• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

10 Reasons for Switching to Linux

Linux has always been the geek’s favorite operating system. However, times are changing and Linux is now being promoted to suit the everyday user. Linux has its own share of pros and cons but the tide seems to be turning in its favor, as hardware vendors are starting to ship their systems with Linux pre-installed (a tactic to save OS costs). Curiosity about Linux is on the rise among computer users and the debate is on whether or not to make the switch to Linux.

Desktop

• Ditch That Other OS

  The result is you will have a leaner OS that runs better on any hardware and you will not have to fight the malware constantly. As long as that other OS is such a soft target, the malware artists will keep writing for it giving you a 1000:1 advantage that way alone. Then most malware for GNU/Linux does not spread like wildfire. Even if it should get in it is very unlikely to do much damage. The few reported cases are mostly folks leaving the doors open with a weak password on a server. If you put up a firewall you are not likely to have any problem at all.

• Surviving Change

  While interesting that this three-ring circus is survivable, it does show that GNU/Linux is at least as capable of being a solid platform as the others. Freedom from malware and cost with flexibility decide the matter for me.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Quality Printing with GIMP

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • “LXDE” is a really svelt and fast Linux GUI

    I’m not claiming it’s the smallest (it’s not) or even the fastest or the best, but it is pretty good for my needs, on my 12 year old celeron computer in my back porch farm office/dog room/Ham radio shack. It only has 576 megs of ram. The computer is too old to spend money on buying more memory, so I wanted an operating system that would use a minimum of system resources. I chose PCLOS Linux, using the LXDE gui (graphical user interface), and it’s made a big difference…

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Benchmarks With Its New Kernel

    As was reported recently, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port now has limited support for handling ZFS file-systems and its stock kernel has been upgraded against that of FreeBSD 8.1. Due to the upgraded kernel we ran a quick set of benchmarks to see how the performance of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to that of Debian Linux.

    [...]

    While Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is now running with the FreeBSD 8.1 kernel, in many tests Debian GNU/Linux continues to be a much faster operating system.

  • Debian Project News – October 18th, 2010

    Welcome to this year’s fourteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

    * State of Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”
    * New question and answer service at ask.debian.net
    * Updated DebianEdu released
    * New “sloppy” backports suite for stable Debian “Lenny”
    * General resolution about Debian project membership
    * Hybrid Installer Image for optical and USB devices
    * About the non-news of package removals in Debian’s testing branch
    * Following Debian Mailing lists via micro-blogging services
    * “Four days” promise for Debian Mentees
    * Who’s using Debian?
    * Why do people contribute to Debian?
    * Further “This week in Debian” interviews
    * … and much more.

  • Mint

    • Review: Linux Mint Debian

      As those screenshots show, once inside a desktop session, things are pretty much as one would expect in a standard Linux Mint session. Of course, some may favor Linux Mint Debian because of its rolling release nature and perhaps because its lack of upstream issues (the infamous Ubuntu video issues in the last few releases should not apply here). On the other hand, those who favor a very polished and user friendly interface, a more aggressive approach in incorporating current software and don’t want to miss on applications developed for Ubuntu exclusively, should probably stick with standard Linux Mint.

      Personally, I believe this is a nice departure from the original Linux Mint approach, a step that provides a wider catalog for Linux Mint users and yet another move towards making the Mint project less Ubuntu dependent. Would I use it? Well, not really, but that’s just because it does not really fit my needs.

    • Linux Mint 9 review

      Finally, this version of Linux Mint 9 comes with three years of support. Now, we’re more than capable of supporting ourselves on Linux, but this will make Linux Mint 9 more interesting to new users or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) considering offering a desktop Linux already installed on their PCs.

    • Release: Linux Mint 10 RC

      The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 10 RC.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 reviewed in brief

      Overall, Ubuntu delivers what it is supposed to do. At the bare minimum, Ubuntu is an operating system that provides the basics for any user. This can be expanded upon to suit each user’s needs. Ubuntu allows for this at zero cost to the user. With the philosophy in mind, Ubuntu will continue to provide for the users that they entertain to. Maverick Meerkat does not fall short of this expectation and will always be available to anyone. With its out of the box nature, anyone is able to jump right into the system and try it for themselves.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 development begins

      Less than one week after the arrival of Ubuntu 10.10, developer Matthias Klose has announced that version 11.04, code named “Natty Narwhal”, is now officially open for development. Discussing the future Ubuntu 11.04 release, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has said that it will be “sleeker and more stylish” and that there was a lot of work going on with ARM chips and Ubuntu to “help keep the planet cool”.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 on the Lenovo Thinkpad T410s

      So far I’m loving this little machine (and the nice touches in Ubuntu 10.10 as well). It’s just the right size, weight, and performs amazingly well.

    • Ubuntu, deKaffeinated

    • Ubuntu 10.10 – the release cycle in review…

      Ubuntu 10.10 developer and Community Leader Dave Walker reflects on Maverick Meerkat’s release cycle. Celebrating with a 10/10/10 release date meant a compressed development period. Many said it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be done. They were wrong…

    • Flavours and Variants

      • First look at Kubuntu 10.10

        In conclusion, Kubuntu 10.10 might not bowl you over, but it seems to function fairly well if you’re a bit forgiving. I would have liked to have seen a prettier desktop and I’d really like someone to look into the NVIDIA and Akregator issues, but overall it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. This is the first time I’ve used Kubuntu for any real length of time, and at the end of my excursion, I am moving on (but I’m taking that font with me). Kubuntu won’t be leaving my desktop with a lot of bad memories, it just didn’t win me over. Like I said before, it wasn’t the best desktop I’ve ever used, nor was it the worst. It’s just stuck right there in the middle of the road. And sometimes, that’s good enough.

      • One week, three distributions (Day 2: Kubuntu)

        As noted in my previous post I have decided to try out a mini experiment wherein I test out three recently released distributions (Kubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 10.10 and Linux Mint Debian Edition) giving each 48 hours to leave me with either a brilliant or terrible first impression. First on the docket was Kubuntu 10.10.

Devices/Embedded

• Tablets

  • Charge of the Bloat Brigade

    “7″ will demand higher licensing fees and not ARM. The competition, using ARM + Android will take over just as they have in smart-phones. The “partners” had better find a new partner, Google. Then they will be able to compete with the real world and not Apple. Even Apple uses ARM and so will have weight/power advantages so “7″ on tablets will go down the drain and squander huge resources in the process. If the OEMs put “7″ on tablets and retailers stock shelves with them, this will be another “Vista” moment, a moment of clarity when the world sees the emperor has no clothes.

55 Open Source Replacements for Popular Networking Tools

Setting up and maintaining networks used to be something that only “super-geeks” did. Network engineers and administrators at large enterprises usually have a lot of in-depth technical knowledge about how systems work and how they communicate with each other.

But these days, lots of people have small networks at their homes and small businesses. They usually don’t have the same sort of specialized knowledge, but they still need to be able to set up and troubleshoot the inevitable problems.

Fortunately, developers have created plenty of open source tools to help both groups accomplish what they need to get done. Open source tools can help you design, test, deploy, manage, monitor, or secure your network, and some can even help you build your own appliances, routers, or other hardware.

Databases

• SkySQL will try to drive MySQL fork, Oracle’s ouster

  The community simply doesn’t trust that Oracle will be a good steward of open source software and is acting quickly to preserve top open source projects.

  SkySQL, which will provide alternative services and support for the MySQL database, is playing it safe for now. It is not helping found a new open source foundation to sponsor an official MySQL fork, and is not declaring open war on Oracle.

Oracle

• New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.3 Beta (part 3)

  And here are some more Chart features in OOo 3.3 Beta:

  Several defaults were changed to allow a faster creation of a pleasant looking and readable chart.
  So the diagram size is now larger with 9x16cm wide screen. That allows also for larger fonts at the axes, data labels and legend entries. We have 10pt here now. The somewhat outdated comic style with black borders around all the data points and symbols was left behind in favor of a modern clean look without borders.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU is not Unix: How the GNU Project has gone astray

  The GNU Project is aptly named. GNU means “GNU’s Not Unix”. If what you want is Unix, look elsewhere.

The Future of Personal Computing

With that, everything else is the network. We need more bandwidth, for video, audio, graphics and software. There are servers all over the world nearly maxed-out in connection delivering software and updates. If GNU/Linux is to “succeed” and assume a full share of IT, this is the next bottleneck right after a breakthrough in retail. Here, GNU/Linux is limited mostly by folks using dial-up. I can update their machines at 10 MB/s anywhere in the building but in their homes they are three orders of magnitude slower, unacceptable. I last used dial-up with GNU/Linux around 2002. It is just not acceptable any longer.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Real Life ‘Pre-Crime’ Technology

  We live in an age of wonders. We can talk and see our friends in the world over the Internet. We live in an age of horrors. Third-world dictatorships are working on atomic bombs. And, we live in age where new miracles and terrors are only a research project away.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 169 – Ubuntu-Proof

  This week on the show: Ubuntu 10.10 is released, System 76 says Unity is slow and confusing, Black Duck acquires Ohloh, LibreOffice now officially a fork, Fab reviews the O2 Surfstick, Microsoft launches Windows Phone by having Ballmer look stupid and Apple patents a completely obvious sentence.

• KDEMU – Claudia Rauch

• ‘Pop’ goes OSS

  You may still not find many people rooting for Ubuntu for their laptops, but the shift towards open source is palpable.

  While we are not quite at the tipping point, we are cruising towards it.

  [...]

  “They did not know what ‘open source’ meant,” says Mangudi. “While all of them are learning programming languages such as C sharp and the web framework dot net, none of them is exposed to languages such as PHP, which powers Facebook or Ruby, which powers Basecamp.”

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • LunarG Proposes A Shader And Kernel Compiler Stack

    LunarG, the consulting company providing professional services for Mesa / Gallium3D that’s led by Jens Owens, the founder of Tungsten Graphics, is beginning to commence work on a new project: LunarGLASS. Last year, LunarG wanted to provided better Linux graphics documentation, but this new LunarGLASS initiative is much more ambitious and it’s about providing a complete shader and kernel compiler stack.

    John Kessenich of LunarG has posted a proposal for LunarGLASS on the mesa-dev mailing list. “LunarG has decided to work on an open source, long-term, highly-functional, and modular shader and kernel compiler stack. Attached is our high-level proposal for this compiler architecture (LunarGLASS). We would like to solicit feedback from the open source community on doing this.”

  • Geek Time with Rusty Russell

    Free software advocate and Linux developer Rusty Russell sat down for an interview with Google’s Jeremy Allison when they were both in Japan for LinuxCon. They discuss Rusty’s role maintaining the Linux kernel (0:15), why Australia has produced so many top notch open source developers (3:13), and suggestions for people starting out in their careers and looking to get into open source (9:13). Enjoy!

Applications

• Video editors usage statistics: duty calls

  PiTiVi has 25 thousand lines of Python code (22% of which are comments) versus OpenShot’s 8 thousand (33% of which are comments)! Obviously that means our application is better! No wait, does it mean that our application requires more lines of code to do similar things? Damn!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Simple tip:How to convert djvu to pdf

  • Apt-Proz And Apt-Metalink: 2 Alternatives To Apt-Fast [Speed Up Apt-Get Download Speed]

  • Apt-Proz And Apt-Metalink: 2 Alternatives To Apt-Fast [Speed Up Apt-Get Download Speed]

  • Video: Nautilus Elementary With ClutterFlow, Embedded Terminal In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

  • Creating Planets and Planetary Rings in GIMP

  • Firefox / IceCat Tips

  • Backing up Master Boot Record

  • Feather Linux’s stats.pl perl script

  • Development (build-essential) tools Slackware

  • Testing MariaDB on Hardened Gentoo

  • HOWTO: Setting Up a New Ubuntu GNU/Linux Box for Java/CFML Development

  • Change your Grub and Grub2 splash screen in Ubuntu

  • Simple Command Line Utility to Upload and Download files from Megaupload and Rapidshare

  • Nano: Open a file at a specific position

  • Command Line Interface Intro Special Edition

    The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the Command Line Interface Intro Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Distributions

• GeeXboX Develops The OpenBricks Framework

  The developers behind the GeeXboX multi-media Linux distribution have written in to inform us a new framework they have been developing and just released called OpenBricks. The OpenBricks Embedded Linux Framework is “an enterprise-grade embedded Linux framework that provides easy creation of custom distributions for industrial embedded devices. It features a complete embedded development kit for rapid deployment on x86, ARM, PowerPC and MIPS systems with support for industry leaders.”

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Release Candidate Available to Partners

    Back in April, we began talking about the development road toward the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 when we delivered the first beta of the platform, with noteworthy improvements spanning performance enhancements to new security features to expanded virtualization capabilities. With the introduction of the first beta, we began working with our customers, partners and the community to test and further develop the release into an ambitious and robust operating platform. Since then, we have continued the momentum of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 development with the delivery of a second beta in June with additional updates and technologies. We also recently announced an agreement to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ in August.

  • Fedora

    • Fusion Linux 14 will come with TeamViewer remote desktop

      After looking at all available remote desktop solution we have found out that TeamViewer for Linux is just best solution out there.

• Debian Family

  • Understanding Debian’s release process

    Currently, the main product of the Debian project is its stable release. Those release come out approximately every 18-24 months. This article gives a short overview of the process leading to the next stable release.

  • Release Team meeting minutes (and release update)

    As previously announced[RT:PM], the Debian Release Team held a meeting on 2 and 3 Oct, 2010 in Paris, France. The meeting was kindly sponsored by IRILL[RT:PMS]. The attendees were Adam D. Barratt (adsb), Luk Claes (luk), Julien Cristau (jcristau), Mehdi Dogguy (mehdi), Philipp Kern (pkern) and Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw).

  • New Backports Suite created

  • Debian Live is getting better all the time

    Nobody writes much about the Debian Live Project, which went from a bunch of stable images for Intel architectures to offering stable and testing images not just for i386 and amd64 but also for PowerPC, the latter in a time when many distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) have abandoned the Power architecture almost entirely.

    Users of i386 and amd64 can also choose from monthly, weekly and daily builds of Debian Live with GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE or the standard install, and there’s also a Web-based utility to build a custom Lenny, Squeeze or Sid image.

  • State of Squeeze

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 214

    • Is Ubuntu 10.10 the perfect rescue distro?

      I liked the fact that you get an automatic preview of .ogg sound files by just hovering over the icon (this feature does not work with MP3s, though).
      Firefox (3.6.10) runs fast, too. The dictionary is a nice add-on. Hibernation seems to be working (I am not sure because I was running a Live CD, but the computer reacted as it should have). Both my USB card reader and my MP4 player were supported. Wired network connectivity was perfect.

    • Ubuntu, open source apps use on the rise: Linux Users Group

      Ubuntu is breaking out from the Linux community into wider mainstream use in Australia, with schools and government agencies leading the charge, according to the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG).

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Edubuntu WebLive

        Since the Edubuntu 9.10 release, Edubuntu has been available on a DVD that also features a complete Live environment. This allows users to start up an Edubuntu session and try out some of its features before installing.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • The Qt Future – Mobile on Nokia

      When Nokia acquired Trolltech, there was a question mark over Nokia’s long term strategy for the Qt framework. Qt for many, is the toolkit behind the KDE desktop and it’s associated applications, so what would a phone company do with it. Over the past years, the strategy has steadily crystallised, and at this years Qt Dev Day, Rich Green, the new CTO at Nokia and first Nokia CTO to speak at the annual Qt developer conference, confirmed that Qt is core to all of Nokia’s plans for mobile applications; “We’re betting the whole company and smartphones on Qt” Green told the audience at the opening keynote.

  • Android

    • GPL violation reports in HTC G2 Android phone

      There have been various reports and blog posts about HTC again committing copyright infringement by not fulfilling the GPLv2 license conditions in their latest Android phone, the G2.

      While at this point I haven’t studied the situation enough in order to confirm or deny any actual violations, let me state this: The number of GPL Violation reports/allegations that we receive at gpl-violations.org on HTC by far outnumber the reports that we have ever received about any other case or company.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Dell likely first to deliver Ubuntu Light netbooks

    A new report pegs the new Canonical distro of Ubuntu Light for netbooks to begin appearing on shipping Dell netbooks within the next month. Dell is considered the most likely to be the first vendor to launch netbooks featuring the OS, as it currently sells more PCs with Ubuntu than any other manufacturer. The netbook optimized version of Canonical’s Ubuntu 10.10 is able to boot in 7 seconds.

Redefining “Realistic”

As open source has shown, some of these creative solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world of software development, free software redefined “practical” and “realistic.”

What open source community?

Foreign Policy had the same debate [log-in required] in 2002 about the phrase “the international community.” They invited a set of practitioners, scholars, and journalists to weigh-in. Although they were thinking in terms of a world filled with sovereign nations, international institutions, and treaties, the debate has some striking parallels.

Let’s start with the negative crowd.

Events

• “Best practices for open source” session at EU Internet of Services meeting

  There is something that I mentioned many, many times: EU projects tend to talk about Open Source, but it is sometimes difficult for project managers to really grasp what OSS is, and how it can be used for real – not only during the project lifetime, but afterwards as well

• Nordic Free Software Award 2010 – 7 days left to nominate

  For one more week you can nominate a person, a project or an organisation for the Nordic Free Software Award.

  The Nordic Free Software Award given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.

• Q & A: The Ubuntu Developer Summits

  Last week I had a nice email exchange with a good friend of Ubuntu, Professor Michael Terry at the University of Waterloo. We met at UIST 2010, but he and Ivanka Majic have been conferring about design and usability in Ubuntu for a while. Delighted with UIST in general and specifically with conversations Mark, John, and I had with Michael and one of his students, we invited them to UDS in Orlando at the end of October.

