration for “Qt Developer Days 2010″. This conference will be in Munich (October 11-13) and in San Francisco (November 1-3).
Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the general availability of Ingres VectorWise for Linux, the next generation of database technology. Ingres VectorWise has been proven by Ingres customers and partners over the last six months to provide performance gains of 10x to 70x over existing database and analytic servers whilst running sophisticated analytics on large to truly massive data sets.
OK, the title of this blog was a bit misleading. We are actually talking about Better Defaults, which are the focus of the most recent Renaissance status presentation, which you can munch on if you find time for a light snack.
Last Friday the Minister of Justice revealed a report regarding the Danish police’s finances. The background is that the police in Denmark has been spending much more money over the last many years, than they where allowed to in the budget.
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The opposition parties are now asking the Minister, why there crystal clear recommendations of F/OSS and OpenOffice.org has been erased from the official version.
Why was important recommendations from McKinsey omitted in the report ‘A professional and well driven police’ to the Parliament?
From the report from McKinsey with the financial analyzes:
The section ‘Use of cheaper software’:
That in stead (of Microsoft Office) works with a scenario with a shift to OpenOffice.org or Star Office, as the product is called, when delivered from SUN (Oracle). By using a well know supplier such as SUN(Oracle), that now also develops and supports MySQL as well as Star Office, it will be assured that support is available with the quality the police needs. (p. 83-84)
A shift to OpenOffice.org or Star Office will according to McKinsey result in savings around 100 mio DKK untill 2017.
Last week Laurent Bounin of Savoir Faire Linux in Quebec wrote in with good news.
A Canadian court ruled the provincial government broke the law in 2006 when it upgraded Windows on 800 workstations and excluded open source from the bid.
In recent years, numerous governments and government entities around the world have issued mandates regarding increased adoption of open source software. We’ve written about the trend from numerous angles, but one of the more interesting spins on this trend has just occurred, as reported by Savoir-faire Linux. A Canadian court ruled that Quebec broke the law when it migrated 800 workstations to Microsoft software without performing a “serious and documented search” for alternatives.
WordPress 3.0 looks like an especially compelling release of the seven-year old blogging platform. The much-anticipated custom menu system features lots of drag-and-drop options along with the ability to create sub-menus hide specific pages, and more. The WordPress admin page has also been altered to users to focus more on content
Billions of mobile phones and devices can now automatically sync pictures with the Web thanks to Funambol, the open source mobile cloud company. The company today announced the general availability of Funambol v8.5, which adds syncing of pictures and rich media between mobile devices and the open cloud. Once synced, pictures and mobile data can be viewed online, synced with connected devices and shared with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
One of the most common observations in the open source marketplace is related to the low level of contributions by companies, especially small and medium sized businesses, to the projects behind the open source software (OSS) they use within their embedded systems or as part of an internal IT infrastructure. Looking at the Eclipse Foundation, one of the best run open source projects, it is possible to see that most contributions are from large companies that use Eclipse as a basis for their products or from open source companies that are aware of the strategic importance for code contributions to OSS projects.
Daniel: KnowledgeTree’s focus is on delivering easy to use, turnkey document management solutions to small and medium business. We also have a significant number of global 2000 customers, mostly at the department level. The reason why we have those large organizations is because of our open source value proposition, a story you have heard many times before and know and love.
Open Source for America, an organization sponsored and supported by some of the biggest names in the FOSS world has launched a study to measure openness in government. With today being the 6 month anniversary of President Obama’s “Openness in Government” directive, which directs “executive departments and agencies to take specific actions to implement principles of transparency, participation and collaboration.”
Watch this space. And while you’re watching it, consider this: the website for the UK Supreme Court and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was £360,000. Or as it puts it: “The cost to create and develop the UKSC and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) websites was £360k in total. The development of both sites was treated as a single project and therefore the costs cannot be broken down by website.”
I first learned about the open source way years ago as a tech lawyer in a private law firm when I was introduced to Red Hat. I found the open source model interesting, but from a different perspective than developers. For context, at the time, many technology licensing lawyers started talking about open source because of the innovative use of copyright law to protect transparency and sharing of the open source code through the general public license (GPL).
India’s Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) collective is the driving force behind the Connect 2 Decode project that aims to pool research data and create a central repository accessible by anyone organization in the world that’s doing TB research of its own. More than 1.7 million people die from tuberculosis each year, and the virus is growing increasingly resistant to existing drugs. The gene research will hopefully lead to better medicines and vaccines that haven’t been improved since they were first developed in the 1960′s.
Fifteen years ago today, on the 8th of June, 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf launched PHP with a post to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Usenet news group. He announced version 1.0 of his “Personal Home Page Tools”, software that was originally intended for managing job applications on a web site. As Lerdorf made the tools available as open source code (originally under the GPL, since version 4.0 under the PHP Licence) his PHP software, written in C, was bound to find a wide audience.
In mid-April, four of us from the Aspose.Words team have attended the ODF Interoperability workshop that was held in the beautiful city of Granada in the province of Andalusia. The main themes of the trip were learning more about Open Document initiatives in Europe, meeting people, talking about nuances of ODT and testing how well Aspose.Words supports it. Besides, we had a chance to make a presentation about Aspose.Words to the ODF Plugfest community.
The new version of ODFDOM – our Apache 2 licensed ODF library in Java has been released!
Aside of a more than a dozen patches there were two outstanding new features for the 0.8.5 release:
1. The support of all ODF templates. Nearly all document types of ODF 1.2 are now supported.
Only the support for Formula (MathML) and Database front end documents will follow later.
2. The new high level Presentation API for slide handling. An API supporting exchange of slides, copy and much more.
After last week’s successful completion of the Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project, CEO John Paton was looking for a new project that would keep the momentum of innovation going for the beleaguered newspaper network.
A new libel law proposed by a Liberal Democrat peer would clarify how quickly ISPs and publishers have to act when told of a defamatory post or article. Defamatory material would not have to be taken down for 14 days, under the proposal.
The toughest lesson to draw from the Whitehaven tragedy is that there might be no lesson at all. We cannot stop people having rows at home or work, taking leave of their senses, finding a gun and going berserk. Such things rarely happen. But even the most authoritarian state must allow some personal liberty, and everyone accepts the resulting risk. No free community can be wholly safe without losing its freedom.
Possibly the most famous instance of poor propriety was when Hayward, while apologizing to the people of Louisiana, told them “I would like my life back”, a comment that sounded particularly insensitive after the Gulf catastrophe claimed 11 lives in the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Further casualties now include nearly 500 birds, 227 turtles, and 27 mammals, including dolphins. Hayward’s poorly-conceived statements do not stop there; he also famously said, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
On Google, paid results are awarded to the highest bidder.
Scott Slatin, an analyst who runs search engine marketing company Rivington in New York, estimates the company is paying upwards of $10,000 per day to maintain the various search terms.
“They paid to lock themselves into the first position against the oil spill terms, essentially putting a positive message on top of the news,” Slatin said.
I think that the continuing global financial crisis has now put an end to the ideological fantasy that highly complex markets can effectively function with minimal government oversight.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., already under fire for its actions leading up to the financial crisis, came under attack from a federal commission that accused it of refusing to divulge information, including documents detailing its controversial bets on the mortgage market.
Saying it had been stonewalled, the federal commission investigating the financial crisis on Monday took the unusual step of issuing a subpoena to Goldman that demanded information about the investment bank’s role before and during the mortgage meltdown and credit crunch.
Ten Washington lobbying firms have represented a whopping 130 different clients in the financial regulatory reform debate — raking in millions of dollars as the bill heads for final passage.
The global war over new bank capital requirements for banks is intensifying, with a clash between powerful U.S. regulators drawing widespread international attention.
For months, Wall Street banks have been biding their time, serenely confident that Democrats would eventually drop their get-tough stance on derivatives and quietly excise a tough new proposal from the financial reform bill.
The commission investigating the causes of the financial crisis said on Monday that it had subpoenaed Goldman Sachs and harshly accused the investment bank of trying to delay and disrupt its inquiry.
