But I think the real goal is not to enable us little birds to do great things like we can do with our standalone Linux apps, like create professional-quality music, photographs, publishing, drawings, programming, make movies, and what-have-you. We’re not supposed to do anything but open our little beaks and consume whatever they see fit to serve us. Which is such a waste when we have all this great technology at our fingertips. No thanks, I’ll keep my Linux Shopsmith.
The next thing that I wanted to do is copy the video to my computer. This is where I was concerned. As you know I use Linux and according to the Flip web site (here) this little beast only supports windows and MacOS. Not one to shirk at a challenge I decided to plug it in to my Linux (Gentoo) and see what would happen.
I am sorry to say that it was not a challenge at all. The Flip was instantly recognized by my computer and I could browse its memory at will. Apart from the programs to install the windows and MacOS software the videos were stored in the same directory format as normal digital cameras. I simply navigated to where the videos were stored and double clicked on a video to play it directly from the camera.
Well, that didn’t take long. Just earlier this month the Khronos Group unveiled the OpenGL 4.0 specification that brought many long-awaited changed to this open graphics API. On the same day this industry consortium also released the OpenGL 3.3 specification, which aims to bring back as much of the OpenGL 4.0 functionality to graphics cards that only support OGL3. OpenGL 4.0 is designed for graphics cards that are meant for DirectX 11.0, which basically means AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 series and NVIDIA’s forthcoming GeForce 400 series. OpenGL 3.x on the other-hand is compatible with DirectX 10.0 grade hardware, such as the Radeon HD 4000 series and GeForce 200 series. For those with a newer NVIDIA graphics card, you can now run OpenGL 3.3 applications or games as they have just released a supported driver.
Due to some idle time* a couple of weeks ago, here’s a quick comparison between a few network control tools for Linux.
These tools all give you some sort of network control from the Desktop – a service traditionally provided by daemons and initialisation scripts. The problem with that is roaming – it’s much more common nowadays to have a laptop travel between multiple access points (Ethernet, 802.11, wireless broadband…) and many of the tasks can be automated. So what better way to use a point-and-click approach.
RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal helping you keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You also can format, tag and search your entries.
I am sure most of the people out there are having trouble with their monitor going to sleep or in screen saver mode while they are watching movies or flash videos on sites like hulu.
In a recent article (“Greenie Linux: A distribution for all users“) I mentioned a tool (used in Greenie Linux) called Ubuntu Tweak. This tool allows the user to make certain tweaks to your Ubuntu desktop that aren’t readily available in the default Ubuntu desktop. This tool allows you to make both desktop and system configurations – all in one easy to use application. Ubuntu Tweak is an open source application (licensed under the GPL) that is ready for you to use and enjoy.
Guarding against inaccurate content, spam, biased material, and unverifiable entries is admirable. The relentless pursuit of deleting content because someone unfamiliar with a topic decides that it’s not “notable” enough is not. The fact that this continues to be a problem even for a project like dwm demonstrates that Wikipedia is still not working well. While the site certainly provides a valuable resource, some portion of its community is ensuring that it is not as valuable as it could be.
This week was the week of Solutions Linux 2010. A 3-day exhibition held in Paris, gathering companies, LUG and other associations. As always, KDE France was here.
ALT Linux ( ALT implies ALT Linux Team ) is one of those undiscovered and non-famous Linux distribution from Russia which lacks the “Pomp, glamour and glory” like other mainstream distributions partly because the development team of ALT Linux love to work in shadows and do not consider it important to publically project and advertise their work and also because people outside Russia are not either aware of or interested in what this distribution is about. But this does not undermine the work this team is doing , they are quitely and persistently working on a project which stands proudly on its work. This is a Russian spirit of all times !
1) Fedora offers the freedom of changing, replacing, modifying each component in the system;
without the concern of the system stability being affected.
2) Fedora has High quality support in the form of User forums, IRCs, Wikis and Official guides.
3) Fedora can be carried on CD or a jumpdrive to use Live on any computer.
4) Fedora provides a set of graphical tools for building a customized, updated Fedora “Spin”.
Using the N900 has been an incredible experience. In the two weeks that I’ve had it I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Though it clearly trumps my N86 in so many way I’m not sure if the N900 could replace because (1) it’s not the type of device you can whip out of a pocket and quickly interact with, and (2) the only available option for a compatible 3G network in Canada has been a colossal disappointment. More on that next week.
Philip Newborough has announced the development release (Alpha 1) version of CrunchBang Linux 10 code-named “Statler” just moments after the release of Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” Beta 1. For the first time ever, the distro is being built using Debian sources, instead of Ubuntu.
Between Canonical’s web-based syncing service Ubuntu One – unveiled last year – the coming U1 music store, and the new Me Menu, Lucid Lynx is looking less like the stoic Linux desktops of yesteryear and more like like, well, what everyday consumers want in an operating system.
What’s new in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1? Well, as everybody already knows… Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 has a brand-new look, composed of two new themes (Ambiance and Radiance), one is dark and the other one is light. Click the link above to access a very nice article we created last week, to showcase the new themes, logos, font, boot splash and boot prompt. However, after installing the proprietary Nvidia video drivers, the boot splash screen has been changed to what you see below…
Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers.
Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme—a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu’s visual identity.
Alpha 3 of Kubuntu features the new KDE SC 4.4. For more information about new features in Kubuntu, see https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Alpha3/Kubuntu.
The forthcoming version of Ubuntu Linux, Lucid Lynx, has just gone beta, and it’s going to be the most important Ubuntu release in years. I say that not just because it brings numerous important changes to this most popular of Linux distributions, but because Ubuntu 10.04 is the next LTS (Long Term Support) edition and, as such, is going to be supported for paying desktop customers for three years and for corporate server users for five years. In other words, this is the edition that’s going to make or break Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical’s business future.
The forthcoming Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx, has a lot of good things going for it but one little change is causing a great deal of angst among users. That change is the switching of the window buttons that enable one to close, maximise or minimise a window from the right to the left.
Martin Owens makes a comment that Ubuntu is not really a meritocracy. Is that true? Is Ubuntu really democratic? Really meritocratic? Actually a dictatorship (as Mark Shuttleworth’s “SABDFL” title implies)? Does it matter? Which is better for Ubuntu in the long run.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being a dictatorship, as long as the leader is good. The Linux kernel is a reasonable example. OS X might be, too, depending on your stance on Free Software.
If too many people start doing that, Mark Shuttleworth has two options. Either he creates the perfect distribution for Mark Shuttleworth or he starts asking himself the right questions. A customer lost take twice the effort to reel in than a new one. He’s making money with that, I suppose. I’m not. I only got my vanity to consider..
If you have been playing around much with the Alpha releases of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx you may have noticed something special that was announced some time ago is actually coming to fruition. Announced soon after the release of 9.10, the Ubuntu Music Store is a new addition to the Ubuntu Linux desktop and promises to extend the capabilities of the Linux desktop further than it has ever been.
Download the Dropbox Linux client that suits your machine (either 32-bit or 64-bit)
Extract the contents of the downloaded archive to your home folder for easy access
Create a Dropbox account if you don’t already have one
Lubuntu beta 1 sees many improvements since the last Alpha release including a beta version of default file manager PCManFM, a new Plymouth theme and the addition of some new applications.
The default theme (well, actually style) in Xubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 1 is Albastross and the icons are Xubuntu Elementary (you can see these throughout all the screenshots in this post)…
MOTOROLA’S LATEST Roi Android handset gets captured on film by the INQUIRER in an exclusive walk through. The Roi is the world’s first 8-megapixel Google OS powered mobile, which is capable of HD video capture that can also be displayed directly on an HD TV via its built in HDMI port.
Since we launched Gesture Search on Android Market two weeks ago, I’ve seen quite a bit of feedback. For example, some of you have requested Gesture Search for earlier versions of Android, as well as access to it outside the US.
Android will, at some point, move past the iPhone and into second place. It will take a large number of different handsets to accomplish this, so it’s safe to say that no single Android smartphone will be a legitimate “iPhone killer.”
Google has released version 4.1 of Google Maps for Android, adding a constantly-updated map wallpaper, tweaking the way search results are displayed and adding a new Latitude widget for tracking your friends.
The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) programme was launched in late 2008 with the aim of providing all primary school children in Rwanda with the important learning tool.
According to this press release, Marvell is announcing the $99 Moby Tablet for Education. You’ve seen my video of Marvell’s 4.3″ Tablet prototype shown at CES based on the Marvell Armada 600 processor. The Moby tablet is based on the same Armada 600 platform but comes with a larger screen (probably 10″).
What are some good practices for managing a successful project? “You need to keep an open mind while carefully listening to what others have to say,” advises Curtis Gedak. “Keeping your cool and remaining patient is also essential to understanding a perspective that might differ from your own. And remember to recognize the contributions of individuals, and to provide credit for accomplishments where credit is due.” Those words of wisdom – and some pretty useful software – have propelled the project Gedak manages, GParted, to a spot on the weekly Tops Downloads list on SourceForge.net. GParted’s latest release came out last week.
7. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). FOSS and the Internet have a symbiotic relationship. The Internet would not have been possible without FOSS. And the growth of FOSS relies on the Internet to power its peer production and distribution model. Over 270 million people use the Firefox browser. Half of the world’s Web sites, about 112 million, run on Apache Server. A quarter million websites, including this one, run on Drupal, a leading open source content management system.
Earlier this week, IBM announced a cloud computing program offering development and test services for companies and governments. That doesn’t sound like much, yet on closer inspection it’s a flagstone in the march toward a comprehensive cloud offering at Big Blue. It also demonstrates how operational efficiency is a competitive weapon in our service economy. Let me explain.
Open source has made its third big move on Wall Street with Bloomberg’s decision to open source its proprietary stock identifiers alongside NYSE-Euronext data streams.
I say third because Marketcetera’s open source trading platform, under the GPL, has been gold for almost a year. A SaaS version of Marketcetera for portfolio management was also released last year. (They must be working hard there — their latest blog post is dated November.)
What will it take to get Americans to use IPv6 (define)?
For one thing, it will require broadband providers like Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) to help users be fully enabled on IPv6 while still being able to access IPv4 content. That’s where the new open source Address Family Transition Router (AFTR) software comes into play.
Mickos is staying in the open-source world but jumping on a newer computing trend — cloud computing. Eucalyptus makes an open-source software platform for building private clouds, or data centers in which workloads can be moved around across different systems to maximize efficiency.
The company’s software is used as the cloud platform for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, a software package that includes Ubuntu’s open-source operating system. It is also designed to work smoothly with Amazon Web Services and other public cloud services.
Mozilla. Red Hat. MySQL. The list of companies that have built lasting and successful businesses around open-source software is not a long one.
It’s early days still, but Lucid Imagination Inc. CEO Eric Gries may just have a shot at adding the name of his tiny startup, which offers open-source search software to business customers, to that list.
A while back I announced the creation of a schedule for GIMP 2.8 development. I’ve made sure to keep this schedule up to date, and after a bunch of initial adjustments such as postponing some feature and adding others, the schedule has now stabilized a bit. The estimated date for a release candidate is still in December 2010. Tracking progress with a schedule really helps you to feel in control of development. The 2.4 development cycle which I were around in the end of, and the 2.6 development cycle which I were fully part of, were more chaotic with no commitment to a delivery date. This is perfectly fine for many, but I prefer structured development.
Jason Cole, PhD, COO of Remote-Learner, is interested in opening content for education. He works with Moodle, a course management system designed to help educators to create quality online courses. He wants to see the course content be as open as possible.
Howard Dyckoff, news writer and correspondent, Linux Gazette, really likes to use open tools to brainstorm and gather ideas. He finds value in harnessing people’s passion to foster ideas, increase participation, and maintain engagement for some of the projects he’s involved with.
Several days ago I posted the slides I used at the Open Source Business Conference in PDF form and also provided the SlideShare version. For those who want to see the contents of the slides directly, I’ve included most of it below.
Google has launched a new project for Chrome that will let the browser run a wider range of 3D graphics content without downloading additional drivers.
The open-source project, called ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine), seeks to let Chromium run WebGL content on Windows computers, wrote product manager Henry Bridge on the Chromium blog.
To help out the adoption of WebGL, the Khronos-backed API originally started by Mozilla that seeks to let web developers tap into modern graphics processors via the web-browser natively, has caused Google to get into the graphics driver game. WebGL binds to OpenGL ES 2.0, and with the Microsoft graphics drivers being more DirectX-optimized rather than OpenGL, Google’s playing to Microsoft. Google wants more users to be able to use WebGL, particularly when running the Chrome browser, so they have just announced the Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine. The objective of ANGLE is to just take the subset of the OpenGL ES API exposed by WebGL and to translate those extensions into their DirectX 9.0c equivalents.
Mozilla has dropped support for version 1.0 of its four-year-old internet app suite, SeaMonkey.
The open source browser maker pushed out a second iteration of SeaMonkey last autumn, so 1.0’s demise was all but inevitable.
Mozilla confirmed yesterday that its modern-day take on Netscape Communicator had moved on significantly enough since it first released the tool in January 2006 for its project developers to discontinue support for SeaMonkey 1.0.
A Mozilla developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3 has been released. The release comes in the form of a nightly build of Firefox 3.7 alpha 3. The new build introduces several new features including an experimental Direct 2D for the Windows builds of Firefox, JavaScript api improvements, stability and security improvements as well as additional fixes for multi-process plugins.
There’s a new version of Linux’s grandest office suite, but is it a major step forward or just another humdrum release with little to show? And most importantly, does it finally get the startup time down to an acceptable level? Read on for all the gory details…
Office suites lack glamour. They’re perfunctory, practical and prosaic. They remind us of real work, mundane chores and things that need to be done. But that’s also why they’re essential and why OpenOffice.org is a vital part of the free software ecosystem, whether it innovates or not.
OOo 3.2 is a step in the right direction. Firstly, it’s a lot faster. Version 3.2 of Writer launched more than 50% quicker than 3.1 in our tests, down to 3.4 seconds from around 7 with a fresh reboot. That alone makes a big difference, but the UI also seems to be more responsive. We used Writer exclusively over the last couple of weeks, and there’s an almost imperceptible improvement in the on-screen typing latency, which can really help if you create a lot of words.
[...]
Our verdict: Still the best, most comprehensive office suite available on Linux. 8/10
The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, including representatives from The Commerce Guys, which helps companies and organizations deliver useful Drupal-based e-commerce sites and solutions.
In advance of the conference, we caught up with Ryan Szrama, a developer with The Commerce Guys, and the original developer of Ubercart, an open source e-commerce package. Here are some of his thoughts on where Drupal-based commerce is headed.
Berners-Lee promotes data.gov.uk, the UK’s government data portal which launched in January. It aims to get developers interested in creating applications to make better use of the information collected by the government.
HTML5 will standardize a lot of things that have been done “ad hoc” over the past ten years, and as such will build a solid base for the web to build on.
Photographs by Newley Purnell of “red shirt” protestors in Thailand as they gather human blood and store it in large bottles, to pour on the ground in front of the prime minister’s residence in a shocking gesture of condemnation.
President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971 and, since then, the National Cancer Institute (part of the NIH) has funded research on prevention, surveillance, and treatments. But, despite the effort, progress has been elusive, leading to press reports in Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times suggesting that, at best, cancer is fighting us to a draw. But a new analysis of death rates, performed by staff at the American Cancer Society, indicates that cancer death rates peaked around 1990, and have been declining broadly since. As a result, they’re now below where they started in 1970.
Big news from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) overnight. The titanic proton-punisher has once again smashed all records to achieve the most powerful particle beams ever generated by the human race, at energies of 3.5 Tera-electron-volts – the maximum redline power at which the mighty machine can currently be safely run.
A total of 31m items will be packed and stacked, including 43,000 military vehicles, 600-odd helicopters, 120,000 containers and 34,000 tonnes of ammunition. Shipping out is estimated to take 240,000 truckloads and 119 shipping freighters.
The withdrawal will leave only 50,000 US troops in Iraq by 30 August, none of them in combat roles, and reduce the number of bases from 290 to fewer than 10. Even with the remaining US presence, the withdrawal will probably be perceived, in Iraq and elsewhere, as the final act of the war.
The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a system. Its purpose is not to eliminate “terrorism” (however this infinitely elastic term is defined) but to perpetuate itself, to do what it does: make war. This system can be immensely rewarding, in many different ways, for those who operate or assist it, whether in government, media, academia, or business. This too is a self-sustaining dynamic, a feedback loop that gives money, power and attention to those who serve the system; this elevated position then allows them to accrue even more money, power and attention, until in the end — as we can plainly see today — any alternative voices and viewpoints are relegated to the margins. They are “unserious.” They are unimportant. They are not allowed to penetrate or alter the operations of the system.
Early terse reports are that the jury has returned a guilty verdict for Dr Peter Watts, a science fiction writer who was beaten at the US-Canada border when he got out of his car to ask why it was being searched, then charged with assault. Peter faces up to two years in prison. I’ve emailed him for comment and I hope that he’s appealing.
Tonight, Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said the ban would have both financial and environmental benefits. It would cut greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and from manufacturing new products such as cans and bottles from virgin materials.
The UK advertising industry has bravely decided it can continue to accept millions of pounds from the state to create alarming climate advertisements, despite inaccuracies and a storm of complaints from parents. The principled decision, from the admen’s self-regulatory body the ASA, follows 939 complaints about the UK energy ministry DECC’s “Drowning Dog” prime time TV and cinema ad (aka “Bedtime Story”) , which cost £6m, and four related posters.
A federal grand jury has indicted two computer programmers on fraud and conspiracy charges for developing programs used by Bernard Madoff to cook the books in his billion-dollar ponzi scheme.
But, far from biding his time, Kaufman has emerged as one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of Wall Street and a champion of the need to push for a serious rebooting of our financial system.
A federal judge rejected a decision this week by the Securities and Exchange Commission to relax one of several provisions put in place after the dot-com bubble to prevent collusion between investment bankers and analysts at Wall Street firms.
A House committee requested that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke turn over documents related to Stephen Friedman’s purchase of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. shares while he was on the boards of both the Wall Street firm and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Friedman bought more than $1 million of Goldman Sachs stock “without notifying the Federal Reserve,” said Representative Edolphus Towns, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in a statement today. “This raises serious questions about transparency, fairness and the appearance of a cozy relationship between Wall Street and the government.”
Economists at Goldman Sachs say if enacted, the health
reform package released in Congress yesterday should have little fiscal effect over the next 2-years, followed by modest restraint from 2012 to 2014.
The loner with a glass eye, a medical degree and Asperger’s who makes millions betting against the subprime mortgage-bond market is just one of the unlikely heroes in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
Lewis is a gifted chronicler and debunker and demystifier of the world of finance. Twenty-odd years ago, in Liar’s Poker, he revealed the crucial story behind the junk bond debacle, turning it into something human-scale for those of us who don’t live and die by the pink sheets.
As if looting Main Street of its savings, pensions, and that precious thing called trust weren’t enough, now Wall Street paints a target on our backs.
The unease begins with the title of the lead story in The New York Times: “Banks bet Greece defaults on debt they helped hide.” [Read here.]
Uh-oh, my instinct for survival alerts me: Sounds like double-dealing, an invitation to retaliation. I hope American banks aren’t involved. I read on and my fears of double-dealing and American involvement are soon confirmed: Banks — including notably the American mega-bank Goldman Sachs — that for the past decade helped Greece mask its spiraling debt with creative refinancing may now be pushing Greece “closer to the brink” by betting it will default. How? With credit default swaps, the instruments that “nearly toppled” AIG, the mega-insurance company. Why oh why, I wonder, aren’t these ruinous ‘instruments’ outlawed or at least very tightly regulated? Straining to keep its prose grey, the Times writes that these swaps “effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire.” Effectively? By now my hair effectively catches fire. The story goes on, “If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.”
A Bernard Madoff victim who lost $15 million is suing Goldman Sachs for allegedly failing to tell him in 2004 that he should pull his money out of the Madoff Fund.
Ok, so a crowd-sourcing request. There’s a lot of coverage on the new Chris Dodd financial reform bill, and most of it is trying to find good things to say about the bill. Trying very hard in fact, with varying degrees of success.
He received $862,000 in 2009, reflecting his decision to forgo a bonus for 2008, when the firm converted to a bank holding company and accepted $10 billion in government rescue funds.
World Water Day 2010 is Monday, March 22nd. It is no surprise that corporations have attempted to co-opt this event. One example of greenwashing that SourceWatch has targeted is the Starbucks-run “www.worldwaterday.net,” which many environmentally-minded individuals may mistake for the official UN World Water Day website. Since SourceWatch first identified the misleading page, www.worldwaterday.net now routes viewers to www.waterday.org, where the Starbucks connection is not apparent. (A cached version of the original page’s privacy agreement can still be viewed here).
* Replaced the word “capitalism” with “free-market system.”
[...]
* Demanded that McCarthyism be defended, because there were some actual communists who were discovered;
* Deleted founding father Thomas Jefferson “from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century,” and replaced him with conservative religious figures St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, and also made changes that called into question the U.S. tradition of the “separation of church and state,” despite efforts of the Framers of the Constitution to ensure that no religious oaths were required by the Constitution among other protections from religious persecution or preferential treatment via the government.
It’s unclear how close this brings Democrats to having the votes they need, but it appears they’re close. And, perhaps as importantly, it shows that Obama’s personal push has yielded results.
Location services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, are a hot trend among some mobile device users, and are usually based on a check-in model. When you get to a restaurant, party, concert or museum you can choose to broadcast your location, using your smartphone’s GPS capabilities, to other network users as well as to your Twitter or Facebook feeds.
We reported last week that Ubisoft’s latest anti-piracy measures caused a barrage of complaints. It was revealed that the system forced gamers to login via the publisher’s website in order to play and required users to have a constant Internet connection.
On behalf of Valve and 99.9 per cent of the gaming industry, Newell said he thought that DRM, in its current form, is restrictive and a damaging customer experience.
Copyright-dependent industries risk alienating the public and undermining intellectual property laws with their unregulated and aggressive tactics, according to an historian who has studied nearly 400 years of piracy and intellectual property law.
THE PEOPLE have the chance to rise up and crush the Digital Economy Bill before the UK Government grovels before the entertainment cartels.
Thanks to people power society 38 Degrees and the Open Rights Group, Internet users who object to the threat of disconnection can write to their MPs and prevent the Government from rushing the bill through.
Yes, LiMux has a long-term agenda. We could have switched to linux clients in just a few months, giving the order to all 21 IT units to set up a linux client until end of 2008. No further specifications, no standardization and no consolidation. I’m pretty sure they would have done this excellent and then I would have published great news in 2007 or 2008 “LiMux done, Munich completely on free software”. But if we would have done this we would have ignored this big opportunity for Munich’s IT as a whole. Quality over time! Not related to free software, but neccessary for cleaning up our IT.
We never ever will be happy slaves again
I won’t excuse me for being clever and adjusting the way to achieve better goals. Digital sustainability is a long-term effort and not only a matter of Linux vs Windows. It’s not a matter for or against Microsoft. There are many vendors trying to lock you in. We learned it and do our homework. We never ever will be happy slaves again. You, too?
