I have now changed my laptop to a linux (Ubuntu) machine and run a piece of software (Virtual Box) on it. Virtual Box is a program which pretends it is another computer – a virtual computer. On virtual box I run Windows. This is – I believe – a superior set-up and it is unlikely I will ever run a machine primarily on Microsoft again. I will explain why more fully below – but first I just wish to make a simple observation… if I take the hard drive out of my laptop and install it in my old laptop everything works just fine – the whole computer is functional. If I tried to do that with a windows operating system it would fail. This is likely to be important in the future of computing because I will be able to migrate my computer from a laptop to the cloud – or possibly onto my (linux powered) phone. It is unbelievably useful to have a hardware-independent computer.
Here at the LinuxCon conference, a panel of Linux kernel developers from Red Hat, Google, Novell and Oracle discussed what’s next for the ecosystem, and why not every kernel debuts with a big new feature.
If all goes according to plan, X.Org Server 1.9 will be released in about two weeks, but after that there still is the X.Org 7.6 release “katamari” to be done. While X.Org releases themselves aren’t as important any longer with the X Server releases being done at different points and the rest of the X.Org package collection being modular, the X.Org 7.6 release is expected in October.
Alan Coopersmith, the X.Org wrangler at Sun/Oracle, has done some X.Org 7.6 planning on the xorg-devel mailing list. On the date of the xorg-server 1.9 release, which is scheduled on the 20th of August but could potentially slip by a few days, all driver and protocol updates needed for the 1.9 release should also have been released. At this point, Alan would also like the first release candidate of Xlib 1.4.0 to be tagged.
SANE is just the application programming interface, a collection of tools and software libraries that allow developers to write powerful software, but it isn’t really a user application itself. The XSane project has built a nice graphical user interface, based on SANE and originally using the X graphical environment used on pretty much everything that isn’t Windows. And if you want to know why “X” is the name of the graphical environment, you’ll have to ask the people at MIT who invented X and made it open source and very popular.
Essentially all the UbuntuOne plugin for Shutter does is save the file to a specified synchronised UbuntuOne folder – which UbuntuOne notices and proceeds to upload. It’s nifty in that it means you don’t have to manually do anything – but you’ll still have to head to your UbuntuOne folder to grab a public link.
Indeed, Canonical has no need to fork GNOME and enhancements to a user interface don’t represent a fork. Look at Android. Motorola has its own MotoBlur interface that sits on top of the OS, but users are still running Android underneath.
Recently, we reported that Red Hat is in fact the largest contributor to GNOME–an environment that the company has a stake in. It’s not surprising to see Canonical experiment with how to treat GNOME, but it would be completely surprising for the company to choose to do an actual fork. Why? GNOME is a very well-done environment that will only increase in popularity, and it’s a user interface, where having users comfortable with it is part of its attraction.
If you’ve ever run a Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB), or booted from a rescue disk, you’ve probably used a version of SYSLINUX, even if you didn’t know it at the time. SYSLINUX, the work of H. Peter Anvin, is a bootloader for Linux which can boot from an MS-DOS FAT filesystem or create a bootable floppy (very old-school!); its close cousin ISOLINUX handles booting from CDs and similar media. SYSLINUX has always been enormously useful for first-time installs, when you’re often booting from a machine that is currently running Windows, but until fairly recently, you had to switch to another bootloader post-install, since SYSLINUX doesn’t handle ext* filesystems. However, EXTLINUX, a fairly recent addition to the Syslinux Project, does handle these filesystems (see below), giving another boot option besides GRUB and LILO for Linux systems.
Wipro has become the first Red Hat Premier Partner in India. The two companies have strengthened their strategic partnership through joint marketing and integration opportunities designed to bring open source solutions to enterprises across the subcontinent.
Making a virtual appliance is not that big a deal, but VMware faced some particular challenges in putting Zimbra in a virtual shrink wrapper to distribute it in a virtualized appliance format. For one thing, most of VMware’s customers are running Windows server operating systems, but Zimbra runs on Linux.
In the case of the virtual appliance version of Zimbra Collaboration Suite, the Linux in question is a distribution of Ubuntu. But SMB shops that use Windows don’t want to learn Linux, and VMware didn’t want to port ZCS to Windows, either.