Banks are not investors. They need to get paid back. We have an S.B.A. loan program that works. Some people complain that it requires too much paperwork. I’ve taken two S.B.A. loans, both many years after I started my business. The amount of paperwork involved was not unreasonable. This is the land of opportunity. Entrepreneurs have an opportunity to borrow money, if they can, or to look for investors. If they can’t find the money that way, they may have to do it the old-fashioned way — earning it themselves and using their own money.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd bring to the negotiations experience from the government’s rapid and often ad hoc response to the financial crisis, including the controversial decision to risk taxpayer money to bail out the financial sector.
Manufacturing job gains in the Midwest helped lower the nation’s economic stress in April to its lowest point in five months, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis of conditions around the country.
The scandal led to euro5 billion (more than $7 billion at the time) in losses once the bank unwound Jerome Kerviel’s positions in January 2008. The case gave a taste of the spiraling crises to come in the finance world, from the fall of Lehman Brothers to Bernard L. Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Earlier today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asking for an investigation into two appointments made by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC). The two members, Drs. Neal Benowitz and Jack Henningfield, have financial conflicts of interest based on their ties to pharmaceutical companies that make smoking cessation products.
The company was part of a vanguard of corporations that, in 2007, began demanding federal action to stop global warming. Until then, America’s big businesses had largely been silent on the issue or actively supporting the other side.
A powerful lobbying organisation representing agribusiness interests helped draft a key government report that has been attacked by environmentalists for heavily favouring the arguments of the genetically modified food industry.
The revelation comes after the resignation of two government advisers who have criticised the close relationship between the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the body that oversees the UK’s food industry, and the GM lobby.
Emails between the FSA and the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) show the council inserted key sentences strengthening the case for GM food that ended up in the final report.
The report, “Food Standards Agency work on changes in the market and the GM regulatory system”, examines how GM products are entering the UK, where the growing of GM products is banned, through the animal feed system. It acknowledges food prices could go up if GM products continue to be excluded.
Emails from the council – which represents leading GM food companies such as Monsanto and Bayer – to Dr Clair Baynton, the then head of novel foods at the FSA, show a close dialogue between both sides between 2008 and August 2009, when the report was published.
There is no funny U.S. Chamber of Commerce math that can overcome the fact that U.S. government data show that we have lost 5 million net manufacturing jobs since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) went into effect. The U.S. trade deficit peaked at $830 billion during this period, and U.S. real median wages still lurk at 1972 levels.
State Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett’s subpoena of the social networking organization Twitter, in an attempt to identify anonymous posters, has drawn criticism from the legal community.
Zimbabwe has an independent daily newspaper for the first time in seven years after the launch today of NewsDay, which aims to provide a counterpoint to state media that is fiercely loyal to longtime president Robert Mugabe.
Montana’s law states, “A corporation may not make a contribution or expenditure in connection with a candidate or a political committee that supports or opposes a candidate or a political party.” The law was passed in 1912 to curb the influence of the notorious mining interests, known as the “Copper Kings.” Now, a right-wing, 501(c)(4) group based out of Colorado called Western Tradition Partnership, has teamed with the local Bozeman, Montana Champion Paint store to challenge the constitutionality of that law in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. The suit was filed in the Helena District Court.
I spent the next 10 minutes explaining to Alice about DRM and what it is doing to people who legitimately purchase music. It seems that the DRM’ed CD allowed itself to be “ripped” but when the copy of the CD was attempted to play in MP3 format, the DRM kicked in, and the “screw you” message, as Alice refers to it, appeared on the screen.
Alice listened without interupting. I could hear her scribbling furiously as I spoke but she never stopped me to repeat something or clarify a point. When I finished and was sure I had covered the entire issue, only then did she speak.
The past few weeks has seen the somewhat unlikely resurrection of Newzbin. The world’s premier Usenet indexing site was crushed by huge debts but through a tangled web worthy of the most dramatic soap opera, it has somehow been reanimated. While ex-owner Caesium eyes future opportunities away from file-sharing, lawyers already have plans to bring Newzbin2 to its knees.
When the British public are asked which band they most want to make a comeback, there is usually only one winner. Abba are generally the number one choice, which reflects the timeless appeal their unmatchable canon of pop classics continues to command, both here and internationally.
It also explains why there are so many Abba tribute acts. At the last count, at least 40 were on the circuit, entertaining fans across the UK with their own take on the ‘70s chart stars’ back catalogue. But they could all face ruin if legal action launched by Universal Records is successful.
Now, one response to this might be that these professors need to be better educated on the boundaries, exceptions and limits to copyright law. However, it’s not so simple. Part of the reason why there is so much fear of copyright law is because of the actions of many copyright holders, who not only aggressively push an extreme version of copyright law out to the public — such as the MPAA’s infamous (infamously wrong) “if you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it” education campaing — but who have used ridiculously high statutory rates to publicize the idea that for very marginal copyright infringement, you may be liable for millions in damages awards (not counting legal fees).
The copyright holders themselves have been trying to paint this picture of copyright as being much more than it really is — and as a result of that, it’s now actively stifling all kinds of important research.
These worlds don’t match. Both Glee and the RIAA can’t be right. It’s hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can’t do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue’s Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.
Kornarens apparently misrepresented Indian copyright law, citing an “immaterial concurring opinion” and misquoting other rulings by inserting parenthetical notations into those rulings, that changed the meaning. The court doesn’t take that sort of stuff kindly:
The district court did not abuse its discretion in concluding Kornarens’ misrepresentations of Indian law evidenced his bad faith and recklessness in pursuing Lahiri’s copyright claim.
Kornarens now concedes his written submissions to the district court contained “mistakes.” However, viewed in the context of the history of this litigation, the court did not abuse its discretion in finding that Kornarens acted recklessly and in bad faith in pursuing a frivolous copyright claim for five years.
Now, this situation is clearly a pretty extreme one, given the details of the case, but with so many copyright lawsuits being filed these days on such flimsy evidence, some of the lawyers involved might want to pay attention to what can happen when you aggressively pursue a bogus copyright claim.
Either way, it would be interesting to see if anyone has more evidence that Viacom properties are improperly monetizing CC non-commercially-licensed videos. That would seem like a relevant point in the ongoing lawsuit…
Now, however, news have surfaced that show that the judge was corrupt and the case all but predecided. It turns out that the lawyer for the copyright lobby, Dirk Visser (who has previously represented the infamous BREIN against Mininova), is actively running an anti-piracy business together with the judge.
The development of Linux on mobile devices may be poised to get a boost thanks to the formation of a new industry group called Linaro, backed by a consortium of chip vendors including ARM, Freescale, Texas Instruments, Samsung and ST-Ericsson.
The goal of Linaro is to enable development of Linux on embedded System-on-Chips (SoC) including ARM-based processors. The effort will also leverage engineering help and resources from Ubuntu Linux vendor Canonical.
So it is not clear that any distribution will make the jump to systemd. But, then, even the above is a fair amount of attention for a project which has been public for less than one month. This program has reopened the discussion on how our systems should initialize themselves, and things may go on from there: there is talk of using systemd to take over the tasks of processes like cron and gnome-session. Regardless of who ends up running systemd, the ideas it expresses are likely to influence development for some time.
Developers in the Eclipse open source community are becoming more inclined to use Linux as their primary desktop operating system, according to a report released Monday by the Eclipse Foundation that gauges sentiments on software development issues.
Application launchers play an integral part in making the Linux desktop a more productive environment to work and play. They represent small utilities which offers the desktop user a convenient access point for application software and can make a real boost to users’ efficiency.
An application launcher helps to reduce start up times for applications by indexing shortcuts in the menu. Furthermore, this type of software allows users to search for documents and other files quicker by indexing different file formats. This makes them useful for launching almost anything on a computer including multimedia files, games, and the internet. Application launchers often support plug-ins, adding to their versatility.
We’ve already shown you how to keep your desktop interesting by setting a video as your wallpaper and how to download and rotate fresh photos. This week, weblog Simple Help shows us how to rotate a photo of the Earth from space.
Sometimes life is very circular. Once upon a time, I was a film major. Then I was an astronomer, then I was unemployed for quite awhile, during which time I discovered free software, and as a result of my various rantings about it, I started writing for Free Software Magazine. Now it seems that I’ve become a film-maker again. I’m working on not one, but two animated science-fiction films using free software tools, intended for a free-licensed release on the internet under new distribution models. And, being a writer, I’m going to write about it. I think it will be both entertaining and useful.