SaaS

• Open Source And Cloud Computing: Open Source Is The Key To Cloud Economics

  Regular readers of this blog know that I am a strong advocate for Open Source in this cloud based world. In fact, I have argued many times here that Open Source is equally important as Open Standards in ensuring the freedom of the users. I am going to push this meme again here quoting a back of the envelope calculation regarding the costs associated with proprietary license path and open source path in the case of a scale-out model.

Oracle

• Microsoft trashing OpenOffice is a good thing

  The claims made by the ad are not new. There are undertones of political attack in it, only natural given that this is a political season. And since OpenOffice.org doesn’t have the resources to respond, some may consider it unfair.

  Please stop the whinging.

  Microsoft can advertise the advantages of its product all it wants, but when even a student version costs $84, with the full deal going for almost $700, and OpenOffice.org can be downloaded free, the difference is obvious. (Whether you can get it a little cheaper is not the issue — the fact is Microsoft software costs money.)

  Speaking of politics it reminds me a bit of Proposition 16, an attempt by a California utility to maintain absolute control over the market earlier this year. The proponent was a gigantic company with an unlimited budget, the opponents a small collection of consumer advocates with no money.

  The consumer advocates won.

  People aren’t stupid. I know we’re all trained to think that if one side has money and the other has none, that the side with money is going to win. Not true. When people pay attention all the money in the world won’t change their minds.

  And when it’s a choice between spending money on something or downloading it, I like my chances, no matter how many attack ads Microsoft puts out.

• Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council

  A group of key OpenOffice.org (OOo) contributors and community members recently decided to fork the project and establish The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to drive forward community-driven development of the open source office suite. Oracle has responded to the move by asking several members of TDF to step down from their positions as representatives on the OOo community council.

Semi-Open Source

• Fear and loathing and open core

  Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so.

  My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only does Bradley lack any evidence for his claim, the evidence he presents completely undermines his argument and distracts attention from what could be a very important point about copyright assignment.

  The premise? Mark Shuttleworth has admitted that he plans to follow the open core licensing strategy with Canonical.

  The evidence? Mark praises the strategy Trolltech took of selling proprietary licenses.

  The problem? Trolltech did not follow the open core licensing strategy. Neither did MySQL, which Bradley suggests inspired Trollech’s strategy.

  Both MySQL and Trolltech utilised a dual licensing strategy, which means that the same code base is available under on open source license or a closed source license (also known as “selling exceptions”. This is not open core licensing, although it is related since open core sees vendors dual licensing and offering extensions only available in the closed license version.

  A significant difference between dual licensing and open core is that Richard Stallman has explained why, in his opinion, it is okay to sell exceptions to GPL code via a dual licensing strategy. In fact one of the examples he uses is… Trolltech.

Licensing

• Interview with Jordan Hatcher

  Over the past twenty years or so we have seen a rising tide of alternative copyright licences emerge — for software, music and most types of content. These include the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence, the General Public Licence (GPL), and the range of licences devised by Creative Commons (CC). More recently a number of open licences and “dedications” have also been developed to assist people make data more freely available.

Openness/Sharing

• 7 Ways Sharing can Make You Happy

  1. Sharing involves reciprocal giving, and the research is full of the benefits of giving, from greater physical health to personal happiness.

• Toward open source peer-to-peer material production. An interview with Michel Bauwens

  Bertram Niessen and Zoe Romano: we are witnessing many examples of small, open enterprises that are becoming competitive on the markets because of their p2p approach (see Wikonomics). Fashion production lays in the middle between material and immaterial production; that’s a great challenge from the point of view of new, open and p2p forms of productions and new type of business models. What are the main issues at stake when material production becomes part of the activity?

• Open Data

  • Rewired Stately

    This is both for programmers over the age of 50 who would like to take part in a rapid development event using open data as well as developers and scrum masters of all ages who would like to get involved in coaching developers in agile programming.

• Open Access/Content

  • Which works enter the public domain in 2011?

    Every year on January 1st hundreds of works enter the public domain around the world. So how do we know which works will come of age in 2011?

    Like last year we are keen to get a picture of this well in advance so we can start planning celebrations for Public Domain Day 2011 (see here for our round up of the 2010 highlights!).

Special report: Morality put to the test

Meritocracies – built to fail

Researchers one step closer to ‘bootless’ computer

Transistor technology ‘will essentially give memory some brains’ and reduce power consumption to the point where PCs and phones could stay on all the time

PayPal robbed my bank account

PayPal has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to dealing with inbound payments that sit in your ‘paypal account’ pending withdrawal. It’s not unheard of that they freeze your account without provocation and only release the funds up to 6 months later (or not at all, in some cases).

Warn HN: When PayPal doesn’t know the meaning of “Donation”…

I write free software. My free software has a “donate” link that goes to the PayPal donation page. The idiots at PayPal froze my account since I couldn’t prove 501(c) exemption (which I don’t have – and more to the point, never claimed to!) and insist that it’s “illegal” to receive donations unless you’re a registered non-profit with 501(c) IRS clearance. All this happened when I changed the name of the account from my name to the name of my website (because I didn’t want my name on the payment page), bringing to their attention my site and PayPal account.

Stop the Signature-File Insanity

Today I received an e-mail from a someone who, I would argue, went a little crazy with their signature file — that virtual Rolodex card at the bottom of a message that holds all manner of contact information. Here’s a fictionalized version of what showed up (I’ve changed all of the details to protect the innocent, but the type of content and the line count is the same as what I got), inspired by James Bond novels and movies .

With a Little Twitter Help

Surprisingly, I was able to get a lot of work done on the launch during my tours, thanks in part to social media. While on the road, I put out a call on Twitter for someone to help me tweak my launch template—after all, the different audio/hardcover/paperback/e-book choices can be hard to present in a clear way. I offered a limited edition hardcover in exchange, despite warnings that professional designers would be upset by this “devaluation” of their work. A designer named Andrew Crocker came through with a brilliant design and even put together the HTML/CSS template, saving my Web master, Mike Little, some time. I also put together the graphics while I was on German trains and e-mailed them while waiting on platforms, using sporadic blasts of Wi-Fi.

eBooks And The Ease Of Self-Publishing

October 19th is the release date for “Draculas,” a horror novel that I wrote with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. How four guys were able to collaborate on a single narrative is an interesting story, but not as interesting as the way “Draculas” is being released.

Though together we have over sixty years of experience in the print industry and have worked with dozens of publishers, we’ve decided to make “Draculas” a Kindle exclusive. Not only that, but we’re publishing it ourselves.

Science

• Magnetic monopoles imaged for first time

  Monopoles – magnets which have just a single pole – were theoretically conceived by the British-Swiss physicist Paul Dirac, who showed in the 1930s that their existence is consistent with quantum theory.

  The scientists were able to image the monopoles directly by using the highly intense x-ray radiation from the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute.

  “Some of the most important theories explaining how quantum matter behaves in the universe are based on their existence, but they have eluded direct imaging since they were first theoretically conceived in the 1930s,” says Prof Hans-Benjamin Braun from University College Dublin.

Health/Nutrition

• Prostate cancer urine test nears

  British scientists have moved a step closer to developing a simple urine test to identify men at risk of getting prostate cancer.

  They have discovered that a protein found in urine is affected by a genetic change linked to the cancer.

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Inside the Lawsuit That Could Ground Deadly CIA Predator Drones

  A new lawsuit alleges that Predator drone targeting software was pirated, and emails obtained by Fast Company suggest the CIA knew it was sub-par.

• When Brute Force Fails

  Liberals don’t like talking about crime. The classic answer—fixing the root causes of crime—now seems hopelessly ambitious. And our natural sympathy for the millions ground down by an out-of-control prison system and a pointless war on drugs doesn’t play well with voters, especially when most criminals can’t vote. The general belief seems to be that the problem of crime has been solved—after all, crime levels have dropped dramatically since the law-and-order 80s—and that the real problem now is not too much crime, but too much punishment. If voters don’t agree, it’s because TV news continues to obsess over violent crime even as actual occurrences of it have cratered, leaving behind a population who wants to do even more to crack down on an army of bad guys who don’t really exist. The smartest liberal position on crime seems to be changing the subject and talking about white-collar crime instead (which, as recent economic news has made clear, is a real epidemic).

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• ‘Humans will need two Earths by 2030′

  Humans are overusing the planet’s resources and will need two Earths by 2030,a new report warns.

  According to the Living Planet Report, human demands on natural resources have doubled in under 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half; and humanity carries on as it is in use of resources, globally it will need the capacity of two Earths by 2030.

• NOAA reports 2010 hottest year on record so far*

  Following fast on the heels of NASA reporting the hottest January to September on record, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center has released its State of the Climate: Global Analysis for September.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• CeBIT: Quarter Of Germans Happy To Have Chip Implants

  CeBit: If it means shorter lines at the supermarket, a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted under their skin

• Opt Out of Behavioral Advertising

  The NAI Opt-out Tool was developed in conjunction with our members for the express purpose of allowing consumers to “opt out” of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies.

  Using the Tool below, you can examine your computer to identify those member companies that have placed an advertising cookie file on your computer.

• Facebook in Privacy Breach

  Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Ofcom supports Get online week

• The internet is full. Go away.

  We’ve got a successor protocol (IPv6) — it’s been around for years, although nobody uses it much. The IP depletion isn’t going to affect end users signficiantly in the short term; new/low-end ISPs will probably switch from using a pool of dynamically allocated public-facing IP addresses, allocated one per active customer, to doing some kind of transparent masquerading/forwarding, to increase utilization. This will prevent incoming connections to customers … but that could be seen as a benefit, not a drawback. However, there is going to be a problem for businesses and folks who want to run servers. Not to mention being a show stopper for Dynamic DNS services, and facilities like Apple’s “Back to my Mac” (a part of the MobileMe package that lets travelling users get a remote desktop on their home system from wherever they are). And the inevitable migration to IPv6 is going to cause headaches.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Intellectual Property Primer – Part One – Trademarks

  Trademarks on the other hand, are forever. As long as the mark is in use, it remains the property of the holder (it can also remain their property if it’s not in use for periods of time, check the law in your jurisdiction). The Disney Company holds a trademark on Mickey Mouse. It will still be valid, even if the copyright on a work that features Mickey Mouse expires. Never mind the patent on the camera that was used to shoot the film.

  Remember – Trademarks are the oddball of Intangible Property. Unlike Copyrights and Patents, a trademark doesn’t represent a creation, even though creativity was involved in choosing the mark, and designing the logo.

• Has Harry Potter crossed the line?

  The claimant says the Goblet of Fire takes five main plot elements from Willy:

  1. a wizard contest
  2. the wizards have to work out what their task is
  3. they work it out in a bathroom
  4. they complete the task using information from helpers
  5. the task involves rescuing hostages held by half-human, half-animal creatures

  Do these elements add up to a substantial part of Jacobs’s work?

• Copyrights

  • Response to Janis Nixon re the Hamilton Spectator interview

    Microprocessors make copying easy, cheap, and fast. Did you notice how I haven’t talked about computers at all? This is because even if you were to totally destroy every personal computer in Canada, it wouldn’t do you any good. Within days there would be new ones, and they be running on the microprocessors that control your microwave oven, your DVD player, your CD player, your cell phone, your MP3 player, your television, your automobile (which may have up to 40 different processors), your motorcycle, your watch, your game console (there’s one super computer made of PS3 game consoles), your dishwasher, your clothes washer, your clothes dryer, your sewing machine, your guitar amplifier, your digital camera, your digital video recorder, your digital picture frame, your clock radio, your, well, you get the picture. The average house has over a hundred microprocessors, each of which could be used to build a General Purpose Computer. And I know of people who have done this. Anyone with a college education in electronics, or for that matter with a book from the library and a bit of stubbornness can take apart a Microwave oven and make a computer out of the guts.

  • Movie Rental Outfit Hacked, Emails Leaked, Redirected to The Pirate Bay

    ACAPOR, a Portuguese organization which represents the interests of local movie rental companies, has been defaced by Anonymous as part of Operation Payback. The ACAPOR website currently shows a message from Anonymous and then redirects to The Pirate Bay. To make the shaming complete, a 640 MB email database of the outfit was leaked and posted to The Pirate Bay.

  • ‘Pay me $1.2M’ Officer Bubbles tells YouTube

    If ever there was someone who represents the worst in policing it is, IMHO, Officer Bubbles, as Toronto 52 Division constable Adam Josephs (left) is now known around the world.

    He had a young woman arrested during Stephen Harper’s billion dollar G20 mutual admiration fest.

    Unfortunately for him, the entire incident was video-taped by Nazrul Islam, going viral online so the whole world can watch as he bullies Courtney Wikels, armed and dangerous with a deadly plastic hoop and a jar of soap detergent.

  • Another Massive Email Breach – ACAPOR Emails Reportedly Leaked on The Pirate Bay

    There’s been another massive email breach – this time Acapor’s email’s have been leaked onto The Pirate Bay. This comes just moments after ACAPOR’s website was hacked and redirected to The Pirate Bay. We are currently gathering more information and will expand this article as news progresses.

    According to Anonymous, Acapor was targeted for their efforts against The Pirate Bay. Their site was attacked earlier today, and apparently exposed a rather ugly security hole. Anonymous also stated, “Acapor wanted to block The Pirate Bay in Portugal. We decided it had to stay up. P.S. Hire real site admins!”

  • CC Talks With Lulu

    Our fall campaign is in full swing and superheroes are giving at all levels – as such, it’s a great time to shine the spotlight on some of our most significant donors.

    Lulu, the fantastic open publishing platform, is one such organization. Beyond offering creators of all types the means to publish their own work, Lulu offers a CC-licensing option for authors when they are creating their books. Over a million creators have used the service to date with approximately 20,000 titles to Lulu’s catalog each month.

  • Anti-Piracy Company Pirates Queen-Issued Coat of Arms

    This year has seen an explosion of companies all trying to cash in on the ‘turn piracy into profit’ mantra. These companies, many of them involving lawyers, are copying other people’s work like crazy – they’re even copying from each other. Today we bring news that one of these companies has taken a Coat of Arms issued by Elizabeth I in 1600, modified it, and used it for their own commercial purposes.

  • Why Won’t Universal Music Let You See The 20/20 Report From 1980 About How The Music Industry Is Dying?

    Here’s one for the “sky is falling” folks, who insist the music industry is dying. Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy points us to an episode of the TV magazine show 20/20 all about how the music industry is in trouble… way back in 1980. What’s amusing is that the story is the same.

  • Targets of Predatory Lawsuits Fight Copyright Troll in Washington, D.C.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked a judge in Washington, D.C., to dismiss copyright infringement claims against two defendants wrongfully ensnared in mass movie-downloading lawsuits.

    In an amicus brief filed Friday, EFF argues that the copyright troll behind the suits — a law firm calling itself the “U.S. Copyright Group” (USCG) — is flouting court rules and engaging in unfounded speculation in order to pressure people into paying premature settlements. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, and Public Citizen Litigation Group joined EFF in the amicus brief.

    USCG has filed these suits against approximately 16,000 defendants so far in Washington, D.C., alleging that they participated in unauthorized downloading of films including “Far Cry” and “The Hurt Locker.” Two of the defendants have submitted evidence that they do not live in Washington, D.C., and since neither of the plaintiffs is located there either, the court ordered the plaintiffs to explain why D.C. is the proper place to sue those individuals. EFF and its co-amici filed Friday’s brief to urge the court to dismiss those defendants and put a stop to USCG’s legal gamesmanship.

  • Media Copyright Group Gets Sued by Competitor

    Media Copyright Group, which represents various adult companies in a number of BitTorrent John Doe piracy lawsuits, has been hit with a trademark infringement lawsuit by a competitor, U.S. Copyright Group.

    Attorneys for U.S. Copyright Group sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Media Copyright Group, claiming trademark infringement.

  • ACTA/Digital Economy (UK

    • Digital Advocacy’s “Weak Ties” Should Not Be Underestimated

      Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling Canadian writer for the New Yorker, recently turned his attention to the use of Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet for digital advocacy. Gladwell dismissed claims that digital advocacy has been an effective tool, lamenting that “people have forgotten what advocacy is about.” He suggested that effective advocacy that leads to broad social or political change requires “strong ties” among people who are closely connected, committed to the cause, and well organized. When Gladwell examined digital advocacy initiatives he found precisely the opposite – weak ties between people with minimal commitment and no organizational structure.

      My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the Gladwell article was published two days after Canada, the United States, the European Union, and a handful of other countries concluded negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Although some issues must still be sorted out, the countries have agreed on a broad framework and announced that no further negotiation rounds are planned.

    • Digital Britain and the return of the Stationer’s Company

      Last week also occasioned the passage in England of the Digital Economy Bill, which, for the first time, made ISPs legally liable for the actions of their subscribers and imposed on them an affirmative obligation to protect copyrights to which they are not party. The timing of the passage was surely a coincidence. It’s unlikely many in Parliament were aware of date’s significance. But it presented a striking juxtaposition nonetheless.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Ten reasons Linux is the best choice for kids

You may think your day job is demanding, but it’s often nothing compared with providing tech support for the family. That’s where Linux comes in, says Jack Wallen.

The problem with working in IT is that when we go home, our job often continues. Sometimes, keeping our children’s computers running can be a bigger challenge than sorting out the adults at work.

But if you install Linux at home, you can avoid the headaches. That’s because sound reasons exist for migrating young users from other operating systems.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Full Circle Podcast #12: Dave’s Nocturnal Desires

Google

• Chrome OS due soon, now in Release Candidate status

  Google’s Chrome operating system may be ready in about a month’s time, since bug comments indicate the code reached Release Candidate status. The information is sure and says the operating system is almost finalized, its latest build being identified as near-ready 0.9.78.1. This is corroborating with a mention of a Google employee referring to a November 11th date when he was asked about a specific feature of Chrome.

Kernel Space

• Greetings from the audio trenches!