Since the end of last year, test runs have, says Schießl, shown that the Linux client can be fully integrated into these heterogeneous environments. According to Schießl, the pilot projects have been successfully concluded. A total of 3,000 computers are running open source software, twice as many as planned under the new initiative. Converting all computers to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has overcome dependency on a single office software suite. The team is now getting down to the optimisation phase, aimed at improving efficiency and supporting “digital sustainability”. Schießl is confident that the remainder of the migration will proceed in a similarly smooth and rapid fashion.
This week on the show: Ubuntu’s “Buttongate”, will Novell be asset stripped?, Mozilla is updating the MPL, Microsoft loosing a patent case again, Simon Phipps new OSI director and much more as always…
I had not heard of that term until I was surprised to see, it even made to a Wikipedia entry! From what I could figure out, PCjacking is an art of messing up with departmental store computers by quietly installing Linux on them to promote Linux. This of-course is an unauthorized install.
Yes! The configurations of Linux and server applications are often customized during the installation as well as ongoing maintenance and general troubleshooting. Even servers with very similar functions are often configured differently. A primary goal to protecting a critical Linux server is being able to repair or replace the system and get it back into production quickly.
The best-documented changes can quickly become outdated and often cause errors if not found until the damage has been done. Having a process that will automatically protect the unique configuration information will allow those changes to be applied to a standby or replacement server for rapid recovery.
Through the Phoronix Test Suite we ran the World of Padman, OpenArena, Tremulous, Urban Terror, and VDrift tests. On the next two pages are the results.
This free software BIOS implementation should now work on these newer AMD-based motherboards and are just the most recent of a growing list of supported chipsets by CoreBoot. AMD had promised this support many months ago but finally they cleared the legal requirements to push this code out to the general public.
Phoromatic has been a huge success, but today we are announcing that Phoromatic has reached a 1.0 status and additionally we are providing the Ubuntu Linux community with a new performance tracker in collaboration with Canonical.
Over the past several weeks there have been a number of new Linux graphics features introduced by David Airlie, a Red Hat employee and long-time X.Org contributer. Last month David began on a project rampage by bringing hybrid graphics to Linux via code he called “vga_switcheroo” to switch between ATI/NVIDIA/Intel GPUs without rebooting the system (though restarting the X.Org Server is needed at this time) that that code has now made its way into the mainline Linux kernel.
A few months ago I mentioned mcplay as an alternative to the time-honored but unfortunately departed cplay. mcplay is intended to be a close mimic to the dead program, written in C as opposed to Python. At the time I made no real distinction between the two, since my concern was mostly with function, but as yasen mentioned, I should have.
Medical Practice Management Software (MPMS) is a type of software that is designed to supervise and support the day-to-day operations of a medical practice. This category of software typically offers functionality such as data entry, scheduling appointments, billing, reporting, records management, the generation of reports, accounting, and capturing patient demographics.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief introduction to arpeggiators for Linux. The programs I’ve profiled are valuable additions to the creative Linux musician’s audio armory, you can’t beat the prices, and they are all great fun to explore. For now, I leave you to those explorations, and I’ll return soon with reports on the Behringer BCF2000 and FCB1010 MIDI control devices.
There hasn’t been much news posted here for a while, so I thought it was appropriate to update subscribers and other supporters of my work on Ardour on what has been going on. Development efforts have ben split (about 60:40) between Ardour 3.0 and continuing work on the 2.X series, both to fix bugs and to support the continuing improvement of Mixbus.
I can’t tell you how many emails, phone calls, IMs, and Facebook messages I’ve gotten that asked when or if an application would be ported from Windows to Linux. Or how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I would use Linux, if X were ported to it!” So I decided to put these wishes to good use and list the top applications that should be ported to Linux. Some could be possible. Some are not (for whatever reason), which is a shame because the “not possible” tends to keep people from adopting Linux.
In this, our final installment, we will look at the screen terminal multiplexing program. What the heck is a “terminal multiplexing program?” I’m glad you asked.
Some company will use LordHavoc’s DarkPlaces engine (DPE) to publish a game on some game console(s). The development team includes “a number of Nexuiz developers, and previous Quake1 community developers”. Nexuiz is a (or rather “the”) FOSS FPS that uses DPE.
As far as I can tell, no assets of Nexuiz will be used. On the other hand, the soundtrack playing on the console-DPE-game homepage sounds like a remix of a Nexuiz track. I will just assume that the composer agreed to this and that the same might happen to other high-quality Nexuiz content and that it will all be legal. Lee Vermeulen (Nexuiz’ lead developer) is no license-n00b after all. Also, the console game will be using Nexuiz’ gameplay, which I assume means “game modes”, “movement/physics” and “weapon functions/balancing”.
Following the success of last year’s Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, former Community Manager at Novell, has announced that the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards have decided to once again co-locate their flagship conferences, Akademy and GUADEC, in 2011. In addition to simply co-locating the events, as they did in 2009, GNOME Foundation board Member Vincent Untz says that he hopes that the projects can “actually plan a combined schedule in 2011 so that KDE and GNOME contributors have every opportunity to work with and learn from each other.”
Although there’s no official word on when Gnome 3 will become the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth suggested last summer that the October 2010 release, or Ubuntu 10.10, would be a likely target.
Given my experience with the new Gnome, I’m not convinced that’s a good idea, unless a lot changes on Gnome’s end between now and the fall. But I’ll save my criticism for another post. Below, I’ll focus on what Gnome 2.30/3 actually does, and how it’s so different from its predecessors.
Mutter, the new window manager designed for GNOME 3.0 integration to replace Metacity 2, has experienced a new development release. Mutter reached version 2.29.0 last month and it integrated the most recent Metacity changes (up to v2.26), improved appearance of scaled down windows using mipmap emulation, new signals and properties, and many other changes. Metacity 2.29.1 that’s been released today doesn’t bring as many changes to the table.
SimplyMEPIS and antiX, two of the products in the MEPIS family, have been through several iterations of their Beta testing cycle, and now each of them has also released three release candidates (RC), and they are very cloe to release. Each of them has a Version 8.5 RC 3 now available for testing. These can be upgraded to final form by simply using Debian upgrade packaging techniques.
Debian Developer Margarita Manterola recently threw her hat into the ring to be the next Debian Project Leader. Surprisingly, she was the first woman ever to do so.
Join me in congratulating her for nominating herself and wishing her Good Luck!
Q: Who are you?
A: My name is Margarita Manterola. I’m a 30-year-old Software Developer from Argentina. I develop mostly in Python, but also in other languages, such as C or PHP. I teach programming at my local university. I’ve been married for five years to Maximiliano Curia, who is a System Administrator and a Debian Developer, like me.
Open-source developers and businesses are focused on the wrong opportunity, according to industry luminary Tim O’Reilly. The future isn’t programming for Linux or MySQL. The future is programming for the “whole Web.”
Linux systems can be installed in various computer hardware, such as smartphones, laptops, PDA, and so forth. The use of Linux is very prevalent in servers. It is even reported that in 2008, at least 60 percent of web servers worldwide was run on Linux operating systems.
We tested out this new package with a notebook and netbook to see how it changes the power game for Ubuntu 10.04 along with whether it’s much of an improvement over the current Ubuntu 9.10 release.
Ubuntu is supposed to be a meritocracy where an elite group of people make decisions based on technical ability. Where is this technical ability that they speak of though? How this process seems to really work is that Mark says “make it so” and his drones say “yes master”. That’s not a meritocracy, not at all.
The kicker, of course, is something I see way too often in Ubuntu land: people that don’t like it are simply called “trolls” and told to shut up. Often it’s shut up and leave.
What the hell? How exactly are you supposed to get feedback and determine if you have a great success with your user interface if you don’t listen to the users?
So since Canonical does currently not exploit all business potential coming from Kubuntu, the community will probably be responsible for quite some time to come.
This ultimately means that the community will apply the rules and judgment of which they think it is the best available. Since the community is mostly consisting of people contributing in their spare time human time resource is rather limited and thus one must choose the battles carefully. In consequence this means that some things simply cannot be done. Like say Ubuntu One integration, of course it would be nice to have, but currently there are much more important things to work on. Same goes for porting Software Center. Finally it also means that the community gets to decide how much branding gets committed, and currently the opinion is to stick with KDE’s. Not only is their artwork of incredibly high quality, but also are they the biggest contributors to the Kubuntu desktop, so they deserve most credit.
On that last note I would also like to note that Kubuntu’s target was to make the best KDE distribution, not the best Ubuntu flavor, thus deriving from KDE’s artwork and color scheme would not only be in conflict with the fact that Kubuntu’s color palette is almost identical, but also with what Kubuntu is trying to achieve.
In short: Kubuntu is not Ubuntu. Occasionally blogs and news stories and bug reports assume Canonical is responsible for things they are not. In general, me and the other Kubuntu developers are responsible for Kubuntu, please keep this in mind when moaning or praising us.
Marvell announced its intent to deliver a $100, Android-ready tablet computer built around a 1GHz Armada 600 series processor. Aimed at students, the “Moby” will offer WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, an FM receiver, and Adobe Flash compatibility, the company says.
In what may have been Google’s worst kept secret in years, Google, along with its partners, Intel, Logitech and Sony, is on its way to delivering the Web to your television. What will they be using to do this? Why, they’ll be using Google’s Android Linux, of course.
Android is an embedded Linux that Google has already been deploying in phones like its own Nexus One and Motorola’s Devour and Droid. But Android has always been more than just a smartphone operating system; it’s also been used in netbooks and other devices. So taking it to a TV set-top box was an easy move for Google and its hardware friends.
With Google said to be working with Intel and Sony to develop a way to bring the best of the Internet to television, industry analysts wonder if the time for a smart TV has finally arrived.
Google has reportedly joined hands with Intel, Sony and Logitech to create Google TV. What is Google TV and why Google is suddenly interested in a new medium: TV?
YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.
Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.
Apart from Apple, some other companies are bringing some interesting tablets. In contrary to the iTab, those other tablets do run Linux. Some are already available, such as the TouchBook from Always Innovating (AI), and some have supposedly better screens, like the Notion Ink Adam tablet. From the info available from Sola’s blog on the Notion Ink tablet, from the Wikipedia-info on the iPad and AI Touchbook and from the website of the AI touchbook I made a feature table so you can compare features. Apart from that, let’s take a look at the future: What technologies are coming to this market?
Back in 1999, Vadim Kurland realized he needed a better way to configure a Linux firewall than the then-typical process of issuing cryptic commands or editing a text-based configuration file full of esoteric settings. Fortunately, he had lots of experience with commercial firewalls that he was able to apply to the problem. The result was Firewall Builder, a firewall configuration and management tool that lets administrators build firewall policies using a GUI, then push the configuration to firewall machines. It supports the open source firewall platforms iptables, pf, ipfw, and ipfilter, as well as Cisco ASA (PIX) and IOS access lists, and makes all these very different firewalls appear the same to the administrator.
SpringSource says they’re expecting the site to be the single go-to-one-stop place for all your Apache Tomcat needs, be it troubleshooting to application server deployment. And that’s kind of a big deal, because, as the press release needs to remind you — Apache Tomact is the “world’s most widely used Java application server…” and “SpringSource employees” are credited with 95% of bux fixes to Apache Tomcat in the last two years. Plus, a good handful of Tomcat problem incidents are noted and fixed by SpringSource before they reach the community. SpringSource says it’s resulted in a 97% renewal rate for Tomcat support. Sounds pretty impressive.
The philosophy of Open Source reminds me of a story from ‘Panchtantra’: the tortoise and the hare.
The tortoise and the hare were friends. One day, they decided to race against each other. The hare obviously took the lead; he thought of relaxing and went off to sleep. The tortoise, walking slowly but steadily, overtook the hare and won the race. The moral is,
‘Slow but steady wins the race’.
In recent time, some new chapters have been added to this story.
The hare was perturbed by the defeat. He asked the tortoise to race again. This time he did not take rest and won the race easily. The moral is,
1. The update offer of Firefox 3.6 to users of Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 is the first time we’ve ever done an offer to a .0 release to our user base. We’ve always waited until the .1 release or later. We did this because we were able to measure improvements over 3.5 in terms of performance, reliability and add-ons compatiblity.
This year (2010) marks the 10th anniversary of a lot of things: Tuvalu’s entry into the United Nations, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the debut of Windows ME, for example. But much more importantly, 2010 marks OpenOffice.org’s tenth year of existence. To celebrate, here’s a look–literally, because there are a lot of screenshots–at how OOo has evolved throughout the decade.
Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux for IBM, gave a keynote address in which he enumerated the criteria by which open-source projects should be evaluated. His talk highlighted the problems that can arise when organizations choose the wrong open-source project around which to standardize. He also advocated the creation of a company-wide open-source governance plan.
I am currently in San Francisco attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). While the conference has been around for awhile, I have never had a desire to attend before since people have told me it is more like the Open Core Business Conference. Also, it was founded my Matt Asay who nurses a strong dislike for OpenNMS (for proof just check out his negative article on us and our BOSSIE last year which is based on quotes that don’t seem to exist in the original article).
We have a standing rule at the OpenNMS Group that we will pay the expenses for any employee who gets a paper accepted at a conference, so I dutifully submitted two talks. The first was my ever evolving “So You Think You Want to Start and Open Source Business?” presentation, but since I was pretty certain that would be shot down, I also suggested another presentation where two of our “Ultra” support customers, Rackspace and New Edge, could talk about how they use the OpenNMS management application platform in their business.
My talk at OSBC centers on the cost savings benefits of open source software and how this drove adoption amid difficult economic conditions. There was also discussion at the conference of the impact of an improving economy. While I don’t believe IT budgets will get fattened up with improving economic conditions, I do believe that this could put more emphasis on some of the other benefits of open source software. Again, we found cost savings was the main driver for customers considering open source. However, after adoption, the top benefit changes to flexibility. In addition, while factors such as vendor lock-in appear to subside after adoption, open source benefits such as reliability and performance grow in significance. I believe this is indicative of where the market, customers and vendors are headed as they contemplate the benefits and rewards of open source. I also believe these ‘other’ non-cost factors all contribute to enabling IT individuals and teams based on open source.
Over the last couple of years a number of different open source business strategies have evolved. According to the 451 Group, it’s an evolution that includes the broader adoption and usage of open source overall by both open source and proprietary software vendors.
We’re happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGL’s subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls. We’re open-sourcing ANGLE under the BSD license as an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers like Google Chrome to run WebGL content on Windows computers without having to rely on OpenGL drivers.
As an election looms in the UK, copyright, intellectual property and Open Source, are making an appearance on the political stage, both at home and internationally.
The government has been forced to make a number of significant changes to Lord Mandelson’s much-criticised Digital Economy Bill. In response to a petition, the Prime Minister has dropped Mandelson’s plans for a controversial ‘three strikes’ rule forcing ISPs to permanently disconnect those repeatedly accused of illegal file sharing by copyright holders.
Amongst a long list of grievances with the proposed bill, critics had pointed out the potential human rights implications of cutting-off households, particularly school children, from the Internet, based on the behaviour of one individual using a shared connection. However, in a statement on the Number 10 website, the government did not rule out forcing ISPs to enforce bandwidth restrictions, download limits and temporary account suspensions onto customers accused of breeching copyright.
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Meanwhile, Shaddow Chancellor George Osborne has reiterated previous pledges to “create a level playing field for open source IT in government procurement”. The Tories’ new manifesto also promises to publish more information on all government contracts and tendering opportunities, as well as spending by QUANGOs and Local Government, in a bid to “open up government procurement to more SMEs.”
King argues for an open access system via article processing fees, fully paid by the federal government. It is noteworthy that King’s estimate is that this would cost, in a worst-case scenario, an increase of less than 1% of what the U.S. federal government spends on research grants right now. King acknowledges the unlikelihood of this scenario. Average cost-per-article of $1,500 and $2,500 U.S. scenarios are employed; the additional cost for 100% funding of articles would be $427 million (at $1,500 per article) or $712 million (at $2,500 per article). King estimates that academic and special libraries could, together, save an estimate $4.1 billion per year.
We’ve been trying for some time to find a way to conveniently take a snapshot of our Open Notebooks and all associated raw data files. This could serve as a way to back up all of our work as well as provide a means of finding out the state of knowledge for a project at a given moment in time. There is also a tremendous benefit to confidently using the best of free hosted Web2.0 services out there (e.g. GoogleDocs and Wikispaces) without being concerned with changes in policies or access down the road.
As is often the case, someone asks for a written answer to a question, but then fails to use the material. The great thing about blogs is that they make it very easy to make sure such content isn’t wasted. So here are some thoughts on the GreenMonk mission and sustainability more broadly.
We set up Greenmonk with the explicit intention of lobbying for open data and open source for better environmental outcomes.
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In the UK, libel law is regularly abused to shut down dissenting voices. Its not just randy footballers that try and abuse the law. Pushing back against the status quo are organisations such as Sense About Science, which is backing the National Petition for Libel Law Reform.
There have been hundreds of articles in recent years exhorting the strengths and warning of the weaknesses of Open Access through author payment. This article discusses a few of the favorable and unfavorable issues and proposes an approach that takes advantage of the favorable aspects and overcomes some of the unfavorable ones. It requires extensive government support, which may or may not be feasible, but the approach is presented here nevertheless. Some evidence is given for the potential savings that would be achieved by scientists, publishers and libraries in the US.
Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop.
Fran Korten: When you first learned that you had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, were you surprised?
Elinor Ostrom: Yes. It was quite surprising. I was both happy and relieved.
Fran: Why relieved?
Elinor: Well, relieved in that I was doing a bunch of research through the years that many people thought was very radical and people didn’t like. As a person who does interdisciplinary work, I didn’t fit anywhere. I was relieved that, after all these years of struggle, someone really thought it did add up. That’s very nice.
STANDARDS ADVOCATE the Open Video Alliance has got behind a campaign to enrich Wikipedia articles with video.
Wikipedia walks a lonely path in supporting Theora, an open format which is in contention to be incorporated into HTML5’s video tag. This goes against the popular Flash encoded video ’standard’ used by sites such as Youtube.
The Open Video Alliance and the Participatory Culture Foundation have launched a new campaign to encourage people to upload videos to Wikipedia, the free collaborative online encyclopedia.
The OVA’s members include open video platform company Kaltura, Yale’s Information Society Project, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). To get the party started, the PCF is making available a new software tool for Windows and Mac OS X that can convert videos into the open Ogg Theora format. The OVA has rolled out a new website with simple instructions that describe how users can download the software and start participating in the campaign.
All the buzz is that HTML5 will signal the death knell for Adobe Flash. Many would say good riddance, especially Apple’s Steve Jobs, whose steadfast refusal to support the technology has left many iPhone users with a crippled web browsing experience (including this blogger). But Jobs should be careful of what he wishes for. The eventual winner of the HTML5 video standards debate could be an open source standard. This will leave Jobs and his black box, closed system henchman in Cupertino in a bind.
In a posting on W3C blog, Ian Jacobs, Head of W3C Communications, has taken up Microsoft’s offer and invited the company to create an “Incubator Group” for the specification. Incubator groups do not produce standards, but the W3C community can decide later on whether or not to move the API onto the W3C Recommendation Track.
Jacobs says that “Incubator Groups can smooth the transition from ‘good idea’ to ‘widely deployed standard available Royalty-Free’”. He also pointed out that the invitation was “not just for Microsoft” and that the W3C is interested in data access APIs adding “If you’re working on an API and it has ‘data’ in the name, I encourage you to build community support in a W3C Incubator Group.”
Canon announced Wednesday it intends to be the first company to say goodbye to .com and buy its own top-level domain, taking advantage of ICANN’s decision to broadly widen the number of top-level names. If — or rather when — this starts happening, web address conventions may never be the same.
My relationship with Google News has always run hot and cold. No make that cold and tepid. From the very beginning of Google News as an experiment back in 2001, they refused to index my work, which they said was my fault, not theirs (“they” being an algorithm attached to an e-mail box, of course). But new evidence has recently come to light suggesting to me that Google News has an actual blacklist.
Commissioning of the LHC continues at a very encouraging rate. In the past few days the protection systems have been qualified such that the beams could be safely accelerated to higher energies. In the early hours of this morning, around 5:30am Geneva time, both beams were successfully ramped to 3.5 TeV, 3 times higher than ever before! Even more encouraging, the beams were extremely stable during this period and had a very long lifetime.
According to Hosein, if the upgrades do take place, early adopters will have a hard time swallowing the fact they had paid £30 for a card that had gone out of date in three years or less.
The Summary Care Records database – which is central to the government’s plans to create health records for 50 million people – contains inaccuracies and omissions that make it difficult for doctors to trust it as a single source of truth, according to a confidential draft report.
The findings by researchers at University College London, are likely to reinforce the concerns of the British Medical Association which has called for a halt to the “rushed” rollout of the “imperfect” Summary Care Record scheme.
Two U.S. senators met with President Obama on Thursday to push for a national ID card with biometric information such as a fingerprint, hand scan, or iris scan that all employers would be required to verify.
If you are over 60 and want a bus pass – Pensioners could be forced to carry identity cards to qualify for free bus travel
If you are poor and bank at RBS and Lloyds – Meg Hillier said companies might offer to buy the £30 cards for people who wouldn’t pay for them otherwise
Or if you are just poor – Home Office minister Meg Hillier argues ID cards can provide the foundation for fairer access to services and opportunities
If you work at an airport – All staff who work ‘airside’ are eligible to get a free card as part of the regional roll-out of the ID cards scheme
A surprise demand to settle an outstanding debt for surveillance cameras in Monmouth could land Monmouth Town Council in the county court, reports Desmond Pugh.
By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.
“We knew we were going to be forced to shut this thing down,” recalled one former civilian official, describing tense internal discussions in which military commanders argued that the site was putting Americans at risk. “CIA resented that,” the former official said.
Early terse reports are that the jury has returned a guilty verdict for Dr Peter Watts, a science fiction writer who was beaten at the US-Canada border when he got out of his car to ask why it was being searched, then charged with assault. Peter faces up to two years in prison. I’ve emailed him for comment and I hope that he’s appealing.
The question of registered sex offenders lists is a tricky one — because for those people who really do commit sexually-driven crimes against minors, it’s hard to be even remotely sympathetic to any complaints they have about the punishment they receive. The problem is that so many things are considered sexual offenses these days that many people are put on the list, and must live with it for life, for something that most people may consider a youthful indiscretion, rather than something that automatically should brand them to neighbors as a possible child molester. Things such as kids having sex with each other after only one of the two teens has reached the “legal” limit or even urinating in public can sometimes be classified as a sexual offense.
Prescribed burns in the forests of the western U.S. will prevent larger wildfires and significantly cut the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a new study.
Nestlé is using palm oil from destroyed Indonesian rainforests and peatlands, in products like Kit Kat, pushing already endangered orang-utans to the brink of extinction and accelerating climate change.
When these regions are compared in animals like turtles and people and chickens, the genomes reveal signs of purifying selection — that is, mutations here tend to be unsuccessful, and lead to death, failure to propagate, etc., other horrible fates that mean tinkering here is largely unfavorable to fecundity (which makes sense: who wants a mutation expressed in their groinal bits?). In the squamates, the evidence in the genome does not witness to intense selection for their particular arrangement, but instead, of relaxed selection — they are generally more tolerant of variations in the Hox gene complex in this area. What was found in those enlarged intergenic regions is a greater invasion of degenerate DNA sequences: lots of additional retrotransposons, like LINES and SINES, which are all junk DNA.