Here I tested 4 Linux MegaDrive emulators: dgen, gens, xe and rgen. Four classic MegaDrive games were used with each, including Sonic 3, Road Rash 3, Streets of Rage 2 and Zero Wing.
In our previous post we had a detailed discussion on what is nautilus elementary and how to install nautlius elementary in ubuntu using PPA. That was just a week ago. And already a number of important updates! Nautilus elementary is really going places. Let’s see what are the changes with nautilus elementary now.
Ubuntu Advantage customers will also receive the assurance of indemnification from Canonical protecting them against any potential legal issues. The legal indemnification is the same that Canonical had previously been making available to its paying support customers. Rival Linux distributions Red Hat and Novell also both provide their enterprise customers with legal indemnifications.
Peppermint, like many distro’s do need your help and support, whether its reporting bugs, telling people about your good experiences with the distro, making a donation or visiting the Peppermint store….it all helps to support and enables the development of excellent projects like this.
Mint 9, aka Isadora, is the latest update to the desktop-focused, Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (10.04). It is one of the more exciting desktop distributions, with a nice selection of custom-developed graphical management utilities.
Vinux is a remastered version of the popular Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx distribution optimised for the needs of blind and partially sighted users.. It provides three screen readers, two full-screen magnifiers, global font-size and colour changing facilities, and out-of-the-box support for USB Braille displays. The Vinux live CD boots into the Orca screen reader which makes it easy to navigate the graphical GNOME desktop using keybindings. For those who prefer to work in a simple text-based console there is the Speakup
Android, Symbian, Bada, WebOS. The list goes on. The list of smartphone operating systems is growing by the day. Many are open source, a good number are proprietary and some are barely out of beta.
National Public Radio (NPR), a non-profit membership organisation, has announced that it plans to open source its NPR Android application. Created in 1970, NPR is a privately and publicly funded US media organisation that produces and distributes news, talk and entertainment programming. The NPR app for Android devices was created by Google developer Michael Frederick in his spare time. With the application, users can read, listen or create playlists of NPR stories, share them with friends and live stream audio from hundreds of NPR radio stations.
My HP 2133 Mini-Note with WSVGA (1024×600) display has been out on loan for several months. It came back a week or so ago, and as it had missed the latest wave of Linux distribution updates, I decided to reload it from scratch. It originally came with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10), and NO WINDOWS (Hooray!). I had preserved SLED 10 in a small partition “just in case”, but it is now so old that it would not be of any use whatever may happen, so I wiped it as well, and started from a completely clean disk.
This is the prototype of the Kno a Linux based dual screen textbook replacement shown by californian startup Kakai at at the 8th Annual Conference of D: All Things Digital, otherwise known as D8
Looking for a job and a way to promote free and open source software? The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) is looking to hire a project manager.
The Government of Malta has issued a new directivePDF instructing all of its agencies to give preference to the use of open source software (OSS) throughout government. According to the directive, Malta will adopt free software using the definition set by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and it says that, “Where it is not possible to make use of OSS in the implementation of solutions, appropriate evidence shall be made available.”
It’s difficult to envision a computer that’s completely open-source—and I mean completely, right down to the software on its drives, the drivers for its components, and the circuit boards for its construction. However, Linux News has gotten its hands on one such device, Qi Hardware’s “Ben NanoNote,” and it’s one of the few massive hardware projects in existence that runs on completely copyleft hardware.
In a decision that does not bode well for plaintiffs bringing privacy-based claims against Facebook in California, the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed the trial court’s rejection of data breach claims against Gap.
According to the FBI, terrorists have noticed that Americans will go crazy and attack themselves (shutting down public spaces and transit, evacuating busy areas, subjecting innocents to search, detention and questioning) if you leave a “suspicious” bag in a public place. This is thanks to programs like New York City’s “See Something, Say Something,” which generates thousands of calls about “suspicious activity” every year, not one of which has ever led to an actual terrorism arrest. Of course, leaving bags of water or socks is an errand that’s a lot less risky than planting bombs.
The Royal College of Nursing is launching a judicial review of a vetting scheme it fears will breach nurses’ human rights and have “catastrophic” consequences for their careers, Nursing Times can reveal.
A federal bankruptcy court ruled that sending an e-mail message with a hyperlink to a defamatory blog post can be considered a publication for the purposes of a libel claim.
While the case before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas revolved around William Perry’s bankruptcy proceedings, the court relied on Texas law to determine that e-mail messages Perry sent linking to websites that made false and defamatory statements about Sugar Land, Texas, mayor David Wallace met the “actual malice” standard a public official needs to bring a defamation claim, according to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
The Bulgarian organizers of the Anand-Topalov World Championship match take Chessbase to court for “violating copyright rules”. Chessbase transmitted the moves of the match live on their Playchess server, against the will of the Bulgarians.
Licensees can now start claiming for refunds from music royalties collection firm, Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), to get a share of £20m owed to pubs, hotels and restaurants, following a legal battle.
The fact that lots of people paid up to settle extortion-like fees didn’t stop people from using file sharing networks to access unauthorized materials. It didn’t get more people to buy. It didn’t help the bottom line. It hasn’t helped the record labels sell more product. It certainly hasn’t helped the big labels stay in business. Hell, it hasn’t even helped the RIAA. Towards the end of the legal campaign, the RIAA ended up having massive layoffs of its own staff. And, let’s not even get into discussing what the average music fan thinks of the RIAA and the big labels these days…
The Eclipse Foundation has released its 2010 Eclipse Community Survey results, which reveal an interesting snapshot of one slice of the development community.
Taking the results at face value, the likely respondent from the 1696 total is a male programmer who works for a high-tech company with fewer than 100 employees. Oh, and their favorite IDE is some flavor of Eclipse.
[...]
And, the second half of the news will surely be that this increase comes at the cost of Windows development, which has seen a steady decrease in platform participation: in 2007, 73.8 percent preferred Windows; in 2009, it was 64.3 percent; and this year just 58.3 percent listed Windows as their favorite operating system.
Today Linux is acknowledged to be the ideal operating system amongst programmers and application intense users. This is not to say that UNIX solutions have developed problems, but simply that Linux continues to be increasingly capable of doing the task that has typically been expected of Unix, and in many instances does so more effectively and efficiently.
No matter the intent, sensationalist articles are not overall helpful or realistic when it comes to advancing Linux. The only thing that will continue to help move Linux forward is action on the behalf of the community that supports it. This includes developing the software to make it better than the competition and providing marketing support, which can include written articles. Those articles need to be informative, however, and better educate users on what Linux is all about. We need to be smart about this though, since there is a difference between the audience on CNET and LinuxInsider — know to which audience you are writing. Why continue to preach to the choir about how Linux is ready to dominate when we can go help it achieve the goals we write about so often?
Ever since I have started learning and using Linux, this is something I always thought “was happening” and never knew when it will “really happen”. And the thing is called mass Linux adoption. Why is it necessary? How is the likes of Android, MeeGo and Chrome OS is going to change the world as we know it forever? Let’s explore.
In the end, we can only hope that of the several networks likely running on a modern passenger jet, that true air-gapping is taking place and these systems are in no way connected to critical on-board networks. Time will tell if this is indeed the case. In the meantime, keep an eye out for those Linux boxes crashing on planes!
Look what freely giving worthwhile stuff to people gets you:
* FedoraProject.org up 18% and in the top 1000 sites in some parts of the world.
* Debian GNU/Linux is in the top 3000 over much of Europe.
* Ubuntu.com in the top 400 over much of the world
Those organizations give stuff away for free sincerely and without trying to manipulate anyone. There are hundreds of GNU/Linux distros and most are thriving, taking a serious and increasing share of the desktop OS market.
The move by the city of Zaragoza to an open source desktop is making good progress. All of the city’s civil servants now use open source tools including Thunderbird, VLC, Firefox and OpenOffice. And this year some seven hundred of the city’s 2800 desktop PCs will have seen their proprietary operating system replaced by the Linux open source alternative.