Applications

• Basenji Gets A Scanner Daemon Which Automatically Adds Inserted Volumes To The Database

  Basenji is a tool which indexes your removable media such as CDs/DVDs and USB sticks and keeps a history of the data on each media you add to its database so you can later easily search / browse for something on your CDs/DVDs or USB sticks without actually plugging them into your computer.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 10 Tweaks and Apps for Ubuntu 10.10

  • Simple Rhythmbox Plugins: Save Cover In Mp3 Metadata, Save Existing Cover in Mp3 Folder And More

  • Use Mplayer With Hardware Acceleration In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat [Nvidia]

  • A Primer – Managed Service Delivery

  • Introducing python-popcon

• Games

  • Amnesia @ 1 Month

    Thanks to readers who pointed out that Frictional Games has posted an analysis of Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s sales after one month…

  • Rage Interview

    Many of the questions center around PC (Windows) vs. Console focus and development; the problems and arguments mirror those that surround Linux gaming: it’s difficult to exclusively support a smaller audience in today’s market.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Multitouch and Qt

    It’s been 11 days since the Qt announcement of new gesture support, and I wanted to blog about it right away… but alas, now will have to do. The folks at Qt have been working on multi-touch support for a while now. They blogged about gestures, multi-touch, Mac support, Windows support, and then at UDS in Brussels (May 2010), they shared their 4.8 plans for multi-touch with the Ubuntu community.

    Until recently, there has been no MT stack for Linux. The great news is that the folks at Qt are very interested in getting Qt to work with uTouch. Stephen Bregma has been working on the GEIS API that toolkits will have the option of taking advantage of, and we were delighted to hear from Zeno and Denis that the Qt API they have envisioned and planned is very similar to GEIS, and should make for an excellent match. They are going to be talking with the community about this at UDS two weeks from now, in fact

  • The KDE Netbook Desktop – Continued

    I wrote a few days ago about Kubuntu on Netbooks. After a few days of experimentation and discovery, I’m going to continue and expand that topic to the KDE Netbook Desktop in general. This is likely to be pretty long, so if you want to either bail out or get a cup of coffee before you get in too far, now is the time…

    I first installed the KDE Netbook Desktop (via Kubuntu 10.10) on my Samsung N150 Plus. I assumed that it would not be terribly interesting or useful on my HP 2133 Mini-Note netbooks, because of the limited graphic support for the VIA Chrome9 graphic controller. That assumption was also based on the fact that the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, with the new Unity desktop, would not even install on the Mini-Note. However, after seeing how NDE Netbook worked on the Samsung (and basically being blown away by it), and seeing how it handles and configures desktop effects, I started to think that it might actually work pretty well on the Mini-Note despite the limited graphics. So I set out to investigate the possibilities…

• GNOME Desktop

  • Goals of the Keyring and Seahorse Projects

    In an effort to get better organized, I’ve put together a page listing the goals of the gnome-keyring and seahorse projects. It’s all broken down into tasks, plans, and what’s already done.

Distributions

• What your distro can do for you that upstream cannot

  Some time ago a user on Gentoo Forums has pointed out that gecko-mediaplayer plugin does not load in www-client/chromium. It turns out there is a compatibility issue that leads to a browser hang, so upstream just blacklisted the plugin (based on file name). The browser has a hardcoded list of plugins that it will not load at all.

• Debian Family

  • Debious – A dubious Debian packaging GUI

    Just some little (unfinished) concept mockup. Seeing that much of it still ends up as a “text box with syntax highlighting” it’d probably make sense to implement it as a gedit plugin.

  • Iceweasel Has To Restart

    I’ve noticed an odd pattern of behaviour in Iceweasel (the unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox that comes with Debian) on Debian Squeeze. It randomly pops up a dialog box telling you that it has to restart Iceweasel to remove or update an addon, and gives you a choice of “restart” or “cancel”. What it does not do is tell you what the offending addon actually is, or what it’s about to do.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • LOK 2010 (Budapest)

    • Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

      I’ve written before about my deep skepticism regarding the true motives of Canonical, Ltd.’s advocacy and demand of for-profit corporate copyright assignment without promises to adhere to copyleft. I’ve often asked Canonical employees, including Jono Bacon, Amanda Brock, Jane Silber, and Mark Shuttleworth himself to explain (a) why exactly they demand copyright assignment on their projects, rather than merely having contributors agree to the GNU GPL formally (like projects such as Linux do), and (b) why, having received a contributor’s copyright assignment, Canonical, Ltd. refuses to promise to keep the software copylefted and never proprietarize it (as FSF has always done in assignments). When I ask these questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably artfully change the subject.

    • Dual-screen version of Ubuntu 10.10′s default wallpaper

      Dual screen users can now benefit from the beauty of Maverick’s default wallpaper thanks to the following dedicated dual-screen version by Kyle Baker.

    • Auto Bug Expiry on Launchpad

      Launchpad has always advertised that we auto-expire inactive incomplete bugs, but we haven’t done this for awhile now. Some developers are using their own launchpadlib scripts which set bug tasks to the EXPIRED status based on the same criteria that Launchpad will use.

    • Ubuntu 10.10

      So my laptop was crapping out. The wifi wasn’t working. It was getting absurdly slow. I tried running Vista’s recovery and it ran into some sort of infinite loop during the process. I have SATA hard drives so I needed a floppy to load XP. Obviously, I don’t have a floppy drive and I didn’t really want to buy a USB floppy.

      So I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 10.10 and I must say, Linux has come a long way.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • TaintDroid code released

    • Angry Birds: 1 Million Downloads in 1 Day

      We’ve been following the Angry Birds obsession for awhile now and after showcasing an early APK, the Android Game finally launched yesterday. The response was so spectacular that downloaders actually crashed the GetJar servers.

    • Angry Birds developer Rovio irked at Microsoft

    • Microsoft ruffles feathers with ‘Angry Birds’ mistake

    • Angry Birds Maker is Angry with Microsoft

    • ‘Angry Birds’ developer angered by Microsoft ad

Open source investment to increase – survey

Has open source reached a tipping point? A new survey has found many organisations are planning to invest more in it, as more perceived benefits are understood beyond the obvious cost advantage over proprietary software.

Accenture’s survey of 300 large organisations in the private and public sector across the US, UK and Ireland has found many committing to clear strategies and policies for open source software (OSS) development.

Web Browsers

• Web browser speed test: Chrome, Firefox, IE9, Opera and Safari head-to-head

  With Internet Explorer 9 being acclaimed as the fastest ever browser client from Microsoft, DaniWeb decided to put it to the test against Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and see just how quick it really is in a real world test of web browsing speed.

  [...]

  And so, without any further ado, the results of the Great DaniWeb Browser Speed Shoot-Out are:

  1. Chrome (37/50)
  2. Safari (35/50)
  3. Opera (34/50)
  4. IE9 (23/50)
  5. Firefox (21/50)

• Mozilla

  • State of Firefox 4.0 on GNU+Linux

    So we’ve probably all seen the mock-ups for Firefox 4.0 by now, but has any of it been implemented? In the Windows version, yes. On the GNU+Linux version, partially. And it looks like it’s going to stay that way. I’m going to show you what’s different in the current development version (nightly 4.0b8pre) from 3.6.

Oracle

• Java: The Unipolar Moment, On distributed governance for distributed software

  Which brings me to IBM. In the good old days everyone knew that Sun defined Java, while BEA and IBM made money from it. These days not so much. But if IBM’s can’t influence the JCP as much as it would like it can now play divide and rule. I expect to see IBM giving Eclipse and OSGi a concerted push over the next couple of years.

  Google is another Java player. It bought Instantiations and is giving away the product. Search company becomes IDE supplier. Weird. But then Instantiations had built some slick tools for building Google Web Toolkit apps. GWT- what’s that? Oh nothing much – just a technology which brings Java and Javascript together in a development model. How many awful Java front end technologies have we seen over the years? Java ServerFaces and so on. Well GWT is a much cleaner approach to application development, and suits web apps – thus Google’s interest. Then we have Google AppEngine- a place to run Java apps. Java in the cloud? So far Google has made all the running in Platform as a Service thinking and delivery.

  EMC VMWare SpringSource is another major center of gravity for Java leadership. SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson after all is the guy that found a way to make JEE not so painful to develop. With his ambition and technical skill, and EMC’s heft- and of course Paul Maritz in the picture- there is now way Oracle will have Java leadership all to itself. It speaks volumes that Rod didn’t even bother to attend Java One this year- then, neither did the RedMonks.

  I’d really like to know your thoughts on the the idea of a multipolar Java world. Who is going to be China?

  My biggest issues is that Oracle seems to think benign neglect will work in the Java world. It won’t. And when your salesmen start denying that your app servers run OSGi, when they do, then you have a problem.

• Oracle Asks Founders Of The Documents Foundation To Leave

  After Oracle acquired SUN Microsystem, some leading members of the OpenOffice.org community forked OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice. They also set up The Document Foundation to continue the independent works of the OpenOffice.org community.

  However, Oracle is not taking their move well. They want the founders of The Documents Foundation to leave the OpenOffice.org council. According to Oracle, their works with The Documents Foundation and LibreOffice will conflict with that of OpenOffice.org.

• Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave

  “In an unprecedented move with respect to other forks, Oracle asked the founders of the Document Foundation and LibreOffice to leave the OpenOffice.org Community Council. Apparently there is a conflict of interest, which concerns the Oracle employees.”

Openness/Sharing

• In Praise of Copying

• The Impact of Open Notebook Science

• Open Data

  • In which I suggest a preprint archive for clinical trials

    The ArXiv preprint archive for research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science and related disciplines was initiated by Paul Ginsparg in 1991. ArXiv enables the rapid dissemination of research articles prior to peer review, and it quickly became very successful in this. ArXiv has not made the peer-reviewed journal obsolete, but rather provides a service that traditional journals – and that also includes Open Access journals – can’t provide. By 1998, more than 90% of all peer-reviewed papers published in high-energy physics first appeared on ArXiv. Nature Precedings was started in 2007 to provide similar services for research in biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and earth sciences. In addition, many preprints are also hosted in institutional repositories.

• Open Access/Content

  • The Mandated Open Access Impact Advantage

Programming

• The Next Big Language

  Summing up

  Advantages

  * great built in concurrency support
  * strong native datatypes
  * functional
  * it’s a lisp
  * on the jvm + natural interoperability with java

  Disadvantages

  * on the jvm
  * it’s a lisp
  * not that fast
  * not very beginner friendly

• Install GNU GCC C++, compiler and other development tools and environment Linux

In The Neutral Zone

Demoscene: Interview with Romeo Knight!

For many people, Romeo Knight was the defacto musician on the scene. Now, approximately 20 years after I was introduced to the Amiga computer and subsequently Linux, I find myself conducting a Q&A with a person who influenced my computing decisions so many years ago.

Directories and how we could do better

So instead of having to import the media it will be offered to explore the media and choose from there what you want to use. So it cuts out the file chooser dialog altogether. Also you should be allowed to move things to trash inside of the program.

All this can be done with tracker to get the mimetypes for each of the file types I know but id like to have the file system organisation done in the background anyway and have the applications just looking at the directory lists to get the files for use in the program. So im not for any file explorers like nautilus or even search and other stuff to find files. The applications should do that job for the user and cut out the middle man.

Science

• Devastation and Recovery at Mt. St. Helens

  The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which began with a series of small earthquakes in mid-March and peaked with a cataclysmic flank collapse, avalanche, and explosion on May 18, was not the largest nor longest-lasting eruption in the mountain’s recent history. But as the first eruption in the continental United States during the era of modern scientific observation, it was uniquely significant.

Health/Nutrition

• Brazil Should Lead on Access to Essential Medicines

  What is Brazil going to do with its new influence? The short and obvious answer is: Brazil is going to pursue the national self-interest of Brazil, just like every other country does. If we asked every Brazilian candidate for federal office, do you think that Brazil should pursue its interests? I would expect them all to say yes.

  But how shall Brazil define the national self-interest that it pursues? Shall it define that national self-interest narrowly, or broadly? Here you have a real debate.

  For example, a few months ago there was a spirited debate in Brazil about Brazil’s role in international diplomacy concerning Iran’s nuclear program. Some politicians and voices in the Brazilian media said: Why is Brazil messing around with this? Brazil should mind its own business. This reflected what the U.S. government and much of the U.S. media were saying: Why is Brazil interfering in our turf?

  But the Brazilian government said: We are minding our own business. If some people in the U.S. government want to use war, the threat of war, or sanctions to prevent Iran from enriching uranium, that’s Brazil’s business, because Brazil enriches uranium, and therefore, it is in the interest of Brazil to defend the right of Iran to enrich uranium. By defending Iran’s rights, Brazil was defending its own. As President Lula said, “When we look at Iran, we see ourselves.”

  I give this example of a dispute over how broadly Brazil should perceive the self-interest that it pursues because it’s an example that one could easily know about from watching the news or reading the newspaper. Regardless of what one thinks about Iran’s nuclear program, this example shows there is a serious dispute, in Brazil and in the world, about how Brazil should perceive its self-interest, narrowly or broadly.

  But there is another very important example which one rarely sees discussed unless one is looking for it, and that is the dispute between countries like Brazil and countries like the United States over what national laws and policies a country like Brazil should have regarding intellectual property claims, in particular, regarding the intellectual property claims of corporations headquartered in the United States and Europe.

  The US and Europe have worked to institutionalize globally a particular set of rules and expectations regarding intellectual property claims. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, establishing rules regarding intellectual property claims was largely considered a national affair.

  But in 1994, when the World Trade Organization was created, the US and other developed countries successfully added something called the TRIPS agreement to the founding rules of the WTO. The TRIPS agreement extended to developing countries in the WTO strong protections for the intellectual property claims of corporations based in the US and Western Europe. The promise of the WTO for developing countries was that it would guarantee their access to sell in the markets of the rich countries. So, essentially the US and Europe used the leverage of access to their markets to impose a global set of rules on the treatment of intellectual property claims.

  It’s important to understand that the addition of the TRIPS agreement to the WTO had nothing to do with the classical theory of “free trade.” There is a longstanding, spirited debate about the theory of free trade, and whether the grand claims that have been made about how removing restrictions on international commerce would promote economic growth were oversold. But the TRIPS agreement has nothing to do with the principles of free trade.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Anxiety

• How propaganda is disseminated: WikiLeaks Edition

  This is how the U.S. government and American media jointly disseminate propaganda: in the immediate wake of some newsworthy War on Terror event, U.S. Government officials (usually anonymous) make wild and reckless — though unverifiable — claims. The U.S. media mindlessly trumpets them around the world without question or challenge. Those claims become consecrated as widely accepted fact. And then weeks, months or years later, those claims get quietly exposed as being utter falsehoods, by which point it does not matter, because the goal is already well-achieved: the falsehoods are ingrained as accepted truth.

  I’ve documented how this process works in the context of American air attacks (it’s immediately celebrated that we Killed the Evil Targeted Terrorist Leader [who invariably turns out to be alive and then allegedly killed again in the next air strike], while the dead are always, by definition, “militants”); with covered-up American war crimes, with the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman frauds — the same process was also evident with the Israeli attack on the flotilla — and now we find a quite vivid illustration of this deceitful process in the context of WikiLeaks’ release of Afghanistan war documents…

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• William Shatner worries about global warming

  Plus his must-see interview by Glenn Beck who says, “I think there are too many stupid people”

Finance

• France hit by new wave of mass pension protests

  A fifth day of protests in France against proposed pension reforms brought 825,000 people on to the streets, police said, although unions put the figure at 2.5m to 3m.

• Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registration System’s Land Title Theory

  Hundreds of thousands of home foreclosure lawsuits have focused judicial scrutiny on the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (“MERS”). This Article updates and expands upon an earlier piece by exploring the implications of state Supreme Court decisions holding that MERS is not a mortgagee in security agreements that list it as such. In particular this Article looks at: (1) the consequences on land title records of recording mortgages in the name of a purported mortgagee that is not actually mortgagee as a matter of law; (2) whether a security agreement that fails to name an actual mortgagee can successfully convey a property interest; and (3) whether county governments may be entitled to reimbursement of recording fees avoided through the use of false statements associated with the MERS system. This Article concludes with a discussion of steps needed to rebuild trustworthy real property ownership records.

• Why is Obama putting a Fannie Mae/Goldman Sachs lobbyist/consultant as NSA?

  Obama last week tapped Tom Donilon as National Security Advisor. What’s Donilon’s resume?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• LobbyLens

• Concerned Taxpayers of America supported by only two donors

  The group’s rapid creation – and its narrow funding base – illustrates how one or two wealthy donors can have a dramatic impact on political races, particularly in the wake of recent court rulings that have swept away many traditional spending limits. The situation also underscores how the precise motivations and goals of many independent groups can remain stubbornly opaque, even when disclosure is required.

  The Concerned Taxpayers, which lists a Capitol Hill townhouse as its address, has spent $450,000 on television advertising targeting just two lawmakers: Reps. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Frank M. Kratovil Jr. (D-Md.).

  When the group began targeting DeFazio several weeks ago, both he and his GOP opponent, tea party favorite Art Robinson, said they were unfamiliar with the group and were surprised by the ads.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Court says University sanction over Facebook postings violated Charter

  An Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench has issued a precedent setting ruling that relates to Facebook comments and, specifically, whether the Charter of Rights and Freedoms can apply to universities. In the case of Pridgen v. University of Calgary, the court ruled that the post-secondary institution violated two students’ Charter rights when it sanctioned them for posting critical comments about a professor on Facebook. The students were found by the University to have committed non-academic misconduct and were placed on probation as a result of their Facebook comments. They applied for judicial review to set aside that decision on various grounds, including that their right to free expression under the Charter. The University argued before the court that the students had committed acts of defamation on Facebook.