The canonical-census package was created for a specific, but undisclosed, OEM customer of Canonical. It will be up to that customer as to whether or not they reveal the results of the data collection, says Spencer, and future plans for canonical-census beyond this one OEM have not been made, but if the scheme works well, it could be considered as an option at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit to provide data to the community.
You can probably use the OS for years, and never know what a command line parameter is. Quite simply one of the easiest to use Linux distros right out of the box, Canonical has seriously upped the ante and made an OS that can be enjoyed both for its simplicity and capability by anyone, geek or average consumer.
Make no mistake about it: Open source developers can be a very passionate bunch.
At the LinuxCon conference, the topic of why Google Android code is not part of Linux was the subject of some intense discussion. One such discussion became so heated that a panelist wound up telling a combative audience member to “shut up” before asking them to leave.
There’s no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it’s all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson — a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device — is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google’s mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we’ve got the goods on it.
The particularly interesting aspect of this OS is that the main guts of it are located on hosted servers. Almost everything is based inside the browser which is like an open source version of Google Chrome (called Chromium).
Jolicloud 1.0 just became available as a free download. This is the very first free cloud computing-based OS. As expected, Jolicloud is based on Linux and features an HTML user interface.
Jolicloud 1.0 is another Linux distribution that just released its first full version after several months of being in beta. What makes this different from the other Linux distributions available out there is that it integrates both native applications with web-based applications that looks like native apps. If that sounded familiar, well, it should if you tried Google’s ChromeOS or if you have use the pre-iTunes App Store iPhone and iPod Touch — where you save web-apps on the launcher and it looks like a native app.
Installing Linux distributions has gone a long way – from dozens of 3.5” diskettes to multiple CDs and to single DVDs. And now, you simple click a few buttons and that’s it – a few minutes later, you have a brand-spanking-new Linux desktop. The same can be said of Jolicloud. However, Jolicloud differs in one aspect — post-install, you need to register at Jolicloud.com for an account.
Wondering what to do with your old XO laptop now that the novelty has worn off? Consider donating it to the Digital Literacy Project (DigLit) and put a computer you’re no longer using into the hands of an elementary school student in one of two schools within the Boston Public School system.
just got a mail from adam holt, the olpc community support manager. olpc-affiliated filipino community group ekindling.org is looking for anyone with strong open source/sysadmin/teaching skills who could help on the ground deploying XOs and Sugar for an organized laptop deployment (100 XO-1.5s) beginning around september or october in the philippines.
Smartbook AG is shipping a seven-inch, 800 x 480 tablet computer for the German market equipped with Android 2.1. The Smartbook Surfer runs on a Telechips TTC8902 processor clocked to 720MHz, and offers 256MB of DDR2 memory, 2GB of flash, 802.11b/g, optional GPS, and a webcam, says the company.
With its roots in Eclipse and Java, BOS 5.2 boasts broad platform support, and runs on Linux, Windows and OS X. I tested the studio application on CentOS 5.5, Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04, with good results across the board.
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a complete management, hosting and access solution for virtualized desktops hosted in the datacenter. By enabling standardized virtual desktop images, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure helps reduce administration overhead, lower total cost of ownership and increase security.
There’s an important corollary here. Hackers, by their very nature, like playing with code, and the easiest/best/most satisfying way to do that is to play with open source code, and to share it with other hackers for feedback and kudos. As a result, many of the best hackers tend to be found either in the free software community, or at least aligned with many of its ideas.
Graham’s argument about the centrality of hackers to any company that needs good software therefore implies that free software is something that should be deployed at least internally – not just because of its own, evident virtues, but because it will help to keep those crucial hackers happy, and to attract more of the same. It’s an approach that is certainly much cheaper than trying to bribe them to stay despite the unhackerish software they are forced to use.
Understanding switching costs is definitely lacking in today’s discussion. That’s why people are locked in to proprietary standards, and have to pay astronomically high prices to decrypt their very own data back to ‘raw data’, to make it suitable for input in another program. Lot’s of people don’t see proprietary standards for what it is: Encrypting your data while you don’t have the key to decrypt it. Those people fail to note those exit costs of a platform are related to their very own choice of ‘entering’ that platform to begin with, and not related to the choice of migrating to another platform.
That’s why requiring open standards matters: It’s another way of requiring your own data not to be encrypted too much. Another way to require a supplier to enable you to retrieve your own raw data without infringing their intellectual property (monopoly? and being sued by them.