You knew I was gonna go there huh. If you want a printer, 3g and OS combo that works – go with Samsung, new Huawei Modem, and Ubuntu. I would recommend this to anyone who needs a reliable combination for the small office but needs Internet on the go as well.
The first problem I had with the article was just seeing it’s link on Lxer. People are still recommending and using 32-bit software. These people needed to be locked up for mental illness. Well at least they SAY it’s Gnome, instead of calling it the default desktop. They ruin it however by making users install mono applications like F-Spot, and a weird assortment of proprietary applications which HAVE NO PLACE in Fedora.
In the begin I talk a bit about difficulties in the forum and my thoughts about flattr.
The TOC
03:25 Subscribe to the RSS feed
04:35 flattr
06:30 An image from the Europahafen
08:15 Goal: Enhance the contrast between old and new
08:25 Rotation correction
10:15 Saving as XCF
10:45 Cropping
11:25 Fixing the aspect ratio
13:15 Duplicating the layer before tweaking the colours
14:05 Adjusting the curve to get more contrast
15:35 Desaturationg parts of the image with a layer in saturation mode
20:00 Adding sepia colour
22:20 Colour layer mode
Should you be using one of the official Google packages, you might want to read the end-user’s license agreement. The agreement reads as though generic, and may not be the final license. Still, you may want to know that, like the license that openSUSE used on its betas until a few releases ago, it is non-free. When you download an official package, the license assumes that you have implicitly agreed not to copy or distribute it.
These are first hours of hackweek. A lot of people in Novell and in the community are starting to work on different projects. What can I give for free software in this week? Sure, my favorite project is NetworkManagement.
Developers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have cooperated with Oracle to port large parts of Solaris’ ZFS file system to the Linux kernel. Their aim is to make the distributed Lustre file system available under Linux with ZFS.
[...]
Native ZFS for Linux can be compiled with kernel versions up to 2.6.32; among the tested platforms are the 2.6.32 kernel in Fedora 12 and in the beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, as well as the 2.6.18 kernel in RHEL 5. The build requires the Solaris Porting Layer and a 64-bit Linux system.
There’s good news for the Ubuntu camp and others releasing in the September-October time-frame: development work on X.Org Server 1.9 is still going as planned for an August release and its merge window is about to be closed. In the past it’s been tough for the X.Org project to release server updates in a timely manner that’s on schedule, but continuing from their X.Org Server 1.8 success, 1.9 is shaping up nicely too.
My favorite Dock Avant Window Navigator, one of the best Docks available so far, it’s fully customizable with themes, extra plugins, extra applets, also working on many window managers, and many distributions such as Ubuntu , Gentoo, Fedora, …
LiVES (LiVES is a Video Editing System) is a free software video editing program and VJ tool, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. There are binary versions available for most popular Linux distributions (including Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora Core, Suse, Slackware, Arch Linux and Mandriva). There are also ports for BSD, and it will run under Mac OS X/Darwin, Solaris and IRIX.
Try your hand at film making with this video editing software.
Vivia allows you to edit videos, cut out important sequences, add effects etc. Vivia can handle both AVI and DV files and has a recovery function that restores you files should the tool crash.
Who said Linux games have to cost nothing? Well, quite a few people, actually. But just as you pay, or at least, are expected to pay for Windows games, there’s no reason why you should not do the same thing in Linux. Creating high-quality games takes lots of work and effort. While many of us believe programmers are photosynthetic and live on PC screen emissions, the truth is they also need to earn money and provide for their families. If a game bears a price tag, then it’s no reason to skip it, just because your operating system is free.
No great design comes without careful planning. Especially the “Plasma-Ponyhof-Shell” caused us some headaches and we had long discussions about the “Movable Tree Plasma Applet” that has yet to grow up.
In this piece, I want to show you that the GNOME desktop has a number of issues that need attention as well. I’ll outline eight areas in GNOME that need to be improved for a better user experience.
Canonical, the commercial presence behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution for servers and desktops, is in business to make money as well as to put out the best free operating system it can.
You’re likely all aware that Ubuntu 10.10 is getting a funky feature-packed new sound applet for Maverick. That shindig promises to be crazy awesome and a great usability improvement. Until that pops up do allow me to bask in the sweet glow of simple progression because sometimes, as you may be aware, very minor changes make me giddy.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 196 for the week of May 30th – June 5th, 2010. In this issue we cover Maverick Alpha 1 released, Kubuntu: Maverick Alpha 1 Released, Postponing Ubuntu User Days, Call for Testing: Hardy Firefox Users (or willing to install Hardy in a VM), Request For Help Preparing ClassBot For Translations, Operation Cleansweep Launched!, Linaro: Accelerating Linux on ARM, Ubuntu Stats, LoCo Teams Best Practices and Guidelines, Help translating the LoCo Teams Best Practices and Guidelines, The LoCo Directory wants to speak your language, Ubuntu Development Team Meetings Minutes, Launchpad News, NGO Team during Maverick, Free culture projects need a ubiquitous funding system, Hacking on grub2, Severed Fifth II, Project Maintainers Required, In The Press, In The Blogosphere, Towards Linaro 10.11, Ubuntu Systems Management update, SouthEast Linux Fest Announces Full Speaker List, VMware User Conference – Phoenix, TurnKey Hub: a new simplified cloud deployment service, Featured Podcasts, Monthly Team Reports: May 2010, Upcoming Meetings and Events, Updates and Security, and much much more!
Profiting from Linux doesn’t involve an obvious winning formula. There are as many different business models as there are distributions, and you seldom find much overlap between those that are working.
Collaboration works better when you trust the people with whom you are collaborating. Transparency is more believable when you trust those who are opening up to you. And it is much easier for the best ideas to win when there is a base level of trust in the community that everyone is competent and has the best interests of the project at heart.
Since Symantec released its report in 2005, Microsoft lobbyists have quoted the old document to make people believe that Internet Explorer is the safest browser today. Their idea is to tell users that Mozilla Firefox might make one’s computer vulnerable to attacks.
Symantec, the company that flags Norton Antivirus, stated back then that there were 25 vulnerabilities in Firefox while Internet Explorer had only 13. This is the part that supporters of IE love to repeat. The part that they don’t want us to consider is this:
1. The Mozilla Foundation started in 2003, so Firefox was a fairly young browser back then. Yet, its problems were solved in a period of THREE DAYS. Some of the noted problems of IE are still there today.
2. From the 25 problems in Firefox, only 8 were considered as real threats by Symantec …the SAME NUMBER OF PROBLEMS THAT WERE FOUND IN INTERNET EXPLORER. This means that the young Mozilla product and Microsoft’s 10-year-old browser WERE TIED REGARDING PERFORMANCE.
3. According to Secunia (a Danish company that checks the security of software products), up to 2010, IE keeps a total of 19 vulnerabilities that have not been fixed, while Firefox has only 3.
He is largely responsible for the popularity of the Linux operating system (including Linux-based derivatives like Android), and the open source community. If it wasn’t for him, you’d probably be paying for every piece of software you use on a daily basis.
I want to make things easier for them to understand, not more difficult. I feel that I am not doing anything wrong; when I choose to call Microsoft Windows Vista “Vista” I am not doing a disservice to Microsoft. Nor do I do a disservice to Canonical by calling Ubuntu “Ubuntu.” A great many people and groups have to come together to make any particular operating system, particularly community-created ones, and credit for success should go to each and every one of them.
A Freedom Outlaw is (loosely) somebody who cares so much about freedom that he or she will go after it regardless of any laws or regulations blocking the way. Will go after it personally. Not petition for it. Not write letters for it. Not vote for it. But GO for it.
An expansive EU project to produce an artificial cornea has found success thanks to the work of Joachim Storsberg of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP in Germany. Storsberg helped develop a new version of an opthalmological polymer which the eye will bond to and still allow to function properly. The new polymer could help restore sight to thousands waiting for corneal transplants around the world. The artificial cornea has passed clinical trials and is ready to see expanded use in patients this year. Very soon those with corneal blindness may find a ready cure in the form of the new implant.
The Federal Trade Commission has come to an agreement with Florida-based CyberSpy Software that allows it to resume sales of its Remote Spy commercial spyware application. According to the U.S. District Court settlement, the company must not provide users with the means to disguise the software as an innocent file or email attachment. Users must also be advised that doing so may violate US state or federal law. Additionally, all recorded information sent over the internet must be encrypted and older legacy versions of the software must be removed from computers on which it was previously installed.