• The GOP vs. Google and Microsoft in a Leaked Memo on Privacy Law Reform

  The argument for reform of the 1986 law is that it hasn’t kept up with technological advances, meaning that there’s legal confusion over the privacy of our emails, smart phones, text messages, and social networking communications, and that some parts of the law are out of date — leading, for example, to no warrant being needed for police to read your emails after they are 180 days old. The argument against reform is that increasing privacy protections will make it harder for police to track down cyber criminals — the boys in blue most often bring up the specter of child pornographers.

• 610G settles webcam case

  “Webcamgate,” the Lower Merion School District soap opera about two teens and two school-issued laptops that spied on them, was never supposed to be about money.

  But that’s exactly what brought the whole screwy saga to a close yesterday – a boatload of money.

  The district’s Board of School Directors voted unanimously to pay $610,000 to settle lawsuits filed by the families of Harriton High sophomore Blake Robbins and Lower Merion High graduate Jalil Hasan, both of whom were unknowingly photographed scores of times at home by webcams on Apple MacBooks.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• News Corp. Shuts Off Hulu Access To Cablevision Customers – And Turns It Back On [UPDATED]

  UPDATE: That was fast. People familiar with the situation say that News Corp. is changing tactics and will turn on access to Fox.com and Fox programming on Hulu for Cablevision’s customers. This could take a “few hours” to roll out across the Cablevision footprint, I’m told.

• Why are U.S. Net Services Slow to Migrate North?

  Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, launched in Canada last month, providing consumers with the option to download an unlimited number of movies and television shows for a flat monthly fee. While the Netflix debut was marred by an ill-advised public relations stunt that involved actors masquerading as excited consumers, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that the long delays in migrating the service north once again raised questions over why popular online services rarely view Canada as a priority destination.

• Telus CEO touts ‘Switzerland’ approach to content

Intellectual Monopolies

• Anonymous Takes Out UK Intellectual Property Office Website

  As part of the ongoing slaughter of any institute or company that defends copyright, Anonymous has now taken down the website of the UK Intellectual Property Office. The website of the Government body has been unresponsive for nearly a day after the ‘Operation Payback” attack started yesterday afternoon.

• Copyrights

  • Canadian Copyright Book Released in Print and Online

  • Big media wants more piracy busting from Google

    At a time when Google is negotiating with television, movie, and music producers for the recently launched GoogleTV and an upcoming digital music service, the company has been sending mixed messages about how much help it will provide in removing links to pirated songs from its search index.

  • Copyright battle in Ohio Gov. race over use of clip to expose ‘steelworker’ as actor

    Given the facts as I know them, I’m with EFF on this one. The Ohio Democratic Party’s use of clip was strictly non-commercial: to make a political point about Kasich’s ad. And the clips they used were very short — just long enough to demonstrate that the “steelworker” really wasn’t. Arginate’s action will have the unfortunate effect of keeping the video off YouTube at the height of the campaign. YouTube can re-post the video at any time; yes, it would lose the DMCA safe harbor as to this video, but it doesn’t need any safe harbor given that the Ohio Democratic Party’s inclusion of the clip is almost certainly a non-infringing fair use. YouTube has taken such a step before; it should do so again.

    [...]

    Copyright battle in Ohio Gov. race over use of clip to expose ‘steelworker’ as actor

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Applications Are Always Easier with Moxa IO Library

Linux is an excellent operating platform in automation industry due to its open-source, reliability, stability, and security.

Short break and a clean slate

The more I have played with Linux and added extra features or software, the more I think, “If I had a complete melt down, how easily could I get a new system up and running the way I like it”. Happily there are some quick answers to this from a preparation point of view. Linux Mint, which remains my system of choice to date, comes with a few handy “end of the world” features. The first of which is a general backup tool to back up the contents of your Home folder.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • QEMU 0.13 Final Is Ready With New Features

    QEMU, the processor emulator that can be used alone for running unmodified guest operating systems and can optionally take advantage of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for greater virtualization performance with Intel and AMD hardware, has finally reached version 0.13 after suffering from a few delays. As was reported by us back in January of this year, QEMU 0.13 would focus on bringing new features and with this release they have achieved introducing several new features.

Applications

• 7 of the Best Free Linux Synthesizers

  A software synthesizer, also known as a softsynth, is computer software which creates digital audio. Computer software that generates music is not a recent arrival. However, with processors that offer multiple cores and faster clock speeds, software synthesizers can complete tasks that previously needed dedicated hardware. The advantage, of course, of software synthesizers is that they are less expensive than dedicated hardware, and simpler to integrate with other types of music software.

• Wallpaper changer for Linux

  Wally is a Qt4 wallpaper / background changer, using multiple sources like files, folders, FTP remote folders, Flickr, Yahoo!, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa, Smugmug, Bing, Google, Vladstudio and deviantART images.

• Gimp 2.7 released for testing and we are Impressed with the outcome!!

  The latest version of Gimp, version 2.7.1 has been released for testing purposes. Compared to its predecessors, it promises to include a host of new features that were previously unavailable. It seems that the developers of Gimp have finally started paying attention to the requests of the community about the serious need to include certain all important changes to the software, so that it can rival its nearest contender and the established benchmark in photo editing software, the almighty Photoshop from Adobe.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing the Opera Browser on Ubuntu Linux

    This entire procedure takes 5 minutes or less. Try it. You might like Opera a lot.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Amarok Celebrates Success, Announces Roktober Fundraiser

    October is here in all of its glory! Whether you are seeing the leaves turn or the sun coming back, it is time to celebrate Amarok. We are nearing the year’s end and are ready to sum up our efforts, while we continue to develop and Rok the World!

  • I’ve Started, So I’ll Finish

  • Tasty Menu

    Tasty Menu is a KMenu replacement aiming to provide the maximum usability, or at least to be a testbed for usability concepts and ideas for a future kmenu replacement.

  • KDE Forum Brazil – Northeast Edition

  • Track effects in Kdenlive 0.7.8

    The second screenshot (on the right) shows a sepia effect on track 2. No effect was applied to the clip but since it is on track 2, the sepia effect is applied on it.

  • SPARQL queries in QML with QSparql

Distributions

• New Releases

  • ArchBang 2010.10 Is Now Available

  • Calculate Linux 10.9 Is Powered by Kernel 2.6.35.5

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Expands Messaging, Real-Time and Grid Features on Cloud Platform

    The Red Hat Enterprise MRG platform includes a new Linux kernel, expanded RHEL support and improved performance.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Chic Linux with multi touch : Ubuntu 10.10

      Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat: The easiest Linux, the world enters the next round. Highlights of Ubuntu 10.10, in addition to multi-touch a separate font, faster interface for netbooks and improved multimedia features.

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks

  • Acer to Offer MS Windows and Linux on Netbooks

    Acer has confirmed it will include both Windows and Google Android operating systems on all its future dual-core netbooks. While the idea of a twin-system machine isn’t new, this represents the biggest commitment yet by a manufacturer to the concept.

Databases

• Strata Week: Army anomalies

  The US Army is vexed by the problem of troops who become disaffected and, by extension, a risk to the operations they’re involved in. Through a DARPA-sponsored research project, the Army hopes to use big data analytics to identify individuals likely to pose a threat.

Oracle

• Microsoft: Open Source Code is Too Expensive, Harms Students’ Grades

  Microsoft attacks OpenOffice (and open-code in general) in a new testimonial-based ad

  Microsoft’s has unleashed a somewhat surprising attack ad (video) against the popular OpenOffice suite, a free, open-source product from Oracle Corp-subsidiary Sun Microsystems according to a report from Information Week.

  The commercial begins with somewhat foreboding music and the text “Considering OpenOffice? Consider this…”

• [libreoffice-marketing] US marketing list started

  I have just started the US marketing list for LibreOffice.

CMS

• eBay to use Joomla as the ‘open source glue’

Education

• Open Source Computing

  A number of interesting and accessible programming languages are essentially open source projects, in which source code for interpreters and compilers in the reference implementation is available for all under an open source licence, and where the standard build of the language includes open source libraries. The most obvious examples here are of scripting languages for web based applications such as Perl, PHP and Python, which represent a way in to software development for many who may not have studied academic computing.

Semi-Open Source

• SugarCRM sees record third quarter growth

  Commercial open source specialist SugarCRM has announced that it has achieved record growth in the third quarter of 2010. Discussing the announcement, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin said, “The continued momentum we are seeing around the world is a testament to the fact that businesses of all types are demanding more flexible, intuitive and open solutions,” adding that, “Businesses are smarter than ever, and understand the value of open solutions”.

Project Releases

• Cinelerra 4.2 Video Editor Released

  While OpenShot and PiTiVi are the two currently most talked about open-source non-linear video editing systems for Linux, that’s not all there is out there. There’s also Kdenlive, Kino, an open-source Lightworks is coming soon, and then perhaps the most advanced open-source video editor of them all: Cinelerra.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Universities in an age of information abundance

    The current debate over higher education funding in the UK ignores the crucial point that information is becoming cheaper and easier to produce, challenging the monopoly of the university in public life.

• Open Hardware

  • The FSF pushes free (as in speech) hardware

    FSF license compliance engineer Brett Smith said, “Every software component needed to produce endorsable hardware is now available. We have several GNU/Linux distributions that only include free software and are completely functional on the right hardware. We have the Linux-libre kernel that does not include non-free microcode. And we have cutting-edge mobile platforms like Android and MeeGo that are based on free software.

Eight Tech Signs the World really might be coming to an End

2. Enlightenment E17 libraries reach beta. After ten years and several rewrites later of being defined as “alpha” software, E17 has finally reached a beta stage. It is yet to be seen if we will see a 1.0 release any time soon, but for the time being a beta release is a step in the right direction. If you would like to easily check out the E17 beta, take a peek at my Ubuntu E17 LiveDVD.

Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook

Twitter was valued at one billion dollars in its last round of financing, but we believe it may in fact be severely undervalued relative to Facebook because Twitter’s value proposition is less obvious.

Science

• Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor

  If you are a science scholar, you hope that all scientific articles that you read are grounded in fact. There is a lot of background information to guide you, including statistical data on what professional journals are read widely, with papers therein that produce citations by other subsequent papers and in general, influence the direction of forthcoming new science. As scholars publishing in professional journals, we are schooled in the importance of factual reliability and impact of articles we read in science journals. In terms of impact, we know of various collective valuations of journals through metrics like the so-called “Impact Factor”. By extension, editors and reviewers reinforce the meaningfulness of Impact Factors by explicit attention to the reliability of submitted articles; if the Scientific Method has not been adequately followed, then there should be a downwardly adjusted evaluation of impact. The picture of scientifically grounded innovations feeding progress in science is well established. I firmly believe that this system has served science well and that the scientific literature has provided generally reliable information and vast benefits to society over the centuries to the present and will continue doing so into the future.

Security

• Oracle patches 29 Java, OpenOffice vulnerabilities

Defence/Police/Aggression

• MoD braced for painful weight-loss surgery next week

  The outlines of the situation are plain enough. Before the current economic crisis began, even before the Twin Towers fell, the MoD’s plans for buying equipment had been allowed to escalate out of control. In essence, more expensive things were scheduled into the kit programme than the budget had provided for. This situation developed a full decade ago following many ruinous decisions taken in the 1980s and 90s. The current government’s vehement assertions that the whole mess is Labour’s fault are quite untrue – the previous generation of Tories should shoulder an equal share of the blame.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Unprecedented day of action to stop climate change on 10/10/10

  From beaches in South Africa where penguins were rescued, to parks in Moscow, where 3,000 kg of acorns were collected to replant trees in forests devastated by fires this summer, thousands of people got to work yesterday to stop climate change.

• Princes responds to your letters with empty words

  As part of our campaign to save the oceans, Princes tuna, an industry leader in canned tuna products, has been receiving thousands of emails from people around the world raising questions about the sustainability of their tuna. Princes uses tuna fished with unselective methods that end up taking many sharks, turtles, skates, rays and often young tuna. So in addition to threatening endangered wildlife – Princes are also preventing the proper recovery of the fish stocks that they rely on.

• Climate change apocalypse NOW

  The ASA ruled, in March of this year, that the ad was OK to air, dismissing claims that the ad was misleading because it presented human induced climate change as a fact, and had exaggerated the possible effects of climate change on the UK with its depiction of “strange weather and flooding”.

• U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels

Finance

• QE1 vs QE2

  Quantitative Easing, or QE, is a powerful monetary tool available to central agencies under fiat money systems. It is the art of “printing money” to buy assets. This creates asset inflation.

  The FED has done a first round of QE in march of 08, stabilizing the markets and sparking a market rally the likes of which not seen since the great depression. The FED has recently hinted it would do QE2.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Bruce Schneier Calls Facebook Worst Privacy Offender

  A high-profile and widely respected security expert is not pleased with Facebook. Indeed, Bruce Schneier said earlier today at the RSA Security Europe Conference that he believes Facebook is the worst social network when it comes to respecting individuals’ privacy.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Apple Wins Trademark for ‘There’s an App for That’

  Heads up to anyone who wants to borrow “There’s an app for that” or some variation thereon as an advertising slogan: Apple now officially owns the trademark on the phrase. Using it will cost you.

• Copyrights

  • Pirate Bay appeal ends, verdict to follow late next month

    The Pirate Bay appeal hearing ended today, but the court’s verdict won’t be revealed until 26 November.

    Officials at the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm, Sweden, have confirmed that a separate hearing will take place for a defendant who has been absent during the re-trial.

  • Anonymous plants pirate flag on MPAA website

    Hacktivists used DNS cache poisoning to deface an MPAA website, according to security analysts.

  • French taxpayer to subsidise music buyers

    The European Commission has approved a French scheme to subsidise music downloads for 15-25 year olds. The taxpayer will contribute €25 per user per year to every “Carte Musique” cardholder, which entitles the user to €50 worth of downloads. The cardholder will stump up the other half of the cost of the card.

  • French to bankroll music-buying

  • Don’t Blame Piracy On Us, Say Google and Leading Russian Web Firms

    Some of the top web companies in Russia have published an open letter to the entertainment industries demanding that they stop blaming them for Internet piracy. Google, Vkontakte, Mail.ru and two leading search engines say that the responsibility for infringements lies with their users and are asking that legal action be directed at them. They are also urging lawmakers to update an outdated legal framework.

  • Ofcom UK Ready to Publish Final Illegal Broadband ISP File Sharing Code of Practice

    Communications regulator Ofcom UK has confirmed that its final Code of Practice for tackling “illegal” internet P2P (File Sharing) copyright infringement by customers of UK broadband providers, which is a requirement of the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA), should be published sometime in “the next few weeks”.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Alcatel-Lucent taps Linux for 10G enterprise switch

Alcatel-Lucent has switched from VxWorks to Linux for a new “intelligent” 10-gigabit Ethernet enterprise switch. The OmniSwitch 10K Modular LAN Chassis supports 5Tbps (terabit per second) performance over 256 10G Ethernet ports, and offers intelligent management features, such as flow-based quality of service with variable flow control, as well as virtual output queuing, says the company.

Blade Network Technologies Supporting 40 GbE Switches

Desktop

• Surviving Mac, Windows, Linux on daily basis

• More Free PCs

  So our cost of PCs is minimal and they work far better than the same hardware running XP thanks to using them as thin clients and running Debian GNU/Linux.

  Our terminal server is an old Xeon server with only 1gB or RAM. My first priority is to upgrade the RAM, if I had a budget. With 20 kids browsing, it begins to swap (FireFox).

Server

• Smart Clusters: Intelligence Is As Intelligence Does

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2010.10.15

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 19

  In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 has been released, and Microsoft attacks OpenOffice.org with a video. Discover our all-new challenge for the next episode, and we judge the level of anticipation for Panasonic’s Jungle.

Kernel Space

• 2.6.36-rc8

• Weekend Project: Get Started with Btrfs

• This Week’s Enterprise Linux News

• LinuxCon: A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux

Applications

• DeadBeef 0.4.2 Has Been Released, Adds Option To Specify New Tray Icon And More

  DeadBeef, a lightweight music player I was telling you about in the Ubuntu Netbook Edition optimization tips post was updated to version 0.4.2 today which brings some minor but interesting new features…

• Qalculate is a Powerful Calculator For Linux

  Regardless which platform you are using, there’s bound to be a calculator included in the stock OS. For simple calculation, these calculators work fine, but if you want to do more complex calculation, like solving an algebraic expression, it won’t make the mark.

• Advanced IRC with Smuxi

  Advanced IRC with Smuxi

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Set up Xen 4.0.1 & Libvirt 0.8.3 on top of Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop

  • Manual Backups in Linux, DD

  • It’s Colorized

  • MySQL and Python – The Problems and [Some] Solutions

  • Abstract Wave Effect

  • Festival – Speech Synthesis System – tutorial

  • Make your own templates for the “Create Document” menu in Ubuntu

  • How to install latest version of Google Earth on Ubuntu Linux

  • Broadcom Wireless Driver Fix In Maverick

  • Copy / Paste Files From The Command Line [Bash Alias]

  • Wizardpen now works on Maverick

  • Find by IP – Perl IP to location Example

  • Set up Xen 4.0.1 & Libvirt 0.8.3 on top of Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop

  • How To Install Openoffice 3.3.0 Beta 1

  • Private Collaboration and Digital Asset Management with MediaWiki

  • Manage Google Services from the Command Line on Linux

  • Installing ISPCP On Ubuntu Lucid x86_64 And Implementing Chroot Per Virtual Host In Apache2

  • Blocking Bad Crawlers with Apache mod_evasive

  • Nautilus script to create mp3s from video files

• Games

  • Naev: Space Trading and Combat Game Similar to Escape Velocity with RPG Elements

    The game have lots of RPG elements. You can earn money by completing missions, buy new ships and equipments, upgrade your systems, talk to scientists, land on planets and can do much more as the game is highly open ended. It does not have best graphics but what makes it unique is its addictive gameplay. The sound effects and music is really good that matches well with the theme of the game.