Britain’s eccentrics, recluses and misanthropes, you can relax. Ignoring neighbours and keeping your curtains permanently shut to the world outside might not win you many friends, but you’re no longer likely to be denounced as a possible terrorist.
A radio advert that urged listeners to consider calling the police’s anti-terrorist hotline if they had suspicions about local people who avoided company, kept their windows covered and eschewed bank cards for cash has been banned for potentially causing “serious offence”.
Putting aside the cost to the taxpayer (I’d say that these councils spend money like drunken sailors, but it’s an insult to drunken sailors who are at least spending their own money), what on earth does this mean..? Does it mean that people can use public facilities to snoop on who’s using particular car parks? To conduct surveillance on their neighbours, their “friends”, their co-workers, their spouses suspected of adultery..? Does it mean that people can scope out car parks to see what vehicles are there worth nicking? Can people read the numberplates on the cars (presumably so)? The list of infuriating possibilities is endless…
Oppressive heat and waves of toxic smog in Moscow has seen the death rate reach 700 a day – twice the normal rate, a senior Russian health official said today.
“The mortality rate has doubled,” said Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city’s health department. There were usually 360 to 380 deaths a day in the city, but “now that number is about 700″.
The function of forest protection completely disappeared, with no human or technical resources allocated to it whatsoever. It was no longer a federal mission and central management was dropped.
“Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive,” Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland’s ice sheet.
The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.
“What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,” he said.
Government austerity measures are already plunging the British economy into reverse according to figures published today which reveal sagging high street sales and renewed falls in house prices.
Expectations of widespread job cuts in the public sector have begun to discourage households from moving home or buying “big ticket” items such as furniture and carpets, with spending going on essential items and replacements only, said the British Retail Consortium. One of the worst-hit sectors is big-screen flat televisions, where sales have slowed markedly, but the BRC also noted year-on-year falls in items such as shoes. It said that high street sales are running 0.5% higher than last year on a like-for-like basis, with the small rise largely due to food price inflation. “Talk of public spending cuts is unsettling consumers and they are concentrating on essentials,” said the BRC director general, Stephen Robertson.
Two more regulating bodies, the U.S.-based Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and UK-based Financial Services Authority (FSA), are still probing into the bank’s failure to disclose to its investors a Wells notice that the SEC had handed it in early 2009– an entire year before the SEC’s lawsuit in April 2010.
Capmark Financial Group Inc.’s creditors sought court permission to sue Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. over a $1.5 billion loan made to the commercial property lender.
One of the most talked-about changes facing Wall Street is the end to proprietary trading. A number of banks were already scaling back their proprietary trading operations because of losses incurred during the financial crisis. Citigroup and JPMorgan are said to be looking at moving employees in those operations to other trading functions, as Goldman has started to do.
Sven Juerss, the chief executive of Microdrones GmbH, a German firm which built the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), said he expects to provide “dozens” more in the future.
However, Google has moved swiftly to deny that the purchase was for company use – Peter Barron, a spokesman for the firm’s UK office, told the Telegraph: “Google is not testing or using this technology. This was a purchase by a Google executive with an interest in robotics for personal use.”
Should companies be able to sue for libel? The recently launched Lord Lester libel reform bill includes a provision that companies would have to show substantial financial loss before being able to sue. The House of Commons select committee for culture, media and sport has also called for fundamental reform of libel law in respect of corporate reputation, while many Australian states have limited actions in libel to companies with fewer than 10 employees.
But to the conventionally minded English lawyer there is no question that companies should be able to sue for libel. After all, companies are “legal persons” – and in English law, personality goes a very long way. The view is that if “natural persons” can sue for libel then so can companies.
When Raja Petra Kamarudin, one of Malaysia’s best-known bloggers, heard he was to be detained without trial for the third time last February, he decided to flee the country. He was already facing sedition and criminal defamation charges after publishing a string of stories that linked the prime minister Najib Razak and his wife to the gruesome murder of a beautiful Mongolian translator, Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa, in 2006.
While Raja Petra says he was prepared to fight those charges in court, he was not willing to face detention without trial again under the country’s draconian Internal Security Act. “Under the ISA, they bypass the court process entirely,” says the blogger, whose Malaysia Today website regularly exposes the abuses of power that blight the south-east Asian nation. “If I’d let them get me a third time, I would have been a glutton for punishment.”