Nestlé, maker of Kit Kat, uses palm oil from companies that are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orang-utans towards extinction.
An unprecedented effort to use world trade rules to save a species from rampant overfishing has failed. A proposal to ban international trade in bluefin tuna under the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was defeated today at a meeting of the 175 nations that belong to the treaty in Doha, Qatar.
The ability of politicians to spin official statistics to support their own point of view is likely to be severely curtailed – at least if UK Statistics Authority has its way.
While the Reg finds it hard to believe that any government minister would be tempted in this way, the good folk over at the Statistics Authority would appear to be a little more cynical.
I wrote a post the other day about Digital Manuscripts, Reading as Writing, and the danger of of “digital rights management” (DRM). The New York Times today provided a lovely follow up in the shape of an article – Turning Green With Literacy – about the Irish role in saving the book after the Roman Empire collapsed.
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DRM is designed to prevent playfulness. But the smartest people in publishing realise that the future will be ludic – George Walkley, who runs digital strategy at Hachette recently told me of the importance of making publishing more “ludic” or game-like.
Now, some will scoff and claims that Grokster was never going to turn into what YouTube is today, but you’re saying that with the gift of hindsight. A large part of Viacom’s motion tries to suggest that the two companies actually were quite similar — but even Viacom is now admitting that YouTube’s business model was able to mature and adapt. Considering that we still don’t have music discovery, promotion and distribution tools as convenient as Napster was back in the day, this can be seen as a real shame. These lawsuits killed off a useful path of exploration for legitimate business models, and that’s not only shameful but a waste of innovative effort. It’s only through the random quirk of a slow court that YouTube may avoid suffering the same fate.
Then there’s an interview of Dan Bull, known around these parts for his musically brilliant open letters to Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson. In the interview, he discusses his views on the music business and things like file sharing. He notes that he’s mainly “against… enforcing backwards laws in order to cling onto an obsolete business model.”
This writer is worn out and he wasn’t even at South by Southwest this weekend. So in the interest of keeping things light, here’s something to put into the strange copyright battles file. Dixie Consumer Products and Huhtamaki Americas Inc. have just finished up in federal court over a suit filed by Dixie who said their competitor had copied their cup design.
Ok. Pick your jaw up off the floor. First, this is stunning in that it’s been the entertainment industry itself that pushed and popularized the term “piracy” for copyright infringement. They did so very deliberately in an attempt to demonize the act of infringement, presenting it as something much worse. That some have since taken that term and embraced it hardly changes that initial fact. Second, she’s wrong about the fact that they’re “talking about a criminal act.” Yes, in some cases copyright infringement may be a criminal act, but in most cases the use of “piracy” these days refers to civil issues between two parties and not criminal acts at all.
Then in another panel session, Mr. Griffin, the founder of OneHouse, whose company is developing a new model of music and entertainment delivery, probably made the most impassioned argument that content must flow freely (double entendre intended) given its capacity to improve the human condition. He likened the current copyright model to an “old vine we cling to,” unsuited for today’s digital world. His solution is to pay content creators based on an “actuarial” model where groups can share revenue collectively.
What was most inspiring is that these people were openly saying what I was thinking — the current system is ill-suited to the current realities. The answer lies in innovating new ways to compensate content creators such as new compensation structures or new engagement methods that can be monetized. In their personal experiences and outlooks, these content producers effectively laid down the gauntlet to the legal industry — innovate or we may all die.
Maybe that’s why Jim Griffin used this quote as a rallying call: “Copyright law … is not an engine of free expression, but a yoke of innovation.” Maybe that’s why the conference is themed: “The Collision of Ideas.”
Newspapers are folding, magazines are fading, ad pages are down and angst is up in the serial publishing business as it struggles through a global technological transition and may not survive. But what will be our next New York Times, our new Field & Stream, our improved Playboy? That’s what the big guns of publishing are fighting about with their Kindles and iPads. But I think they may have it all wrong and my friend Anina, the fashion model/girl geek may have it all right.
The scene at Hailey’s Club on Friday afternoon played like a rumpled, foul-mouthed version of Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton. Denton musician Scott Porter had notes at the ready for his interview with Chicago-based punk rock musician and recording engineer Steve Albini. The near-capacity crowd in the bar filed in from Mulberry Street.
I have restrained myself from writing much about the ICC’s “Building a Digital Economy” report, because I knew it would make me too cross. Fortunately, someone who is rather calmer me than me has done a better job than I would with some careful, rigorous analysis.
Yesterday, Richard Wray wrote up a piece in the Guardian on a study which has been backed by the TUC and claims that by 2015, losses from piracy will reach £218bn and put 1.2 million jobs in peril.
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What the BPI does publish (repeatedly on its site) is the figure of “some 7.3 million people engaged in unlawful filesharing”, according to Jupiter Research. Assuming these two figures — the number of people sharing and the amount of infringement taking place — are supposed to be consistent with one another, this leaves us with a few problems.
That 7.3m figure was investigated by BBC Radio 4’s “More or Less” programme, and the results were written up by Ars Technica.
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The bottom line here is that the 7.3m figure is essentially meaningless; it’s based on a survey of just over a thousand households and then multiplied up in the same way that the BASCAP report does in its predictions. If — and there’s potentially some wiggle-room here — this (still publicised today) 7.3m figure is related to the 1.1bn “infringements” figure, then it renders the UK music part of the BASCAP report as worthless as an educated guess by a journalist. If this is the quality of the data across the board, then the entire report has little merit at all from a analytics perspective.
Two weeks is a lifetime in politics – especially in the political life of the backwards digital economy bill, Labour’s gift to the incumbent entertainment industries that government is bent on ramming into law before the election.
In my last column, I bore the bizarre news that the LibDem front-bench Lords had introduced an amendment to the bill that would create a Great Firewall of Britain. This would be a national censorwall to which the record industry could add its least favourite sites, rendering them invisible to Britons (except for those with the nous of a 13-year-old evading her school’s censorware). Over the following days, the story got weirder: the LibDem amendment got amended, to add a figleaf of due process to the untenable proposal.
And then it got weirder still: a leaked memo from the BPI (the UK record industry lobby) showed that the “LibDem amendment” had in fact been written – with minor variances – by the BPI. And the BPI continued to leak: someone sent me the weekly internal status update prepared by Richard Mollet, BPI Director of Public Affairs for the core group of plotters behind the bill (someone should teach Mr Mollet about BCC).
Translation for non-wonks: Historically, developing countries have asked the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization for “technical assistance” with their copyright laws. This has usually amounted to “Create copyright laws that will make it easier for rich countries to get richer,” but in the past several of years, WIPO has found itself with a large cadre of public interest activists and now, WIPO is working on a treaty on its “Development Agenda” to figure out a copyright system that serves humanitarian goals, too (for example, by making it legal for archivists and educators to work together to translated and adapt works that have different copyright rules in different countries).
We’ve all known that ACTA is a way of writing copyright treaties without having to let poor countries and human rights advocates into the room. We’ve suspected that poor countries — who aren’t invited to the negotiations — will be strong-armed into signing onto the treate afterwards.
David Lammy, United Kingdom Minister for Intellectual Property, today said the UK supports the European Union’s position that the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) should be made public.
The European Commission has now admitted in writing what the ACTA negotiations will mean for the Internet. In Europe, it will mean a ‘harmonised’ enforcement
A simple programming tool is helpful in understanding what’s changed – but we really need some proper internet-enabled means of viewing bills, as MySociety points out
The more of ACTA that leaks, the worse it seems. KEI has the details on another portion of ACTA that had not leaked yet, which focuses on setting up new institutions that would manage ACTA after it was implemented. Basically, it would be an ongoing organization tasked with continuing to update ACTA’s rules — sort of a parallel organization to WIPO, which already exists, but which has recently committed the mortal sin of actually listening to consumer rights groups.
In this episode: Gnome’s Guadec and KDE’s Akademy are getting back together in 2011, and they’re looking for a venue, while Canonical unveils a major rebranding for Ubuntu 10.04. We reveal which presenter had the most SUSE Studio downloads and report back on our time spent with Ubuntu 4.10.
I’m very aware of the FUD that was thrown at open source software and especially Linux in the last decade, though I think we’ve gotten the right facts by now. Therefore I’ve tried to be very careful in the tone of the presentation to be constructive while realistic about adopting open source software.
Bruce Schneier’s blog post about the Mariposa Botnet has an interesting discussion in the comments about how to make a secure system [1]. Note that the threat is considered to be remote attackers, that means viruses and trojan horses – which includes infected files run from USB devices (IE you aren’t safe just because you aren’t on the Internet). The threat we are considering is not people who can replace hardware in the computer (people who have physical access to it which includes people who have access to where it is located or who are employed to repair it). This is the most common case, the risk involved in stealing a typical PC is far greater than the whatever benefit might be obtained from the data on it – a typical computer user is at risk of theft only for the resale value of a second-hand computer.
The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most widespread and critical programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. They are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.
Desktop GNU/Linux is happening whether on clients thick or thin or on servers. Repeating the same old drivel that GNU/Linux has no share and never will is tiresome and wrong. It could be that certain niches will stick with M$. It is those who are becoming irrelevant. GNU/Linux is mainstream and growing more rapidly daily on both server and desktop. Last time I looked, that other OS was still losing share in the top server hosting companies.
The story was told by Greg Price on the Ksplice blog just over a week ago. Said tale involves an impending product launch, a list of critical engineering projects, and not enough time.
Startup companies are always hunting for ways to accomplish as much as possible with what they have available. Last December we realized that we had a growing queue of important engineering projects outside of our core technology that our team didn’t have the time to finish anytime soon. To make matters worse, we wanted the projects completed right away, in time for our planned product launch in early February.
TerminalRun and FoxRunner are two similar Firefox extensions for running a command from a website in a terminal. Because FoxRunner didn’t work for me (but it seems to be working for most people so you can try it if you want), I’ll review TerminalRun.
Package installation for Linux distributions has traditionally separated libraries and application binaries into different packages, so that only one version of a library would be installed and it would be shared by applications that use it. Other operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS X) often bundle a particular version of a library with each application, which can lead to many copies and versions of the same library co-existing on the system. While each model has its advocates, the Linux method is seen by many as superior because a security fix in a particular commonly-used library doesn’t require updating multiple different applications—not to mention the space savings. But, it would seem that both Mozilla and Google may be causing distributions to switch to library-bundling mode in order to support the Firefox and Chromium web browsers.
Want to take full control of your email? Tired of the limitations of Webmail, or GUI clients that are designed for users who only get a handful of emails every day. It’s time to bring out the heavy guns and start using Claws.
Snapping a quick screenshot is a capability you get out of the box with most current Linux distributions. Hit the Print Screen function key, and you should see a dialog box pop up with a capture of your entire screen. For GNOME users this typically launches gnome-screenshot while Kde will bring up Ksnapshot. Both tools are similar in functionality and get the basic job accomplished.
I know that there are those who will argue that Linux isn’t worth supporting, but I disagree. It’s been a travesty and grave injustice for Linux to be almost totally locked out of the computer gaming market thanks to Microsoft pushing its proprietary junk and deliberately locking game vendors into Windows, and the laziness of game companies that can’t be bothered to support multiple platforms.
The lack of games for Linux (and also Mac OS X) has worked to Microsoft’s advantage by making Windows the platform for computer gaming. That’s great if you’re a Microsoft shareholder or employee, but it’s very bad if you believe in choice when it comes to computer operating systems.
Gaming companies need to abandon DirectX as quickly as possible and move to OpenGL instead.
True story: last night I was thinking about how great a Magical ~/Downloads/ folder would be, so that downloaded PDFs, videos, documents, whatever would automatically get moved into my ~/Documents/ and my ~/Music/ and my other folders. I thought, hmm maybe I’ll make a wish on http://bugs.kde.org/ for something like that. Granted, not everyone wants it as their Downloads/ folder (and not everyone even has that; Iceweasel and Firefox set it up in 3.5 and beyond and I don’t know if Konqueror, ReKonq, or Aurora even use it). But it was an interesting idea.
The economy may still be in the doldrums, but Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said pitching the cost savings of open source software doesn’t necessarily seal the deal with enterprise customers as it once may have.
In fact, the cloud has largely displaced open source as the “next big thing” in the enterprise computing landscape, but it’s important to recognize that open source provides much of the underlying software infrastructure for the majority of commercial public clouds.
In a press meeting Wednesday, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and vice president of corporate development Mike Evans discussed how open source is at the basis of cloud computing and how an open architecture and layered approach to infrastructure is the best path forward.
Berry Linux is a Live CD Linux distribution based on Fedora and aimed mostly at the Japanese market. The latest update, Berry Linux 1.01, is based on the latest stable release, Fedora 12, and comes with updated packages, especially the very latest stable versions. It uses a customized KDE 4 environment, the latest version plucked from Fedora 12, KDE 4.4.0. Both Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird are now at the newest versions and the Microsoft Windows networking suite Samba has also been updated.
Canonical’s Jorge Castro recently introduced me to a nifty tool called TestDrive that simplifies the setup process by automatically downloading the ISO and configuring a VM. TestDrive provides a simple command-line tool that allows you to select which ISO image you want to test. It will download the image and then configure and launch a VM. The real win is that it caches the ISO images and uses rsync to update the parts that have changed so that you don’t have to download the whole ISO again every time you want to test a new daily build.
Want to run WordPress, Drupal, or whip up a DJango instance on Ubuntu without all the hassle of configuring an operating system and support stack? Now you can. BitNami has added the most recent release of Ubuntu to its virtual appliance stacks.
PeterB was right. Greenie Linux is one outstanding distribution. All you have to do is get beyond the language barrier (by simply installing the distro) and you will find a flavor of Linux that has something for just about everyone. Give this distribution a try. You won’t be disappointed.
My blogomaniac buddy Alan Shimel recently posted a piece arguing that Android, the open source darling of the mobile world, looks pretty small against the elephantine overall mobile market whichodence-droid comprises mostly un-smart phones. Despite that, he points out that recently open sourced Symbian “is a major force in the traditional handset OS market.” Substantiating the point, Tony Bradley writes for PC world, “Symbian has nearly as much market share as the rest of its competitors combined–including the iPhone, with more than 330 million Symbian smartphones in use.”
Google’s attempt to trademark the term “Nexus One” for its Android smartphone has been rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as it was deemed too similar to a related term.
There is an experimental, pre-alpha version of the addon available for download here.
Please be aware that this experimental code. If you are not comfortable with running software that can crash your browser, or cause you lose work, you may want to wait. Please read the Release Notes first.
Recently at OpenOffice.org we have decided to give more highlight to our many native-language communities, who are in charge not just of localization, but also QA, users support, documentation translation and marketing. Each month, we will interview teams, blog about it, include it in the OpenOffice.org, newsletter, etc. This month, we start with the Irish native-language project, lead by Kevin Scannell. You can find more about the Irish language here.
Since it’s almost Easter Sunday, I will be sharing with you several cool virtual Easter eggs hidden inside some of our favorite software applications. Today, we will take a look at some Easter eggs inside OpenOffice.org so get ready to have fun or be amused.
I could reinvent the wheel here, but there’s no point. The best post that I have seen on this comes from my friend, John Henley of Decision Analytics. Henley details some advantages to customizing an application. They include:
* Core competencies
* Your other front/back-office systems require it
* You want additional fields and/or different field sizes
* Regulatory requirements
The Free Software Foundation has always done a great job defending the various free software licences, promoting their use, and asking for Linux to be referred to as GNU/Linux.
I had the opportunity earlier this week to sit down with Jeff and discuss with him his appointment and learn a little more about the work of W3C and his plans for the coming year. Jeff talked about the importance of W3C’s Royalty-Free Patent Policy and we discussed how the free software community could participate in and follow the work of W3C. He stated that he wanted to “make sure that free software advocates view W3C — which has spearheaded the removal of patent royalties from standards — as a great place to participate.”
Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.
Better than almost anyone, Eben Moglen knows what’s at stake. He was General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and helped draft several versions of the GNU GPL. As well as being Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, he is the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. And he has an ambitious plan to save us from those seductive but freedom-threatening Web service companies. He explained to Glyn Moody what the problem is, and how we can fix it.
Free software is software that comes with permission for anyone to use, copy, and distribute, either verbatim or with modifications, either gratis or for a fee. In particular, this means that source code must be available. “If it’s not source, it’s not software.”
It’s only appropriate then, that during Sunshine Week, the National Security Archive would check on how various agencies have responded to Freedom of Information Act requests in the last year. Sunshine Week, according to the organization’s Web site, is a national initiative established to focus on the importance of open government and the freedom of information.
One year into its promise of greater government transparency, the Obama administration is more often citing exceptions to the nation’s open records law to withhold federal records even as the number of requests for information declines, according to a review by The Associated Press of agency audits about the Freedom of Information Act.
Indeed, as ABC’s Nightline revealed much later, both Negroponte and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden pressured the LA Times to kill the story. And when Klein told his story to CBS’s 60 Minutes, they too eventually killed the story without explanation.
In the end, of course, Klein’s evidence became the backbone of EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for their complicity in illegal government spying. Originally ignored by Senators and newspapers alike, his evidence was ultimately so damning that it could only be defeated by an unprecedented “telco immunity” law pushed by the Bush White House and passed by the US Congress amidst a massive public controversy. EFF then relied on Klein’s evidence for a case against the government, which has been met with fierce resistance by the Obama Administration.
“Open source prevents monopolies, helps to share knowledge and increases social innovation”, says Vincent Van Quickenborne, Belgium’s minister for the Simplification of the Administration. He expects that public administrations will increasingly turn to this type of software, in part because it helps to cut costs.
With his talk, minister Van Quickenborne opened a workshop on free software for public administrations, organised by the ministry of Economics in Brussels, on Friday 12 March.
Playing with open map data can be a fun pastime. Creating and editing open data can be not only fun, but also a boost for free data to go along with free software. Whether you want to view open map data or edit it, there’s no shortage of applications that run on Linux and work well with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Here’s a look at some useful mapping applications for displaying and editing open map data on the Linux desktop.
According to a new schedule, the next version of the dynamic Ruby 1.9.2 scripting language will probably be released in mid August. While previous plans were for a final release by last December, the developers wanted to ensure that the new version passed the RubySpec tests. Eventually this lead to the release being postponed. Ruby 1.9.2dev has now passed all the relevant tests.
The Qt developers have announced a technical preview for QT 4.7, the cross platform C++ framework for GUI applications. According to the developers, the pre-release is not suitable for production use, but will give a good idea of how they plan to enhance the framework. According to the developers, the final release of Qt 4.7 will be around the middle of the year.
There are several more ideas on the site and ways to support the organizers of the event itself. So, if you’re one of the millions of people who would actually like others to be able to open the documents you send them, visit the Document Freedom Day website for more info and start working on your DFD project. You’ve got two weeks! Feel free to share your DFD ideas below.
Two Muslim men were charged last night in the Irish Republic in connection with an alleged plot to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, whose artwork outraged many Muslims after he depicted the Prophet Muhammad’s head on the body of a dog in 2007.
To address the violence, decriminalization has to encompass not just possession for personal use (a policy that Mexico and several U.S. states have adopted in limited ways) but production and distribution as well. During alcohol prohibition—when the U.S. homicide rate rose by 43 percent, peaking the year of repeal—there were no criminal penalties for drinking. Yet by making it illegal to manufacture and sell alcohol, the government invited the likes of Al Capone to vie for control of a lucrative black market, with predictably violent results. Once alcohol was legalized, the business was no longer run by criminals, and liquor suppliers stopped shooting at each other.
Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal’s Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership has been at the top of my discretionary reading pile for months, now ever since the publisher, Yale, sent me a review copy. Unfortunately, it’s been months since I’ve done any substantial discretionary reading and it’ll be months still before I get to do so. So yesterday, I just carved out 45 minutes to give it a good, thorough skim, and while I don’t have enough of the book in me to do an actual review, I can tell you that my suspicions were confirmed.
A 25-year-old man was asked to leave a train after staff became concerned when he wrote song titles by bands including The Killers on a piece of paper.
As many as 85 per cent of teachers have reported the use of CCTV in their schools and one-in-10 said cameras had even been placed in toilets.
According to the study, some schools are also using other techniques such as fingerprinting, metal detectors, electronic identity cards, eye scanners and facial recognition systems.
Research funded by Salford University said that schools were increasingly becoming a “hotbed for surveillance practices” in the UK as children were subjected to checks for often mundane reasons such as borrowing a book from a library or paying for lunch.
But Dr Emmeline Taylor also suggested many schools were collecting CCTV images illegally by failing to inform pupils and visitors that they were being monitored under the Data Protection Act.
Sussex Police will be the first force in the country to have members of the public monitoring its CCTV.
Twelve independent, fully trained and vetted volunteers will visit each police CCTV monitoring centre in Sussex once a month to look at the usage of more than 400 council-owned cameras.
Currently, 400 cameras stream live to bases in Brighton and Haywards Heath and can be searched from police stations around the county.
To effectively oversee a massive, complex institution like the US military, you need a massive, hierarchical institution composed of people whose job it is to understand that institution. The military itself has an officer’s corps that performs this function. No other institution, inside or outside the government, has the capacity to understand military operations in anything close to their full detail.
[...]
Similarly, last year the New York Times documented that the “military analysts” you see on cable TV programs tend to have close (and almost always undisclosed) ties to the Pentagon. The tricky thing about this is that it may very well be true that these folks are the most knowledgeable about military strategy. What better way to become an expert than to work in the military for decades? But at the same time, if you want impartial analysis of current policy, you don’t want all of your experts to be people with close ties to the people running that policy.
Innocent until proven guilty is a founding principle of our criminal justice system. This principle has also been codified in the U.S. Constitution via the 6th Amendment, providing the right to adequate counsel to all individuals accused of a crime. Last week, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol launched an attack on individuals who undertook the enormously difficult task of upholding justice when they represented Guantanamo detainees. In the advertisement by a new entity named “Keep America Safe,” Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol question the loyalty of Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers who had previously represented Guantanamo detainees in order to defend U.S. legal obligations under the Constitution and treaties we have ratified.
Sal Miah, 35, heard a noise in the cellar and when he investigated he saw two teenagers who fled but he pursued them to a park and dragged them back to the restaurant.
In the last few posts in my Vietnam series, I argued that American foreign policy was crippled by the fact that senior officials were fed a steady stream of misinformation. Positive news about the war flowed easily up the chain of command and reached the Secretary of Defense and the President. Negative information, in contrast, was systematically filtered out by the official reporting channels. As a consequence, senior officials were working with a limited and distorted view of the “facts on the ground.”
Body scan Our position on body scanners has been made clear on this site several times. They’re an intrusive and unnecessary over-reaction to a threat (the Christmas Bomber) which could and should have been picked up using the intelligence available at the time – competent use of existing resources, not throwing money at new ones to be run by the same people whose incompetence led to the problem in the first place.
As if President Barack Obama didn’t have enough on his platter, he’s calling for people accused of crimes to have their DNA samples collected and stored in a national database, whether they’re convicted or not. He’s a brave man to open that can of worms.