  • Lets build a gadget: Pandora’s 900th linux-handheld gaming unit ships – it wasn’t easy

    Pandora project, the ultra-portable linux-based handled mobile gaming console that took on pre-orders in 2007, just shipped 900 more units. The makers of Pandora have been struggling with nubs, apparently its not easy to make a nub you know. The quality has to be just right, this led them to replace the first 150 sub-nub units that were sent out earlier in the year. Pandora went back to the drawing board not once, not twice, but three times to get the nubs just right; and after all that, the nubs are now fast and should last over 300k of actuations.

  • ScummVM 1.2.0 “FaSCInating release” is here!

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Gregory Schlomoff – BetterInbox & KDE Development Platform

    The KDE Development Platform is an attractive base for developers of Qt applications. At its core, the KDE libraries provide job APIs for asynchronous processing, transparent network access, caching and more. The KDE PIM Development Platform also provides libraries for common transport and storage standards such as POP3, IMAP, vCard, iCal, MIME messages (email) and more. With Akonadi, the KDE 4 Development Platform is a complete framework for creating full-featured PIM applications with modern modular design, extensibility and scalability.

  • A Declaration of Plasma Love

    The Plasma declarative bindings have landed into kdebase!

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core Linux 3.2 arrives

    Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has released version 3.2 of Tiny Core Linux. Based on the 2.6.33.3 Linux kernel, Tiny Core Linux 3.2 features version 1.17.2 of the BusyBox tool collection and features changes to System Stats and the AppBrowser.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Expands Messaging, Realtime and Grid Technology Capabilities to Advance Cloud Leadership

    Red Hat today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3, including updates to the product’s Messaging, Realtime and Grid technologies, which provide a key technology base for Red Hat Cloud Foundations, a solution set that offers a comprehensive set of tools to build and manage a private cloud.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 is a hit! Here’s why.

      Every list is subjective. Even this one. But if you knew my history with Ubuntu, you’d share my excitement with this latest Ubuntu 10.1o (Meerkat) release. It is really easy/fun to use. Makes me remember my PCLinux days, when things just worked. I really am surprised with how functional this Ubuntu really is. Currently, it is my favourite go-to distro. The following are a few features of the latest Ubuntu that I really like. I haven’t listed some others (like Ubuntu One) because I haven’t actually used them, or I haven’t really like it (like Ubuntu Broadcast). So anyway, in no particular order…

    • Here’s a crazy security idea – ditch Windows for Ubuntu 10.10 Linux

      Load Ubuntu on a spare PC or laptop – it’s not hard to do – and access your bank using the Linux version of Firefox.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Lubuntu Screencast: Minitube

      • Comparison Test: Peppermint OS One 08042010 vs. Ice 10012010

        So which one would I choose? Chromium has convinced me of its capabilities with just 256 MB of RAM, and Ice just feels snappier than and doesn’t choke up as often as One. I think I’m going to go with Ice. In any case, bravo to the Peppermint OS developers, and keep up the excellent work!

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Palm Hires Former Head of Meego/Maemo, Ari Jaaksi

      All things Digital claims that Ari Jaaksi, the former Head of Meego and Maemo is joining Palm as Senior Vice President of webOS. He’s expected to start in November. Ari Jaaksi resigned from Nokia earlier this month for personal reasons. I guess now we know what those reasons are.

  • Android

    • Congrats, Now You Have Gesture Search on Your Android Phone

      Google has released an updated version of its Gesture Search application, which allows users to turn the application on by flipping the phone to the side and then back, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.

    • Android Apps Less Likely to Access Personal Information Than iPhone Apps

    • Android 4.0 To Be Named “Ice Cream”? [Major News Outlet Reports That Ice Cream To Follow Honeycomb, Gingerbread In Android Naming Convention]

• Tablets

  • Gene Munster: Android-Based Tablets Will Be More Popular Than Apple’s iPad

    First let’s get something straight, the interviewer says that the iPhone is “revolutionary” and that Apple invented the tablet. Both those statements are complete Apple hype. Microsoft had tablets before Apple did. Nor did Apple or Microsoft invent touchscreens. Touchscreens have been around for almost as long as the mouse, and they have always been used to lull computer users into thinking that they’re doing something “fundamentally different,” the same way Apple did in the eighties with their other invention, the WIMP GUI. Oh wait, Xerox invented that.

How to Get Support for Open Source Software

One of the most persistent myths surrounding Linux and other open source software is that there’s no easy way to get good support. Just this week, for instance, we saw this claim used in Microsoft’s anti-OpenOffice.org video, obviously with the hope of striking fear into business users’ hearts.

Nordic Free Software Award 2010 – 7 days left to nominate

Open Source Security Camera

Panasonic39s security cameras at ASIS show innovation in i-PRO. ZoneMinder: Linux Home CCTV and Video Camera Security with Motion . ZoneMinder is a free video camera security application suite, designed for low cost DIY video security including commercial or home CCTV, theft prevention and child or family . WV-SP305 Megapixel Fixed Network Camera, an i -PRO SmartHD productPanasonic System Networks Company of America showcases its expanding line of i -PRO SmartHD products at ASIS 2010, highlighting. . Emphasising open systems interoperability at ASIS 2010, Panasonic will re-launch the expanded and enhanced Panasonic Solution Developer Network PSDN, which now covers a wider array of product lines and provides additional resources including a larger, more responsive .

Open Sourcing Your Company

Innovative, rapid and cost-effective development and market share expansion are leading an increasing number of software vendors to incorporate open source, both as a technology and a business strategy, into their organizations.

The question of Why?

One question that I am often asked is “Why does a big software company like Adobe (or any other) release technologies to open source?”

The reasons for open source are widespread, but the basic reasons that a software company gets involved are:

1. Making revenue from selling a product or service that relies on OSS in some way
2. Reducing the cost of technology and time to market
3. Providing a community benefit
4. Enabling customer led innovation

What’s the Return on Investment for Open?

One of the collaborative projects I’ve worked the most on is Subversion (a system for tracking changes — ”versions” — made to files and folders; hence the name). Subversion was started by my employer, CollabNet. They needed a better version control system for their customers, as part of a larger hosted online collaboration service, and realized that ubiquity and clear lack of lock-in would be strong assets. So CollabNet decided to release Subversion as open source software from the very beginning, and they knew, from past experience with open source projects, that they’d need to put some effort into drawing a community around the code and making it easy to collaborate on the project.

Firm creates ‘open source’ tech portal in Dayton region

Open Source Ohio, which recently went live, is an effort to connect displaced workers, students and recent graduates in programming and software development — and those who want to change careers — with companies and organizations that need work performed on smaller, unfunded projects.

Here’s how it works: companies submit their needs to see if they meet certain criteria, then those projects are posted at opensourceohio.net. Those displaced workers and other developers volunteer to tailor open source software to complete the projects.

Events icon set released

Events

• Diversity, Freedom and Education at the Open World Forum

  I have to confess that I went to the Open World Forum expecting to find some pompous, self-referential, corporate driven marketing show. Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and this is what I’ll try to show here. The pounding, rave-style music at the beginning of each session was really depressing. A few talks by some politicians were not among the highest moments of the Forum (Glyn already explained why and I agree with him). This said, the Forum agenda was quite balanced and diverse. Personally I found it an interesting, useful event, one I would have been glad to attend even if I had not had to present my work. The Forum explored many sides of openness, not just the commercial one of Open Source software. Here are just a couple of examples.

• EU-funded Projects and Open Source

  Open Source sustainability is rare at best among EU-funded projects, basically because projects’ partners tend to loose any interest in the project when funds are over. As a matter of fact most of them close their websites hosting software, documentation, etc.

Web Browsers

• Google Chrome OS is coming

  When Google first announced Chrome OS, a cloud-focused operating system back in July last year, it all seemed a little too vague. Everyone knew that Google could do exactly this, if it wanted to, but the question was why they would want to. The company also said it was aiming to release Chrome OS by the end of 2010.

  Now it looks as if this could indeed be happening. According to Chrome developer forums the current version of Chrome OS is labelled as a release candidate and a final version looks likely to be released by year-end.

  In a statement published on the TechCrunch site Google said: “We are very happy with the progress of Google Chrome OS and expect devices will be available later this year. We’ll have more details to share at launch.”

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 falling behind schedule?

    Mozilla has missed the scheduled date for releasing Firefox 4 Beta 7. The update was originally due in the last two weeks of September, but did not appear then or later. At Mozilla’s most recent developer meeting, there were 17 blockers, problems which could be a reason for delaying a release, for the beta 7 release and an overall total of 901 blockers in the queue for the eventual Firefox 4 release.

SaaS

• Fog Aims to Advance Ruby in the Cloud

  From a technical implementation perspective, Fog is a Ruby library that can be used by any Ruby project or Ruby on Rails application. Beary noted that some of the API decisions for Fog were made to make it feel familiar with the way that Ruby on Rails applications are written.

• Engine Yard Announces Formal Support for ‘fog’ to Ensure Application Portability in the Cloud

  Engine Yard now formally supports fog, the leading cloud computing library for Ruby applications and a component in the Engine Yard application platform. Specifically, Wesley Beary the creator of fog and engineer at Engine Yard has transitioned to a new role where he will lead the project and manage its community of contributors full-time.

Databases

• OpenTSDB: A Distributed, Scalable Monitoring System on Top of HBase

  Tracking this based on Hadoop world in tweets. StumbleUpon plans to open source ☞ OpenTSDB: a scalable time series database built on top of HBase.

• SkySQL Delivers an Alternative Source of Software, Services, and Support for the MySQL® Database

  SkySQL Ab, the alternative source for software, services and support for the MySQL database, today formally launched operations with the release of SkySQL™ Enterprise. The company, which is founded by former MySQL AB executives, personnel, and investors, is committed to furthering the future development of MySQL database technologies, while delivering cost-effective database solutions and exceptional customer service.

• SGI Announces Support and Record Benchmarks for VoltDB Database

• Cassandra gets performance tuning options

  The open source NoSQL and Big Data database Apache Cassandra has been updated to version 0.6.6 and now allows users to tune performance. The changes that have been made are based on real world experience with customers and users. They include the ability to adjust Cassandras’s indexing interval to make it more memory efficient with large amounts of small rows with “cold data” and the ability to control when the JVM should trigger garbage collection to avoid the database being paused for several seconds.

Oracle

• Microsoft-Oracle: Unlikely Alliance Against Android

• Is this a text file, or an Excel file?

  http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/is_this_a_text_file

• Microsoft’s fake validation of OpenOffice.org

  A recently released OpenOffice.org marketing video from Microsoft tries to highlight prospective issues for companies considering alternatives to Microsoft Office. Although the video suggests OpenOffice.org is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, the video also presents insights into Microsoft’s business growth strategy.

  The title of the video, “A few perspectives on OpenOffice.org,” might suggest a balanced view from OpenOffice.org users. However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion.

• OpenOffice.org 10th Anniversary: 8 Years in Retrospective

  Promoting OpenOffice.org nationally was hard in 2003. Lobbing with some Italian free software organizations – namely Assoli and the Italian chapter of the FSFE – I brought the Director of the information system of our Minister of Education to think that Italian schools needed to know more also about OpenOffice.org.

• Split JCP: a compromise proposal

• JCP – Pragmatism or Bust

• Java 8 Vote

• Java 7 Vote

  Stephen Colebourne correctly pointed out in his blog this morning that when the Java 7 JSR is proposed to the JCP Executive Committee, that the Eclipse Foundation will vote “yes”. I think that it would be helpful to explain why that is the case.

Education

• FOSS in Indian Schools – A Serious Concern & a Request to Unite.

  I am writing this letter to all for a request to create a task force to advocate FOSS in schools. If we fail to advocate Linux in schools then we will be failed everywhere.
  Most of the computer users like me are using computer from Last 5-6 year or less. They learned everything in college only. Also at our time computer was a costly device. We have not faced much difficult in migrating from Windows to Linux. Now we love Linux based distro and advocate for open curriculum, content , no-patents, no-DRM etc.

Healthcare

• VA will use open source model for health records system

  The Veterans Affairs Department will adopt an open source model to modernize its legacy electronic health records system, the department’s chief information officer said at a Senate hearing Oct. 6.

  The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) runs on an archaic program language called MUMPS, which experts said must be modernized to properly serve the 8 million veterans who receive care at VA health facilities.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • OSSCube Releases an Open Source Asterisk and SugarCRM Integration Bridge – OSSCube Voice

    OSSCube has served 50+ industry leaders including Intel, Google, Yahoo, Trend Micro, LinkedIn, Bigadda.com across four continents. Some of the solutions developed by them include Enterprise Products, Web 2.0 applications, Social Networking sites.

  • SugarCRM Continues Record Customer and Revenue Growth in Third Quarter

    SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced it achieved record growth in customer and revenue momentum in the third quarter 2010, highlighted by a 60 percent increase in revenue.

  • Vyatta Partners With Sourcefire for Increased Network Protection and Availability

Project Releases

• coreutils-8.6 released [stable]

• Gnuaccounting 0.7.8 released

  The Gnuaccounting developers have released version 0.7.8 of their free open-source Java accounting application that embeds OpenOffice and utilises MySQL or OpenOffice’s HSQLDB to create and administrate invoices, credit memos, delivery notes, bills etc. The program is intended for use by small and medium-sized companies and now for the first time supports the deferment of VAT prepayment in countries where VAT is estimated and collected in advance.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Closed bibliography on the Cambridge train

    I came back from the British Library and Imperial War Museum (I’ll tell you why later) on Thursday on the 1615. One of the privilege of the 1615 is that if you get there after 1605 you have to stand or sit on the floor among the folding bicycles. Because I wanted to hack I sat on the floor. I overheard a conversation between two hackers and have caught most of it. They were talking about a book, which I think was about software but I couldn’t see it.

    She: “That looks an interesting book”

    He: “Yes, it’s written by one of the great software gurus”

    She: “What’s it’s called?”

    He: “I can’t tell you?”

    She: “Why not?”

    He: “It’s copyright”

    She: “Yes, I know the book is copyright, but I just want to know the title”

    He: “Sorry I can’t tell you. It’s copyright”

The Amazing Contribution Of Telecentres To Our Digital Society

If you would rather look at the full text of my message to the amazing staff of Telecentre Europe, for their summit in Budapest this week, then read on.

The Equality Act is a dangerous joke

On 1 October the Equality Act 2010 became law. Its stated intention is to end discrimination in the workplace. The likely result is it will poison relationships between colleagues and employer-employee. It urges us all to view ourselves as victims in need of state intervention to police our working lives.

OEMs are Reluctant Customers

Still the OEMs are forced to ship Wintel. They are reluctant customers. Why can they not be allowed to produce what the consumer wants, small cheap computers?

Health/Nutrition

• Global Hydro and Nuclear Power in Perspective

  At the recent ASPO conference in Washington, DC I found myself in a lunchtime conversation discussing the contributions Nuclear and Hydro were making to world energy supply. It’s worth noting that Hydropower did experience an uptick in global use in the past five years. Nuclear meanwhile, which has seen a slowing rate of consumption since the 1980′s, leveled off and fell during the same period. While these two energy sources are worth discussing, they pale in comparison to oil and coal use globally, as the second chart shows.

Finance

• Foreclosure Fraud: Megabanks At Risk As Analyst Identifies New Problems With Mortgages

  Pension funds and other investors who have suffered losses on mortgage-backed securities could have a “strong legal basis” to call into question the very securitized mortgages they purchased stakes in, increasing the pressure facing large Wall Street firms that packaged these securities during the housing boom, a prominent mortgage bond analyst said Thursday.

• Settlement May Be Near in Countrywide Case

  In June 2009, the S.E.C. filed civil fraud and insider trading charges against Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide. The agency also sued two of his top lieutenants: David Sambol, the company’s former president, and Eric Sieracki, the former chief financial officer.

• Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Cut Social Security Benefits?

  We aren’t supposed to use the word “lie” in Washington, probably because the practice is so common, but let’s just use normal English for a moment. NYT Roger Cohen devotes his column to a tirade against the French for their opposition to raising the retirement age. This opposition has taken the form of a general strike that has seriously disrupted the economy.

• Mortgage Mess May Cost Big Banks Billions

  After scratching their heads for weeks over how much the foreclosure mess will hurt banks’ bottom lines, investors got out their calculators Thursday to tally the potential costs — and sent bank stocks plunging.

  Analyst estimates of the possible toll varied widely, but the fear was evident in the stock market. The share price of Bank of America fell 5.2 percent, while shares of JPMorgan Chase sank almost 2.8 percent.

• Government reports $1.3 trillion budget deficit

  The Obama administration said Friday the federal deficit hit a near-record $1.3 trillion for the just-completed budget year.

• House to vote on bonus payment for Social Security

  The House will vote in November on a bill to provide $250 payments to Social Security recipients to make up for the lack of a cost-of-living increase for next year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.

  The Social Security Administration is expected to announce Friday that more than 58 million retirees and disabled Americans will go a second consecutive year without an increase in benefits.

• It’s speed vs. skepticism for Fla. judges facing avalanche of foreclosure cases

  Judges in Florida are under pressure to clear their foreclosure dockets; the state’s crippled real estate market and its lagging economy cannot recover until cases work their way through the courts. Earlier this year, Florida’s legislature allocated $9.6 million to help speed up the processing of foreclosures. Much of that money went to pay retired judges and case managers to help shoulder the load and quickly dispose of cases in special foreclosure courts.

• Cohen Says Preconditions in Place for Stocks Rally: Tom Keene

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• ‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web

  PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

  “I felt totally violated,” says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

• Who cares about medical privacy

  On this evidence teenagers also have a much clearer understanding of the meaning of privacy than government policy makers, who have just decided that the NHS Summary Care Records system can continue to be built by the sort of inertia selling that would be illegal for a commercial organisation. In future they will put an opt-out form in the envelope. Big deal. You will still be assumed irrevocably to have consented, regardless of your understanding of what you are being asked, if you fail to use it – on behalf of yourself and your children.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Did The RIAA Really Just Come Out In Support Of ‘Opt-In’ Copyright? [Updated]

    Of course, the MPAA and the BSA apparently disagreed, with the BSA saying copyright should definitely be opt-out rather than opt-in. That said, it is nice to see the MPAA come out in favor of flexible fair use policies, though I’m sure that’s as an alternative to actually improving copyright law.