Want to hear something interesting? The often made claim that “there are no distinctions between developers and users” is at worst a lie and at best misinformation. What it actually means is that if you really don’t like something about a program you have the code and can change it yourself. What the implication though is that if you have an issue with a program you can contribute these thoughts to the developers and be taken seriously — which pretty much is never the case. The reality of the matter is that unless you are willing to actually code the fix yourself it simply wont get done and even then you have no guarantee of it actually being included. On average you have more chance of being listened to by closed source developers as their success is financially linked with your usage.
[...]
The very fact that no efforts are made to find out what your users think and what problems they are having is disturbing enough, actively putting roadblocks in their path is just madness. After all the only people who make it through this trial-by-fire are going to be the most tenacious pro-Linux advocates. Of course they think everything’s hunky dory and dispute what I say, it’s the very definition of selection bias — the unhappy people all left a long time ago.
While Linux 2.6.36 development continues apace, a number of new stable releases iron out various quirks in previous versions. New versions of PowerTop and graphics drivers for AMD and NVIDIA graphics chips offer numerous enhancements and bug fixes.
GNOME Do and Docky aren’t the only options Linux users have if they want to install a dock-style launcher on their systems. Two others, Avant Window Navigator and SimDock, are also in the running. While AWN has its faults and frustrations, it narrowly beats out GNOME Do on style points. SimDock, on the other hand, just doesn’t measure up to either.
Adobe rolled out a security update to their Flash Player yesterday and for Mac OS X users this update also integrates Gala — their codename for H.264 GPU video decoding in Flash on Mac OS X. With Adobe Flash Player 10.1.82.76 on Apple Mac OS X there is now GPU video decoding enabled by default to offload more of the playback work to the graphics card, assuming you are using a newer NVIDIA graphics processor. This is coming after Adobe introduced H.264 GPU decoding in their Windows Flash Player 10.1 release, but they continue to shaft Linux users with video support.
Hamish Paul Wilson started let me know of his porting of The Chzo Mythos to GNU/Linux at May 2010, and updated me on his progress at June 2010, now finally the porting is done and The Chzo Mythos is available for GNU/Linux free of charge !
They are available for purchase and download right over the Internet (often DRM-free), and some of them are pretty high quality. Here are five more you might not have played but are definitely worth giving a try.
Ok, today I have quite a lot of stuff, and its all Quake2 related :p Believe it or not Quake2 is alive and kicking… and its engine is featuring some of the very best open-source games!
For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome
THE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT KDE has been updated with over 1,700 new features and 16,000 bug fixes.
The cross platform application project best known for its desktop environment that is shipped by many Linux distributions has issued this major update a month after the rival project Gnome put one out. The latest KDE update features integration with Webkit in applications such as Konqueror, the default KDE web browser.
After giving it a spin for a few hours, GNOME Shell never really felt like a complete disaster for me. It works quite well in my 3 year old laptop with basic configuration. Though GNOME Shell still leaves a lot to be desired, you have to keep in mind that GNOME Shell is a still a work in progress.
Absolute Linux seems to get frequent updates and while writing this update 13.1.4 was already released on 30/07/2010 (Update: On 08/08/2010 apparently 13.1.41 was released). These incorporate the latest updates from Slackware but when looking at the Changelog on the website seem mostly small Absolute usability updates and bug fixes. This makes for the impression that it is always a bit of a moving target and never ‘quite right’ at release time, which begs the question why the developer does not rather wait a few days longer and release less often.
A deluxe version of Vector Linux 6.0 “SOHO” is due out in 10 days and will cost $22.99 on the Vector Linux website. This is something Vector Linux started doing during the 5.9 release. I like the idea of having a deluxe version available for convenience. Make sure you check out the Lighter version of Vector Linux which are lightweight, fast, and great on old hardware. Enjoy these screenshots of Vector Linux 6.0 SOHO edition.
Except for office applications we couldn’t complain about the packages that came with the OS. For instance in the internet and communications domain PC Linux came with a browser (Firefox), a twitter client (Choqok), an IM client (Pidgin), mail client (Thunderbird), torrent and even Dropbox ! There was no office suite bundled and the text editor (KWrite) was pathetic. At least AbiWord would’ve raised the score a little above the zero that we gave it on this criteria. The main menu was well categorised but a Mepis or Mint-like search would’ve been better. Although a nice addition was the displaying of recently used applications. Kwallet – the default password keeper integrates into all programs that require logins. We checked randomly for codec support and found that SM Player could handle all of the different encoded video files we threw at it. The default music player was Amarok which does what it’s supposed to quite well. For file managers there was a choice between Dolphin and Conqueror – nothing spectacular.