I’m reading various articles about the Russia’s proposal, with support from the UN, for a “cyberwarfare arms limitation treaty”. What astounds me is that nobody seems to realize that “cyberwarfare” is a fictional story, and that “arms” in cyberspace don’t exist.
As major botnet operators have moved from top-down C&C infrastructures, like those employed throughout the 1990s and most of the last decade, to more flexible peer-to-peer designs, they also have found it much easier to keep their networks up and running once they’re discovered. When an attacker at just one, or at most, two, C&C servers doling out commands to compromised machines, evading detection and keeping the command server online were vitally important.
Did anybody tell these people how many “losing” trading days Goldman had in the latest quarter/year? Joking aside, we do find it somewhat ironic that the company which brought capitalism (or at least the Goldman-centric version thereof) to China is now being openly attacked for being “too successful.” It really is time for Buffett to MBO the squid and get the public company farce over with (that means only another $30 in GS downside before the Oracle announces his true intentions). We are sure that Goldman can pull enough strings where even as Buffett’s last hypocritical hurrah, it will still have full discount window access, even as a fully private hedge fund. Because the last thing Goldman needs is to be the primary scapegoat of a better way of life gone horribly wrong for 1.3 billion angry Chinese. On the other hand, look for the American Idol empire to promptly move to Beijing with Goldman’s blessings and venture funding – when all else fails, prime time distraction with moronic entertainment for an increasingly lazy middle class always seems to get the job done.
Always eager to jump at anything suggesting foreign conspiracy, the Chinese press leapt at accusations of fraud made against Goldman Sachs by the American regulatory authorities.
The brutal combination of inept management, poor legal advice, and horrific decision making is combining is uniquely ugly ways to further damage their reputation — as if that were possible. Hard as that is to imagine, their PR — recently ranked as “For Shit” — is now heading south from there.
A high profile panel investigating the causes of the financial crisis announced Monday it had subpoenaed Goldman Sachs for failing to cooperate with the probe.
“The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has issued a subpoena to Goldman Sachs & Co. for failing to comply with a request for documents and interviews in a timely manner,” the body said in a statement.
It is the latest controversy for the New York-based bank, which is facing civil and potentially criminal charges for misleading investors.
Fifteen attorneys have left Richmond-based LeClairRyan to form Murphy & McGonigle, a firm specializing in advising financial services clients during lawsuits, government investigations and enforcement actions.
Countrywide Home Loans and its mortgage servicing unit, which are now part of Bank of America, agreed on Monday to pay $108 million to settle federal charges that the company overcharged customers who were struggling to hang onto their homes.
When the CCS derivative instrument maturity came, we saw back in 2009 that Greeks Deficit suddenly climbed to 12% of GDP which is 4 times over the limit. With the credit crunch, borrowing more to finance government spending became a problem. This resulted on the news of its potential default of certain loans.
Stocks fell across Asia on Monday and the euro hit fresh multiyear lows against the dollar and yen, after disappointing U.S. jobs data and amid renewed fears that the European government debt crisis could spread to other vulnerable economies.
Its budget deficit is about one-half that of Greece. It does not use the euro and so could, if pressed, lift exports by devaluing its own currency, the forint. And it is in the middle of an economic overhaul program with the International Monetary Fund and can call upon an additional $2 billion if needed.
That’s the amount that foreign banks and other financial companies have lent to public and private institutions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, three countries so mired in economic troubles that analysts and investors assume that a significant portion of that mountain of debt may never be repaid.
Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed, has long been a proponent of serious financial sector reform. As a former commercial banker, he sees quite clearly that the legislation now headed into “reconciliation” between House and Senate versions amounts to very little. He also knows that pounding away repeatedly on this theme is the best way to influence his colleagues within the Fed and across the policy community more broadly.
In 2008, about two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges and universities had student loan debt averaging $23,200, according to data analyzed by the Project on Student Debt, an initiative of the nonprofit Institute for College Access & Success.
But there is another part of their story that contains some truth. The government is borrowing large amounts of money right now to sustain demand in the wake of the collapse of private sector spending following the deflation of the housing bubble. If the deficit continues on the projected path, the country will substantially increase its debt burden over the course of the decade.
Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.
When the Senate bank reform legislation passed in May, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) said it sent the message to Wall Street that they can “no longer can you recklessly gamble away other people’s money.” The bill told Main Street, “you no longer have to fear that your savings, your retirement or your home are at the mercy of greedy gamblers in big banks. And it says to them: never again will you be asked to bail out those big banks when they lose their risky bets,” according to Reid.
New federally subsidized bonds that have proven wildly popular in helping cash-strapped state and local governments fund roads, schools and other construction projects also offer a windfall to a less obvious beneficiary: Wall Street banks.
The proportion of people jobless for six months or more has accelerated in the past year and now makes up 46 percent of the unemployed. That’s the highest percentage on records dating to 1948. By late summer or early fall, they are expected to make up half of all jobless Americans.
FROM the earliest days of the credit crisis, the nation’s big financial institutions have been less than forthcoming about ballooning loan losses buried inside their books. To some degree this is understandable: denial is a powerful thing, after all, and writing off troubled loans during a period of severe stress is, for bankers, the equivalent of getting a root canal.
The Sacramento Association of REALTORS® is breaking out monthly resales by equity sales (conventional resales), and distressed sales (Short sales and REO sales), and I’m following this series as an example to see mix changes in a distressed area.
Swipe your debit card at the supermarket and you’ve placed yourself at the heart of a contentious congressional debate.
On one side are banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America and credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard. On the other are retailers, including giants like Wal-Mart and Target.
An anonymous reader writes “A computer science student at University College London put together FitFinder as a bit of a joke — it’s been described as a cross between Twitter and personal ads, and it rapidly became very popular. The university took exception to this and started by blocking the site from being accessed on campus. Not content with this, a few weeks later it fined the student £300 and had him take the site down completely. Currently, the site is still offline, although there is a petition with several thousand signatures requesting its return. In the meantime, a site called PhitFinder has appeared, claiming to have no link to the original.”
Some websites, including ones with pornography, that were previously blocked by China’s Internet censors were accessible inside the country Friday, though reasons for the change were unclear.
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Turkey has imposed an indefinite ban on Internet search engine Google and many of its services citing “legal” reasons.
In an official statement, Turkey’s Telecommunications Presidency said it has banned access to many of Google IP addresses without assigning clear reasons. The statement did not confirm if the ban is temporary or permanent.
For instance, only a huge effort from concerned people prevented Europe from adopting software patents under the pressure of lobbying from big self-interested software companies. And only continued vigilance will prevent those big companies from wearing down resistance.
In the UK a big campaign against the excessive measures of the Digital Economy Act has had some effect in tempering the eventual implementation as prpoposed by Ofcom, but it didn’t kill it, because in the end most elected representatives simply don’t get it, and let it pass in the rush before the end of the parliamentary session.
Cutting costs is at or near the top of every IT manager’s priority list. Moving your enterprise from proprietary to Linux-based systems may be one of the best ways to increase efficiency while reducing your overall expenses. Here is a glimpse at just three cost-cutting perspectives you may not have considered before.
I switched on the printer and plugged in the USB cable. Immediately I started to click through to the printer setup area to see if I could set it up. Suddenly my eye caught a little dialog popup next to my network monitor.
Most people probably have never heard of an operating system different than Windows. Most of them are not as widely advertised as Windows either.
I have completely switched to Ubuntu about a month ago and I must say I do not regret one single bit of doing so.
I was using Windows Vista as my main operating system and I couldn’t help but notice how slow it was at times. Especially when I had all the needed applications installed. It was so frustrating to wait for it to boot up in the mornings when I needed it to boot up fast, because all I needed was Firefox. Right then I found out about Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu is free, fast, functional, customizable and user friendly!
If we want to fix bug number one, get rid of the Microsoft monopoly that’s been plaguing the world for 20 years, and actually bring free software to the masses, we need to hit the gym and get in shape. Not only our product, Ubuntu, but our collaboration and our protocol, our infrastructure and our people.