Analysts from the world over agree that today’s economic instability and resulting write-downs proved the most serious threat to the financial services organizations, and is by far the most prolonged crisis since the 1930s. The downturn continues to contaminate more sections of the markets, driving most companies to re-evaluate their strategic moves or risk bankruptcy. Equity values have become more volatile. Financial products and services are falling back in its demand amid the accelerating slowdown in the global economy leading to a dip in the business and consumer confidence.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd will unveil financial-regulation legislation that may create a consumer division at the Federal Reserve with power to write rules that could be overturned by a systemic-risk council, according to a Senate aide with knowledge of the plan.
I have warned my readers about following myths and legends versus reality and facts several times in the past, particularly as it applies to Goldman Sachs and what I have coined “Name Brand Investing”.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) has lost its bid to exclude a proposal on executive pay from its upcoming annual proxy filing, according to a response from U.S. securities regulators.
We agree that he joined Goldman only in January 2002 (this was in our original post). But the latest revelations regarding the Goldman-Greece relationship (on the Senate floor, no less) clearly indicate that Goldman was a lead manager of Greek debt issues in spring 2002, i.e., when Mr. Draghi was on board.
In its previous response to us, the the Bank of Italy pointed out that Mario Draghi (its current governor) did not join the management of Goldman Sachs until 2002 – hence he was not there when the controversial Greek “debt swaps” were arranged.
The Sunday Telegraph also reported the European Union (EU) nations were preparing a “bailout package” for Greece that could exceed $34.4 billion as early as Monday the 15th, with Germany and France the main cash backers.
Lehman Brothers executives weren’t the only ones in the building when they were moving billions of dollars in liabilities off their books at the end of each quarter with magic accounting. So were the Feds, The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his latest DealBook column.
Congress Daily reported today that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would spend at least $3 million in a multi-state TV ad buy opposing Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd’s (D-CN) bill to revamp the financial regulatory system. David Hirschmann, President of the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said his organization would spend the money as the bill gets ready to be marked up and voted upon in the Senate Banking Committee next week.
Though Google is denying anything about its processes have changed, MSNBC.com reported Tuesday that searches on subjects that had been blocked as objectionable are yielding results. For example, searches on “Tiananmen Square massacre,” “Xinijang independence,” and “Tibet Information Network” all returned results. They would not have returned results before.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has said he plans to introduce legislation by the end of next week that would require ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” websites for all Australians.
Any town U.S.A. You walk into a store and notice someone you recognize, from Facebook. But you really don’t know the individual; only online have you “met” that person. You have shared a note, or played a game on Facebook, Myspace, or other media website. You can choose to say hello or ignore them. That choice is up to you.
Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages.
Wikileaks, a website that aims to boost government transparency and accountability by publishing sensitive documents, has released a classified military counterintelligence analysis report that discusses the “threat posed to the US Army” by Wikileaks itself.
Citizens United, fresh from its Supreme Court victory giving corporations the right to bankroll election campaigns, has sent a trademark demand letter to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, complaining that a Facebook page entitled “Citizens United Against Citizens United” infringes its trademark. Apparently, Citizens United is worried that members of the public might come to the page and think that the organization “Citizens United” is attacking Citizens United, the landmark Supreme Court decision that it won.
Reporter Amy Wallace wrote an article late last year for Wired Magazine about the extremely heated and somewhat controversial debate over child vaccinations. In the course of the article, she quotes people from both sides. At one point, when one of the main doctors who supports vaccinations discusses the woman who has become the face (and voice) of the anti-vaccination crew, he responds to some of her claims by noting “she lies.” Apparently, those two words resulted in her filing a defamation lawsuit against the doctor and the reporter, Amy Wallace.
This means you will no longer be able to download replacement Digital Rights Management (DRM) ‘unlock’ licence keys for the WMA files you’ve bought from us is in the past – so you should back up your music and DRM licence keys now.
Any MP3 files you’ve downloaded from BigPond Music will not be affected.
Gamers have long known that patience is rewarded with cheaper, less-buggy games. But does that adage hold true for the inclusion of digital rights management as well? Not always, but history does show us that time makes even the strictest of DRM less sucky.
I’ve always thought that in a copyright free world (and de facto that is our online world now – whatever they law may proclaim) DRM had a role to play. Not the role of permanently putting content under lock and key – that isn’t feasible. But it is possible to use DRM on a short-term basis for new releases to give some short-term monopoly power – and this might provide some useful incentive for creation, while being largely self-limiting. By unlocking the content after a brief period of initial sales the incentive to crack the DRM is greatly reduced, while from a revenue point of view, most of the money is from the initial sales anyway.
Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.
There’s been something of a battle going on in the UK over news aggregators. Obviously, we’ve all heard about the various threats by companies like News Corp. in the US to sue Google over its Google News product, but a lot of this has already been playing out on a smaller scale in the UK. Last year we wrote about newspapers in the UK threatening aggregators like NewsNow, leading some to start blocking NewsNow crawlers. This is silly in the extreme. These aggregators offer links to the news. The “issue” with NewsNow is that it sells this as a service to companies — and the newspapers claim they deserve a cut. Note that NewsNow provides just a link and a headline and the tiniest of blurbs. It’s much less than even Google News provides. The newspapers seem to think that no one can profit from advertising their own stories unless they get a direct cut.
Albini recently made at a conference about the music business, with a great quote about the focus of so many on royalties:
“Royalties are a means to pay producers in the future — and in perpetuity — based on record sales,” said Albini, who is also a music journalist. “If a band does a show, blows a whole bunch of minds and a bunch of people become fans and go out and buy millions of records, the producer gets paid. I think that’s ethically unsustainable.
“I don’t think you should pay a doctor extra because a patient doesn’t die. I think the doctor should be busting his ass for every patient. I don’t think I should get paid for someone else’s success.”
As was leaked earlier this week, a study paid for by the International Chamber of Commerce has come out with ridiculously misleading and misguided report about how “piracy” is killing jobs all through Europe. The tagline is that it’s “costing” 1.2 million jobs and about $330 million. And, of course, that sort of report is the kind that the press loves, and so we get a series of headlines:
* Net piracy puts 1.2m EU jobs in peril, study shows
* Internet piracy taking big toll on jobs
* Illegal-file sharing could ‘cost billions’ by 2015
* Piracy threatens Europe’s creative industries
* EU must take ‘urgent’ action on piracy, report warns
And on and on and on and on. Of course, it’s not even close to true. The real story is that for certain companies who refuse to adapt and refuse to embrace what consumers want and what technology allows, modern technology will cause them to fail. However, at the same time, it has already opened up new opportunities and created new jobs while making it easier and more efficient to create, promote, distribute and consume content. Somehow, however, none of that seems to show up in these studies.
Her current project — recently funded — has been to produce “Minute Memes.” These are short animated films which promote free culture ways of thinking about copyright, specifically intended to counter propaganda from industry copyright maximalists like the MPAA and the RIAA.
Second, the bill expands the levy to audio recording devices, defined in C-499 as “a device that contains a permanently embedded data storage medium, including solid state or hard disk, designed, manufactured and advertised for the purpose of copying sound recordings, excluding any prescribed kind of recording device.” This covers everything – iPods, iPhones, Blackberries, Androids, iPads, personal computers. While the CPCC (the private copying collective) may not target all of these devices, there is nothing in the bill that prevents them from doing so.
Third, the bill deals solely with sound recordings, but there have already been calls to extend to video and other forms of content. Expanding the levy in this manner without addressing those issues leaves open the prospect of an even bigger levy in the future.
The reggae artist is outraged over alleged similarities between his 80s song and Gorillaz’ new single, Stylo
[...]
Curious listeners can compare the songs for themselves (see below) – paying particular attention to Stylo’s drowsy three-note synth riff, 40 seconds in. In comments to the NME, Grant suggested Gorillaz’ publishers already visited a musicologist to evaluate this similarity. “[Normally] I would have gotten a call from EMI to say, ‘Damon [Albarn] wants to use Time Warp. What arrangement can you guys come to? Would you claim 100%, would you claim 60%, or 70% of whatever it is?’ That phone call never came. Instead what happened is somebody went straight to a musicologist, implying that there was some kind of pre-knowledge of some kind of infringement.”
Google Inc accused Viacom Inc of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Just as Davenport Lyons lawyers are being sent for disciplinary action over the firm’s practice of sending large numbers of “pay up or we sue” pre-settlement letters, ACS:Law, the shady firm that effectively spun out of Davenport Lyons to do the same thing is ramping up its efforts. This isn’t a huge surprise. Late last year, the firm said it was preparing to send out 30,000 letters, despite numerous studies showing that these letters regularly target innocent people, but scare many people into just paying to avoid a lawsuit.
KEI has learned that the European Union has proposed language in the ACTA negotiations to require criminal penalties for “inciting, aiding and abetting” certain offenses, including “at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting and copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale.”
There’s a reason you don’t hear much about international trade agreements. They are kind of dull, and they’re usually not very controversial. But the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is different.
“One feels that you’re almost in a bit of a twilight zone,” says Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. “I mean, we’re talking about a copyright treaty. And it’s being treated as akin to nuclear secrets.”
For several years, the United States and other developed countries have been quietly working on ACTA. Geist has been one of the loudest critics of the proposed pact. He says it’s a counterfeiting agreement in name only, and he thinks the treaty would actually change some of the fundamental rules governing the Internet. But what makes Geist really angry is the way it’s been negotiated.
“Virtually none of it has been open to the public,” Geist says. “Even the early meetings were actually held in secret locations, so no one even knew where they were taking place.”
We’ve written about the unhealthy secrecy around the ACTA treaty negotiations. As New Zealanders we believe we have a right to know what our government is doing on our behalf.
We wrote to the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to ask them some questions about ACTA under the Official Information Act. We just got our answers back (scanned PDFs of the MED letter – 3MB, MFAT letter – 3MB, and cabinet paper – 6MB) and we have to admit that we weren’t very surprised to see more excuses not to release official information than we saw information.
The Australian Government has no intention of changing its domestic laws to harmonise with an international treaty on copyright, according to a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
· Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1 Has KDE SC 4.4.1 and Plymouth
· Announced Distro: Frugalware 1.2 Comes with KDE 4
· Announced Distro: SME Server 7.5 RC1 and 8.0 Beta 5 Are Ready for Testing
· Announced Distro: Fedora 13 Alpha Released
· Announced Distro: Available Now: VortexBox 1.2
· Announced Distro: PC/OS 10.1 OpenWorkstation Final Released
· Announced Distro: Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Alpha 3 Is Here
Some of us are still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. Some think it’s already here. One thing is certain however, Linux does not have a majority desktop market share. By the time we get there, perhaps the entire idea of what a Desktop is will have been re-defined, thanks to “The Cloud”.
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate organization LPI-Portugal (http://www.lpi.com.pt) has signed an agreement with UMIC (http://www.umic.pt/), the Knowledge Society Agency of Portugal’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Education to promote training and certification of professional skills in the use of Linux, open source technologies and free software in higher education institutions in Portugal.
What I do see being good for Linux is the growing size of the Linux community. Eventually, a software vendor will decide to start releasing its software for the Linux platform as well as x86-64 Mac and Win32. A company such as Adobe or Microsoft would then be dictating which distribution became dominant, but you would see other vendors follow that lead, and Linux would come screaming into the mainstream rather quickly, and I would talk to my boss, and I would start recommending Linux machines. I have a feeling that others in my position would do the same. The money to be made would be in keeping these commercial applications running. As an update broke the app, I would be called upon to fix things so that the application would once again run. I can see that being very lucrative indeed. How often is that cry of distress heard by Ubuntu users?
Are you a practice, clinic or any other health care institution that is using medical open source software in daily routine? And wasn’t it quite hard for you to find the right software, to get it up and running and to finally customize it to your needs without having any experienced users or reference sites at hand?
Even a high number of downloads or a strong ‘activity percentile’ of an open source software project doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability for your purposes and in general about the stability and efficiency that are required for successful clinical practice.
The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC also features a choice of 4GB SSD (Solid State Drive) flash module with Linux as well as standard hard disk drives for a superior computing experience.
The library purchased 50 laptops with a Linux operating system. He said library officials are deciding whether the check out duration will be three days, seven days or a month.
“Right now [laptops] go out for four hours and you can’t check them out over night, which is not because we don’t want to, but the campus Microsoft license restricts how it can be used,” Tyckoson said. “Linux is an open source competitor to Microsoft.”
SMEStorage, the multi cloud data access provider, have released the third beta of their Linux Cloud Drive which currently enables up to 10 commercial storage providers to be accessed directly from a virtual drive in Linux.
IBM’s cloud environment includes support for Linux–through Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell–as well as Java (presumably supported directly by IBM.)
Interestingly, the underlying virtualization is powered by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, the Red Hat branded and supported KVM offering, as opposed to Xen, which powers much of Amazon. IBM and Red Hat have long been partners, but it’s a huge boost for Red Hat’s virtualization efforts to get IBM on board in such a big way.
Voxware, Inc., a leading supplier of voice picking software for warehousing operations, announced support for the IBM WebSphere application server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. A major US retailer has chosen this technology stack for the rollout of their Voxware 3 voice picking solution.
As one of the early pioneers of VDI based on top of a Linux hypervisor platform, Virtual Bridges has been competing with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft in the emerging VDI market.
GMO had to consider their primary applications: MySQL, Postgres, and Apache. To define their direction, GMO queried the community to find what they are using for their Linux-based replication needs. With DRBD’s reputation and recent acceptance into the Linux Kernel (2.6.33), LINBIT came with high recommendation from the experts. DRBD’s ease of use, absence of vendor lock-in, simple installation and upgrade path made GMO’s decision a simple one.
Saw an interesting article today that out of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, 9 of them are running some variant of Linux. On top of this a whopping 85% of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world run some form of the open source OS too.
While NVIDIA has been working on the 195.xx Linux driver since before last November, they have yet to officially release a stable driver in this series as of yet. Betas have been available and they even had to recall their recent drivers over a fan speed issue that could damage the system, but now they are finally getting ready to push out a stable release.
ABBYY Europe, makers of FineReader OCR software, has announced a command line version of its FineReader Engine 8.0. Previous versions have required use of ABBYY’s SDK version to create applications which make use of the company’s proprietary OCR technology, but the new command line version can be driven from the console or incorporated in shell scripts or web server processing for a simpler integration process. ABBYY have had an OCR offering on Linux since 2003, and brought its FineReader Engine 8.0 SDK to the open source operating system in 2007.
One month later, it teamed up with Nokia to create Meego, a hybrid of Intel’s own Moblin OS and Nokia’s Maemo. This platform will offer one Linux-based development ecosystem that will give developers one build across phones, netbooks and potentially tablets, e-readers, in-car and more.
At their heart, note-taking apps perform a very simple function: put letters on the screen. They differ widely, though, in the special features each offers.
Since our collection of Free and Open Source finance/accounting software for Linux has been quite popular, I would like to add 7 more to that list. As I’ve said before, finance or accounting software will prove valuable for those who have small or medium-sized business as it will allow users to do important tasks like recording and processing accounting transactions within functional modules such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and trial balance.
Exaile music player is released, the n ew release come with many new features and many bugs fixed, now in the new version is including a completely revamped and much more powerful tag editor, an equalizer, Collection panel should now be faster , better support for non-standard filename encodings, standalone lyrics pane plugin, Plugins for DAAP music sharing support, better display of compilation albums.
The Yorba developers have released version 0.5.0 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. In addition to the usual stability and performance improvements, this major update to the free digital photo organiser includes a number of changes and new features.
OpenOffice.org is the greatest open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. Over the years OpenOffice has evolved to become much more than just an alternative to MS Office however. Let’s look at some hacks that will allow you to become more of a power user of OpenOffice, enabling you to be more productive with the software.
It’s not going to happen overnight, games developers will need to become comfortable developing cross-platform titles for release on PC and Mac, and they will have to gain confidence in the ability of both OpenGL to keep up with GPU development, and of Unix GPU drivers to attain the same quality as their windows counterparts, but if by the end of 2010 we have at least a couple of AAA titles released as native Linux versions, such as ID’s Rage, then other developers may look to follow their lead in 2011.
We will be launching a survey this week asking GNOME developers who they work for, and whether they have worked for other companies previously – because of the widespread use of gnome.org email addresses in GNOME, unfortunately it has not always been easy to identify companies behind the people. We also want qualitative information on projects you work on, whether you work on GNOME in your free time, and more. We are be breaking down GNOME development by core platform, external dependencies, GNOME desktop, GNOME hosted applications and other GNOME applications. Vanessa will be sending out a very short survey to everyone who has committed to GNOME, and we need your help to make the census as useful as possible to the GNOME project.
Well, if you follow the active development of GNOME as much as I do, you may have heard of two recent technologies actively being developed. They are Zeitgeist and the GNOME Activity Journal. What are they? Well, Zeitgeist is a little, unobtrusive daemon that ticks quietly away in the background and records every file you access, every image you edit, essentially every event you perform on your computer and keeps a chronological Journal of this information for other applications to use. This is the core engine that runs quietly in the background. The frontend to this is the GNOME Activity Journal – an application that allows you to browse and search through Zeitgeist’s recordings of your activities and interact with that information. One of the developers of the GNOME Activity Journal posted a very handy video showing it in action. I use it myself and it is very handy. I also use Docky2 on my desktop that has Zeitgeist interaction. One of the options when you right-click on a launcher in Docky2 is the Journal entry, that allows you to browse through recent events and files accessed in that particular application. A stroke of genius. Again here’s a handy little video demonstrating Docky2 with Zeitgeist integration.
There is usually no distribution that will perfectly fit everyones needs. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses which will vary from person to person. This article covers all the major advantages (and disadvantages) each of these distributions have to offer and will hopefully give you enough information to help guide you in choosing which Linux Distribution is right for your computer.
Mandriva has announced the availability of the first point update to version 5 of its Enterprise Server commercial Linux distribution. Mandriva Enterprise Server 5.1 includes all of the distributions previous updates and a number of improvements.
The GeeXboX developers have announced the availability of the second alpha of version 2.0 of their small embedded Linux distribution aimed at Home Theatre PCs (HTPC) and media centres. The latest development release addresses a number of bugs from last month’s first alpha and includes several changes.
After the announcements of KDE, KDE64 and Fluxbox editions of the current Linux Mint 8 (Helena) operating system, Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint community are once again proud to present today the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 8 LXDE Community Edition. Being powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31, the new edition includes X.Org 7.4, Openbox 3.4.7.2 and PCManFM 0.5.2. The Linux Mint 8 RC1 LXDE Edition has been created for people who want a fast, lightweight and good-looking operating system, for their antique hardware.
Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 30.72, +0.05, +0.16%) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Symbian Foundation, a global non-profit organization formed to foster an open source community around its mobile device software, has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide a scalable, high-performance base for its private, cloud-based developer website and server.
The company has surprised some commentators with the decision to base the system on virtualisation software from enterprise open source vendor Red Hat, rather than the more commonly used Xen open source hypervisor.
Red Hat’s implementation of KVM is the virtualization underpinning of the new software test and development service for the IBM Cloud. Red Hat hopes that vote of confidence will persuade enterprises to try KVM in their own IT shops.
Open source solutions outfit Red Hat will host its third annual EMEA partner summit in Valencia, Spain from May 2nd to 5th 2010. This year’s event will focus on open source middleware, cloud computing and virtualisation, while highlighting the strength of the Red Hat partner ecosystems and its potential for growth in the EMEA market.
“The technology landscape is constantly evolving. With the introduction of cloud computing and virtualisation coupled with a full portfolio of open source middleware, we want to ensure that our partners are equipped with the latest training and information on these offerings to help them deliver better solutions and higher value to their customers,” said Petra Heinrich, senior director, partners and alliances EMEA region at Red Hat. “The Red Hat and JBoss EMEA partner summit will address these current market trends.”
At the inaugural Open Source Business Conference in 2004, the discussion centered on how to fund open source’s survival. Just six years later, the OSBC conversation has taken a 180-degree shift to focus on whether proprietary software’s shelf life is nearing its end as open-source software economics increasingly drive technology innovation.
The Debian project was given a new server from Thomas Krenn AG, Intel and Adaptec for its image building. With the Dual-Xeon computer the build process was reduced from 20 to two hours.
New in Debian’s infrastructure is the SC846 server with a 4-unit height and two Intel Xeon E5540 processors. While the previous five-year-old system took 20 hours for a build, the new one took less than two hours, according to the project and its benefactor, Thomas Krenn AG, in a joint press release.
MEPIS has released SimplyMEPIS 8.5.00, RC3 of MEPIS 8.5, now available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.00-rc3_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.00-rc3_64.iso respectively. Deltas are also available.
One thing that we have been really keen to facilitate in Ubuntu is an ethos of just do it. I really believe our community should feel engaged to be creative in their ideas and be able to get out there and do it, with plenty of support resources so others can help them achieve their goals. I am keen that we don’t have a bottleneck where creativity is limited. Of course, this happens from time to time, but we are always keen to resolve it where possible.
I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with “older” Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn’t even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.
Trent and I were both looking forward to the release of the Linux Mint LXDE Community Edition for various reasons. Luckily for us, Kendall (maintainer of the Linux Mint Fluxbox CE) pointed us to the .iso for RC1, which is what we’re using as the basis for this review. Since we both have feedback on this CE, we’re trying a Trent Says/Joe Says model. Enjoy!
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The installer was the familiar Ubiquity installer used by Ubuntu and Linux Mint alike, which was not an issue on my hardware — though Ubiquity can be an issue if you’re running less than 256 Mb of RAM. While you may scoff at that, some people are looking to lighter weight releases like this one as an option for resurrecting old hardware, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking about giving this or any other distro which uses the Ubiquity installer a try.
The NYT says the service—with the apropos name ‘Google TV’—is being developed in conjunction with Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Intel; (NSDQ: INTC) the testing, meanwhile, is being done with the Dish Network.
Intel announced a SOHO-oriented network-attached storage (NAS) reference platform based on its D410 and dual-core D510 “Pineview” Atom processors and 82801R I/O controller. NAS vendors LaCie, LG Electronics, Qnap, Synology, and Thecus will incorporate the Linux-compatible platform in upcoming NAS devices, starting with the Blu-ray burner-equipped LG N4B2, says Intel.
AccessKey IP is shipping a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) and related secure USB key for viewing encrypted IPTC broadcasts. The AccessKey Home STB offers a security-enabled HD IPTV service that can be combined with digital terrestrial, satellite, or cable reception, while the USB key can bring the same secure IPTV service to PCs, the company says.
The “6WINDGate SDS” profile is optimized for platforms in which the networking Fast Path runs on dedicated cores without the overhead of a Linux-based Slow Path.
Carmes said 6WINDGate’s architecture removes the complexity of integrating high-performance packet processing with the Linux environment, because it fully synchronizes the Fast Path and Linux, while preserving Linux APIs.
The MathWorks has announced the latest release of its MATLAB and Simulink product families, writes Richard Wilson, which include new streaming capabilities for signal processing and video processing in MATLAB and nonlinear solvers for standard and large-scale optimisation.
Wind River announced that its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) operating system, development tools, and build system now supports HP BladeSystem carrier-grade and enterprise server blades. Wind River Linux 3.0 is the first registered CGL 4.0 distribution supported on HP ProLiant server blades for the HP BladeSystem, claims Intel subsidiary Wind River.
The CAK-2000 supports Linux, and is available with an optional copy of Freescale’s Vortiqa, a Linux-based software development platform for optimizing firewall, IPSec-VPN, IPS, anti-virus, and anti-spam software for multi-core QorIQ and PowerQUICC SoCs. The network appliance is said to comply with FCC/CE, UL, and RoHS/WEEE.