Copyright licensing and trademarks are two different areas of law, and we consider them separately in Ubuntu. The following policy applies only to copyright licences. We evaluate trademarks on a case-by-case basis.
The combination of Chromium and the Ice SSB edges out (barely) Peppermint OS One. It’s not a big enough difference that you could go wrong using Peppermint OS One, but the Chromium/Ice SSB combination was just fast enough to warrant using Peppermint Ice.
Ludwig Enterprises, Inc. (Pink Sheets:LUDG) board of directors announces that TheOne(TM) receiver will utilize Linux as its base operating software. This architecture will allow applications from other application developers to operate in TheOne(TM) radio. Applications such as jpeg viewer, media players, web mail, foxfire and others may be utilized. Rather than restrict or block outside applications Ludwig welcomes collaborative input from independent application developers resulting in rapid evolution of superior software. A report by the Standish Group states that adoption of Open Source software models has resulted in savings of approximately $60 Billion per year to consumers.
Mobile syncing remains a vital task that few really get right, but the open source NoSQL initiative aims to fill the gap, at least on Android. CouchDB, the open source database that is part of NoSQL and Apache, has been made available for the Google OS and will also be supported by Hewlett-Packard’s next release of webOS.
Modders and ROM developers are about to bury themselves in source code today and will chug six packs of Red Bull to stay up late into the night hacking away. HTC has released their valuable Android 2.2 source code for the EVO 4G, DROID Incredible, Aria, and Wildfire today allowing programmers and enthusiasts to get their hands dirty with code.
Linux has become omnipresent. It’s presence is so deep that a user may not even know that he/she is in-fact using Linux, the kernel. The GNU combined operating systems do give Linux its identity.
Yesterday we looked at Jolicloud as an option for netbook owners keen on using the net’s cloud computing potential. Today, we look at the big name in Linux: Ubuntu.
The latest version of Ubuntu “Lucid Lynx” — 10.4 — comes in a netbook-optimised version that is designed for computer makers to deploy on new netbooks, but it is also available for public download. It’s a great operating system choice for netbook users.
[...]
I personally prefer the Netbook Edition over the vanilla Desktop version. The user interface is very intuitive, and the resources footprint is smaller than the normal Ubuntu system. For most netbooks, you will be surprised with the power that Ubuntu Netbook Edition has in a fresh install, and the Ubuntu/Debian software installation system is one of the best on any platform, so installing the software to suit most user needs is rather easy and quick (or even the operating system itself for that matter).
Open source software is poised for rapid growth in enterprises over the next 12 months, but cost is no longer the primary driver behind open source adoption.
That’s according to a new study from global consultancy Accenture, which based its findings on interviews with 300 executives at organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland with annual revenues above US$500 million.
The group cites several reasons why women don’t participate more readily in the free software community and offers some solutions for remedying the problem. But is it enough?
Intelligence analysis software is about to go open source. Matthew Burton, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and software developer, is working on an open-source version of a CIA software tool called “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.”
Another key factor that keeps open source appealing is that it often does not require a high-end system to run well. Some of the applications run well even on older computers.
There are also open source equivalents to many programs Windows and Mac users would normally need to pay for. Among them is OpenOffice—a free, full-featured office suite.
Fiorina had a vision of HP as a GM of high tech. Hurd’s view was that of a new IBM, even though that had been done. These open source times call for something different, and a bigger dream.
Devotees of Google Wave have set up a protest site to persuade the global advertising giant not to abandon the collaborative messaging platform, following last week’s decision to halt development of the tool.
The decision to pull the plug on Wave was a giant blow for Google Australia, which led development of the tool. Now Wave followers from around the world have called for the company to reconsider.
When looking at the commercial RBAC marketplace, it’s important to note that some of the biggest players in the market aren’t the biggest companies. Because RBAC’s potential is still being realized, if a vendor can react faster to advancements in RBAC functionality, it can gain an advantage over its competitors. This positions smaller, boutique companies like Aveksa Inc., BHOLD Company and SailPoint Technologies Inc. in front of larger enterprise competitors like CA Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. (recently acquired by Oracle Corp.).