We’re all working towards the same thing, so don’t get all defensive if I criticize your work – I’m trying to help. Don’t work in secrecy when you’ve got an entire community of intelligent and talented people at your disposal literally asking for stuff to do, and don’t skimp out on the minor details, because it’s all those minor details put together that make a good product into a great one. Work out where to draw the line between forcing something that’s unpolished into a release because you’re stuck on a schedule, or perhaps giving it another six months before incorporating it.
“With Linux, the operating system is effectively free,” says Phil Cox, principal consultant with SystemExperts. “With Microsoft, there are licensing fees for any version, so cost is a factor.” And relative to any physical hardware platform, Linux performance appears to be about 25% faster, Cox says.
Last week we openly asked the question if and when will X12 emerge to replace X11, which was met by a variety of responses. Some view the Wayland Display Server as being a potential successor to the current X11 / X.Org Server, but others don’t give it much credit seeing as it’s not too actively worked on — well, directly, but it leverages a lot of work actively going on with the Mesa and kernel DRM. The last time the Wayland Display Server received new commits to its code-base was back in March, but that changed this weekend.
While many new packages have been pulled into the “Maverick Meerkat” repository for Ubuntu 10.10, one area that hasn’t yet received many changes compared to the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS packages has been the X.Org graphics stack. However, that soon will change with X.Org Server 1.8 being pulled into the Maverick repository in the very near future.
With Slideshow Creator and dvd-slideshow you can transform your pictures in a beautiful dvd-quality slide show rich of fashinating effects like ken burns, pan and animated transitions.
I’ve been working on a project for work involving the re-use of older (6-8 years old) PCs and laptops using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with the goal of distributing them to some of our tech-impoverished Georgia libraries (nothing’s firm yet – still in the exploratory phase). These were state library staff members’ computers from maybe 2 generations ago and if they are not re-used, they’ll be surplused or discarded. As I was installing and configuring Ubuntu, it occurred to me that since we would be redistributing whatever software we install, we are constrained about what we can include when they are sent out. Ubuntu, as-is, is all free software and all included packages can be redistributed freely. However, installing Adobe Flash, Sun (or Oracle) Java, or many proprietary A/V codecs or device drivers, makes it illegal to redistribute.
This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 13 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.
Shortly after Alex Austin released Gish’s source code, Gish got its first new public feature courtesy of FrozenCow. I find these “zero day open source contributions” really interesting. It reminds me of the immediate rush to crack DRM or to exploit a newly disclosed vulnerability, but this is unequivocally awesome, feels good, and is only motivated by positively helping the community.
In terms of popularity KDE is the second most popular desktop environment. Like Gnome it is fully matured and provides it’s own full application set as well as GUI tools for configuration. KDE also has a wide selection of “plasma widgets”, which are handy applets you can place all around your desktop for all sorts of tasks. They range from something as practical as a calculator to as useless as a display from “The Matrix”.
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All of the various desktop environments have their advantages and their disadvantages. Which one is right for you largely depends on your task at hand. Personally I run LXDE on my netbook, KDE on my gaming laptop, and Gnome on my home media center. If you are not sure which is best for you, try them out! It is all free software after all, get a feel for which desktop environment you
are most comfortable on and use that one.
Is there another desktop environment that you enjoy using that I failed to mention here? If so let me know, I am always looking to tinker with new things.
Of course, there is still a lot of work to do. I’ve already got a few ideas for the future of quicklaunch, but since KDE SC is currently in it’s beta phase, these will have to wait until trunk unfreezes for the 4.6 cycle. In the meantime, if you’ve got the chance to have a look at the new qucklaunch plasmoid and you’d like to share some feedback (be it positive or negative), please let me know.
This is a feature a lot of people have been asking for. I have never really used a tiled window arrangement. I suspect that this would be good for people with large monitors, who work on multiple applications at once – for example developers, journalists or technical writers. However, on my 13 inch laptop screen, there’s just not enough screen real estate for tiling to be practical. It’s difficult to say whether this is a good or bad implementation of window tiling. Given I’ve never really played with window tiling, I’ll leave such an analysis to the those users who are tiling junkies.
Right now, as in KDE SC 4.5 and Qt 4.6/4.7 is still not for everyday use, is still not so stable and there are some graphical glithces (this actually varies from a graphics driver/video card model like crazy) but what is encouraging is that since this feature was introduced (Qt 4.4) it came a very long way, it’s really sooo better than when it was originally out.
Another week-end spent out, shooting people… I liked the expression on the face of this arm wrester so much, that I couldn’t resist messing with it in Inkscape.
When I found about Pardus some weeks ago, I was surprised to find a distro which is not among the most popular ones, but an impressive piece of work nevertheless. I personally believe the Pardus developers have a very good understanding of their users needs, specially those users who may not have any experience in Linux or KDE. I think they have done a superb job at removing “obstacles” where it matters, joining other great distributions like PCLinuxOS 2010 or Linux Mint 9 in making the Linux desktop more accessible than ever.
Quirky distribution built using Woof builder for Puppy Linux, looks as same as puppy linux 5.0 but more lighter, we already reviewed Puppy Linux 5.0 check it for more information.
Overall, though, I am enthusiastic about the possibilities Arch Linux offers and plan to continue experimenting with it. This article has been completed using the beta version of OpenOffice.org 3.2, which is available through the Arch Linux repository. Both the stable and the beta versions can be installed. It would be immensely valuable to me if users could try the new packages for features important for them and provide feedback.
After all this, I ended up with a usable Slackware 130.0 installation. Login screens have a pleasing dark theme by default while the desktop is very blue. There may be no OpenOffice but KOffice is there in its place and Seamonkey is an unusual inclusion along with Firefox. It looks as if it’ll take a little more time to get to know Slackware but it looks good so far; I may even go about getting 13.1 to see how things might have changed and report my impressions accordingly. Some will complain about the rough edges that I describe here but comments about using Slackware to learn about Linux persist. Maybe, Linux distributions are like camera film; some are right for you and some aren’t. Personally, I wouldn’t thrust Slackware upon a new Linux user if they have to install it themselves but it’s not at all bad for that.
The shortest posts I seem to have are always for the tools that are the quickest, most efficient and most effective. PLoP Bootmanager is one of those things, and for that reason, I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about it.
A long time ago I kept Smart BootManager on hand, for times when a machine wouldn’t boot from a CD. Any more though, PLoP has supplanted it, and won a place in my little CD binder.
PCLinuxOS 2010.1 KDE4 is a rock solid distro – just in my case I had a problem with the LiveCD, but not with the installed version – which offers a KDE4 DE tailored to newcomers and KDE-geeks alike.
ed Hat Inc. options saw high put activity today. A total of 1,871 put and 276 call contracts were traded raising a high Put/Call volume alert. Today’s traded Put/Call ratio is 6.78. There were 6.78 puts traded for each call contract.
In short, I’m not running the latest versions of applications anymore, because Fedora doesn’t have a rolling release schedule. This used to be a big deal for me, now I find that I don’t care. The repositories are extensive, but of course Arch has the AUR which contains almost all open software known to man…but I’m not running anything exotic anymore.
Fedora 13 is the latest update to the Redhat-sponsored, RPM-based Linux distribution. It has long held a reputation of being a testbed for features that will eventually make it into Redhat Enterprise Linux, and, therefore, less stable than other desktop-oriented distributions. And I think that’s one reason why Fedora has features that you’ll not find on other desktop-focused distributions.
A new theme called ‘Eclipse’ can be found in the Ubuntu-Light testing area on Launchpad. Using the Equinox and Murrine engines it takes advantage of RGBA transparency enabled in Maverick.
I am sure the people working on this release are painfully aware of the implications of a release number of 10.10, no failures will be tolerated in what has already been dubbed the 10/10 (ten out of ten) release.
A considerable segment of embedded systems are often found in mass-market products and are therefore subjected to hard economic constraints. The basic nature of these systems mandates further constraints on physical size and power consumption. These in turn give rise to resource constraints on the computing platform level, e.g., constraints on computing speed, memory size, and communication bandwidth etc. In spite of the rapid development of computer hardware these constraints are true due to the economic overheads. In most cases it is not economically justified to use a processor with more capacity due to the overall product’s cost limits.