If you’re a really hardcore techie, you’ll be able to use the ‘Fun Plug’ system to install apps on your NAS to add functionality. Be warned though, this isn’t a beginner feature and requires at least some technical understanding of Linux.
Standard controllers for dataplane applications, including one Linux-optimized model. Based on Tensilica’s configurable, 32-bit RISC “Xtensa” architecture, the five upward-compatible processor cores include a Diamond Standard 233L processor with a Linux-optimized MMU, and are claimed to be 15 percent faster and more power efficient than earlier models.
GE Intelligent Platforms announced a Linux-ready AdvancedTCA single board computer with an option for Intel’s new Xeon 5600 processors. The dual-Xeon A10200 offers up to six cores clocked to 2GHz, plus 12MB of L3 cache per CPU, and offers dual 10 gigabit Ethernet interfaces and four gigabit Ethernet interfaces, says the company.
Timesys announced that its LinuxLink commercial software development framework for building custom embedded Linux based products now supports the latest networking processor from Wintegra. Now shipping in volume, the dual MIPS 34K core “WinPath 3″ IP packet processor is designed for 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile and fixed wireless base stations, says the company.
I had a great interview with the architects of MontaVista Software’s 1-second boot-time real-time Linux. After the interview went to press it occurred to me to ask Alexander Kaliadin a related question. If smart people like him can figure out how to boot a computer in less than a second, is it also possible to turn the computer off in a short time? His answer was that you could possibly just flip the power switch, if the hardware was designed to allow this. His response and elaboration are below.
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I mentioned to Alex that I would like to publish the above comments in my blog and he was nice enough to elaborate on them in the following communication:
In a typical desktop box, the proper Linux shutdown process will involve flushing disk caches, closing multiple files and un-mounting drives (local or networked). Depending on the use case, certain daemons or processes may wait for various operations to complete in order to proceed with the shutdown process.
MontaVista® Software, LLC, the leader in embedded Linux® commercialization announced it has been elected to the Board of Directors of the GENIVI Alliance, an automotive and consumer electronics industry association driving the development and adoption of an open In-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform. MontaVista was a Core member of GENIVI in it’s inaugural year, and now assumes a seat on the board as GENIVI enters it’s second year. Dan Cauchy, vice president of Marketing at MontaVista will sit on the GENIVI board.
The Qi Hardware 本 NanoNote – also known as the Ben NanoNote, and pictured over on Engadget – is a Linux-based palmtop with QWERTY keyboard designed to be hacked into anything your heart desires: a media player, a note-taking tool, a Wikipedia reader, an RSS aggregator, or whatever you can imagine.
STMicroelectronics announced a design win for its new ARM-based SPEAr 300 SoC, which it says drives the Linux-based Snom 870 VoIP phone. The Snom 870 offers a 4.3-inch color touchscreen, gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity, plus an integrated XML browser, says Snom.
Following the release of MeeGo, a software platform resultant from the partnership between Intel and Nokia, and also the successor to the Linux-based Maemo operating system, Nokia seems to be undecided on whether its flagship smartphone N900 will receive the upgrade.
VoX Communications announced it will resell Nokia’s Maemo Linux-based N900 smartphone with a mobile VoIP plan offering unlimited data and voice service. Meanwhile, Nokia confirmed that the N900 will be the first smartphone to run the Moblin/Maemo mashup, MeeGo, when a preliminary version of the operating system debuts at the end of the month.
Google has released an unlocked version of its Android-based Nexus One phone that’s compatible with the 3G networks of AT&T and Roger Wireless. Meanwhile, a Flurry report claims that the Nexus One sold far fewer units in its first two months than the iPhone and the Motorola Droid did in theirs, says eWEEK.
Google insists its pull-out won’t impact Android, but can we really be certain? Can Google really be certain?
Hassling HTC, quietly putting out the word to others not to support Android, could delay Google considerably. If China wanted it could tell its courts to encourage Apple to file suit there, saying it was only seeking to protect patent rights. It could tell Taiwan that Android is provocative.
Google expects its Android mobile operating system to “flourish” in China, Google’s chief financial officer said Monday amid a two-month standoff with Beijing over Web censorship and cyberattacks.
Mobile platforms like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android have become a key focus for open source developers. And the trend is only increasing, though new research has found that over the course of the last year, there has been a shift in which mobile platform has the most open source development activity.
And just like that, we now have the date for the official Motorola Droid’s Android 2.1 update. It was just approved today and will be rolled out in batches of 250,000 starting this Thursday, March 18, at high noon (EDT). So if you don’t get it in the first batch, hang on for a little bit. Or, even better, once we have the download link it should be no problem to apply the update manually, just as we did for Android 2.0.1.
The iPad isn’t even out yet, and a jailbreak is already in the works for its OS version 3.2 by Joshua Hill, member of the Chronic Dev team. According to BlogsDNA, Joshua has tweeted some images of the GreenPois0n (running on Linux) and asked for donations from those who are interested in the iPad jailbreak.
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration.
WANdisco, a leading provider of infrastructure software for replication, scalability, high availability and commercial sponsor of the Subversion open source project, today announced that Stefan Küng, the lead developer for TortoiseSVN has joined the company. Mr. Küng, who has been working on TortoiseSVN since its inception, will lead WANdisco’s efforts to support and enhance this popular Subversion client for Windows as part of its sponsorship and support of the Subversion open source project.
So, like investing, one must weigh risk versus monetary reward. Though these- and other- open source software providers can offer many of the same services as the higher priced options, you will likely have to pay something and must make an educated estimate of the level of risk associated with use.
When I first found out about open source software, I felt the sky was the limit — with the source code, I could do anything now! But after working on open source ERP for the last seven years, I’ve come to realize that customizing software, even open source software, should not be taken lightly. I recently spoke with Phil Simon, long-time enterprise software veteran and author of The Next Wave of Technologies and Why New Systems Fail, and asked him for his thoughts on when you should customize open source software such as ERP and CRM.
Google March 12 launched its extensions for Google Wave, a move to boost the open-source, real-time collaboration platform’s functionality with the help of outside application developers. New extensions include trip app Trippy; Mind Map, to let users build visual workflows; Waffle, a time management tool; and Poll, a gadget for taking polls. These apps should come in handy for regular Wave users, who are using Wave for very different purposes, but all in the name of real-time collaboration.
This Enterprise-level solution will provide an open source, direct-to-consumer (D2C) web infrastructure for music recording labels and other media segments that need to accelerate content delivery online, scale rapidly to respond to fan demand, and create new revenue streams.
This past week, we had 93 people respond to the question:
‘Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?” The respondents were pretty much in full support of the open approach. Of the 93 people who responded, 83 said, yes, there is a place for open-source. But we wonder what it will take to get such a movement to a pace of note. We do have faith in the open-source way but how will this effort transfer to the data center?
By the end of April, Standing Cloud will be offering its “community edition” which will allow you to install and operate open source apps permanently for a very reasonable fee. Standing Cloud will be offering other cloud based, open source packages throughout the year.
A computing device for every teacher and student so they can access the Internet at school or at home? That, along with an embrace of cloud computing, Creative Commons, and open-source technologies is part of a new set of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education.
We have long complained that Becta’s very public conversion to the virtues of Open Source software is a little longer on words than it is on action.
The suspicion is that they are playing ‘lip-service’ to FOSS while the edu-world continues to spend millions of pounds of money they no longer have (sacking staff as a result..oh the crocodile tears) on expensive proprietary products… exactly as before.
Welcome to the Flourish 2010 Open Source Conference site! Our goal is to promote the use of open source and provide a gathering place for open source enthusiasts in the Chicagoland area. This will be our fourth Flourish Conference, and although times are tough, this year we’re working even harder to make this conference the best one yet!
The CE Linux Forum (CELF) is once again sponsoring a free technical demonstration room for embedded open source projects at this year’s Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) on Apr. 13 in San Francisco. Demonstrations should cover embedded technology that offers software available under GPL or LGPL compatible licenses, says CELF.
rSmart, the provider of enterprise support for open source application software in education, today announced its participation in The Chair Academy’s 19th Annual International Conference for Post-Secondary Leaders being held this March 15-18, 2010 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The workshop will include three hands-on breakout sessions, one aimed at new users interested in starting a hub with the open source release, as well as current users who want to learn more about the hub technology. The other two breakout sessions will focus on research software developers and on Web developers working with hubs.
Ingres Vice President Deb Woods to Discuss How Appliances are Changing the Face of Software and Technical Account Manager Tyler McGraw to Shed Light on New Partnership
Now, Open-Xchange, the open source email specialist, is making a similar move. Open-Xchange expects more than 15 million users to run its software by the end of 2010. At the same time, Open-Xchange is partnering up with 4PSA to introduce a unified communications bundle.
Open-source collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has integrated VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and social networking sites in the latest version of its e-mail server and client.
Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, today announced enhancements that give users telephone and fax integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information.
Open-source e-mail and collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has done a little collaborating itself to offer an enhanced unified communications product set that includes telephone and fax integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information.
If it were not for Mozilla and its numerous open source projects that saved us from the IE Dark Ages, the browser market today would definitely be very different. In 2010, the Firefox browser is facing some pretty tough competition from the likes of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 (v9 is actually good), Safari and Opera, all modern and feature-packed web browsers. With Windows’ new ballot screen, things might become even more interesting.
The Web Browser is evolving at a mind-bogglingly rapid pace, and the changes it went through in 2009 only are incredible. That is why I was really happy for a chance to talk to Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects, who has been with Mozilla for 12 years. This is my first interview and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Mr Dotzler’s answers as much as I did. We cover Firefox, Mozilla and the new Web. Don’t forget to check out Asa’s blog for even more on the topic.
Currently Mozilla has a Firefox 3.7 developer preview available, testing all kinds of new features including out-of-process plugins (something that IE 9 isn’t currently testing). It’s a real browser with back button, tabs and address bar and it resembles the real world modern browser. It enables developers to actually see how the browser will work and doesn’t try to hide its flaws by limiting critical functions.
Dealing with the terabytes of data generated by users online and serving up relationships tied to that data quickly are forcing web-scale sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook to investigate a variety of home-built, open sourced and hardware solutions, and reject as many closed-source software (such as Oracle) and specialized hardware solutions as possible.
OpenSSO is one of the best (if it isn’t the best one) open source web Single Sign On projects out there. Sun Microsystems on 2008 open-sourced one of their products called Access Manager, and rebranded it as OpenSSO. But it’s sad to see how Oracle after Sun acquisition, is slowly shutting down this amazing open source project, marking it as “not strategic” and dismembering the few parts they think are worth for their own SSO product. They started on December by freezing the next express release, and during the last few weeks they have slowly started to remove all the open source downloads from OpenSSO website. Last but not least, they have also started to remove content from the wiki. Now, the only download available is the enterprise version, which is buried very deeply at Oracle’s website (it took me like 15 minutes to find it, it isn’t even listed as an Oracle product),and the patch sets that also were free to download, are now only available to paying customers with a valid support contract.
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But here it comes the awesomeness of the open source community: A Norwegian company called ForgeRock has stepped up to give OpenSSO a new home and continue developing OpenSSO under a new name: OpenAM (because of copyright issues with the name). They claim they will conitnue with Sun’s original roadmap for the product, and they have started to make available again all of the express builds, including agents, that were removed from OpenSSO’s site, and a new wiki with all the content that once was available at dev.java.net.
Last week was a really big week — perhaps the biggest ever — for open source simplified sign-Ope on in general and OpenID in particular.
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Not quite as momentous, and having nothing to do with OpenID, another SSO service was released into the wild as open source. I was really amazed by MetaPass SSO when I saw it two years ago (“MetaPass’ single sign-on package enables administrators to create scripts visually”) and now it’s open source. Windows, Mac, and Linux executables and source-code of MetaPass SSO are available for download on the MetaPass Web site and on major open source Web sites (such as SourceForge). MetaPass is definitely an enterprise (not a consumer, or “user-centric”) SSO solution. If you are friendly with “roll your own” software for your organization it’s definitely worth a look.
With the news last month that Oracle would be shutting down development resources for Project Wonderland, the open-source virtual world platform originally supported by Sun Microsystems, associated developers began looking for alternatives. Last week saw the launch of the Open Wonderland Foundation, a non-profit devoted to providing a free and open-source platform for virtual worlds based on Project Wonderland.
I chose WordPress as my general-purpose framework, even though it’s theoretically a blogging platform, for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s backed by a company, yet still has a large number of independent contributors. This is probably the best way of keeping code up to date and viable commercially, while still using the Open Source model. New features, bug fixes, and security patches are thus released relatively often, and it doesn’t hurt that you can now update WordPress with a single click. Secondly, there are a phenomenal number of freely available, high quality themes and plugins that allow you to easily customize not only the look and feel, but also the functionality of your WordPress site. Finally, the total interoperability of WordPress with other platforms is second to none, so your site will be able to handle everything from Google Maps to SEO to AdSense to iPhone capability from day one. Don’t believe it? That’s why I’m here to teach you how to do it all.
As an open source project, WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). The code for WordPress is created both by Automattic developers as well as a community of hundreds of third-party developers. The open source nature of the product means it can be used by anyone and for anything without paying a licence fee.
A little later Matt Mullenweg took to the stage. Matt is the charismatic and high-profile founder of Automattic Inc and WordPress, the world’s most successful open-source blogging software, powering over 200 million websites.
He chatted intimately with the audience about the founding of his company and the driving philosophies behind its success. He also shared his views on the future of blogging and open-source software development. One interesting story was that he founded Automattic with three other people from around the world, including another Irish developer. These four people had never met physically but knew each other via their web-based interactions. This created enough of a bond for them to start a company together, one that has been very successful.
We also use open source throughout our production and testing environments. The Verical Marketplace is deployed on servers running the Linux operating system. This open source operating system is of high-quality and performs better than most of the operating systems available for purchase. In addition, we were able to use commodity hardware that further reduces our cost of deployment. Testing is aided using open source products including JUnit and Apache JMeter.
The service, called Drupal Gardens, is in beta testing now with a “couple of thousand” users, said Dries Buytaert, who created Drupal and cofounded Acquia to build a commercial business around it. The service will be based on Drupal 7, an upgrade to the CMS software that will be released at about the same time, Buytaert said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Drupal is a software platform for publishing Web sites and managing text, images and other content on those sites. It has been used by individuals to publish blogs and by larger organizations, including the White House and NASA, to run their Web sites.
Magento currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software, which was downloaded about 1.5 million times as of January 2010. The company also says they’ve registered over $15 billion in transactions to date. The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.
For many people network security starts and stops with firewalls. The foundational technology of perimeter based security, firewalls have grown more complex and sophisticated over the years. Today keeping your firewall rule set tuned and managing complex firewall configurations is a job often best left to experts. A new open source tool, Flint offers help though.
Open-source security infrastructure can be taken to the next step by augmenting it with commercial solutions, according to Gabriel Mizrahi, vice president technologies at Commtouch.
The UTM (unified threat management) offering, called Ubiq-Freedom, is available under an open-source license, and includes popular open-source software such as Squid caching proxy for the Web and IP tables for the firewall, said Debasheesh Bagchi [CQ], Wep’s program head for Ubiq-Freedom.
Harvard University has released Profiles Research Networking Software, a form of social networking and expertise mining technology, to the open source community. Developed with the support of Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, the software is now broadly available to institutions seeking a web-based means of facilitating collaboration among their academic researchers.
To date, opentaps has had over 500,000 downloads from SourceForge.net and has been used by companies ranging from Fortune 500 to midsize manufacturers, retailers, and online retailers to small startups.
At least on paper, thanks to CaroCandidato, Free Software may have a voice this year in many of the regional councils assisting the governors. As of March 17th, the 2010 edition of the campaign has already enlisted more than 100 candidates from all parties. Citizens visiting the website can easily find, sorted by party or electoral district, which regional candidates have signed the Pact for these elections.
You DO NOT need permission to access it, modify it and/or distribute it. However, depends on the open source license, commercializing it may or may not be restricted.
Without a defining open source license that the government can slap on each software project, there is no option but to revert back to the old ways of protecting intellectual property.
The problem is this – the government can claim that the software source code is freely available to the public, but you need permission. Here’s the twist, there is NO guarantee that permission will be granted.
Some of that is already going on. In a follow-up, Torkington links to a few posts from the Open Knowledge Foundation, which has come up with a Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) taken from the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition. This includes everything from content like movies and books to government info, and sets 11 criteria that a work has to meet to be considered “open.”
That’s the viewpoint of Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, whose modular, open source hardware company aims to fix that shortcoming by making it easier for people and companies to create their own electronics products using a Linux processor module, a camera module, a touchscreen LCD module and so on.
Probably the best known open-source software is the Linux operating system but this is only one example. The mountain of software that open-source developers have created is robust enough to be used by big corporations and cutting-edge enough to have become incorporated into the latest mobile phones and laptops. But importantly, it has saved on development costs. It has been estimated that producing the open-source software we have today, using traditional means, would cost $387 billion and take 2.1 million people-years of development.
The above results show that as a Python web developer we have lots of different methods to deploy our applications. Some of these seem to perform better than others but by focussing only on server performance I will not justify most of the tested servers as they differ greatly in functionality. Also, if you are going to take some stock web framework and won’t do any optimizations or caching the performance of your webserver is not going to matter as this will not be the bottleneck. If there is one thing which made this benchmark clear is that most Python Web servers offer great performance and if you feel things are slow the first thing to look at is really your own application.
China supplies most of the rare earth minerals found in technologies such as hybrid cars, wind turbines, computer hard drives and cell phones, but the U.S. has its own largely untapped reserves that could safeguard future tech innovation.
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA’s Planck satellite. Analysing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.
In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.
Even if Windows is password protected, thieves can still access all your files, for example, with a Linux-based LiveCD. To protect your documents and privacy, you can encrypt your data. TrueCrypt is a great open source solution.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit Tuesday demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas.
In particular, the lawsuit asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, the number and rate of civilian casualties and other basic information essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to conduct targeted killings.
More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
When questioned about Becrypt’s decision to choose Ubuntu, Jones said the popular Linux distribution worked well with a diverse range of hardware.
“One reason we chose Ubuntu is because it is a very powerful OS and is very up to date – it has got lots and lots of drivers,” he said.
Administrators can assign a portion of the Trusted Client USB stick to store documents or applications. Alternatively, if internet connectivity is guaranteed, everything can be stored in the cloud.
The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player.
The KDE and GNOME communities are looking for a host for the Desktop Summit 2011, the combined annual conference featuring KDE’s Akademy and GNOME’s GUADEC events. Following up on the successful Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the second edition of the combined event in 2011 will be the premier place to learn about, discuss, and work on free software on the desktop.
The goal of the desktop summit will be to present and discuss the state of the art of free software for end users, do community building, enable cross-community collaboration, and enable partners from industry and other communities as well as individuals to get informed and involved.
Austin, Texas! Home to live music, great food, a world-class University (U of T) and the longhorns!) and IBM’s Linux Technology Center is a great place to have a Linux Fest, and that is what is happening on April 10th, 2010.
For just one day the Linux Faithful are going to descend on Austin with a packed program that ranges from beginner subjects to those that would teach the experts in FOSS. After forty years in computer science (and most of those years using what most people would call today “Open Source”), I still find it is impossible to keep up with every aspect of it, so you will probably see me slip into a few of these talks to both learn what is going on and to talk face to face with some of the developers and people advocating their software’s use.
I had been a apple computer user for the past 5 years and immensely enjoyed the hardware and the software. But, all good things come at a price. Apple’s price for a polished user experience has lately turned out to be user freedom.
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All said, in the end, there is only one thing to do for me. Stick with Freedom and give up Apple. So, as of yesterday night, I have migrated all music from iTunes to Ubuntu (Rhythmbox player).
We’ve covered our concerns about Apple’s control issues, and we’ve also highlighted how the company is creating opportunity for more open alternatives to capture developers, mindshare and yes, believe it or not, consumers. This is the picture we foresaw in our 2008 report, Mobility Matters, where we described the first Android phone, the G1, not as an Apple iPhone killer, but an impressive first step and a sign of an oncoming onslaught of iPhone alternatives, all with openness advantages for hardware manufacturers and wireless carriers that can maintain or create their own brands, and also openness advantages for developers and users in the software available for the devices.
My home Ubuntu machine is also set up to periodically check for updates to all the installed software. It works as easily as automatic updates in Windows.
One of the things I am amazed about for the above software is that all the Linux software is free and open-source. I see very little difference in performance from a user’s perspective, and using free open-source software has saved me several thousand Patacas by not having to pay software licensing fees.
I am convinced that Ubuntu is a viable alternative for most work computers and can save businesses and other organizations considerable amounts of money. I also believe that it is an excellent alternative for children and parents for home computers.
As proof of the Linux-powered cloud’s advantages, IBM points to eBay’s online payments division, PayPal, where developers are creating and testing payments applications for smartphones in IBM’s cloud. In the above statement, Osama Bedier, PayPal’s VP of product development, said, “We want to provide a very simple way to make payments available on all platforms, including mobile applications,” and IBM’s cloud delivers the goods.
Resonate Inc., the leading provider of award winning traffic management and load balancing solutions, today announced that it is shipping the latest version of Resonate Global Dispatch™ for RedHat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE.
Finally I would like to mention two other alternative application installers for Linux. Zero Install is a net-based method for running applications on your computer without having to actually install the application itself and Klik is a method of compiling packages into a compressed archive that can later be mounted and run again without any installation.
Know of another piece of (non-package manager) software that enables a distribution neutral, friendly, application installation that I didn’t mention here? Drop a comment below so I can check it out!
Until now, though, you’ve had to set everything up yourself. Admittedly, this isn’t too difficult, but Fluendo has released a full media center version of Moovida which includes Fluendo’s DVD player and full codec pack, meaning that you don’t need to be concerned about the legality of installing DeCSS or restricted and Medibuntu codecs.
In my opinion, the KDE4 desktop is the most revolutionary piece of Linux software since the Linux kernel itself, and I appreciate how it strives to challenge old desktop paradigms and introduce new ones.
On the testing block this week was Mandriva 2010.1 Alpha 3, Ubuntu 10.04 post-Alpha 3 development snapshot from 2010-03-11, PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta, and openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3. The latest development release of Mandriva 2010.1 is packing the Linux 2.6.33-desktop kernel, GNOME 2.29.91, X.Org Server 1.7.5, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.191, Mesa 7.7, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. Ubuntu 10.04 is carrying the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.29.92, X Server 1.7.5, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.191, Mesa 7.7, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. PCLinuxOS meanwhile is based off the Linux 2.6.32 kernel with the Brain Fuck Scheduler (BFS) and other patches, KDE 4.4.1, X Server 1.6.5, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.4, Mesa 7.5.2, GCC 4.4.1, and an EXT4 file-system. Lastly, Novell’s openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3 is built with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, KDE 4.4.0, X Server 1.7.5, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.4, Mesa 7.7, a snapshot of GCC 4.5, and an EXT4 file-system.