    I’ve asked the RIAA for comment (updated below) on whether or not this represents a change of position for them, and whether the group would now support an opt-in copyright system that only gives copyright to works that are formally registered (as we had for many, many years). If true, this would really be a huge deal. While an opt-in system has many problems, if set up properly, it’s a lot better than the current opt-out system, which obliterated the public domain. An opt-in system at least makes it much easier to feed the public domain.

    Update: The RIAA responded to my request as to whether or not this was a policy change, in response, I was told:

    His basic point (and I’m quoting from his remarks) was that “we need better ways to distinguish when copyright is a beneficial property right, and when copyright is a meaningless and unwanted right.” He was later asked what he meant by this, and he responded that it may be time for creators to affirmatively assert copyright, rather than have it automatically granted to them whether they want it or not. He also explained that this was a personal view, not an RIAA position.

  • ACTA

    • More Countries React To ACTA; Brazil Says ACTA Is Illegitimate

      We’ve already covered how the EU Parliament is skeptical of ACTA. Ditto the Mexican Senate. In the US, which will undoubtedly sign the agreement, at least some politicians are asking questions about the document. Now news is coming out in a few other countries as well. Down in Australia, unlike in the US, they’re planning to go through a full scrutiny process involving the Parliament and the public. On the flipside, it sounds like Singapore can’t sign the document fast enough.

    • ACTA in the UK

      The final draft of the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released to the public (unlike previous drafts, which were leaked). Previously we had looked at the possible changes that the agreement would bring to UK copyright law. I am happy to say that at least the worst case scenario did not materialise, but there is still some room for concern.

    • Alvaro asks 9 questions to the Commission about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency

      Alexander Alvaro (ALDE) has asked 9 questions about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency, or the access by the INTA committee to the drafts documents. He is also asking about changes to substantive patent law (read software patents here).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Lenovo ThinkPad W510 Notebook

Since July we have been testing a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook under Linux and have already published a variety of Linux benchmarks. This Lenovo notebook boasts an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU, 4GB of system memory, a 320GB SATA HDD, and NVIDIA Quadro FX880M graphics. In this review we are taking a closer look at the ThinkPad W510 notebook and have more Ubuntu Linux benchmarks comparing its performance to the ZaReason Verix and an older ThinkPad T61.

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election

Applications

• Hotot Twitter app adds multi-profile, identi.ca support in latest update

  Users of the Hotot twitter application’s Daily Builds PPA are in for a treat with the latest alpha build coming with access to the indenti.ca microblogging service added as well as multi-profile support.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Copy / Paste Files From The Command Line [Bash Alias]

  • Recover FreeBSD root access when you forgot the password

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.5 Betters Its Shader Model 4 Support

    Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.

• Games

  • New Screenshots Of Unigine’s OilRush Game

    At the start of September we reported on Unigine’s OilRush game, which will have a native Linux client and really be the first title to make its debut that’s powered by this advanced OpenGL (and DirectX) engine (after Primal Carnage abandoned Unigine) that up until now has just really been seen by gamers and consumers with some amazing tech demos. The OilRush game is still expected to be released this quarter, but some new screenshots for now are available.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4: The KDE SC in Kubuntu and Fedora

    Although not one of my main desktop environments any longer, I have been keeping track of KDE development now and then and feel it has improved a great deal. Ever since the 4.4 releases it actually seems stable and light enough to use and while not all features and functions present in KDE 3.5 may have been replicated (at least Kwikdisk and Kdiskfree are back), the 4.4 series has marked the point where KDE has finally become usable again. I have to admit, it looks good too. I actually enjoy booting into the new KDE.

Distributions

• 6 Linux Distros That Changed Everything

  Linux is all around us. From phones to firewalls, from Macs to PCs, it’s getting hard to find electronics that don’t run Linux. Over the years, there have been many distributions (normally called distros) of Linux. Some are full-featured, others are very small, some are general purpose, and others are designed for specific tasks. Love it or hate it, Linux is here to stay.

  Below is a list of 6 distros that were milestones for Linux adoption. Enjoy.

• Following the Fragmentation Era, Linux Needs a Federated Front

  Federated marketing of Linux, federated support of it, and more organized community-driven resources for Linux platforms are the next steps. It’s not so easy to get these kinds of federated initiatives going, though, especially as myths about Linux continue. Perhaps the impetus for more progress in this area will come from smart entrepeneurs who see that Linux is fragmenting less, succeeding more outside of the desktop, and represents a free, malleable platform opportunity to leverage.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Mark Shuttleworth talks Project Harmony, Unity, Windicators and more

      If you have done some homework, you might already who Mark Shuttleworth aka SABDFL is.

      As the founder of Ubuntu ,it becomes necessary to interact with the community, however Mark is busy man so it is only limited to an 1 hour IRC session after release.

    • Test Drupal 7 beta for 54 min free thanks to Canonical

      This week two exciting things happened in the open source world. Drupal 7 beta was released for testing and Ubuntu 10.10 was delivered. It just so happens that the timing couldn’t have been better, because Canonical debuted a new feature that lets you test Ubuntu Server Edition in the cloud free for one hour.

    • Better Than Ever Ubuntu 10.10

      Looking for an alternative operating system besides Windows or Mac OS? There’s always Ubuntu Linux. The latest version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu 10.10 or the Maverick Meerkat was unveiled on Sunday in time for the 10/10/10 date. Checking out the updated Ubuntu version will definitely be worth your while since it has several exciting new features.

      Ubuntu 10.10 has several editions, one of them is Ubuntu Netbook Edition which has an improved user interface called Unity that enables netbook users to open their frequently-used applications. Also, it helps make the screen more organized. In addition, Ubuntu 10.10 has the Software Center that provides convenient access to numerous open-source and free apps.

    • Natty Narwhal open for development

      Natty Narwhal is now open for development. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the natty-changes ML, please do so at [1].

    • Ubunchu Chapter 7 in English Released

      Hey there! I’ve just finished the finally editing and correcting for Chapter 7 of Ubunchu. The long awaiting Installfest chapter.

    • This week in design – 15 October 2010

      For a kick off Andrea, a community member who has worked with us on the enhancements to the theme in the new release, has been hard at work thinking about the future of the Murrine theme engine. This engine is the beating heart of our gorgeous default themes and before we’ve even really started on Natty he’s upgraded it to work with the latest version of GTK. As we’re not sure what’s going into the next release just yet we can’t say for certain if all this work will make it in but what we can say is that if you’re a brave and heardy soul you can head over to his blog and get it for yourself.

    • Development Begins On Ubuntu 11.04

      Not even a week has passed since the release of Ubuntu 10.10, but developers are now free to start committing package changes for the next release, Ubuntu 11.04, which is codenamed Natty Narwhal. Matthias Klose has announced that the Ubuntu Natty repository is now open for business.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Ubuntu Privacy Remix 10.04r1 Comes with TrueCrypt 6.3a

        Ubuntu Privacy Remix 10.04r1 has been released, the first stable version of the Ubuntu-based distro. Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR) is a specialized Linux distribution for handling highly sensitive data. The latest release comes with several updated packages as well as some custom software.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Palm Hires Ex-Nokia Meego Chief Ari Jaaski

      After a very large number of Palm employees headed to Nokia to work on Meego, perhaps its only fitting that somebody from Nokia heads to Palm. So reports John Paczkowski of All Things D, who writes that that Nokia’s head of the Meego division, Ari Jaaski, will move to the bay area and become the new Senior Vice President of webOS for Palm / HP.

      Paczkowski also notes that Palm is pulling in Victoria Coleman from Samsung R&D to oversee platform and app development as well as a few execs from within HP to run product marketing, sales organization, and product management.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Schools Combine Netbooks, Open Source

    The marriage of low-cost netbooks and open-source technologies to create 1-to-1 computing programs is a relatively new development. Open-source technologies, which evolve when individuals voluntarily contribute their creativity and knowledge to online networks of innovation, were once thought to be too free-wheeling and untested for schools. But that is now changing as schools look for more creative and cost-effective ways to use technology.

  • ‘Ubuntu Netbook’ Linux Adds Multitouch, Looks Tablet Friendly

    As flavors of Linux go, Ubuntu has been pretty popular over the years. The open source operating system can be installed on a wide range of computer hardware, and there’s even a version called Ubuntu Netbook that’s specially made to optimize the relatively tight 1024×600 screen resolution found on many of today’s netbooks.

What Does “Free as in Speech” or “Free as in Beer” Really Mean?

In a nutshell, it translates to “zero price” (gratis) versus “with few or no restrictions” (libre).

Events

• Guest Post: The Apache Software Foundation’s Open Source Approach

  ApacheCon, one of the biggest open source conferences of the year, is coming up in Atlanta November 1st through 5th, sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Of course, from Hadoop to the web server, Apache software platforms have become enormously influential. Ross Gardler, VP of Community at the foundation, provided OStatic with a guest post–one of a series we’ll be doing in conjunction with ApacheCon–on how the Apache Software Foundation approaches open source. Here it is.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • last few days of survey

    If you’re a Thunderbird contributor and you haven’t already done so, please help us understand how we can make the Thunderbird community and contribution process more enjoyable and rewarding by taking a short, 7-question survey at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/376585/Thunderbird-Participation-Survey by this Sunday.

Databases

• SGI Announces Support and Record Benchmarks for VoltDB Database

Oracle

• Proof That Microsoft Is Worried About Office’s Competition

• Microsoft’s fear of an OpenOffice

  Of course, it’s possible that Microsoft sees something the wider market doesn’t yet see: momentum building for Office defections. The Register’s Kelly Fiveash suggests: “By declaring such a threat, it would seem that Microsoft just admitted that it’s worried about losing market share in an area where it has been unshakeable for years.”

  If true, it would seem that the last thing Microsoft would want to do would be to dignify its competition with a formal campaign. Remember its “Get the Facts” campaign against Linux? That one worked wonders for Linux, putting the upstart operating system on the radar screen of a huge swath of CIOs who probably hadn’t given Linux much thought up until that point.

• Microsoft video proves that Microsoft Office is like cocaine and has dealers inside schools

  When it first appeared, I simply ignored the video. After seeing all the buzz around it and reading two articles that explain some of its weaknesss (1), I gave up and watched it. The first view proved the objections made in those articles, but also made me uneasy. I could feel that there was something more serious, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So I watched the video again, and a flash of understanding came.

  What Microsoft published is not really a video about office productivity. A good part of that video is about drug addiction and nothing more. It says “we already fell addicted to this specific drug, it feels good and we see no way out. So you should take it too”. This is what I was feeling. Several of those quotes really sound like statements from people who tried to free themselves of cocaine or some other equally destructive substance and failed, simply because they misunderstood their situation or didn’t really care to succeed.

CMS

• Matt Mullenweg

  “I am lucky enough to be able to code, and only have a limited time on this earth, so I want as much of my work as possible to benefit humanity. Having my output be freely available under the GPL is one of the best ways to make the world just a little bit better and more open with every line I write.

  Also, as an anecdote, every good thing that has happened in my life was because I gave something away first, be it time, money, or code. I see no reason to change that now. It’s just good karma.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Pentaho Brings Business Intelligence to Hadoop

    Open source business intelligence company Pentaho unveiled BI and data integration tools for Hadoop this week, but they aren’t available to users of the free community edition of Pentaho.

Openness/Sharing

• Why We’ve Learnt to Love the Labs

  This more public kind of lab has been spreading, albeit slowly: we have Mozilla Labs, Apache Labs, Eclipse Labs, the just-announced LinkedIn Labs, as well as the rumoured Facebook Labs and Twitter Labs. I predict we will see many more; indeed, I fully expect every self-respecting software company to set one up.

• Beautiful technology: The Open Source Satellite Initiative

  His background is electrical engineering and computer science–he completed his Master’s at ICU Engineering in Korea. He works on things like satellites and sophisticated machines designed to avert war.

• What’s the Return on Investment for Open?

  And actually, that’s the real story here. The quantifiable contribution ratio — 3-to-1, 2-to-1, 4-to-1, whatever — might vary based on a lot of factors. The true “RoI of open” usually shows itself before a given piece of code makes it into the project. Many times one of us, the CollabNet-salaried developers, would post a proposal for a feature design, or even post a concrete implementation, and the non-CollabNet community would find bugs and potential improvements in it. They would also contribute new features themselves, in some cases quite major ones

• In praise of cheap science

  The era of ‘big science’ in the United States began in the 1930s. Nobody exemplified this spirit more than Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley whose cyclotrons smashed subatomic particles together to reveal nature’s deepest secrets. Lawrence was one of the first true scientist-entrepreneurs. He paid his way through college selling all kinds of things as a door-to-door salesman. He brought the same persuasive power a decade later to sell his ideas about particle accelerators to wealthy businessmen and philanthropists. Sparks flying off his big machines, his ‘boys’ frantically running around to fix miscellaneous leaks and shorts, Lawrence would proudly display his Nobel Prize winning invention to millionaires as if it were his own child. The philanthropists’ funding paid off in at least one practical respect; it was Lawrence’s modified cyclotrons that produced the uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb.

• Open Licenses vs Public Licenses

  It’s critical to distinguish “open licenses” from “public licenses” when discussing IP licensing, especially online — mostly because Creative Commons is so popular and as a result has muddied the waters a bit.

• Open Data

  • Nobel news blackout lifted: The Party Strikes Back

    Stand by for a major announcement: The Cabinet Office is about to publish the organogram of Whitehall.

  • Departmental structure charts

    As part of its ongoing drive to make Government more accountable and more transparent than ever before, the Cabinet Office is publishing new details about civil servants working at the heart of government.

  • Principles for Open Bibliographic Data

    While first attempts were mainly directed towards libraries and other public institutions we decided to broaden the principle’s scope by amalgamating it with Peter Murray-Rust’s draft publisher guidelines. The results can be seen below. We ask anyone to review these principles, discuss the text and suggest improvements.

Heise vs. the music industry – German appeal court rejects link ban

Since 2005, Heise has been involved in a protracted legal dispute with the music industry. In late 2008, the Higher Regional Court in Munich upheld a ban on Heise placing a specific link. Judges at the German Appeals Court have now found in favour of Heise Zeitschriften Verlag (publisher of heise online and The H’s parent company).

The Times of London’s impenetrable but straightforward paywall

The order to adopt the paywall came directly from Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, which owns the Times’ parent company News International. Murdoch has been extremely vocal about the importance of implementing paid online content both for financial and principled reasons since spring 2009. But Whitwell explained that the thinking at the paper has suggested for some time that this could be the right move to take.

Two mice and two pointers

So, please, can somebody do this. Is a simple hack, but I am not a programmer. Nowadays to have two mice attached to the computer is easy. Just connect them to two usb ports, but them they will share the same pointer. That would be no good. The idea is to have a pointer for each mouse. Then will mouse typing speed will soar!

Joan Siefert Rose on the insanity of entrepreneurship

Joan Siefert Rose is the president of CED, a 25-year-old organization with 5,500 active members who promote and work to accelerate the entrepreneurial culture in North Carolina and the Research Triangle area in particular. She gave a talk at today’s TEDx Raleigh event outlining the six symptoms of what she called the “Insanity of Entrepreneurship.”

Health/Nutrition

• Rinderpest virus has been wiped out, scientists say

  Scientists working for the UN say that they have eradicated a virus which can be deadly to cattle.

  If confirmed, rinderpest would become only the second viral disease – after smallpox – to have been eliminated by humans.

• Eat less meat, save the planet? Livestock nears sustainability limit

  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that agriculture accounts for 10-12 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This figure does not include land conversion effects; taking those into account, the number jumps to almost thirty percent, and livestock production accounts for the bulk of these emissions. Rearing livestock also uses a great deal of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which goes into the animals’ feedstock.

  A new analysis of the carbon and nitrogen cycles suggests that livestock production is on a path to unsustainability, and that it will push us beyond Earth’s safe operating limits by the middle of the century.

Security

• Friday’s security updates

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Twitterphobia and the mainstream media

  IMHO, the experiment was a brilliant success. It highlighted the amazing range of things that the police service is called upon to do, and made that point more forcefully than any official speech by a senior officer or Home Secretary could do.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Confounding Fathers

  Glenn Beck’s view of American history stems from the paranoid politics of the fifties.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Nobel news blackout lifted: The Party Strikes Back

  On October 14th, the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department relaxed their total news blackout around Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Major online news portals, including Netease and Sina, seem to have been instructed to prominently position a pair of Xinhua Daily articles that respond to the Nobel announcement.

  The two articles, physically positioned high up on the news portal websites, are titled “From the Dalai Lama to Liu Xiaobo: What the Nobel Peace Prize Tells Us” and “Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo was an Especially Big Mistake.”

  Following days of media blackout, the strong push behind the two articles suggests that the Party’s propaganda apparatus is finally gearing up to ‘lead public opinion,’ a media control strategy used by the Party since 2005. Before 2005, the Party typically responded to negative events by suppressing all related news stories. Over the last five years, however, the Party’s more common reaction to politically sensitive news has been to temporarily block all reports, craft an official version of events, and order media outlets to publish only the official version.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As Negotiators Launch Talks On Biodiversity, Industry Requests IP Protection

  This week, global attention will be focussed on hopes to find solutions to give the world a better chance to reduce the loss of biodiversity and reach agreement on an international instrument ensuring benefits are being shared. Intellectual Property Watch will be in Nagoya, Japan to report on the negotiations.

  The 10th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) will take place in Nagoya from 18-29 October. Two intense weeks during which member states of the convention will have to agree on the next 2011-2020 strategic plan for the CBD, and finalise a binding international instrument on access and benefit sharing (ABS) of the commercial benefits derived from biological resources, and the prevention of biopiracy.