The Global Software Institute (GSI) has announced that, effective immediately, OpenDragon is available for free download by users anywhere in the world. OpenDragon offers a full suite of image analysis and raster GIS capabilities including image enhancement, supervised and unsupervised classification, geometric correction, measurement and statistics, vector capture and display, slope, aspect and buffer calculations and multi-criterion decision making. OpenDragon also includes the OpenDragon Toolkit, which allows users who can program in C to extend the software functionality.
Historically, the open source community has impacted both the economics and the innovations of the computer industry. Open source software is known for causing previously monolithic applications to become commoditized. In the database space, one only needs to look at MySQL and PostgreSQL. In the Web server space, there is Apache, and in application servers, there are Tomcat, JOnAS, JBoss, Jetty and GlassFish. In programming and scripting languages, there are the likes of Java, Perl and PHP. GNU Linux, in particular, has done so much to commoditize the operating system market that even phones use it.
As MySQL grew, Widenuis’ message of community got pushed back and that’s where things started to go wrong. Widenuis also slammed Sun, saying that had no respect for engineering talent. Wiednuis left Sun in 2009 and the main reason for his new MariaDB was about saving the people that he cared about and he wanted a good home for MySQL that he didn’t believe was in good hands.
A focus on community is what MariaDB is all about, Widenuis said he is now following a hacking business model. It’s not a company that is being built to be sold, it’s democratic and employees are all shareholders.
At the company’s strategy update, Oracle outlined the future for Solaris 11, but said nothing about OpenSolaris. Oracle’s John Fowler says that Solaris 11 will be a major upgrade to key components, such as networking stacks, threading, file systems, package management and maintenance. A focus on scalability would also be incorporated in preparation for the next generation of hardware, like the 128 core, 16,384 thread system with 64TB of memory that Oracle is currently developing. Solaris 11 is expected around the second half of 2011.
The motto for the 3.3 release is “Fit and Trim.” The phrase is vague, but suggests a concern with interface improvements. This impression is reinforced by the first item on the features list, which is “First Achievements of the Renaissance Project,” an OpenOffice.org sub-project focused on improving the interface. Further confirmation, if any is needed, is provided by the fact that only a few new features are scheduled and the rest are enhancements of existing features.
The 3.3 release is available on the OpenOffice.org site in 323 and 64 bit .RPM and .DEB packages, as well as source tarballs. Regardless of your choice of formats, the release installs into a separate sub-directory of /opt, allowing it to co-exist with other OpenOffice.org releases. To start the release, click /opt/ooo-dev3/program/soffice. The build is relatively stable, and documents created in it can be opened in earlier versions of OpenOffice.org, but you should probably use 3.3 sparingly in case of problems.
Webiva is yet another content management system that aims to give the likes of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal some competition. The difference? In addition to being an open source, Ruby on Rails system, Webiva comes packed with a SaaS hosting platform that cuts out a ton of management hassle.
Webiva.com allows web professionals to build websites on a load-balanced, backed-up and replicated cloud without the hassle of installing and maintaining a Ruby on Rails installation. It competes with other web 2.0 CMSs like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
“We’re seeing a lot of activity in the K12 arena for folks looking to open source technology for both professional development and teaching in the classroom,” says Joe McAvoy, vice president of sales and marketing at Moodlerooms. “These are really powerful technological tools that are giving people new, different and innovative options.”
The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is an international institution based in Europe, whose goal is to provide online education, at master level, about Free Software. I recently spoke with Wouter Tebbens, president of the Free Knowledge Institute and FTA director, to know how the FTA works and what are its plans for the next year.
The developer of free, open source flash player Lightspark announced the release of Lightspark 0.4.3. In addition to a number of bugfixes, the software includes a number of additional features since the last release.
Open source software is the key to prevent the initiative from becoming simply another unfunded mandate. With open source software, governments developing open information innovations have the freedom to share software code and applications with other like-minded governments and organizations.
Now that organization has completed its first quite successful year of operations, and it’s decided to celebrate that event by announcing an awards program to recognize those that have been most influential in advancing its goals.