Kernel updated to 2.6.32.10bfs – Updates, bugs fixes and suggestions based on community feedback over the past week were implemented on the LiveCD. In addition to the KDE 4.4.1 SC version we now have Gnome, Phoenix XFCE, PCLXDE and Gnome Zen Mini isos available which showcase the various desktops available on PCLinuxOS. An Enlightenment desktop iso is also in the works and should be available sometime this week. PCLinuxOS 2010 was built from the ground up using the packages in our repository.
I will stay on Sisyphus and enjoy the best of this distributions from Russia.There is no harm in paying back to my former commies friends by staying on so called ‘unstable” but still stable Sisyphus!
Ideas seemed to converge on how to vote by email but it was noted that this would constitute a change of GLEP39 which the council can’t modify without an all-developers vote. Since there were already other changes planned or suggested to GLEP 39 it was decided that the council would work on a new text and submit it to a vote when ready. Calchan has volunteered to gather all ideas and work on the text.
Of course when I say leopard, with regards to anything computer, you think Mac OS X. Not this time. This time we’re talking about a different flavor of Linux – Pardus.Pardus is developed in Turkey and named after the Anatolian leopard. It’s goal is to be a complete distribution that new users can use with little introduction to Linux. It takes advantage of KDE 4 and offers a very user-centric experience.
Pardus has a few features that most will have never heard of or seen before. In this article I will introduce you to some of these features as I introduce you to Pardus Linux.
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $30.90 with the current price action closing at just $30.76 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.
Today, the Debian project administrators are activating a new cdbuilder server. The server computes the official Debian ISO images once all software packages are ready for a new Debian release. While the old system needed 20 hours to build the ISOs, the new server needs less than two hours for the same job.
For the first time in its 16-year history, the Debian GNU/Linux project has a woman in the running to become leader of the project when voting for the post takes place between April 2 and April 15.
Margarita Manterola, a software developer from Argentina, mostly Python, teaches programming at a university. She has been involved with Debian since 2003, became a developer in 2005 and has been part of the Debian Women project since it kicked off in 2004.
The current stable release, as of this writing, and soon to be replaced by Lucid Lynx. Karmic brought us ext4 as the default filesystem, the first look at the Ubuntu Software Center, and the somewhat controversial GRUB2. Not to be left out of the cloud computing craze, Karmic shipped with Ubuntu One personal cloud service, and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Images.
In a lengthy 2008 blog (as we reported), Mark Shuttleworth outlined a plan for the most commonly used Linux distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE) to agree to a two-to-three-year major release cycle. The sting: if they were to agree to a common version numbering, it would immensely simply the software and especially the driver development process. According to Shuttleworth, it would lead to a definite positive effect for all distros.
In this installment we are going to cover the planning phase of the upgrade process. Good planning is often the difference between a good upgrade experience experience and a bad one. As a computing environment becomes more complex, planning becomes more essential. My environment is fairly complex so I have to plan.
The default positioning of window-management buttons in Ubuntu 10.04 has generated a lot of controversy. But given the decreasing importance of these buttons in modern desktop environments, I’m left wondering if the issue is really so important. In a year or two, after all, window titlebars may be a thing of the past.
But those already employing the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx are in luck, as they now have a couple of Google Chrome themes for both the “light” and the “dark” versions of Ubuntu’s visual revamp. And the best part is that they’re both available in Google’s own online gallery.
Scalr – the open source admin console for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and its Eucalyptus doppelganger – has added a cron job task manager to its arsenal, giving you more freedom to write and schedule scripts on sky-high virtual servers.
Like RightScale, Scalr provides web-based management console for so-called infrastructure clouds, services like Amazon’s EC2 that provide on-demand access to scalable compute resources. Amazon now offers its own web interface, but services like Scalr and RightScale provide a few extras, and they dovetail with other, similar services, including Eucalyptus, the open source project that lets you mimic Amazon’s setup in your own data center.
Asay: There is much that we can do on the design side. It’s telling that Mark has stepped down as CEO so that he can focus on product design. He has an eye for design and should be a great addition to the Linux community’s efforts to improve Linux’s usability on the desktop.
But the other side of it is that we work very closely with OEMs like Dell to ensure a seamless customer experience. If a customer buys an Ubuntu-based machine from Dell, it’s going to “just work.” Every time.
BitNami, the project that simplifies the process of deploying web applications natively, virtually and in the cloud, has released Ubuntu-based virtual appliances for all of the BitNami-packaged applications. Using the new, freely-available appliances, BitNami users can deploy ready-to-run virtual machine images of applications for CRM, bug tracking, document management, business intelligence and more in minutes.
That will get you a bare bones device that can simply be used as a Linux-based “handheld laptop” out of the box or, as the company hopes, be turned into anything from a PMP to an offline Wikipedia device. Something along those lines would seem to be the most practical, considering the device only has a 3-inch 320 x 240 display, along with some similarly basic specs including a 336 MHz XBurst Jz4720 CPU, 32MB of RAM, 2GB of flash storage, and a microSD card slot for expansion. Head on past the break for a look under the lid.
At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it’s no wonder that the size of the Android Market is increasing in its slipstream.
Android is great in principle: after all, having millions of mobiles running Linux at the bottom of the stack is pretty good news. But we have a big problem at the top: there are very few free software apps, so you are almost forced to run closed source code on top of the open source Android (ironic or what?).
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While it’s great news that the Android platform is attracting developers more than the iPhone, and far more than Windows Mobile, these are still small numbers: 224 new projects in a year is pretty footling compared to the 30,000 apps that are out there for the Android.
There has always been the suspicion that the hardware manufacturers (especially Intel) teamed up with software vendors (especially Microsoft) to release software applications and operating systems increasingly heavy, forcing a constant process of updating, not only processors, but memory and hard disks too.
This process of constant update went well until a certain point. Until they reached a sufficient computing power to run several applications in elaborate graphical environments .
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With Open Source operating systems and applications, you can recycle old computers, from 2004, 2005, 2006, so they are able to run the latest applications such as Firefox, Audacity, Open Office, and with a little more powerful video hardware, to run the 3D effects of Compiz desktop and KDE 4.
Skype has announced that it has published the source code for its SILK audio codec, introduced last year, which the company uses in its internet telephony applications for Windows and Mac OS X. Daniel Berg, Skype’s Chief Technology Officer said “This represents a key step in the development of an international standard for a wideband codec for use on the Internet,”. The release of the source code comes as part of Skype’s recent submission of an an Internet Draft to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Squeak, the open source implementation of the Smalltalk language and environment, has been updated to version 4.0 and re-licensed under a combination of the MIT and Apache licences. Version 4.0 of the code is functionally identical to the previous 3.10.2 release of Squeak, only varying in the licensing terms, but the developers will release Squeak 4.1 as soon as possible to include current development work.
I have grown to love the GIMP as I don’t have the money or want to illegally download Photoshop and soon after watching and reading tutorials online I learnt all I needed to know and begun sharing my knowledge with the rest of the GIMP community. GIMP, like Photoshop is available on most operating systems, and has a free portable version available to put on a flash drive for when GIMP isn’t installed.
4½/5 – Great features and closely resembles Photoshop for free!
3D printing community Shapeways allows their members to upload 3D models, preview them on the website and have them 3D printed in a variety of materials. Until recently, the previews were rendered in OpenGL and were rather bland looking. I was involved in the implementation of Blender on their webservers, in order to generate better quality previews. Here’s a look behind the scenes of this project.
Before I begin: this was an awesome project. I had a chance to work together with some great Blender designers and developers. The Shapeways team loved the concept but wasn’t easy to satisfy – a great combination for arriving at a fantastic final product.
Engine Yard, the leader in Ruby on Rails automation and management technologies, today announced the company’s customer base has tripled in size in the last 6 months. With more than 1,000 customers, Engine Yard Cloud is the leading destination for business-critical applications built with Ruby on Rails. The company’s momentum has been fueled by the success of Ruby on Rails applications across many industries, with concentrations in social gaming and mobile applications.
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a winning strategy.
Among the many high-level Sun people leaving the merged Oracle-Sun conglomerate is Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, who announced his departure on his blog last week. (Side note: Is Chief X Officer the new Vice President? They sure seem to be proliferating!) It was the sort of expected combo of pride and wistful regrets, and (as is probably the intent) it’s not that easy to tell whether he’s leaving voluntarily or not. Still, the most interesting bit, as one might expect, was one of his regrets, offered in passing: “I’m sad that Apache did not get the TCK license they requested.”
If we assume that Web applications and cloud computing played a significant role in the proportional decline of the GPLv2, we would expect to see a significant rise in the use of the AGPLv3. While the use of the AGPLv3 has indeed risen 16% between June 2009 and today, in real terms the rise is from 198 projects to 231 – still an insignificant amount compared to the GPLv2.
Obviously, I don’t believe in angels myself. But, Clarence’s (admittedly naïve) logic is actually impeccable: Either you believe in angels or you don’t. If you believe in angels, then you shouldn’t be surprised to (at least occasionally) see one.
This film quote came to my mind in reference to a concept in GPL enforcement. Many people give lip service to the idea that the GPL, and copyleft generally, is a unique force that democratizes software and ensures that FLOSS cannot be exploited by proprietary software interests. Many of these same people, though, oppose GPL enforcement when companies exploit GPL’d code and don’t give the source code and take away users’ rights to modify and share that software.
Today social technology theorist Clay Shirky delivered a fitting counterpoint to Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy at SXSW the day before. Where Boyd spoke of the danger of making information more public than users intended it, Shirky talked about new opportunities for sharing information online and elsewhere.
New York University professor Clay Shirky thinks he’s getting old, or in other words, “my average age has been going up at the alarming rate of about one year per year.” Recently, he said, he had to explain Napster to a class of his students because they were too young to have known much about the groundbreaking music-sharing service in its heyday.
Ullage, the word for the empty space at the top of a wine bottle, is Peter Suber’s term for the gap between a library’s actual holdings and its patrons’ access needs. That’s a difficult thing to measure, but I might have found a way to estimate it with reference not to patron needs but to all published journals, as follows.
Today, Representative Steve Israel introduced the Public Online Information Act, which if enacted would free a vast treasure trove of government information. All too often, information that the law requires be publicly available is hidden behind stone walls and paper barriers. POIA tears down these walls by:
* Requiring Executive Branch agencies to publish publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats.
* Creating a multi-branch advisory committee to develop government-wide Internet publication guidelines.
This week is Sunshine Week, a lot of people are very excited and are taking the time to write about why open government is important to them. Here are just a few of the great posts people are writing, explaining why transparency is important.
So here—free, gratis, libre, and open—is a brief, simplistic guide to several flavors of open, organized around the following questions:
* What is the target of this movement? What is being made open? As compared to what?
* What legal regimes are implicated?
* How does openness happen? What are the major variants of open works of this type?
If you follow Larry Lessig on Twitter, you noticed that all day Monday he was putting messages on Twitter about how “JZ” was sick and was trying to “open source” his diagnosis.
With GCC 4.5 the MPC library has been integrated to evaluate complex arithmetic at compile time more accurately, a new link-time optimizer has been added, automatic parallelization can be enabled as part of Graphite, improved experimental support for C++0x, Windows improvements with Cygwin and MinGW, and many other changes.
The initial “State of ODF Interoperability” report has now gone out for public review. It is a baseline report, surveying the context of document interoperability, the sources of interoperability problems as well the ways in which these problems are being addressed. Although it explicitly deals with ODF interoperability, much of the report is equally relevant to any other office document format, XML-based or binary.
One of the major battles under way in Europe is over open standards. As its name suggests, an open standard is one that is open to all, without restrictions or obstacles; anything less than that is just window-dressing.
In particular, if any part of the standard is encumbered with patents, these must be available on a royalty-free basis: “Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND)” is not good enough, since RAND licences with non-zero fees, however minute, *do* discriminate against open source using licences like the GNU GPL.
When we last saw the AirStash, it was keeping its mystique about it and refusing to disclose any salient details beyond the fact that it’ll function as a wireless SD/SDHC card reader. Today, the fog of war is lifted with the news that the AirStash is now officially on sale for $99.99, and will come with a battery good for five hours of continuous data streaming.
About 3,000 New York City taxi drivers routinely overcharged riders over two years by surreptitiously fixing their meters to charge rates that would normally apply only to trips outside the five boroughs, according to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.
A few days later, another UK paper – The Daily Mail – ran a story headlined “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you …” The story was indeed sickening; written by a former police detective, it revealed how after signing up to Facebook as a young girl, he was immediately contacted by middle-aged men looking for sex. There was just one problem with the story: it wasn’t true.
For a start the story was ghost-written by a Mail journalist, loosely based on a phone interview with the detective. More importantly, the detective had made clear – repeatedly – that the social network in question wasn’t Facebook. In fact he’d actually praised Facebook for having put in place measures to protect young users against ‘grooming’ by adults. Unfortunately, the Mail seems to have a beef with Facebook – they previously accused the site of causing cancer – and so decided to name and shame it both in the article, and in the headline and – yup – in the URL. As with Zoe’s story, the headline was changed after a few hours (having already been widely syndicated) but the libellous URL remained uncorrected for more than a day.
Today Crikey launches an investigation six months in the making. Spinning the Media is an investigation in conjunction with the University of Technology (UTS) Sydney into the role PR plays in making the media.
Abdulrahman Zeitoun is the real-life hero of Dave Eggers’s new book. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina he paddled from house to house in a canoe, offering help to his neighbours. For his trouble, he was arrested as a suspected terrorist
Progressives and conservatives alike are slamming one of the most blatantly McCarthyist attacks yet. People For the American Way released a report several months ago on the rise of what we called the New McCarthyism. Clearly, that trend is growing.
An attack ad by Liz Cheney, archconservative daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Bill Kristol, Head Cheerleader for the Iraq War, brands Eric Holder’s DOJ the “Department of Jihad” for employing nine lawyers who represented detainees and asks of these lawyers: “whose values do they share?” The ad, produced by Cheney and Kristol’s new Swift Boat-style front group, “Keep America Safe,” labels seven then-unidentified DOJ lawyers “The Al Qaeda 7.”
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, a nursing student from Colorado, was detained in Ireland in connection with an alleged conspiracy to kill a Swedish cartoonist. News of her arrest came days after Colleen LaRose, 46, of suburban Philadelphia, was named in a federal indictment for her alleged role in the plot against Lars Vilks, who had offended many Muslims with his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad as a dog.
Torture survivors seeking sanctuary in Britain are being wrongly held in government detention centres, despite independent medical evidence supporting claims of brutal violence against them in their home countries.
Following reports that the IPS had scrapped plans to store biographical information on the Department for Work and Pensions’ database, Hillier said that the controversial scheme has three databases. “There is the one that holds the fingerprints and facial image, the biometric data, and then the other information which is broadly what is on your passport already and the third bit is the one that links the two,” she said.
Fifteen years ago, the Center for Media and Democracy in my book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You first exposed the deceptive PR campaign by the municipal sewage industry that has renamed toxic sewage sludge as “biosolids” to be spread on farms and gardens. Unfortunately, the scam continues to fool more people than ever, even in San Francisco which is often dubbed the country’s greenest city.
It is always the same, says Dharmendra Khandal, toying with a heavy iron skinning knife as he recounts the story. Khandal is sitting in the offices of Tiger Watch on the edge of the national park, one of the most popular tiger reserves in India. He spreads his palms in frustration. The government’s forestry department is always the last to act, he says, though it is its job to protect the tigers.
Fishsubsidy.org today publishes a list of 42 convictions of fishing vessel owners that have also received EU subsidies under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The study, which focuses on two major EU fishing nations, Spain and France, involves matching records of court convictions with data on EU fisheries subsidy payments. Between them, the 36 law-breaking vessels received 13,510,418 euro in EU subsidies between 1994 and 2006.
World Water Day 2010 is Monday, March 22nd. This year’s theme is “Communicating Water Quality Challenges and Opportunities,” and is aimed at increasing awareness of the importance of water quality. One way to help stand up for clean water is to sign on to Food & Water Watch’s petition aimed at strengthening America’s public water supply. You can also help “take back the tap,” if you have not done so already, and learn more about the environmental and economic impact of choosing tap water over bottled water.
Children at a village near the Wugang manganese smelting plant in Hunan province on 22 August, 2009. Hundreds of children in the province are suffering from suspected lead poisoning caused by the local factory. Photograph: Frederic J. Brown/AFP
Usually a draft like this sets the high water mark. With 1,500 bank lobbyists on the hill and $390 billion spent on finance industry lobbying in 2009, the public will need to weigh in to fix the problems that do exist in the bill and hold off provisions that will make the bill worse.
Literally, the four reporters on the team, along with their producer, each pooled about $200 of their own money, in order to buy $1,000 worth of toxic asset. They’ll be tracking whether or not they make their money back, and if they make anything on top of that as well (any profits will be donated to charity). The podcast itself is fascinating, as two of the reporters spend a couple days with a company called Mission Peak Capital, based out in Kansas, which has been analyzing and buying up toxic assets. They go through the whole process of analyzing and bidding on a few of these things until they find the one they wanted. Mission Peak bought the whole asset for $36,000, marked down from $2.7 million, and then sold a $1,000 sliver to the team at Planet Money.
Michael Lewis made a name for himself on Wall Street by writing about it. His 1989 book, “Liar’s Poker,” exposed the inner workings of Salomon Brothers, a firm then at the peak of its power, and described his improbable run as a bond salesman there.
A standard repo, or repurchase agreement, is a form of secured loan. They’re fairly straightforward affairs. In exchange for a financial asset – usually a highly secure government or state government bond – one party will make a cash loan to another party (with the financial asset as security).
That means the lender’s exposure is not directly to the borrower, but to the issuer of the underlying security. So the associated interest rate on the loan is lower than it would be if the money were lent on an unsecured basis to the borrower.
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As Michael Lewitt, an astute bond fund manager and commentator, observed in the latest edition of The HCM Market Letter, “Goldman Sachs entered damage control mode and dispatched the highly respected Gerald Corrigan, a former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Chairman of Goldman Sachs Bank USA, to tell a UK parliamentary committee that ‘with the benefit of hindsight … the standards of transparency could have been and probably should have been higher’.”
The real Lucas van Praag is renowned throughout the financial press as arrogant, caustic, and in possession of a very large vocabulary — traits that normally aren’t considered desirable public relations attributes. But this is Goldman Sachs we’re talking about, so until recently, van Praag may have seemed like a good fit for a company whose CEO seems convinced that earning billions of dollars while helping to engineer the greatest financial collapse in the history of humanity is equivalent to doing “God’s work.”
The fake Lucas van Praag is just funny. To wit:
@thattwerptaibbi. Stop hounding me! Yes, it’s true. $GS funded Kate Gosselin’s makeover AND bought CDS against her performance on DWTS.
According to Josh Gerstein of Politico, Ari Emanuel claims he was misquoted, and was in fact referring to the “vice President.” KEI’s first take: Ari Emanuel’s quote was widely discussed on twitter and blogs, and Ari was embarrassed at his indiscretion, which suggests Rahm Emanuel’s brother is lobbying the president directly.
After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm, Murray Hill, Inc., took what it considers the next logical step: running for office in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.
The yearlong legislative fight over health care is drawing to a frenzied close as a multimillion-dollar wave of advertising that rivals the ferocity of a presidential campaign takes aim at about 40 House Democrats whose votes will help determine the fate of President Obama’s top domestic priority.
The coalition of groups opposing the legislation, led by the United States Chamber of Commerce, is singling out 27 Democrats who supported the health care bill last year and 13 who opposed it. The organizations have already spent $11 million this month focusing on these lawmakers, with more spending to come before an expected vote next weekend.
It is no liberal college professor conspiracy; it is a fact. Hamilton strongly favored a strong federal government with almost king-like powers for the president — that’s why Hamilton has often been cited by Bush lawyer, John Yoo, as his inspiration for virtually unlimited powers for the national executive.
A Web site that satirizes news can run a fictional story about a giraffe attack at Global Wildlife Center in Folsom, a state district judge ruled Monday.
After a two-hour hearing, state District Judge Beth Wolfe struck down a temporary restraining order signed March 2 that had called for the removal of the story from the site, Hammond Action News.
But it turns out that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) is upset about a “deliberately offensive article about Aborigines,” and is threatening to take the site’s operator, Joseph Evers, to court. The thing is, the stuff on Encyclopedia Dramatica are deliberately offensive to pretty much everyone. That’s the point. But the nice thing about the internet is that if you don’t like that sort of thing, you can avoid it. Furthermore, Evers is in the US and isn’t breaking any US laws.
Joshua Newton, the producer and director of “Iron Cross,” has sued Variety for fraud and breach of contract over a negative review of his film that he claims undermined a $400,000 advertising campaign orchestrated by the trade. Grilled by Sharon Waxman, he accuses Variety editor Tim Gray of lying, and says publisher Neil Stiles told him he planned to end all reviews in 2010. Asked for a response, Gray had no comment and Stiles did not respond to an email.
China’s Information Office of the State Council published a report titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009″ here Friday. Following is the full text:
The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009 on March 11, 2010, posing as “the world judge of human rights” again. As in previous years, the reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China, but turn a blind eye to, or dodge and even cover up rampant human rights abuses on its own territory. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009 is prepared to help people around the world understand the real situation of human rights in the United States.
No country in this world has impeccable records on human rights. Therefore, it should be healthy for governments of different countries to exchange ideas on human rights if the intention of these exchanges is to improve human rights performance in this world.However, the routine US reports on different country’s human rights records are gradually turning the noble concept of human rights into a big farce as it engaged two deadly wars, causing lives of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
China’s state-run broadcaster, China Central Television, published on its Web site Tuesday the text of a letter, claiming it was sent from a group of 27 Google advertising resellers to John Liu, who leads Google’s sales team and oversees the company’s business operations in greater China. (Read the WSJ’s translation of the full text of the letter here.)
Music industry sources say Canadian Member of Parliament Charlie Angus, the NDP’s digital issues critic, is preparing to enter a private member’s bill next week proposing the country’s private copying levy should be extended to MP3 players.
The levy is currently in place on other blank media, but attempts to extend it to MP3 players have failed in the past. The discussion of the levy came at the same time Canadian music industry insiders at Canadian Music Week were focused on the possibility of a new Copyright Act for Canada, after support for intellectual property was referenced in the Conservative government’s throne speech last week.
If you ever read terms of use pages for websites, you know that they are mostly boilerplate. Unfortunately whatever template all these businesses seem to be sharing makes some ridiculous assertions, perhaps the worst of which is a provision against hyperlinking to the site without written permission.
What a bizarre statement, considering just how many real life examples we see every day of musicians successfully embracing an understanding of basic economics (which Lanier apparently lacks). I was trying to better understand how Lanier could make such an easily debunked statement with a straight face, and it’s not clear at all. It appears that Lanier is the one who is pretending here.
Ellis Paul is an American singer-songwriter and folk musician. To date, he has released 16 albums and has been the recipient of 14 Boston Music Awards. He has published a book of original lyrics, poems, and drawings, and released a DVD that includes a live performance, guitar instruction, and a road-trip documentary. As a touring musician, Ellis plays close to 150 dates each year and his extensive club and coffeehouse touring, together with radio airplay, has brought him a solid national following.
This talk was given by Tim Kring, creator of the popular TV show Heroes, and he made some interesting points — noting that he’s “honored” that Heroes is the most “illegally” downloaded TV show out there, because “we’ll take audience anywhere we can get it.” But he’s not just sitting back.