• Copyrights

  • Google Music in China… the way it should be everywhere.

  • Public outrage mounts over plan to nab pirated DVD buyers

    Public outrage is mounting over the proposal by the Domestic Trade and Consumerism Ministry to penalise those who buy pirated DVDs and VCDs.

    Accountant Ahmad Huzaimi Ghazi, 27, said it was unfair to take legal action on people who buy such DVDs, when original DVDs were too expensive.

  • Album price ‘should drop to £1′

    The price of music albums should be slashed to around £1, a former major record label boss has suggested.

    Rob Dickins, who ran Warner Music in the UK for 15 years, said “radically” lowering prices would help beat piracy and lead to an exponential sales rise.

  • Former UK Record Boss Proposes $1.60 Album to Fight P2P

    Rob Dickens, former head of Warner Music in the UK, proposes a “micro-economy” in which album sale prices are “radically” reduced, and in which the resulting increase in sales volume more than makes up for the drop in prices.

  • India to align copyright norms with global standards

    ‘The Copyright Amendment Bill 2010 contains better provisions to deal with technology issues by extending protection of copyright material in India over digital networks related to literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, films and sound recordings,’ said Amit Khare, joint secretary in the ministry of Human Resource Development, Friday.

  • MPAA Copy-Protected DRM Site Hacked By Anonymous

    A site run by the MPAA has become the most recent victim of cyber attacks being carried out by Anonymous. CopyProtected.com, a site used to inform on copy protection and DRM on DVD and Blu-ray movie discs, now displays a missive from the anarchic group . After a few seconds it redirects visitors to the homepage of The Pirate Bay.

  • The Impossible Job Of Being The Copyright Czar

    The administration’s “IP czar” (more technically, the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator”), Victoria Espinel, recently gave a talk at the Future of Music Coalition event in Washington DC, and while I had seen various reports about her speech, and had a few submissions asking me to comment, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Espinel basically said the same things she’s been saying all along. Her job is to “protect the creativity of US citizens.” And, to her credit, she doesn’t just define that as big companies. While reports of her pressuring ISPs, payment processors and registrars to voluntarily block or disable accounts of infringers is… troubling, she is always careful to try to “balance” things. This was evident in the IP Strategic Plan she released a few months back. While it makes some suggestions that clearly makes industry interests happy, at the same time, it tosses some breadcrumbs to those concerned about how over-aggressive IP laws can actually hinder quite a lot of creativity.

  • The “Imbecile” and “Moron” Responds: On the Freedoms of Remix Creators

    “Remix,” in the sense the competition intended, means a creative work that builds upon the creative work of others. That doesn’t mean simply grabbing or using the work of others. It means using the work of others in a way that is transformative, or critical. The rules of the competition expressly required that every entry “recombine[] and modif[y] existing digital works to create a new transformative work.” The recombined or modified work must, the rules specified, be either original with the remixer, in the public domain, or “created under the protection of fair use.” Every entry that I reviewed had a strong, almost certain argument that it satisfied the requirements of “fair use.”

  • FREE – THE JOURNEY

  • ACTA/Hadopi

    • ACTA – PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS!

    • Hadopi? Not Even Scared!

      The Minister of Culture and the Hadopi itself have been prompt to announce the launch of the Hadopi’s operations: here we are, no later than the end of the summer, the Hadopi would ready to send its first mail to Internet users who have been caught in Trident Media Gard’s nets, the private society empowered by rights holders representatives3 to scan file sharing on peer-to-peer networks. However, analysis of enacted laws and decrees calls for more caution on this potential threat. The Hadopi might be unable to impose penalties, but it could be that the Hadopi should not even be authorized to send any warning without prior judicial ruling.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Did you ever tried Google Search Engine for Linux users?

Google offers a good search tool targeted for Linux users.

Linux Foundation sets record for stating bleeding obvious

Until this morning, I was convinced that the late Benjamin Disraeli had it down pat when he said that there are three forms of deception – lies, damn lies and statistics.

Server

• Smart Clusters: Intelligence Is As Intelligence Does

  The following topic scares me for two reasons. First, maybe I read too many sci-fi novels about Artificial Intelligence (AI) going wrong (or right, we’ll get to that in bit). Second, most HPC people are pragmatic individuals who deal with numbers and results that have a firm mathematical underpinning. Talking about AI as an HPC application is not quite a mainstream discussion.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 371 [Ogg]

• Episode 149: Lens Flares Ahead!

Kernel Space

• Book Excerpt: Linux Kernel Development, 3rd Edition.

  In this chapter, we introduce some of the basics of the Linux kernel: where to get its source, how to compile it, and how to install the new kernel. We then go over the differences between the kernel and user-space programs and common programming constructs used in the kernel. Although the kernel certainly is unique in many ways, at the end of the day it is little different from any other large software project.

• LinSched Advances For Testing The Linux Scheduler

  While we are close to seeing the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, this week LinSched for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released. LinSched is a simulator that allows testing the Linux kernel scheduler in user-space for modifying and observing its scheduling behavior.

  LinSched is not a new tool, but it comes from the academia world (University of North Carolina) and has since seen adoption by new developers looking to understand the kernel scheduler and is also used by corporations like Google. This new release of LinSched is based upon the Linux 2.6.35 kernel and now supports several additional features of the kernel.

Applications

• Command Line Little Helper: CLI Companion

• Introducing: Recipe Manager

  Three years ago, Daniel Taylor (of Arista fame) made a small application designed to store and manage your favourite recipes. It was simple, lightweight, elegant. He called it Recipe Manager (got a better, unique name, anyone?) and released a “technology preview” along with the file format spec onto this website.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HTML5: Up and Running

  • Inside MySQL Character Sets & Settings

    Character sets are ways of storing string or text data in a database. Since the world’s languages use different character sets for their writing systems, a database must support many different types of character sets to store information in those languages. For Western European languages, for example, there are alphabets with many overlapping characters, but in addition some require accents, different currency characters, and so on. For Asian languages with many more characters, a multi-byte character set is required since one byte is not large enough to store all the characters that can be represented in that language.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Using digiKam with MySQL

    By default, digiKam uses SQLite as its back-end for storing important metadata and thumbnails. But the photo management application also provides support for the popular MySQL database engine, and it comes with a database migration tool that can help you to move your data from SQLite to MySQL. Of course, you might wonder why you’d want to switch to MySQL when SQLite already does a good job of managing the data? Using MySQL as digiKam’s database back-end allows you to store the data on a remote server. This way, you can use multiple digiKam installations (e.g., on your notebook and desktop machine) to access and manage your photo collections. You can also use MySQL tools to back up and analyze digiKam’s data.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GTK+ Continues To Become More X11-Agnostic

    As good news for those of you interested in GTK+ applications on Mac OS X and other operating systems, or to even run such applications within a Wayland Display Server on Linux rather than an X Server, this tool-kit used by GNOME continues to become more X11-agnostic and easier to port.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 14 Spotlight Feature: Keeping Secure with OpenSCAP

      Back by popular demand, we’ll again be posting a series of blogs leading up to the Fedora 14 “Laughlin” release, which highlight some of the cool new features planned in the latest Fedora distribution. Up first is a feature that boosts security in Fedora 14: OpenSCAP.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Unity uTouch demo

      One of the more exciting aspects of Ubuntu 10.10 is undoubtedly the Unity shell in Ubuntu Netbook Edition and the uTouch touch screen capabilities bundled with it. In his latest blog entry Canonical’s Gerry Carr unveils this new user experience in a cool video demonstration that shouldn’t be missed…

      “One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them,” explains Carr. “But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.”

    • The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

      This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) desktop 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.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Galaxy Tab Gets Unboxed For the First Time [VIDEO]

    • Motorola Flipout Arriving at AT&T, Goes on Sale Sunday

      Thanks to a trusted source, we know the Flipout has started arriving in retail outlets around the country and that they will be available starting this Sunday, October 17th.

    • Motorola Cliq Update Coming “Soon”

Events

• Registration Open For Linux.conf.au 2011

  We’ve known since January that Linux.conf.au 2011 would be in Brisbane, and now registration for Australia’s key Linux event has opened up.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • we’re getting fast

    Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team!

Oracle

• Why Is Microsoft So Scared of OpenOffice?

  Microsoft and its supporters have a long history of applying all kinds of FUD to any discussion of free and open source software. Whether it’s Linux or other free alternatives to Microsoft’s high-priced products, it seems no conversation can take place without the inevitable insinuations about higher total cost of ownership, lack of support, and other baseless fearmongering.

• What does IBM joining OpenJDK mean for Java?

  This week IBM announced it would be supporting Oracle’s OpenJDK. At first glance it seems like “Great!”

  Isn’t it good that two big supporters of Java are getting behind a single open source project?

  Well, in my personal opinion, no. It is bad. Bad for Java. I’ll try to explain why.

  The first point is that IBM are not just saying they will support OpenJDK. They are also saying that are pulling effort out of Apache Harmony. Apache Harmony is a project to build an Open Source JVM under the Apache license, rather than the GPL which is the license under which OpenJDK is available.

Business

• Open Source ERP + CRM in the Cloud: opentaps and Amazon EC2

BSD

• FreeBSD gets USB 3.0 Support

  It seems FreeBSD is receiving support for USB 3.0.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSF initiates “Respects your Freedom” hardware endorsement

  The Free Software Foundation has announced the initial criteria of the “Respects Your Freedom” hardware endorsement programme. Under the programme, the FSF will endorse products that comply with its conditions, which include; using only free software in all parts of the product, ensuring the software can be built using only free software tools and allowing user installation of modified software. The non-profit organisation is seeking to get feedback on these criteria and hopes to use the process to raise the interest of hardware manufacturers.

Project Releases

• GNU MyServer 0.10 released

Openness/Sharing

• Net Positive: A Conversation with Clay Shirky

  The Internet has brought about a sea change in the way societies organize and operate. Few scholars anticipated the trend sooner, or articulated it with greater force and optimism, than Clay Shirky. In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Shirky described how new social structures were being created spontaneously as a result of the Web’s astounding ability to enable people to coordinate—instantly and across distances—not only with other individuals, but with the masses. Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, develops his ideas further. He sees a revolution in the way people are beginning to pool their free time. “Cognitive Surplus,” he says, “is essentially answering the question, What is Wikipedia made of? What is Linux made of? What is YouTube made of? It is made of the coordinated contributions of the world’s connected citizenry.”

Health/Nutrition

• Antidepressant reboxetine no better than a placebo, study finds

  An antidepressant prescribed in the UK over the last 13 years is ineffective and potentially harmful, according to a damning study published today.

  The drug, reboxetine, which is known in the UK under the trade name Edronax, works no better than a placebo, or dummy pill, say scientists in the British Medical Journal, who accuse the manufacturer, Pfizer, of failing to disclose the results of trials which show its inadequacies.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Western lifestyles plundering tropics at record rate, WWF report shows

  The Earth’s population is using the equivalent of 1.5 planets’ worth of natural resources, but the long-term decline of animal life appears to have been halted, a WWF report shows.

  The latest Living Planet report, published today by the conservation group, also reveals the extent to which modern Western lifestyles are plundering natural resources from the tropics at record levels.

• Deepwater drilling: risks and consequences

  What if officers of corporations in the oil, coal or auto industry were to face arrest and possible prosecution, when their actions in the US – as in Hungary – result in deaths? Might that change the calculation of acceptable risk?

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Chinese Communist party veterans defy censors with call for free speech

  Communist party elders are defying China’s censors by pressing ahead with a bold demand for freedom of expression, after authorities erased their attack on the “invisible black hand” of central propaganda officials.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Five problems Linux still needs to overcome

Greg Kroah-Hartman’s, a Linux kernel developer and a Novell engineer, Linux Driver Project (LDP), has been creating Linux drivers for years for anything that any vendor brought to the project that needed one made for it for years now. Kroah-Hartman and his crew of open-source developers charge nothing to create Linux hardware drivers. Despite that, a handful of companies still won’t release Linux drives. Other companies, like Wi-Fi chip vendor Broadcom, that have been slow to release Linux drivers has recently taken to making them. So what’s the real problem?

I think there are several problems hiding under the ‘drivers’ issues. First, even now some hardware doesn’t have any Linux drivers, or, more commonly, the drivers aren’t that good. That’s true of Windows as well, but people seem to give Windows a pass for this kind of thing.

Aruba Revs Its Wireless Gear with ArubaOS 6.0 release

ArubaOS is the underlying network operating system that powers Aruba’s wireless access points and controllers, and is built on top of a Linux base. With ArubaOS 6.0, new spectrum analysis, security and quality of service capabilities are being baked in. The new ArubaOS comes as Aruba is growing its market footprint following a partnership deal with Dell.

Linux users to get AUSkey access before Christmas

The key replaces the need to separately log into online government services with a username and password, and is integrated into commercial software to provide businesses with a point of access to the Australian Tax Office (ATO) portals, its electronic commerce interface, and the Australian Business Register.

Desktop

• Christmas? It’s Still 90 Degrees Here..

  But for us with with The HeliOS Project, it’s one of the most satisfying times of the year…haranguing advertising notwithstanding.

  Last year, between November 1st and December 25th, we built and gave away 41 computers. Three of them I delivered and set up on Christmas Day.

  [...]

  We’ve blown through the machines gathered at this year’s Linux Against Poverty event, planned and hosted by Lynn Bender. Having such an all-encompassing event twice in one year is just too much to ask of anyone…it takes months to plan and over 50 people to execute.

Server

• Linux Foundation highlights growth, but what versions?

  The Linux Foundation survey also highlights continued gains for Linux at the expense of Unix, with 19.8% of respondents indicating a decrease in their use of the OS (compared with 18% decreasing use of Windows and only 1.8% decreasing use of Linux). Those planning on increased use were 76% for Linux, 41% for Windows and 19.5% for Unix. We also wonder whether Oracle’s end of support for OpenSolaris will perpetuate Unix-Linux migration?

Google

• Google Testing Chrome OS Release Candidates. Official Release 1 Month Away?

  At their official unveiling event 11 months ago, Google promised that Chrome OS would be ready to by the end of this year — before the holiday season. It looks like they will be able to keep that promise, as bug comments on their Google Code site for the project indicate that the OS has already hit “RC” status — also known as “Release Candidate”.

Ballnux

• White Samsung Fascinate and Sony Ericsson X10 joining Dell Streak in Best Buy this month

Kernel Space

• Solid-state storage devices and the block layer

  Over the last few years, it has become clear that one of the most pressing scalability problems faced by Linux is being driven by solid-state storage devices (SSDs). The rapid increase in performance offered by these devices cannot help but reveal any bottlenecks in the Linux filesystem and block layers. What has been less clear, at times, is what we are going to do about this problem. In his LinuxCon Japan talk, block maintainer Jens Axboe described some of the work that has been done to improve block layer scalability and offered a view of where things might go in the future.

• Aava Mobile Joins Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Aava Mobile has become its newest member. It will participate in the MeeGo project with specific emphasis around x86-based devices and the mobile user interface.

Applications

• Blasphemy! Three graphical tools

  One of the fun things about bouncing around between distros is that you occasionally (or should I say frequently?) see new and interesting software you didn’t know existed.

  [...]

  If you you have a digital book or something similar, you’ll probably be interested in gutenpy, if just for its ability to deftly arrange and manage a database of more than 33,000 books, authors, languages, etc.

• The Battle Rages On: CLI vs. GUI

  Every now and then, when surfing the blogosphere, I come across waves after waves of postings stating how “Linux needs to rely less on the CLI” or “Windows is perfect for basic users because everything can be done with the GUI”…blah, blah, blah. In fact it was this article that prompted this posting. It gets tiring reading the same things over and over again, but it hasn’t stopped me from adding my 2 cents.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Script To Fix The Ubuntu Plymouth For Proprietary Nvidia And ATI Graphics Drivers

  • Script To Fix The Ubuntu Plymouth For Proprietary Nvidia And ATI Graphics Drivers

  • How To Disable The Spotify Tray (Notification Area) Icon In Linux

  • Multiple X (Desktop) Sessions in Ubuntu

  • Resolving SELinux Boot Error

  • How To Find Servers and Hundreds of Online Players for Popular Linux FPS Game Urban Terror

  • How to use eCryptfs (Cryptographic Filesystem) in Ubuntu Linux

  • HowTo: Use Bash Parameter Substitution Like A Pro

  • Hardening CentOS kernel with grsecurity

  • How To Upgrade Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) To 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

  • Snakes on a Couch! Using Python with CouchDB, Part II– Where do you want to eat?

  • HowTo: Use Bash Parameter Substitution Like A Pro

  • get rid off ConsoleKit / Dbus / Hal stuff on a server

  • Zenity 2.32 “Still rocking” – Missing Feature from release notes

  • Blocking Bad Crawlers with Apache mod_evasive

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Solid Sprint Enhances Key KDE Platform Technologies

    Solid is the part of the KDE Platform that handles interaction with hardware, making it easy for application developers to deal with things like network availability by abstracting underlying libraries within a familiar KDE-style API. As such it is an essential component across all kinds of KDE software. It is getting clear that Solid is becoming a well defined team within KDE and everybody is exited about the idea of attracting more developers interested in hardware support to the desktop, mobile devices, netbooks, media center and beyond. There are now quite a few developers working on Solid so it was a good time to get them all together for a sprint in Madrid, Spain.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • UPR 10.04 RC1 released

  • Sabayon 5.4 (CoreCDX)

  • RIPLinuX 11.0

  • SystemRescueCd 1.6.2

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fusion Fedora 14 Remix beta Debuts

      Fusion Linux is a completely free and open source based Linux operating system, it is also a Fedora Remix. It is a installable Live DVD/USB image that includes multimedia functionality out of the box with added desktop tweaks for better usability and additional software.