Deploying the tools and training in house will help alleviate fears. But the kingpin of the program is the standard format for data exchange. The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) working group will do what it can to accelerate adoption. If this takes off, it will vastly reduce the complexity involved in ensuring compliance and enable customers and developers to develop and deploy open source software with far greater confidence – and fewer costs. It will be interesting to see if this format makes gains or dies on the vine.
The Linux community is generally behind a new open source licensing compliance program proposed by the Linux Foundation. The Open Compliance Program aims to make it simpler for developers to distribute infringement-free open source software code.
What does it take to gain that adoption and push forward adoption, Hammond offered a top ten list of best practices based on his experience with the enterprise open source adopters.
We did a small experiment along these lines with the Peer to Patent project, which seized upon the truth that each of us is an expert in something. The idea behind Peer to Patent was to take the problem of bureaucratic slowdown and inefficiency in the patent office, and to marry to this the idea of self-selected expertise. This would create a process by which people could volunteer in a self-selected way, and work together to help discover information that would help an examiner decide whether a patent truly deserve a 20-year grant of monopoly rights – whether the patent is truly non-obvious and novel as the law requires. By creating a software interface and system that would allow groups of people to self-select, come together, and review each other’s works, some of the burden would be taken off the beleaguered government examiner. By using visual interfaces to help reflect back to and explain to people clearly what it is that the examiner needs to do, and how they divide up the tasks of examining a patent, we were able to set up a project not removed from government but together with government – the first institutionalized social network in the U.S. federal government to participate in the work of decision-making.
Another option could be open-source textbooks, as are available on curriki.org, a nonprofit that seeks to provide “universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12,” according to its website. For college professors, though, who are generally very specific about which textbook their students work from, it could be a long time before open-source curricula are adopted widely.
Liquidware Launches First Open Source IT Hardware provider Liquidware has launched the first 100 Percent Open Source Hardware and Open Source Software Scientific Calculator – the Open SciCal X101.
In a footnote, this comment is followed up by: “Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.”
Does relativity really steer people away from God? Or maybe – and this is just a theory, to use their favourite phrase – the same kinds of people who study general relativity are simply less likely to consult the Bible for answers to the questions of the universe.
Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.
As economic recovery wavers in the United States, evidence is mounting that growth abroad is also slowing and may be unable to sustain the fragile rebound here.
A federal judge in California ordered Wells Fargo & Co. to change what he called “unfair and deceptive business practices” that led customers into paying multiple overdraft fees, and to pay $203 million back to customers.
The personal income of California residents declined last year for the first time since World War II, state officials said Wednesday.
An analysis by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis found that statewide income fell by $40 billion in 2009 to $1.56 trillion. That’s down about 2.5 percent from the previous year and even lower than the 2007 figure.
The United States is selling fewer products around the world and spending more on cheap imported goods, an imbalance that hurts the job market at home and means the economy is even weaker than previously thought.
The trade deficit of nearly $50 billion for June is the biggest in almost two years, and economists fear that economic growth for the second quarter, which came in at a sluggish rate of 2.4 percent in early estimates, may turn out to be only half that.
Stocks were deeply in the red Wednesday after the U.S. trade deficit widened unexpectedly and a string of weak economic reports from Asia and Europe heightened concerns that the global recovery is veering off track.
Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws as the government steps up scrutiny of hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.
Youth unemployment across the world has climbed to a new high and is likely to climb further this year, a United Nations agency said Thursday, while warning of a “lost generation” as more young people give up the search for work.
Full flights? Get used to them. Stressed flight attendants and call centers in India? Get used to those, too.
While the current state of the U.S. airline industry can be frustrating for passengers, it’s bad for employees, too – and some suggest it’s getting worse.
U.S. airlines have cut jobs for two straight years, the government said Wednesday, an acceleration of a trend since 2001. What’s worse for employees: There’s no indication that trend will reverse sharply anytime soon.
A federal judge in California ordered Wells Fargo & Co. to change what he called “unfair and deceptive business practices” that led customers into paying multiple overdraft fees, and to pay $203 million back to customers.
We spend a lot of time discussing bad legislation around here, every so often it’s nice to hear of some good legislation. Last month, we noted that an anti-libel tourism bill was making its way through Congress, which would protect US citizens from foreign libel judgments on laws that went against the First Amendment. Thankfully, that bill has now been signed into law — and it may be even better than we initially expected. That’s because, at the urging of folks such as Public Citizen, Congress inserted a bit into the law that also extends the important Section 230 safe harbors to this bill.