This is an important and interesting ruling. I tend to agree with the linking part of the reasoning, but I completely disagree with the argument presented by the judge with regards to P2P networks. The judge uses some paper-thin arguments here to imply that P2P networks are not illegal, that they are here to stay anyway so what is the problem, and that almost nothing taking place in those networks can be enforced. I would be surprised if SGAE does not appeal the ruling.
After early calls to shut down a Spanish file-sharing site were dismissed, music group SGAE pinned its hopes on success at the full trial. But, the outcome for them was nothing short of a disaster. The judge declared that both non-commercial file-sharing link sites and non-profit use of P2P networks are legal in Spain.
Now half a year old, a study from the University of Rennes researched 2,000 users in Brittany about their downloading habits before and after Hadopi’s launch. The report found that P2P service use fell from 17.1 percent to 14.6 percent, but the piracy level in general actually went up 3 percent.
The majority of music fans will switch to alternative ways of accessing copyright-protected content for free if using peer-to-peer (P2P) services leaves them vulnerable to disconnection, rendering futile the Government’s attempts to stop copyright infringement.
That’s according to new research from TalkTalk, the biggest provider of broadband to Britain’s homes.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has referred two solicitors from London firm Davenport Lyons to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over claims that the firm sent ‘bullying’ letters accusing hundreds of people of illegal file-sharing.
Consumer group Which? complained to the SRA in 2008 that Davenport Lyons partner David Gore and former partner Brian Miller had engaged in ‘bullying’ and ‘excessive’ conduct, while acting on behalf of client copyright holders.
Well, the fact that two years ago very few had heard of ACTA, whereas today many people know and care about it, is sufficient reason to carry on: it does make a difference, and people are starting to realise how serious this is. Moreover, hints like this suggest that making noise, even in that notorious echo-chamber that is the blogosphere, gets noticed in rarefied and exalted regions of power:
Recent informations have revealed to me that the worldwide anti-ACTA campaign is having an impact on EU officials, a number of which are following closely the highlights of the most well-known blogs and webs. This is a sign of the success of an effective public campaign that has forced the EU out of its bunker and into the open battlefield over the content of this important international agreement.
A major change to UK copyright law is likely to be introduced and debated within the space of one hour on the last day of the current parliament, according to Labour MP Tom Watson.
Watson said the lack of time available for parliamentary discussion before the general election — expected to be on 6 May — means the Digital Economy Bill will skip the weeks of scrutiny usually given to complex legislation.
“This is a fiendishly complex piece of legislation, and it therefore requires proper and adequate scrutiny,” Watson said to ZDNet UK on Tuesday. “At the moment, it looks like it will get a day’s second reading where [MPs] talk about the general principles of the bill, then it’ll be banged through in an hour on the last day of Parliament.”
Even if you are not in the UK, the UK LibDems fight to Save the Net matters. A LibDem emergency motion opposing copyright measures to block the Internet which are currently going through the UK Parliament is to be debated at their conference tomorrow.
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A UK LibDems Save the Net Facebook page has been started to gather support. It is open to all, even non-Party members, and non-UK residents. The point of it is to let the UK government – and other EU governments – know how much people want to keep the Internet open, and how much they oppose blocking it:
“This group needs proof that millions of people like you care about the Net so that they can convince the UK Government, or indeed any government, not to block websites or disconnect people from the Net by law. Wherever you are in the world, become a fan and show that the Net matters to you. ”
And they explain that they have set up the page because: “The UK’s Labour Government thinks people in the UK wants them to control the Net. It’s trying to push through Lord Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill before the UK elections in May/June. The UK’s Conservative Opposition seems to agree with them. The UK Lib Dems are the only mainstream party which is trying to stop them. ”
Not a single speaker made any comment against the text – and Liberal Democrats reiterated their opposition to the closed ACTA negotiations. They emphasised the huge social, educational and economic value of the net today.
Very happy to note that the Liberal Democrats, with some input from lobby groups including independent academics such as myself, Francis Davey and Simon Bradshaw, have tabled amendments today which alleviate the worst excesses of amendment 120a. Good to see that even in the time-compressed framework of the run up to the general election, a party can still speedily take account both of external criticisms and its own grassroots and party concerns. I would still rather see both am 120a and clause 17 (now 18) go, since both raise dangers of fundamentally interfering with due process, proper scrutiny and civil liberties; but if not that, this is a step forward. Now let’s see what happens today.
The Lib Dem amendments I mentioned in my previous posts – alongside some equally sensible amendments designed in particular to stop every search engine being blocked under clause 18 – were rejected by the Government this afternoon in the Lords, on what appeared to be legally spurious grounds, to the clear dismay and disquiet of the Lords.
Shortly thereafter it appears some kind of deal was done whereby the Government announced they would bring forward unspecified changes to the disputed clause 18 at “wash up” – the pre election stage where legislation is pushed through with no opportunity for MPs to propose amendments or even , perhaps, make comments in debate, let alone scrutinise. It seems all opportunity for democratic amendment to the Bill has now come to an end.
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There is one way forward for here for democratic scrutiny to be restored, and that is for MPs to demand a debate at the Commons stage of the Bill and refuse to allow this messed up mockery of legislation to pass on the nod. Write to your MP and demand this. Go on one of the rallies and flash mobs planned for next week by ORG. Write to the BPI and tell then that you did not vote for them to run the country. Make your voice heard.
Fluendo has announced the release of its Media Center, a software application developed by the Spanish company. Fluendo Media Center’s versatility was evident from the off when it was used for reproducing a whole manner of multimedia in a variety of devices using completely different platforms. Whether on Windows or Linux; on netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs), notebooks or set-top boxes, Fluendo Media Center demonstrated not only its outstanding adaptability, but also its multiple features, attractive graphics and user-friendly interface. This first release will only be operational on Linux distributions but it is expected to get the application running on Windows in the near future.
These are testing times: if you want to experience the latest advances on the Linux desktop, you have to be prepared to test things and accept that stability is a secondary feature.
The continued development of KDE 4 is the perfect example. Many of its users have felt like guinea pigs over the last couple of years, while its developers have filled in the missing blanks on the path to a fully operational desktop.
There are certainly ways to prevent users from running downloaded programs, but in the end, the multi-user security of a system will depend on security of every piece of software installed. Preventing the exploits from being successful, a la SELinux, adds the most viable method of protection. Coupled with a frequently updated system, additional restrictions such as rbash aren’t generally necessary.
The aim of Buck Security is, to allow you to get a quick overview of the security status of your system. As a Linux system administrator – but also as a normal Linux user – you often wonder if your system is secure. In this situation it is useful to get an overview of the security status of the system immediately. Buck Security was designed exactly for this. It runs important tests and returns the results to you after a couple of minutes.
Now smug with the ease with which that had worked I started installing the HP driver software on a popular proprietary operating system so I could use it to configure the printer’s WiFi feature (something I assumed I couldn’t do from within Ubuntu – an assumption that turns out to have been wrong). Ten minutes later it was still finishing off the install process, but eventually I did get the printer hooked up to our wireless network.
Back to the Lucid machine, I told it to add a new printer, it immediately saw the HP announcing itself on the network and let me quickly add that and I could print over wifi. Pretty nifty stuff.
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So there we have it, out of the box I was up and running within 10 seconds of plugging the device in, and if I’d known to just install hp-toolbox I would have had everything running wirelessly a few minutes later.
We, my partner and I receive a regular advertising newsletter from Dell, because our company is on their mailing list, apparently although we have never purchased a single Dell, we are one of their best customers (the deal is offered to quote “our best customers”). The latest one was pushing a special rate on Dell Laptops and desktops with Windows 7, around $1750. So I rang the up and asked for a price with Linux.
If you live in a “well to do” country for instance, downloading 600MB of data might be a matter of minutes, but to those of us who only have 1GB of bandwidth for a whole month, it generally is out of the question. This first bottleneck alone puts Linux out of the use of most people in developing parts of the world.
On my own behalf and on behalf of Ntugi Mixed Day School let me thank Upper Canada College and Mark Battley in particular for helping the school to get XO laptops. The laptops have boosted the morale of both students and teachers in the school.
Some parents have transferred their kids from the neighbouring schools to our school because we are the only secondary school connected to Internet. This has raised the school enrollment from 4 classes to 6 classes. Students are using them, especially in Science and Geography. In the 2009 Science Congress, two projects scooped the best 2 positions in the District and were ranked No. 9 and 10 out of 102 in the Provincials. Previously, no Ntugi student had participated in Science Congress.
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The Kenya National Examination Council has started registering students for the National exams online. Schools without Internet facilities are greatly challenged. As the Head of Ntugi Secondary School, I feel very humbled for this donation (laptops) as it has made my work very easy when registering students for the National exams. (K.C.S.E).
ACCORDING TO Novell nine out of ten of the most powerful supercomputers in the world run open source software.
The numbers come from the Top 500 supercomputers list, which shows that Linux powers nine of the top ten, and in total eighty five percent of the whole 500. In case you are wondering what this has to do with Novell, Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server runs on six of the top ten.
Power management support within the Linux kernel for the ATI Radeon DRM driver has been in development for months and gone through several revisions, but with the forthcoming Linux 2.6.34 kernel there is initial ATI KMS power management support. For making the power management situation even better, over the weekend Alex Deucher of AMD has been working on another set of patches.
In fifteen years, I expect somebody else to come along and say, hey, I can do everything that Linux can do but I can be lean and mean about it because my system won’t have twenty years of baggage holding it back. They’ll say Linux was designed for the 386 and the new CPUs are doing the really interesting things differently. Let’s drop this old Linux stuff. This is essentially what I did when creating Linux. And in the future, they’ll be able to look at our code, and use our interfaces, and provide binary compatibility, and if all that happens I’ll be happy.
AjaXplorer is an easy-to-install file explorer for remotely managing files on a web server. Its rich client layout and actions make it accessible to any end-user for a variety of purposes: file management/sharing, photo gallery, code browsing, etc. PHP 5 is necessary, no database needed.
Have you just started to experiment with Linux? Are you looking for more than the basic applications? Here we’ll quickly review 10 Linux apps you might want in addition to those preinstalled with Ubuntu or other Linux distribution (distro).
Kristanix Games announces the release of Linux versions of its most popular games. The Linux Games project now includes such high quality casual games as Sudoku Epic, Solitaire Epic, Mahjong Epic, Jewel Twist, Fantastic Farm, Crossword Twist and many more. The clear interface, rich graphics and variety of genres (time management, puzzles, cards, match3, math games, etc.) guarantee hours of entertainment!
The Amarok team just released Amarok 2.3.0. It comes with many bugfixes and improvements such as a new funky toolbar and a rewritten file browser featuring much better integration with the rest of Amarok. Read the release notes and enjoy rediscovering your music!
It’s Sunday now in Deventer and, except for Lukas Tvrdy, all Krita hackers have gone home — or, in the case of your author, stayed home. Time for tea and writing a recap of the whole sprint and hackfest!
Linux (GNOME-based): There are work-arounds to set Gmail as a default mail app in Linux, but they don’t cover right-click file sending and complex mail links. Gnome Gmail does a much better job of integrating Gmail.
Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 30.76, 0.00, 0.00%) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will deliver the opening keynote address at Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2010. OSBC brings together open source vendors, customers, partners and community members to share strategies and hear the most current thinking on open source from the top experts in the field.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) was released on March 14, 2007 and yesterday was RHEL 5’s 3rd birthday. Since then we have gotten 4 update releases.
Given the fact that Red Hat’s original plan was to have a new RHEL release every 18 – 24 months, one has to wonder where RHEL 6 is and why it is so late. My best guess is that RHEL 6 (which so far has had a non-public alpha release within Red Hat as witnessed in some Bugzilla reports) will come out sometime this summer… possibly in time for the Red Hat Summit in Boston (June 22-25, 2010). For that to happen I would expect a public beta for RHEL 6 to be released in the not too distant future. We’ll see how that pans out.
All Linux users have their own vision of the ideal distribution. Some people crave stability, others want new and exciting features, some people are very security focused and others are concerned about licensing. Warren Woodford has his own vision and he’s made it accessible to the world via MEPIS. This week he was willing to take a few minutes to talk about his creation.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, says some progress has been made towards what he calls cadence, an alignment of versions and release schedules, between distributions, even though his earlier proposals of a formal alignment between Debian and Ubuntu were not taken up. He points to an informal synchronisation between Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian Squeeze on the Kernel, GCC, Python, OpenOffice.org, Perl and Boost versions, as an example of progress.
The T7500 is just stupid fast, and Lucid’s a nice interface for the hardware. I don’t have enough up and running yet to do any legitimate comparative benchmarking versus my usual hardware, but it’s impressive even on trivial applications. The disk usage analyzer, for example, scans the entire filesystem in less than ten seconds; with either of my old machines, runtime was a minute to two, depending on what else was running.
I’m particularly interested in this particular release of Ubuntu since I’ve been using the previous Ubuntu LTS 8.04 Hardy Heron and am looking forward to upgrading. For those of you in the same boat, if you want to keep current on the moment-by-moment (almost, anyway) changes to Lucid, you can sign up to receive email notifications.
Waiting for something can be difficult and, after all, in the world of technology, six-weeks is almost an eternity. If patience is your virtue though, April 29th is right around the corner.
Now all we need is a Maemo 5 port of Gnumeric for spreadsheets. Since there’s already a version for previous-gen tablets that shouldn’t be too hard, should it?
As stated off the top of the post, this is but a taste of the wondrous FLOSS apps available for the N900. If there’s something specific that you’re looking for leave me a comment below and I’ll see if it’s available…
Have you ever seen one of those lists on a tech site giving you this list of apps that they claim are the end-all-be-all of lists? The type of article that swears up and down that what they are telling you is for your own good, and that the author knows everything about all of the apps in the Market? Yes? Great! Here’s another one!
A recent Crowd Science study indicates that BlackBerry users have wandering eyes and are considering other platforms for their next handset. Roughly 1/3rd of BlackBerry owners would switch to an Android phone, specifically the Nexus One. According to Crowd Science CEO John Martin, this indicates a restlessness with the current brand and allure of other platforms. On the other hand, Android users are very loyal to their handsets. Roughly 90% of those surveyed planned to stay with green robot-powered phones.
Swedish student Thomas Eriksson says a lot of advanced computer usage is still best done from the terminal. Given that, he’s developed Bashish to provide a more useful and beautiful terminal environment.
Bashish is a theme engine for the console, providing themes with different colors, fonts, and cool-looking graphics. The name Bashish is a play on bash (the Bourne Again SHell), the hash symbol (# – the root indicator in bash and tcsh), and hashish. Think of it as an addictive terminal theme utility. But it’s not just eye candy – Bashish can also provide useful visual feedback. For instance, it can change colors, font, transparency, and background image on a per-application basis.
Committed to freely providing software code back to developers and customers, open source followers often passionately evangelise its benefits over the licensed software model.
However, Mr Burkhardt — previously chief technology officer at the New York Stock Exchange, where he established an open-source IT shop — rejects the fervent approach, saying open source is a “pragmatic decision”.
He says proprietary software innovation is driven by commercial return and legal protection, which is supported by costly, ongoing licensing fees.
Join me on a tour of my house as I show how I use open source software in nearly every room. This episode also is the first to use my new intro. This episode is NOT sponsored by the Apple iPad.
Alfresco Software, which specializes in open source enterprise content management, says it more than doubled its partner network in 2009. But here’s the really interesting part: Alfresco partners are earning $10 to $15 worth of services for every dollar of Alfresco Enterprise subscriptions sold. Here are the details.
Mozilla has launched a contest to spur on development of add-ons for its recently-released Firefox for Mobile browser. Between now and April 12, developers are encouraged to create extensions or other add-ons tailored for the mobile browser. The top ten submissions (as judged by Mozilla’s Add-ons and Mobile teams) will each be awarded a package containing a Mozilla t-shirt, phone case, and a brand-new Nokia N900 phone — which runs the Maemo mobile Linux operating system and was the very first device to support Firefox for Mobile.
The goal of the contest is to extend Firefox in innovative ways that take special advantage of the fact that the browser is mobile: the small screen size, the touch-screen interface, and the out-and-about nature carrying the browser in your pocket. Complete rules for the contest are available on developer.mozilla.org and specify compatibility and UI style guidelines. The contest is for add-ons which in Mozilla parlance includes both extensions and media plugins, though most of the discussion centers on extensions. The judges indicate three areas which they are most interested in seeing add-ons break new ground: using native device APIs, photo / media / social sharing tools, and session- and file-saving tools.
We are pleased to announce PyPy’s 1.2 release. This version 1.2 is a major milestone and it is the first release to ship a Just-in-Time compiler that is known to be faster than CPython (and unladen swallow) on some real-world applications (or the best benchmarks we could get for them). The main theme for the 1.2 release is speed.
So, Steve Jobs’ grunting about CPU hoggage don’t quite hold water apparently. Then again, did anyone really expect his aversion to Adobe’s flash to come down to anything less than politics?
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts headed back to Capitol Hill on Thursday to defend his company’s proposed merger with NBC Universal, offering what by now are familiar assurances that the combined company won’t use its market power to bully smaller cable competitors, raise prices for consumers or restrict access to Internet video.
The very first dot com domain symbolics.com was registered 25 years ago today on March 15, 1985. From that event a quarter century ago, there are now over 192 million total domain name registrations, with some 96.7 million domain names that are registered as dot com or dot net.
Joseph Casias has sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor and takes medical marijuana, which is legal in Michigan. He was fired from the Michigan Walmart where he had been working for the last five years after he failed a drug screening test there.
Are we alone in the universe? That’s the big question the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) seeks to answer, and so far the answer appears to be yes. In the half-century since Frank Drake first used a radio telescope to begin searching for alien radio signals, there has been no message from ET—indeed no artificial radio traffic of any description.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps hacked into 29 websites affiliated with US espionage networks, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported on Sunday.
Staten’s attorneys said their client was racially profiled by Carrollton police when they spotted him in a shopping center one afternoon after he changed the license plates, as required by law, on a blue 1997 Geo Prizm. Staten was waiting to deliver the car to a client who was getting a cashier’s check at a nearby bank.
Since at least the summer of 2008, when security researcher Dan Kaminksy disclosed a critical vulnerability in DNS, the global Internet domain routing ecosystem has been moving to implement DNSSEC, which provides is a digitally signed mechanism to authenticate the integrity of DNS information, secure the system and prevent attacks.
A lot of people in the security industry are paid to think like attackers: pen testers, security consultants, software security experts. But some of these people have never met an actual black hat, so much of their work is necessarily based on what they think attackers might do in a given situation.
Considering the stakes in today’s security game, gleaning intelligence from professional attackers is an invaluable experience for researchers on the other side of the ball. Robert Hansen, a security researcher and CEO of SecTheory, has been doing just that in recent months, having a series of off-the-record conversations with spammers and malicious hackers in an effort to gain insight into their tactics, mindset and motivation.
So let’s say I’m badguy1 who wants to break into one or more companies of interest. Sure, I could work for days or weeks and maybe get into one or both of them, but at the risk of tipping my hand to the companies and there’s always a chance I’ll fail entirely. Or I could work with badguy2 who has a botnet. I could simply give a list of IPs, domains or email addresses of known targets to the bot herder and say that instead of paying a few cents to rent some arbitrary machine for a day, I’ll pay thousands of dollars to get a bot within the company I’m actually interested in.
Crooks planted bogus payment card processing terminals at multiple locations operated by the Hancock Fabrics chain store that allowed for the theft of sensitive financial data from customers, the company warned.
This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). ‘The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.’ It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ‘trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,’ the report recommends ‘The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.’ [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that ‘Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.’ The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.
In this two-year-old classified Army Counterintelligence Center report (hosted on wikileaks.org, where else?), American spooks set out to destroy Wikileaks by intimidating its sources. They cite as justification for this the fact that Wikileaks has outed American embarrassments and crimes including “US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.”
Google should obey Chinese government rules even if it decides to retreat from the country over hacking and censorship complaints, a Chinese government spokesman said on Tuesday.
You’ve got nine days left to file comments for Victoria Espinel, the Obama administration’s new copyright enforcement czar, and her department’s inquiry on how the US should best enforce copyrights. Given that the president himself has spoken out in favor of the secret and sinister Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (AKA ACTA — a punishing copyright treaty that seeks to expand the American DMCA and push it around the world), and that he plans to bring it down by executive order, without an act of Congress, this is especially urgent.
In a step that is unusual even for litigation-heavy Hollywood, the maker of “Iron Cross,” a small independent film that has yet to find a distributor, charged in a complaint filed on Tuesday that the trade paper Variety had damaged the movie.
Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said.
The copyright holders, led by Norway’s performing rights society TONO and by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Norway (IFPI Norge) Norway have lost two rounds in the Norwegian court system, and have now decided against appealing the case to Norway’s supreme court, the organisations said.
You must be tired, I know. It’s quite hard to impress a novice. I remember a GNU/Linux novice once saying that he was quite uncomfortable with his newly installed distribution. You know, most of the open source enthusiasts would have observed that people who are likely to migrate back to proprietary realm are those who have used GNU/Linux for a period less than a couple of months. The reasons are quite obvious – the primary cause is that they are unable to find alternatives and the second being the fact that they might not have find the new environment to be ‘user friendly’. I know few guys who are looking for more oxygen in the environment (KDE) to breath.
As of the time of this writing this printer can be found in most stores, keep in mind if you are a Linux user that Best Buy may void your warranty for using any of their products with Linux although the company has yet to provide any evidence that Linux will damage any hardware. As for me I certainly have not had that problem, and so far the printer has not quit working or blew sparks or anything.
This month marks the one-year anniversary of Linux.com in its newest form. A year ago, we built the site based on your rankings of features on IdeaForge. Today, we want to hear how you’re using Linux.com and what is most useful. And perhaps even more importantly – what isn’t useful. We also want to better understand who is using the site so we can provide resources that specifically meet your needs.
You’re probably aware of my disdain for Microsoft’s Swiss-cheese-security-hole Web browser, Internet Explorer, which is so unsafe even some of the software experts at Microsoft avoid it.
In volunteer computing any person with his mind bent a bit (towards the side of greater human cause) can donate a part of their pc’s computational power as a service. Many data intensive projects like the SETI@home runs on volunteer computing with people all around the world participating in it.
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And for those techie guys who i am sure will be bit disappointed after skimming through this – BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing. It is an architecture developed by David Anderson to support GRID based projects.It is available in open source..thanks to those great minds.. And it is this middle-ware which integrates various nodes present
Medical imaging is an essential, non-invasive, routine activity performed by radiographers and radiologic technologists. It is a discipline of the health profession which involves using technology to capture images of the human body.
Some Linux users insist that anything you can do on Windows, you can do better on Linux. While there’s some truth to that, many of us have Windows applications that make completely leaving Windows close to impossible. That’s where CodeWeavers’ latest version of CrossOver Linux comes in.
Switching to Linux is easy if you know how to run Windows applications on it.
For many users considering switching to Linux the biggest hurdle is a question of whether they can find a suitable replacement for their favourite Windows applications. While sites like LinuxAppFinder list hundreds of open source application alternatives it’s not always as straight forward as that. Many users are bound, for one or other reason, to using a particular application, be it because there is no way to convert existing data or because company policy demands they use a particular application. Fortunately there are a number of ways to run a good deal of Windows applications on Linux.