    • First Look – Fusion Fedora 14 beta Gnome – Review

      Conclusion:

      Pros:

      * Very stable for a beta
      * Easy and safety-concious installer rivals or exceeds Ubuntu’s Ubiquity
      * Extra software via the RPM Fusion repositories and others
      * Nice Chrome web browser didn’t crash at all, as it does in some distro’s
      * Fast and no noticeable slowdowns or freezing under load
      * Great detection of video on both my testbed PC’s
      * Stylish and easy-to-use Desktop and menu
      * Rivals or maybe exceeds some aspects of Ubuntu though still beta

      Cons:

      * Somewhat large install, maybe release a Netbook or single CD version (probably already happening
      * Will it support nVidia proprietary graphic’s drivers, including Legacy?

    • Fedora 13: Fixing sound and video for the Lenovo G555

      In order for the “standard” fix to work for sound, I needed 2.6.34 and the full ALSA version 1.0.23 to go with it. Unfortunately, I had to get the missing ALSA bits — meaning the ALSA-driver — from another repo, as they’re not in Fedora 13′s official repository (and seemingly not needed to have working ALSA for reasons that continue to elude).

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Unity and uTouch

      One of the most exciting things about the Ubuntu 10.10 release has been the delivery of the Unity ‘shell’ in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. For the uninitiated, this delivers a very different user experience to that in the main desktop edition. For a start the icons of the most popular applications are permanently featured on the left-hand side of the screen. This borrows more from the smartphone interfaces but is adapted for use on, in this case, netbooks. So there remains a workspace where users still have sufficient room to watch video, edit photos, create documents, play games, read the web, write emails – all of the usual tasks we use a computer for, day to day.

    • Maverick Upgrade *sigh*

      I’m fairly conservative when it comes to upgrading Ubuntu, every upgrade fails in some way on this System76 laptop. One week after the release of 10.10 and after asking lots of people if they had any problems. I decided to upgrade.

      I shouldn’t have bothered.

    • Installing Ubuntu 10.10

    • 50+ Beautiful Hand-picked Ubuntu Wallpapers

      Ubuntu is a computer operating system originally based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software with additional proprietary software available.It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu (“humanity towards others”). Ubuntu provides an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation. Web statistics suggest that Ubuntu’s share of Linux desktop usage is about 50 percent, and upward trending usage as a web server.

    • Ubuntu – The Flagship Linux Desktop Distro

      The year after Ubuntu’s first release the amount of searches of “Ubuntu” versus searches for “Linux” was 13 to 1

    • 10 Reasons to Install Ubuntu 10.10

      It’s been a few days since I installed Ubuntu 10.10 and my initial good impressions have not only been confirmed, but exceeded. In my PREVIEW and REVIEW articles I covered some concepts and features that I considered innovative, surprising or simply welcome. Today I want to present 10 reasons why this release is totally worth it installing.

    • Spice up Ubuntu 10.10 desktop with Cairo-Dock

      Ubuntu 10.10, the latest edition of the popular Linux distribution, which was just reviewed here, ships with the same blank desktop that has come to identify the Ubuntu desktop. But you do not have to live with it. You can spice it up with a very simple and elegant application. You can go from the default desktop shown below, to a more sexy desktop.

    • Open Source Technologies: Ubuntu 10.10 Cozies Up to Android, iPhone and the Cloud

      The October 2010 release of Ubuntu Linux brings the usual slate of free and open-source software updates, alongside unique new capabilities around cloud services integration. The distribution’s Ubuntu One personal cloud service adds interoperability with Android and iOS-based mobile devices, as well as new support for Windows.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 builds on app store, cloud service strengths

    • Askubuntu Support Site Has Good Pedigree

      All in all, it’s great to see this kind of crowdsourced support for Ubuntu, and given the fact that lack of support is so often cited by IT administrators and users as a shortcoming with open source software, it could make a difference for the new version of Ubuntu. Check it out.

Devices/Embedded

• $250 ARM9 computer supports PoE, sips two Watts

  The Linux-based Gateway Express 2 (GWX2) Embedded Computer incorporates Techsol’s ARM9-based SA2410 Medallion module, and offers up to 64MB of SDRAM, a microSD slot, an Ethernet port, and four USB ports, says the company.

• Phones

  • The biggest mistake Palm has made with WebOS

    Palm’s WebOS (a Linux variant) based phones have been out for a while but I haven’t had the need to consider them until recently (in the form of my Treo 650 broken down).

    My Treo 650 was a real workhorse, containing hundreds of contacts, thousands of calendar entries (I use the calendar actively and like to keep entries for a very long time for reference), lots of todos and memos. As a long time Linux/Ubuntu user, I have synchronized and backed up my Treo with JPilot, which is an excellent Linux application. In the past, I have used several Palm devices and I was always able to migrate my complete PIM database with ease between the old device and the new one.

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo 1.1 for ARM handsets gets closer

      The MeeGo project says MeeGo 1.1 will be available soon for the Nokia N900 smartphone, which will be able to boot into either the MeeGo or Maemo flavors of Linux. Meanwhile, Aava Mobile, which is porting MeeGo to its Intel Atom N6xx based Aava Mobile smartphone reference design, joined MeeGo’s overseer, the Linux Foundation.

    • Nokia Prepares to Give Developers a Look at High-End System

      As previously reported, Nokia has high hopes for the MeeGo operating system, which merges Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo Linux-based operating systems, to lead its next-generation mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet computers.

      [...]

      In the blog post, titled “MeeGo calling – on N900,” Mr. Hakulinen said that after months of work the team is in its last phase of development for MeeGo version 1.1, which will give smartphone application developers something tangible to work with. Mr. Hakulinen also said they’re close on an update that will allow users to run both the current N900 operating system, Maemo, and MeeGo on the device.

  • Android

    • LEGO Launches Robot-Controlling Android App

      Semi-autonomous robots are already available in a number of forms: the most notable being iRobot’s Roomba and Scooba line of single-purpose devices. And the new MINDdroid app isn’t going to replace such commercially available robots. But for now, my son and I can look into using a smartphone to remotely control the robot arm we built a few months back.

    • Opera Mobile for Android Coming Soon

    • HTC Releases Source For T-Mobile G2

      Is it that time already? Like clockwork, HTC has released the source code for the G2 – only this time, it doesn’t appear that they’re being very vocal about it. Instead, a few G2 enthusiasts in the #G2ROOT channel on Freenode have managed to find it while digging through HTC’s site.

    • Google: We’re on Track to Make $1 Billion this Year from Android

      Google held a financial earnings conference call earlier today and threw out some interesting mobile-related stats to prove that their desktop search strategy isn’t the only thing poised to earn them some big bucks. According to Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg, if you take all of last quarter’s earnings and extrapolate the trends over the next year, they could be looking at over $1 billion in revenue. It’s a far cry from the $10 billion goal they’ve set before, but it’s a good first step.

Events

• Linux Plumbers Conference keynote and event lineup

  The Linux Plumbers Conference has announced keynotes by Michael Meeks and Jonathan Corbet, as well as several evening events.

• Optimizing Linux Applications on ARM Processors

  I highlighted the Cortex-M4 Development tool seminar yesterday, but there is another session added to the ARM Connected Community programme: Optimizing Linux Applications on ARM Processors

• Registrations open for Australian Linux conference

  Registrations have opened for the forthcoming Australian national Linux conference which is scheduled to be held in Brisbane from January 24 to 29 next year.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 by the End of October

    If all goes according to plan, Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 could be made available for download by the end of October 2010.

SaaS

• Open Source Cloud Project Development Jumps 70 Percent

Oracle

• Java wars: IBM joins OpenJDK as Oracle shuns Apache Harmony

  Prior to acquiring Sun, Oracle was one of several companies that sided with Harmony and called for the test suite to be made available under suitable terms, as stipulated by the JCP policy. Oracle reversed its position, however, after completing its acquisition of Sun. Like Sun, Oracle intends to exercise its control over the test suite licensing in a manner that will drive open source Java adopters towards OpenJDK, the implementation that it controls.

• Will Oracle and IBM Help Java Move Forward?

  As concerns over Oracle’s allegedly territorial behavior toward Java continue to spread, with its lawsuit aimed at Google regarding parts of the Java code used in the Android mobile OS fueling the wall of worry, Oracle’s agreement to cooperate with IBM on advancing Java is drawing mixed interpretations. Are two of the biggest software titans necessarily going to proceed with the kind of open goals and focus on open standards that Sun Microsystems did?

• Microsoft Launches FUD VS OpenOffice.org

  Were did all these quotes come from? None other than twelve Microsoft cases studies (You can find a full list/links to these on ArsTechnica). When watching the video you will also notice clever advertising tricks such as a brown colored background whenever they are speaking about OpenOffice and a pleasant blue colored background whenever Microsoft Office is mentioned. This video is nothing other than pure FUD, plain and simple. If Microsoft really does love open source they have a strange way of showing it.

• http://ostatic.com/blog/will-oracle-and-ibm-help-java-move-forward

  And, this is hardly the first time that Microsoft has shown its poker hand regarding the OpenOffice suite. Jonathan Schwartz, who was Sun Microsystems CEO and had deep involvement in the progress of OpenOffice, started a blog after he left Sun called “What I Couldn’t Say,” which contains very interesting items from his tenure as Sun CEO. In this post from the blog, he notes the details of a meeting that he had with Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates years ago:

  “As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, ‘Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.’”

  It’s clearer now, more than ever, that Microsoft takes the OpenOffice suite seriously as competition. Let’s hope Oracle and the OfficeLibre community do right by the suite.

• Microsoft Starts A FUD Campaign Against OpenOffice.org

  Here is the Microsoft video…

• Key binding compatibility options

  As I posted on the libreoffice development list, I’m currently working on adding a new option page in the Options dialog, to provide a quick way to switch key bindings between LibreOffice’s default and OpenOffice.org’s for Calc. For the most part, the default key bindings are identical between LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org as far as Calc’s concerned, but there are some differences, which are enough to annoy those users who are accustomed to the old key bindings from OOo Calc.

CMS

• WordPress and Drupal: Convergence?

  Obviously, as a once-upon-a-time core developer for the project, and as someone who continues to work in that community, I am pretty familiar with WordPress. There’s hardly a day that goes by that I’m not hip-deep in WordPress code and news. I’ve watched its evolution over these past 7+ years as it has moved from a simple blogging system towards becoming a more full-featured CMS.

  [...]

  WordPress started with good usability, but a limited architecture and feature set. Drupal started with a strong architecture, but a very developer-centric user experience. But WordPress has been steadily improving its architecture. And Drupal has been working on its UI. They had different origins, and they have taken different paths, but they are both evolving towards CMS Nirvana. And we users get to ride along.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Respects Your Freedom

  Even if consumers have been brain-washed to feel it is OK for manufacturers of hardware and software to restrict their use of IT for commercial advantage, those who are aware should tell them there are alternatives and we should promote alternatives on all levels. Some day the freedom to use a PC free of arbitrary restrictions will be one of the considerations when purchasing PCs and peripherals and the monopoly will be truly broken. That day is coming soon.

The latter-day ‘scarlet letter’ of sex work

In the waning days of the last millennium, I worked as a stripper to pay for university. It requires no courage to admit this now, but had I written it a few years ago, when I taught high school, I would have been fired on the spot. My continued presence in the classroom would’ve set a bad example for the innocent teenagers in my charge, because we can’t let “The Children” think sex-industry workers could ever be decent people or anything.

Italy to combat prostitution by cutting trees

Environmental organisations today expressed outrage over a plan by local authorities in the Abruzzo region of central Italy to combat prostitution with deforestation.

For decades, local law enforcement and politicians have struggled to police the Bonifica del Tronto road, a haven for the sex trade that runs inland for more than 10 miles from the Adriatic coast alongside the river Tronto. Over the years, cameras have been installed, raids mounted, 24-hour patrols implemented and the mayors of towns near the road have signed bylaws imposing fines on prostitutes’ clients. All to no avail.

Health/Nutrition

• Where’s Da Bread?

  If you like cramming Lucky Charms and Wonder Bread into your piehole, you’re probably white. But you’re also probably somebody who should go to this Action Center to End World Hunger deal tonight at 6. Harper’s contributing editor and Vice contributing contributor Fred Kaufman will be there to outline how those dastardly diablos on Wall Street are responsible for starving millions of people and why you may not be able to afford to be such a fat piece of shit for much longer.

  Fred’s cover story for Harper’s June issue, “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It,” picks apart the relationship between Goldman Sachs and the 2008 food crisis that increased the number of hungry people in the world by a good 250 million. It can be a tough read if you’re not familiar with hedging, selling short, demand shock, perpetually selling long on wheat futures, or any of the weird, made-up bullshit that constitutes finance, but the story should be a wakeup call for those of us who take cheap food for granted, aka probably 99.999999% of us.

• MERCK SUED: HomeAgain® PET CHIP IMPLICATED IN CANCER

  Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has been served with a lawsuit over claims its HomeAgain® pet microchip induced cancer in a cat. Animal rights attorney Steven Wise seeks “reasonable compensatory damages” for a malignant tumor “likely” induced by a HomeAgain® ID chip implanted in his client’s cat, Bulkin

Security

• Oracle Plugs Java for Drive-by Downloads with October CPU

• Half of wi-fi networks can be hacked in seconds

  Of the 40,000 networks identified in the six cities, just under 20,000 had no password or the most basic form of security encryption, the research for card protection and insurance company CPP found.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Schoolchildren being warned of ‘terror risk’ for school outings to London

  More than 100,000 pupils were given the warning by Northamptonshire County Council, which issued an alert to all 349 of its secondary and primary schools.

• WikiLeaks says funding has been blocked after government blacklisting

  The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims that it has had its funding blocked and that it is the victim of financial warfare by the US government.

  Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects WikiLeaks donations, emailed the organisation to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Climate change could lead to Arctic conflict, warns senior Nato commander

  One of Nato’s most senior commanders has warned that global warming and a race for resources could lead to conflict in the Arctic.

  The comments, by Admiral James G Stavridis, supreme allied commander for Europe, come as Nato countries convene on Wednesday for groundbreaking talks on environmental security in the Arctic Ocean.

  The discussions, in the format of a “workshop”, with joint Russian leadership, are an attempt to create dialogue with Moscow aimed at averting a second cold war.

• Brussels plans strict new controls for offshore oil drilling

  The European commission is to reveal plans for tougher controls on offshore oil and gas drilling tomorrow. It would force national governments to abide by rules set in Brussels and extend liability for oil companies in the event of a disaster, The Guardian has learned.

Finance

• French protesters join forces in last-ditch attempt to derail pension reform

  French workers, students and schoolchildren today joined forces in a last-ditch day of strike action and street protests aimed at derailing Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension reform.

• New wave of French strikes raises spectre of May 1968 protests

  The battle between President Nicolas Sarkozy and the French unions over pension reforms enters a crucial phase today with a new wave of strikes and protests across the country.

• US bankers set for record pay and bonuses for second year

  US bankers are set for record compensation for a second consecutive year, shattering both the illusion of pay-reform and the expectation that bank bonuses would be tempered while the US economy remains weak.

  With third-quarter figures from JP Morgan expected to begin a bumper profit reporting season today, a study of more than three dozen banks, hedge funds, money-management and securities firms estimates they will pay $144bn (£90bn) in salary and benefits this year, a 4% increase on 2009.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• RepubliCorp

  The Cabal of Multinational Corporations is pleased to formally announce RepubliCorp^TM, a new combined entity following our complete merger with the Republican Party.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Schneier: invasions of privacy a “byproduction of the IT society”

• The Coalition and Civil Liberties

  It was surprising and disappointing to watch as the Labour government – which gave us the Freedom of Information Act – became the most authoritarian British regime in modern times. As we at Big Brother Watch pointed out in our manifesto before the election, the arrival of a new government offered an opportunity to undo some of that work – and indeed, both parties in the Coalition pledged before the election to reverse the rise of our surveillance state, and reaffirmed that intention in the Coalition agreement.

• Guest Post by Yasin Akgun: Facebook’s Privacy Problem

  There are only two reasons that Facebook is allowed to get away with their overzealous demands over your personal information. They can get away with it because people will simply obey and because there are no national or international laws governing who has a right to demand what personal information you hold and who does not hold these privileged rights. Both issues lie with one group of people, the members of the public. We have the power to do something about it, whether or not we choose to exercise this fast diminishing power is another matter.

• Bolivian newspapers stage protest

  Several Bolivian newspapers protested last week against a proposed law that would allow the government to shut down media outlets it deems guilty of racism. They carried front pages bearing a single slogan: “There is no democracy without freedom of expression.”

• The Values of Everything

  Progressive causes are failing: here’s how they could be turned around

• Liu Xiaobo’s wife under house arrest

  The wife of Liu Xiaobo, this year’s winner of the Nobel peace prize has been placed under house arrest as part of a crackdown by the Chinese authorities aimed at stifling celebration following the award.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Council of Europe Agrees That Net neutrality is Key to Freedom of Expression

  On September 29th, 2010, the Committee of Ministers at the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted a declaration on network neutrality1. The declaration is overall a very good news for the protection of freedom of expression and communication in Europe. It is one more indication that governments are finally realizing the importance of the Internet’s core architectural principles for the future of rights and freedoms in our democracies.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda

    Copyright has long been viewed as one of the government’s most difficult policy issues. It attracts passionate views from a wide range of stakeholders, including creators, consumers, businesses, and educators and it is the source of significant political pressure from the United States. The latest chapter in the Canadian copyright saga unfolded in June 2010 as Industry Minister Tony Clement and Canadian Heritage James Moore tabled Bill C-32, copyright reform legislation billed as providing both balance and a much-needed modernization of the law. The introduction marked the culmination of months of public discussion and internal government debate.

  • ACTA

    • ACTA: EU/US monopoly protection ready for export to the rest of the world?

      The European Parliament will have an opportunity to vote on ACTA.