In the emerging netbook market, Google decided it would announce a new-style Linux-based OS that would be perfect for netbook owners, set for release in Q4 2010. Recently, Google has also showed off a new application market for Chrome and Chrome OS. We at The PC Report have used Chrome OS briefly when it was first released, but today we’ve taken an in-depth look at the OS and how it will affect the OS and netbook markets.
Fidelity: Software running in a virtualised environment should not be able to detect it is running on a virtualised system. Containment: Activities within a virtual machine (VM) should be contained within the VM itself without disturbing the host system. A guest should not cause the host or other guests running on the host to malfunction.
You’ll find many Linux-based and/or open source options when searching for a Wi-Fi hotspot solution. Whether you’re wanting to give away or charge your visitors for the wireless Internet, you should find something that will work. The best part is that most of these solutions are free — you don’t have to spends hundreds on a off-the-shelf hotspot gateway.
This Firefox add-on installs a menacing little “Destroy this page!” icon on the Firefox toolbar and all you have to do is load up your favorite or even not-so-favorite webpages and hit the button. Soon afterwards, you are greeted to arcade music and a countdown timer that beckons you to “Destroy the Web.”
This is a huge number but this number doesn’t count all distribution specific variants. The number could even be higher when taking the download numbers from other build providers into account.
Everyone has heard the old saying “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, well statistically OpenOffice.org is used somewhere between 0.2% and 22% depending as to where you live. (these statistics can be found at Webmasterpro.de). This leaves a lot of people saying, “Huh?!?”. So I will resolve to discuss OOo adoption anecdotally. The first class of pharmacy students I taught 4 years a go had never heard of OpenOffice.org prior to me using it for a presentation, but this past month (May 2010) I had several students email me their pharmacy law papers as ODTs. The reasons for this increased adoption could be due to multiple reasons such as alternatives being perceived as bloated, slow, and expensive or the increased number of students I have using alternative operating systems where OOo has a native port or maybe even the fact that they find their pharmacy professor so darn cool that they want to be just like him and run OOo as well. As biased as I am towards myself, I seriously doubt it’s that last reason but I am seeing more and more OOo use. My intention with this article is not to proselytize OOo, but instead to show some good ways to extend the use of OOo.
A. “If open source is free software, how do you make money with it?” is a question I hear often, sometime expressed simply as “you can’t make money with open source”.
Since 2002, I have made my living working with open source software, specifically the OpenNMS project. While I wouldn’t describe myself as wealthy in terms of money, I am both happy and comfortable. It is possible to make money with open source, although being free does mean a departure from traditional software business models.
HTML5 is the second most buzzed word around I think, second only to the Hypepad. In case you’re wondering whether your current browser is compatible with it or not, a simple tool to help you determine this is the HTML5 test tool.
Giving someone a desktop is a moving experience. I’ve done it hundreds of times. It was my job to deploy desktops with Red Hat or Fedora 2000-2006 for Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. There, some of the brightest minds would be there to receive it.
It’s about time that Amazon gave potential Kindle customers a little try-before-you-buy time. Target Corporation announced today that it will carry Amazon’s popular e-reader in all of its stores starting Sunday June 6.
FOSS gaming really started coming into its own in the last couple of years. There are many reasons for it. One of the biggest reasons perhaps may be the mainstream grudging acceptance by the general public, publishers and copyright activists of the creative commons/open content production and distribution methodologies.
Red Hat’s Fedora has an ARM version, but it is not commercialized (yet) as Enterprise Linux, and Maemo, Movial Thundersoft do ARM-based Linuxes too. And there are already a plethora of Linuxes for sundry “liliputers,” as someone has cleverly called them, including Android, LiMo, MeeGo, and webOS. And lest we forget, Windows is also trying to muscle its way into here and Apple has iPhone OS, a derivative of its Mac OS (itself a variant of Unix).
Motorola announced a square-shaped, low-end Android phone, featuring a pivot design that exposes a hidden, five-row QWERTY keypad. The “Flipout” is equipped with a 2.8-inch, 320 x 240 touchscreen, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a three-megapixel camera, and runs Android 2.1 with a new version of Motorola’s MotoBlur UI layer.
Taiwanese mobile development firm Innocomm Mobile Technology and Silicon Valley fabless semiconductor firm Telegent Systems have collaborated on a low-cost Android phone with analog TV reception. The Innocomm Shark is equipped with a 3.2 inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, eight-megapixel camera, 3.5G connectivity, and WiFi, and incorporates Telegent’s analog mobile TV technology.
Here’s what my guy has to say about the phone – It is running MOTOBLUR with Android 2.1 and has a sliding QWERTY keyboard. The processor is said to be 600MHz and there’s a 3-megapixel camera on it. Not much, I know but it doesn’t sound like any other Android phone we’ve seen so far. Perhaps a new form factor and/or a Metro PCS exclusive?
Well, this is just great timing. What we’re looking at here is supposedly a Sony Ericsson smartphone, which seems to sport a five-inch screen and a hinged slide-out keyboard like the HTC Shift and the Eking S515. Even if this prototype turns out to be legit, our tipster — who has a solid track record — says it’s only running on Android 2.1 and that development is in its infancy while low-level drivers are being tested. Well, we can probably wait, except we’re also told that internally SE doesn’t appear to have any plans for 2.2 yet. Cue the angry tomatoes and eggs, but bring us a PSP phone any day and we’ll call off the rally.
Two 10.1-inch touchscreen tablet designs that run Google’s mobile Android software are on display at the Computex electronics show in Taipei, one from Foxconn Technology and the other by Hardkernel.
Another day, another Android tablet. Right? Not exactly. Check out the newly unearthed Viliv X10 and you will see one of the best looking Android-based tablets yet. One of the guys over at Laptop Magazine spent a few minutes with the device and came away using words like “impressive”, “gorgeous”, and “immersive”.
I received a mass-mailed letter from one Elizabeth Sparrow today that triggered my open source instincts. She’s the current President of the British Computer Society, as well as one of the key people trying to get us all to stop calling it that. She and her colleagues would like us – the current voting members – to agree to rename the BCS as “The Chartered Institute of IT” and there’s an expensive marketing campaign in progress to perform the naming and rebranding switch.
Right now it’s in an awkward phase where we’re all instructed to treat “BCS” as an abstract string preceding “The Chartered Institute of IT”.
The reason for the letter? A group of members – Elizabeth and her friends would like me to believe it’s “a very small number” but that’s calculated purely from the number required to call a meeting – are concerned by the changes and have pressed the governance ‘panic’ button.
The letter was to seek my support for the current leadership at an Emergency General Meeting (EGM) on July 1st. While the letter and accompanying leaflet characterises the opposition as Luddism, the concerns expressed have a kernel of reality.
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As a long-time member (at the Fellow grade) I have no doubt that the BCS needs revitalising – my own attempts to engage over open source have gained little traction, for example, and the public policy positions the BCS has taken have often seemed to me over-accommodating to business influences.
Creative agency Jess3 has developed a Firefox plugin that aims to black out all mentions of BP (British Petroleum) across the web. As one popular tweet espouses, “Want BP to [blank] up your browser like they’ve [blank] up the Gulf? Install the Oil Spill Firefox plugin from @jess3.”
DELL chairman and chief executive Michael Dell sent Dell shares higher today when he said he had considered taking private the computer giant he founded with $US1000 in 1984.
Should mainstream media be held to different standards than bloggers when it comes to crediting sources? Mainstream media agencies have frequently turned their noses up at bloggers, essentially claiming that they steal and repurpose the work of their hard working journalists. While this may be true in some cases, it is hardly fair to say that this is true in general. In fact, this week, we’ve seen a clear example of the hypocrisy of this notion, because mainstream media publications are clearly just as guilty as blogs when it comes to improper crediting of sources.
Fortunately, no instances of identity theft have yet been reported as a result of the breach. But no harm doesn’t always mean no foul where data breach is concerned, especially since this one could have been prevented with just a password. The university could have saved itself the embarrassment – not to mention the cost of credit monitoring times 700 – by adding password protection.