In 2007, when the Android OS was still vaporware, Google made a gutsy $4.6 billion bet on mobile net neutrality. While they never had to pay out the money, that all-in move forced the FCC to license wireless spectrum with binding rules that finally force the wireless carrier that wins a spectrum auction to let Americans use whatever handsets, services and apps they wanted to connect to it.
A spokesman for Sky, which is 39.1pc-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, said the company was trying to prevent Skype from using its trademark in relation to the sale of TV or internet service, because customer might assume that ‘Skype’ is part of Sky.
US Copyright Group, which is controlled by Virginia law firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, has sued more than 14,000 Americans this year for allegedly downloading various independent films on BitTorrent networks. In January, it brought the first two of these cases, targeting 749 anonymous “Does” for sharing the film The Gray Man and 83 Does for sharing Uncross the Stars (later upgraded to 195 Does).
US Copyright Group used the suits to subpoena ISPs, trying to get real names and addresses instead of the IP addresses it had collected. The lawyers then sent out settlement letters to these defendants, asking them to pay up or risk a named federal lawsuit.
HADOPI is effectively an anti-piracy organization that oversees and enforces Frances three strikes law. Unfortunately for HADOPI, someone else took the Trademark of ‘HADOPI’ – someone who just so happens to be opposed by the new French copyright laws to be more precise.
Even odder? Apparently EMI has issued a takedown notice for just that one video pulling it off YouTube. This is despite literally hundreds of Empire State of Mind parodies on YouTube. Those 55 best parodies? They’re all on YouTube (with the exception of the Darth Vader one…). Honestly, I thought this had to be a mistake, or some weird Content ID error by YouTube. Considering the vast number of these parodies that have all remained up this whole time, would EMI really issue a takedown for this one parody?
We are not lawyers, but as the last case was dropped by ’summary judgement,’ we doubt the ability of Viacom to turn the tables in their favor. They lost hard in the last dispute, what can they do to change that this time around? Still, the company has its arms out and is pushing forward yet again. Perhaps after another judge sticks with YouTube they will drop the case. Then again, perhaps not.
Werner Müller, boss of the Austrian film and music industry trade association, has canceled his participation in a panel discussion on “Art in the Digital Age” after he learned that Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde was one of his fellow participants. Müller stated that he refuses to sit at a table with a “convicted criminal” who supports “professional theft”.
Summary: Assorted Novell and OpenSUSE news with emphasis on videos
IT HAS BEEN about a month since we last took stock of Novell’s new videos. There is nothing fascinating among them, but this file was uploaded a month ago to celebrate a Novell “Success Story” and Novell has begun utilising some account that’s described as follows: “Novell’s Learning Channel (sponsored by Novell Training Services) is focused on enhancing your ability to use Novell products effectively.”
Well, to name just some of the earlier videos that were uploaded by it last month:
“IdentityServerDemo” has uploaded another 10 or so videos. Novell is really filling YouTube up with commercials and supportive material for proprietary software. Hamline University added its own share to it and here is an unusual SUSE video from last month. The agitated dog is eating the SUSE mascot:
Masim Sugianto writes some instructions for software on OpenSUSE [1, 2, 3, 4]. Other posts about software on OpenSUSE (mostly packaging) cover Skrooge, iFolder, AutoYaST, openFATE, and LATEX editors:
I have started maintaining three packages, namely Texmaker, TeXworks and Rubber, in the Publishing repository. These applications make working with and compiling latex documents user-friendly and painless.
I received an email from a user who switched from openSUSE to Ubuntu since his Wireless netcard did not work. It worked with openSUSE 11.2 initially but after an online update it failed. He hoped that openSUSE 11.3 worked, tested it, it failed – and he gave up and wrote a frustrated email.
I was frustrated reading this since we should have been able to help this user if he contacted us in time.
The Wiki-based Weekly News has this new release and OpenSUSE’s wiki having spam problems. Techrights has seen a sharp increase in wiki spam too over the past month.
Novell’s OpenSUSE “boosters” are trying to grow the team [1, 2] and the marketing folks are imitating Ubuntu with a site and merchandise whilst others further refine the looks of OpenSUSE [1, 2]. █
Content is available under CC-BY-SA