Project:Possibility organise team coding competitions for computer science students. The the goal of these SS12 events is to create accessibility software that will be of benefit to real users. These weekend ‘code-a-thons’ bring the students together with a mentor from industry and provide an exciting chance to learn something about accessibility, while creating open source software. Thus students get exposure to topics and skills that are still sadly absent from many computer science courses. Plus they get to have fun and win prizes.
GNOME is part of the GNU project and supports the goals of the GNU project as defined by the Free Software Foundation. Free software licensing has always been a mainstay of GNOME, and we must ensure that this tradition continues. GNOME will include only Free software.
I sometimes wonder if there are people in this business who think that the third letter of the Greek alphabet is “RC”. This is only in part due to the regrettable decline in classic education, but more largely due to the expanding popularity and importance of pre-release software distributions. In the world of Linux distributions, this tends to run in approximately 6-month cycles, and we are now entering the most interesting and hectic part of that cycle. Here are some of the highlights…
Quite clearly I’ve been working with machines with no more than 192Mb for too long. And running an entire system on under 20Mb on a daily basis has my perspective skewed. So if you’re a Gnome user and you’re bristling right now, feel free to remind me that my expectations are too far gone to make comparisons. Tell me I need to move out of 1996. Tell me it’s time to look for a real desktop, and not a hacked, whacked arrangement of console programs on a framebuffer screen. Tell me it’s time to face reality.
I’ve heard that Slackware has a lot less bloat than most other Linux distros, and my experience certainly bears that out. Compared to Xubuntu, my new Slackware install with XFCE is lightning-fast. As of right now I’m running slackpkg to update my system and while it may not be as flexible and powerful as apt, and not have a nice graphical front-end, it’s perfectly usable
and I’m happy with it. I’m used to sudo from both Ubuntu and OS X so I’ve set that up, and all in all I’m very pleased with my new system.
* GNOME’s development release has reached version 2.29.92, bringing mostly bug fixes.
* Also KDE got many bug fixes thanks to the new 4.4.1 version.
* Devicekit-disks and devicekit-power have been replaced by udisks and upower. gnome-disk-utility now makes use of upower instead of Hal, and brings
* The OpenShot movie editor reached version 1.1 final., bringing improved performance
NOT wishing to pass full judgement on a distro until it has reached its final release stage – it is not fair on the developers – I nevertheless thought it might be useful to offer some early, ‘First Look’ observations about PCLinuxOS 2010.
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PCLOS 2010 played my test audio CD in Kscd without any issues but the Dragon media player fell over twice when trying and failing to play my commercial DVD movie; I suspect this was probably linked to the absence of the libdvdcss, though I must admit to not yet having checked this out.
So, the early signs for PCLOS 2010 are very good – menu issues aside – and I’m very much looking forward to the full release.
Red Hat, Inc., one of the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced today that it will host its third annual Red Hat and JBoss EMEA Partner Summit in Valencia, Spain from May 2-5, 2010. This year’s EMEA Partner Summit will focus on open source middleware, cloud computing, and virtualization while highlighting the larger Red Hat partner ecosystem and its opportunity for growth in the EMEA region.
The DebConf organisers have announced they are now accepting proposals for contributions to this year’s Debian conference. The organisers ask attendees to contribute to the annual Debian developers meeting by submitting presentations on a variety of topics. These can include presenting technical papers, hosting panel discussions, tutorials, debates or hosting meetings, such as Birds of a Feather Sessions (BoFs). Proposals for tracks, a thematic grouping around a particular subject, and for people to coordinate them, are also being accepted.
With the economy coming out of recession and the appetite for new devices growing and Canonical’s pushing into larger deals, the company will most likely resume the kind of growth it had between 2007 and 2008 in 2010. Of course, this is all speculation, as is the supposition that Silber moved up to CEO and Asay was brought in as COO to keep Canonical growing and presumably to push it to profitability so the company could go public. Canonical does not need to go public to get backers to fuel its growth, and it is hard to imagine Shuttleworth giving up the company to investors before it has reached a higher value than it would have even a year or two from now.
The big news out of the Ubuntu world this month is the radically refurbished look introduced to accompany Lucid when it’s released in April, replacing the orange-brown “Human” theme that Ubuntu users have known and loved–or not–since 2004. Here’ s a look at the new face of Ubuntu, with an attempt at abstract thoughts related to it.
Ubuntu’s traditional theme never enjoyed universal acceptance. For some users, earth tones just didn’t look right on an LCD display. For others, there wasn’t enough contrast between colors.
Even though the idea of formal alignment between the freezes of Debian and Ubuntu didn’t hold, there has been some good practical collaboration between the maintainers of key subsystems. There are real benefits to this, because maintainers have a much more fruitful basis for sharing patches when they are looking at the same underlying version.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #184 for the week March 7th – March 13th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Lucid Kernel now Frozen, Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 freeze now in effect, Intel, Eucalyptus and Canonical join forces to help user build cloud infrastructures confidently, Call for Testing: Cluster Stack – Load Balancing, Google Summer of Code 2010: Ubuntu application, New Ubuntu Members: Asia Oceanic Board & Americas Board, Request for input for Lucid Beta 1 technical overview, International Womens Day “How I Discovered Ubuntu” Winners, Ubuntu Global Jam(LoCo Style), Getting started with launchpadlib: Launchpad’s Python library, Ubuntu Global Jam – what’s it all about, New stuff for the Ubiquity slideshow(Proposed), Alan Pope: Why (I think) Ubuntu is Better Than Windows, Ubuntu hits HTC’s Touch Pro2, is any Windows Mobile handset safe, and much, much more!
For testing out the three Ubuntu kernels and three latest mainline kernels we used one of our test systems that had an AMD Opteron 2384 Quad-Core 2.7GHz “Shanghai” processor, a Tyan Thunder n3600B (S2927) motherboard, 4GB of ECC Registered memory, a 64GB OCZ Agility EX SSD, and an ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card driving a Dell S2409W 24-inch LCD display. We performed a clean installation of Ubuntu 10.04 using a daily development snapshot from 2009-03-13 that was running with GNOME 2.29.92, X.Org Server 1.7.5, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.191, GCC 4.4.3, and the default EXT4 file-system. All testing was done with 64-bit kernels and using the Ubuntu amd64 installation.
Ubuntu has really missed the boat on this one. They have the underlying technology to take their Linux distribution way ahead of the pack. Instead they tinker with a few colors and call it a day. Make a statement Ubuntu! If you want to really make an “Impression” don’t think, for a second, those new “themes” will do just that.
The Humanity Icon Theme got a really nice update in Ubuntu Lucid today which brings integration with the new branding (purple that is) as well as a new Banshee monochrome icon for the panel.
Some developing-world companies are looking at the NanoNote, but realistically it’s more of a Linux-hacker’s toy at the moment, albeit a pretty one that will run Quake.
Tim Bray–co-inventor of XML, notable tech blogger, and until recently a Sun Microsystems employee–has joined Google’s Android team in part to show the world what he thinks is wrong with Apple’s iPhone.
The move puts a personal face on the cultural, technical, and business issues central to Silicon Valley companies. In a blog post titled “Now A No-Evil Zone,” Bray said Monday he’s in philosophical alignment with Google in general and in opposition to Apple’s iPhone specifically.
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Google in some areas is allied with Apple, but with Android increasingly is in competition. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board in 2009. And in March, Apple sued handset maker HTC for patent infringement, a move that has repercussions for Google since HTC builds its Nexus One and other Android phones.
The iPad isn’t the only touchscreen slate sitting on the launchpad. Remember the CrunchPad – an open-source tablet built by geeks, for geeks?
The pet project of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was in the works long before Apple’s iPad moved out of the misty swirl of rumour-land, but lost its way after a messy split between Arrington and CrunchPad co-developers Fusion Garage.
Now christened the JooJoo, the Linux-powered tablet has suffered its own series of setbacks from the promised kick-off last December, with the launch now set for March 25th – just one week before the iPad will make its debut amidst a predictable blaze of publicity.
The iPad won’t be out for a few weeks, but that doesn’t have to stop you from getting on the e-book train today. In fact, there are a ton of e-book readers and proto-tablets that you can buy now, and some of them are pretty good. Come to think of it, who even needs an iPad?
Even if mainstream media only notice when few expensive, and i-prefixed devices are presented, are cheap player and phones that eventually ended in billions people pockets. So let’s call them “clones” after all it’s also thanks “ clones” if information technology reached the mass diffusion now it has.
A number of humorous yet undocumented features are hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. Although easter eggs are generally easy to spot when you can look at an application’s source code, there are a few that aren’t widely known.
Open Source community has great Audio Applications. We had featured 20 Audio Editors. Here is a best of the Audio Applications list that has, Audio Editors, Audio Sequencers, Stream Rippers, CD Rippers and much more. This list is constantly updated and comments, additions are most welcome. Thanks for commenting and helping us to grow the list.
In the Free Software community there are so many differing opinions about everything. From why we should use this distro over another to whether we have to worry about the software running on our cable set top boxes. One thing I think that we all can agree on is that there is a problem with flash. If you use proprietary Adobe flash you have tons of issues. Everything from pages rendering strange and flickery playback to firefox crashing from adobe eating up so much system resources. If you use free flash you have a whole new set of issues from players not rendering quite right or just nor working, to skipping playback at times. Even with all these issues and problems I will present a case that if you choose to use flash in Gnu/Linux you should choose a free flash player namely Gnash.
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Some people thing that any software is Okay. That you should just use the right tool for the job. With software it is more then just the tool that works today. We must also evaluate the potential of that tool tomorrow. Adobe has no real potential for us tomorrow other then continuing to annoy us. I hope I made a case that Gnash is a tool that has real use for us today an great potential for tomorrow if we put some energy into it. So please help support and fund this project use gnash and if you can Donate. I know I will.
This month Buntfu began advertising on the Ad Bard network. Further extending its reach and informing the community of its services. Buntfu believes that anyone with a computer for sale thats loaded with Linux or BSD is an open-source system vendor.
We don’t just sell stuff. We are apart of something bigger. We help drive technology and freedom forward by helping to promote open-source software by selling your new, used or refurbished Linux or BSD computers for free. We don’t want your money. We want to promote and sell your open-source systems.
The IIPA goes on to demand that Indonesia rescind this order on page 80:
“IIPA requests that the government of Indonesia take the following actions, which would result in the most significant near term commercial benefits to the copyright industries: […] Rescind March 2009 MenPAN circular letter endorsing the use and adoption of open source software […]”
The IIPA’s war against the free software revolution then takes us to the Philippines on page 148:
“IIPA was concerned regarding reports of consideration of a Free Open Source Software bill which would require government offices to use open source software. Passage of that bill would deny technology choice regarding software usage and ultimately would stunt the growth of the IT industry in the Philippines.”
Thailand’s commitment to open source is attacked on page 353:
“Among other market access restrictions to be addressed, reverse proposed policy mandating use of open source software, and, e.g., requiring bundling of government funded computers and computers for schools with open source software; maintain neutral policies with respect to technology choice.”
Vietnam is instructed to avoid open source on page 396: “Cease government-endorsed open source preference policy which is limiting technology choice in Vietnam.”
The course will be offered again in the fall, and every effort will be made to continue the cycle. Jacobs’ Lab for Technological Literacy will be disseminating details of the model and the curriculum off the FOSS@RIT website and at FOSS and CS education conferences in the next six months. The LTL will also be seeking internal and external support to formalize and institutionalize the emerging ecology at RIT.
As the project’s documentation regularly points out, Haiku is still in the alpha stage. It may be a developer’s and hobbyist’s playground, but it’s definitely not in a position to move into the home desktop or business markets. The system is quick enough and shows promise, but it’s missing a lot of features available in other modern operating systems. In some ways, it feels like Haiku is stuck in the 1990s. Separate user accounts, package management, and a wider range of applications would go a long way to making Haiku more appealing and will hopefully be added later. With the alpha now out in the wild and the system equipped with development tools, I suspect new software and ports will spring up fairly quickly. In conclusion:
* Project in alpha
* Off to a really good start
* Not for production
Zarafa, the Dutch mobile messaging and collaboration specialist gets a foothold in France. Today, Zarafa announces that it has signed contracts with the French open source systems integrator Smile and with French distributor ETC. With these contracts and her presence at Solutions Linux, Europe’s largest commercial open source exhibition, Zarafa aims to strengthen its international market position.
A number of former Sun Microsystems employees who worked on Drizzle, an offshoot of the MySQL open-source database, have ended up at cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace, where they will continue their efforts, developer Jay Pipes wrote in a blog post Monday.
It uses the LAMP server stack and has lots of features that are common in most of the big weight CMSs.The core Hotaru package provides the absolute basics for a PHP-based website: A home page, an admin page, and a plugin management system. It comes with a straightforward installation script that installs some database tables and registers you as the administrator. And that’s about it. You are then left to plug in the functionality you want your site to have.
They’re right, of course, that open standards are crucial to ensuring meaningful transparency in government. It does not follow, however, that this precludes a role for open source. Open source software is an invaluable tool — one of many — to approach all three goals (transparency, collaboration, participation) of the Open Government Directive. It’s not about open source software specifically, although the software helps. It’s about the process that open source projects use to create good software. Because the open source development process requires real collaboration, tangible progress towards a goal, and the participation of a broad community of users and developers, it’s an excellent mechanism for getting citizens involved in the work of government.
Considering you have read the previous article on GUI programming, this article will give an insight about GTK.
When starting learning Glade, it is essential to learn the basic concepts of GTK+. Unfortunately there is a misconception that it’s enough to learn Glade for learning GUI designing rather than learning GTK+. Glade is definitely an easier way to implement GTK but it is impossible to create interface for your application with only Glade knowledge.
One of the great advantages of the OpenDocument format is that it is simply a zip file. You can unzip it with any archiver and take a look at the contents, which is a set of XML documents and associated data. Many people are using this feature do create some nifty toolchains. Unzip, make some changes, zip it again and you have a new ODF document. Well… almost.
The OpenDocument Format specification, section 17.4 has one little extra restriction when it comes to zip containers: The file called “mimetype” must be at the beginning of the zip file, it must be uncompressed and it must be stored without any additional file attributes. Unfortunately many developers seem to forget this. It is the number one cause of failed documents at Officeshots.org. If the mimetype file is not correctly zipped then it is not possible to programmatically detect the mimetype of the ODF file. And if the mimetype check fails, Officeshots (and possibly other applications) will refuse the document. This problem is compounded because virtually no ODF validator checks the zip container. They only check the contents.
With his two trials ending in hung juries, Internet radio shock jock and former FBI informant Hal Turner faces the prospect of yet another criminal trial in April on a charge of threatening to murder federal judges.
For years I wondered why I was fat. I lost weight, gained it back, and lost it again – over and over and over. I owned suits in every size. As a former commissioner of the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration), surely I should have the answer to my problems. Yet food held remarkable sway over my behaviour.
IMAX and the space program go hand-in-hand. These giant screen movies have been recording rocket launches and space exploration since the 1970s in precise and stunning detail, to be shown at science centers and large cinema multiplexes around the world. Titles such as Hail Columbia, The Dream is Alive, and Destiny in Space, are IMAX benchmark films in documenting the beauty and grandeur of space for the public audience. It is literally the closest many of us will ever get to understanding just a sliver of what it might be like to be weightless in space.
On August 17th of 2009, Associate Professor Daisuke Takahashi of the University of Tsukuba in Central Japan announced that his research team had uncovered more than an astounding 2.5 trillion decimals of the famous mathematical number Pi using the 47th most powerful supercomputer in the world at the time. That number more than doubled the previous Guinness Book world record from 2002 of about 1.2 trillion decimals, set by a different Japanese team.
Freedomtshirt When Lloyd Berks – a 38 year-old football coach from Bexley – walked into Gatwick Airport wearing a Levi Strauss T-shirt bearing the phrase ‘Freedom or Death’, with a picture of a skeleton dressed in armour beneath, the only reaction he might reasonably have expected would be a compliment from a fellow dedicated follower of fashion.
Under laws introduced by Labour, if you have failed to nominate a keyholder who can switch off your alarm you are guilty of an offence. You could be liable for a fine of £1,000 and could have to appear in front of a magistrate if you fail to pay a fixed penalty on time.
This is just one of 4,300 offences created by the Labour government since 1997 — an avalanche of legislation. It equates to an average of 28 offences every month since Labour came to power and it is getting worse. Under Gordon Brown, the Liberal Democrats say, the creation of offences has risen to 33 a month.
By contrast, the Conservative governments between 1988 and 1996 produced 494 offences in total. Since 1997 Labour has introduced more than 50 criminal justice bills to parliament — to the dismay of many lawyers, who believe much of it is more for show than real effect.
Japan has announced that it will ignore a ban on international trade of the Atlantic bluefin tuna. This will likely be a hot topic when the meeting of the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) takes place in March.
According to Environment Canada, the winter of 2009-2010 was the warmest since they started keeping records sixty-three years ago. It also had the least precipitation. Even with the heavy rains we’ve received today, it’s been a really dry winter. Not quite drought levels, but dry enough to possibly affect crop planting.
For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world’s experts on biodiversity has warned.
Conservation experts have already signalled that the world is in the grip of the “sixth great extinction” of species, driven by the destruction of natural habitats, hunting, the spread of alien predators and disease, and climate change.
Pressure is growing on David Cameron to identify the mystery Tory MP who deliberately scuppered a landmark anti-poverty bill that could have stopped “vulture” bankers profiteering from the developing world’s debt burdens.
Debt campaigners have reacted in fury and disbelief to the killing of the bill and Labour MP Sally Keeble, one of the bill’s backers, has accused the Conservatives of “duplicity” by pretending to back the legislation and then sabotaging it at the last minute.
Campaigners are now calling on the leader of the opposition to clarify his view of the bill and asking whether the MP concerned will be identified. The international development secretary, Douglas Alexander, has sent a letter to Cameron demanding an explanation.
Simon Johnson writes that unless we shrink the big banks drastically, the banking system will become “Way Too Big To Save” link here.
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Johnson, who was International Monetary Fund’s Economic Counselor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department and now teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Management, writes a blog and a constant flow of papers, and serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers and as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
For those who have not been paying attention to Detroit’s travails of late, there has not been much good news. The previous mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, resigned in disgrace following a series of scandals. Numerous other city officials have been convicted on a variety of corruption charges, including Detroit City Council member, Monica Conyers, who just received a jail sentence of 37 months for a bribery conviction. Conyers is the wife of U.S. Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).
When I see companies in troubled industries reporting quarter after quarter of great results, while all of their peers are getting killed, I know a fraud is going on. I remember in the early 2000s, WorldCom kept reporting profits when all of the other long-distance carriers were getting killed.
The part that awed me, is that BofA and Citi now have more derivative exposure than they did in 2007! Huh! What is Timothy Geithner being paid for? I have to admit after TARP and the apparent hands on approach I like most assumed things were being fixed, but apparently not.
This simply adds to the point that despite all the histrionics and efforts in Washington, nothing has been learned and the American Banking system is now at least at as much risk now as in 2007, pre crash.
Did they realize, Trumka asked, that Wall Street bankers gave their employees $16.2 billion in bonuses? “If you and your fellow workers had a chance to talk to some of those Wall Street people, what would they say?” Trumka asked.
“How can you look in the face of a real working man,” Esteban Contreras said. The community activists listening at the union hall in Orlando, Florida, last week booed and hissed.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how big banks refused to renegotiate deceptive, Greek-style interest rate swaps with local governments throughout the US. Such swaps cost local governments approximately $29 billion a year when local governments are laying off badly needed public employees and cut services.
A quintet of Democratic senators introduced legislation Wednesday to specifically prohibit investment maneuvers that have been likened to “selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars”.
There was a whistleblower too, as described on page 21. “In May 2008, a Lehman Senior Vice President, Matthew Lee, wrote a letter to management alleging accounting improprieties in the course of investigating the allegations, Ernst & Young was advised by Lee on June 12, 2008 that Lehman used $50 billion of Repo 105 transactions to temporarily move assets off balance sheet at quarter end.” Its seems as if Ernst & Young did not report these aligations to the audit committee.
Some critics have questioned the size and scope of the small business project, which they said was intended to deflect congressional criticism about huge profits and executive compensation.
In quotations, the article says, “After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office.” “It’s an opportunity to see this court opinion play out to its logical conclusion.”, “…the firm appears to be the first “corporate person” to run for office and is promising a spirited campaign that ‘puts people second, or even third.’” “I guess with a corporation, should someone go on vacation, like many of our current members of Congress, you’d have fill-ins to take their place.”
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who is criticized by media freedom groups, called on Saturday for regulation of the Internet and singled out a website that he said falsely reported the murder of one of his ministers.
On Friday, Netflix announced on its corporate blog that it has settled a lawsuit related to its Netflix Prize, a $1 million contest that challenged machine learning experts to use Netflix’s data to produce better recommendations than the movie giant could serve up themselves.
In the classic rock tale, the young, talented musicians are exploited by one of two entities: the unscrupulous manager or the greedy record company. This week Pink Floyd turned the tables on the record company, winning a case involving a 1999 contract that stated Pink Floyd’s albums had to be sold intact. In other words they could not be broken up and sold as individual songs.
InternetNZ is excited to announce that renowned Canadian law professor Michael Geist, a world authority on technology law issues, will be the keynote speaker at the PublicACTA event, being held in Wellington on 10 April 2010.
The U.S. response to the European developments came yesterday, as President Obama reiterated his support for finishing ACTA. In comments on IP enforcement, Obama discussed the need to “aggressively protect” IP, pointing specifically to ACTA. The reference to ACTA was clearly meant to send a strong signal that the U.S. intends to continue its push for a treaty. Indeed, the U.S. has not changed its position on anything with respect to ACTA – it is one of the lone holdouts on the issue of transparency and its negotiating position on the text itself has not moved much through almost two years of negotiations.
There was an article on Boing Boing over the weekend that includes a leaked copy of an e-mail sent by Richard Mollett, head of BPI (that’s the UK’s version of RIAA). He provides his key constituents with a round-up on news on the Digital Economy Bill, the legislative omnibus for all that’s bad in ACTA and the UK’s equivalent of the DMCA. Apparently, Mollet believes there is no groundswell of opposition for the Digital Economy Bill and that MPs will just wave it through for lack of popular concern.
AAAGGGHHHHHH!!! I let that other OS do it to me again. Yesterday I was giving my second lecture for my computer science course. I was using an XP machine on a cart as a terminal via RDP to my GNU/Linux terminal server.
I started up Impressive with a PDF slide show and some images to finish it off. I had set Impressive to show my progress bar for 20 minutes side to side. I had just got into it when a pop-up from the underlying OS intervened. It warned me that it would re-re-reboot in 14 minutes. “Cancel” was greyed out. I minimized my terminal window and it was still greyed-out. I didn’t want to interrupt my flow so I checked the time and decided I could finish in the time left. I dragged the pop-up to the side while roundly cursing that other OS.
As a longtime Linux user, this seems to me to be a perfectly sensible idea; after all, it is essentially what is provided as part of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, for example. I subscribe to a security bulletin E-mail list; but there is also an automatic background process that runs daily and notifies me of any updates to the 25,295 packages that Ubuntu knows about. It makes keeping things up to date pretty painless. In the next few days, I’ll post an article here explaining how it works, which I think might clarify what Secunia is proposing to do.