The UK’s Manchester Airport has installed biometric iris detection systems for access to secure areas of the airport; it has tested 3-D baggage screening technology; and now it is installing passenger holding areas that permit travelers to wear coats, jackets and shoes while detectors scan for dangerous items. Glass gates enclose passengers as they are scanned, then either a green door opens to allow cleared passengers to continue or a red lane directs them to a full-body scanner for further screening.
A beach warden – who would only identify himself as “Beach 8” – challenged our photographer as she took snaps on the promenade at Branksome Chine yesterday.
He demanded to see a licence and told her she shouldn’t be taking pictures without one.
After years of taking photos on the beaches unchallenged, our snapper Hattie Miles ploughed on regardless.
Finally, I note that it was “announced” by brief Written Answer, without debate, on the day of the statement made to the House on the Cumbrian shooting, so it didn’t get picked up anywhere. A Jo Moore 9/11 situation writ large, but after weeks in power rather than New Labour’s years in office by the time of Moore’s disgrace. New government, old tricks. No change, and no shame.
A senior source at the Department for Communities and Local Government said pilot schemes underway would be “consigned to the dustbin of history,” making good on a Tory election promise.
The truth is, the government was only ever following EU law when it made foreign nationals part of the first phase of ID cards’ roll-out. It merely seized on the requirements to fit its populist, xenophobic rhetoric, in a sad attempt to wring as much political capital as it could out of what was already an unethical EU regulation.
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Given the money we’re paying IBM over the next seven years for the NBIS database one might consider it sensible to scrap it on financial grounds. Indeed it would be, but this isn’t just about money, or even civil liberties. This is about taking a rational, compassionate view of immigration – an unpopular view at present.
Did you see Greenpeace activists took direct action against Dell at its global headquarters in Texas, U.S., last week?
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Since the action, over 12,500 people have sent protest emails to CEO and company founder Michael Dell. Dell’s public relations arm has responded but the company has not yet made good on its promise to take action.
Women are likely to be hit harder by climate change than men due their social roles and the simple fact that a majority—as much as 70 percent—of the world’s poor are women.
Admiral Thad Allen told me he has ordered that oil spill operations be open to the media. The National Incident Commander for the oil spill efforts said in my “This Week” interview, “I put out a written directive and I can provide it for the record that says the media will have uninhibited access anywhere we’re doing operations, except for two things, if it’s a security or safety problem. That is my policy. I’m the national incident commander.”
It has been so obvious that the oil, coal and timber industries have actively lobbied behind the scenes before, and in Copenhagen to stall a global climate deal. They fear they will lose profits if the planet is steered towards an energy revolution and zero deforestation. A few weeks ago a Greenpeace investigation reported that the fossil fuel industry have provided 30 million dollars of backing to the Koch Institutes to damage the credibility of climate science.
BP will pay dearly for its apparent negligence, ending up poorer and smaller as a result of the spill. Not so with the federal government: disasters are the health of the state.
That dynamic won’t change as long as pundits, pols and the public embrace the poisonous notion that the president is America’s daddy.
Fears that the debt crisis could migrate to central Europe were stirred Friday after a senior Hungarian government official said the previous government had manipulated budget figures and lied about the state of the economy, but most financial experts dismissed the remarks as a ham-handed negotiating ploy.
Where are they? What’s keeping them? Stock markets across the globe are getting hammered, and there’s no sign of the Plunge Protection Team.
Sure, there were some sightings of the bond vigilantes in places like Greece over the past month. But a worldwide equity meltdown is a job for real men, for the PPT.
As profits rebound at many of these institutions, however, artful dodging becomes more disturbing. And when disguising problems winds up harming the taxpayer — the same folks who rode to the rescue of banks with billions of dollars — the denial is downright exasperating.
Though the Wall Street and banking features of the giant financial industry overhaul bill taking shape on Capitol Hill have drawn most of the attention, home buyers and mortgage applicants should be major winners when the legislation is finally signed into law, probably early next month.
“Those countries with serious fiscal challenges need to accelerate the pace of consolidation,” it added. “We welcome the recent announcements by some countries to reduce their deficits in 2010 and strengthen their fiscal frameworks and institutions”.
These words were in marked contrast to the G20’s previous communiqué from late April, which called for fiscal support to “be maintained until the recovery is firmly driven by the private sector and becomes more entrenched”.
It’s basically incredible that this is happening with unemployment in the euro area still rising, and only slight labor market progress in the US.
But don’t we need to worry about government debt? Yes — but slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is both an extremely costly and quite ineffective way to reduce future debt. Costly, because it depresses the economy further; ineffective, because by depressing the economy, fiscal contraction now reduces tax receipts. A rough estimate right now is that cutting spending by 1 percent of GDP raises the unemployment rate by .75 percent compared with what it would otherwise be, yet reduces future debt by less than 0.5 percent of GDP.
Will the bill that emerges from this conference do what it is intended to do? Will it prevent another crisis? Will it put an end to government bailouts? The painful answer is: probably not.
In the first place, there is nothing even remotely radical about anything in these bills. Nobody is suggesting setting up a new Securities and Exchange Commission, which reshaped Wall Street regulation when it was formed in 1934. Nobody is talking about breaking up banks the way they did in the 1930s with the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act. Nobody is even talking about a wholesale revamping of a regulatory system that so clearly failed in this crisis. “They are trying to attack the symptoms, instead of the basic issues,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director of the Institutional Risk Analyst. There is something oh-so-reasonable about these bills, as if Congress was worried that they might do something that would — heaven forbid! — upset the banking industry.
Take a look at the top ten military expenditure offenders and think what could be done with a fraction of the cash, and the wasted human potential squandered on designing more sophisticated ways to bomb the world to pieces.
* USA $661bn
* China $100bn (Sipri estimate)
* France $64bn
* UK $58bn
* Russia $53bn
* Japan $52bn
* Germany $46bn
* Saudi Arabia $41bn
* India $36bn
* Italy $36bn
The Guardian newspaper has sued two online dating sites in the High Court, claiming that the companies have violated its database rights by using profiles taken from its own dating service.
WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization’s founder.
WikiLeaks has denied that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a key part in the early days of the whistle-blowing site.
Wired reports that early WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off from Chinese hackers’ activities via a node on the Tor anonymiser network, as an extensive interview with WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Paul Assange by the New Yorker explains in greater depth.
One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”
Bangladesh blocked Facebook over the weekend, leaving the social networking site marooned from another tranche of Muslim users even as Pakistan largely restored access to the site.
Facebook said on Tuesday that it has blocked users in Pakistan from accessing the ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day !’ page on its site out of respect for local standards and customs.
According to various reports and tweets, authorities in the Communist country have banned the service after linking it to the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The group, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, announced that it is suing the US federal government for the release of documents relating to a controversial spying law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).
The ACLU said that the act was unconstitutional and “gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls in dragnet fashion, without a warrant and without suspicion of wrongdoing.”
OK, laugh–but just a little. Because it’s true, even on wired broadband networks, that a tiny portion of subscribers gobble up most of the bandwidth. But with the expected surge in video applications for wireless devices, we’ll all be data hogs soon enough.
Having trouble with DRM on your ebooks? Try this site. The problem with DRM is it encourages piracy. It can always be removed – but it can be a hassle. So: if you are going to distribute it widely it is worth the effort – and if you take the trouble to do it yourself you are so pissed off that you feel a strong temptation to share it.
Last week, many of you may have read of GameLoft’s outrageous DRM policy regarding HD Android games sold through their site. Fortunately, due to many complaints and the negative response from the Android community, GameLoft has changed their stance. They listened to the concerns of many of their potential customers and have taken significant action. For starters, they’ve completely reversed their stance on re-downloading games that aren’t in the Android market.
During the weeks leading up to the UK General Election — and during the exciting aftermath — our focus has very much been on UK parliamentary politics, and since the election, we’ve been dealing with our internal elections and getting our paperwork done. But what’s been going on at the European Parliament in Strasbourg in that time? Yesterday morning, my attention was drawn to our fraternal Pirate colleague Christian Engström’s blog, and in particular two issues that need your action as soon as possible.
Eckhard goes on to analyze how authors fared with and without copyright. The bottom line: the journeyman author – those who produce most of the books – did better without copyright. The big guys at the top? They did better with copyright.
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