incommunicado

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Server
  • Mainframes Have a New Need for Speed

    The first is virtualization, which more IT organizations are starting to consolidate on faster servers. Virtual machines hunger for memory and the mainframe, most likely running Linux, provides an efficient shared memory architecture.

  • IBM launching world’s fastest microprocessor

    Such workloads include data managed by DB2/IMS, and general Java performance on Linux, though we imagine the cards should fall about 60% faster as well when you beat solitaire.

  • MokaFive outs bare-metal PC hypervisor

    MokaFive thinks the market does indeed want a bare-metal PC hypervisor, and so, according to Padmanabhan, the techies at MokaFive have grabbed a popular Linux distro – the company won’t say which one – and ripped out everything that was not necessary and locked it down to turn it into a hypervisor for running the Moka Player.

• Audiocasts/Shows
  • Podcast Season 2 Episode 16

    In this episode: Sony was legally allowed to remove the ‘Other OS’ feature from the Playstation 3, according to Australian lawmakers. Glibc is now really free and KSplice gets into Fedora. We report back from the mid-point of our games development challenge, and ask, what’s your favourite Linux improvement?

• Applications
  • What’s the best Linux BitTorrent app?

    Not all BitTorrent apps are made equal. Yes, there’s a big range of features such as support for encryption and random port access, but at the same there’s also a huge range of speeds – some BitTorrent apps are simply much faster than others. To save you the time of trying them all to find which one works best, we’ve done it for you: we’ve put the best BitTorrent apps through their paces, and tried to find which one offers the blend of features and speed that makes it stand out from the rest.

  • Instructionals/Technical
    • Using Spell Checking in Vim
    • The Cloud Server for Linux Training
    • Hack of the Day: commandlinefu – Linux Command Heaven
    • Using a Bamboo Tablet with Ubuntu 10.04
• Distributions
  • Red Hat Family
    • Red Hat appoints Dirk Peter van Leeuwen as VP

      Van Leeuwen joined Red Hat in 2004 and was responsible for establishing Red Hat’s operations in Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg (Benelux). In 2006 he assumed responsibility for Central Europe and in 2008 added Eastern Europe. In Europe Van Leeuwen was responsible for the general management of 47 countries with a primary focus on Sales Management. Under the sales leadership of Van Leeuwen, Red Hat saw its European customer base grow.

    • Piper Jaffray Reiterates an ‘Overweight’ Rating on Red Hat (RHT); Survey Shows RHEL Increasingly Replacing Windows

      Piper analyst says, “Our survey of 45 RHT partners reveals that customers are more frequently using Red Hat in place of Microsoft Windows (Nasdaq: MSFT). Essentially half of the surveyed partners, including some of the largest OEMs, indicate their customers are increasingly using Red Hat for what would have otherwise been Windows Server workloads.”

    • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2011
    • Red Hat in talks to buy JBoss cloud fluffer Makara
    • Fedora
      • Ksplice for Fedora Linux now available for free

        Ksplice is of course available for other common distributions like Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and others at a subscription of $3.95 per month.

• Devices/Embedded
  • TrygTech Announces Linux-based BSP for Topaz i.MX25 CPU Module
  • Phones
    • Android
      • Motorola Defy: Android 2.1 goes rugged with water, dust and scratch resistance

        Remember the Motorola i1? Moto has just added its second rugged(ish) Android handset in the 3.7-inch Gorilla Glass-fronted Defy. It’s dust-, scratch-, impact-, and water-resistant. Matching up to the IP67 durability spec means it’s expected to resist being submersed in up to a meter of water for up to half an hour — making it a pretty awesome option for taking your Android to the beach, 854 x 480 is your screen resolution, backed up by an OMAP 3610 chip running at 800MHz (there had to be some tradeoffs, right?).

      • Motorola spins rugged Android phone and a new Milestone

        Motorola has long made ruggedized phones running Linux, but the Defy is only its second such Android model after the Motorola i1 was unveiled in March. The Defy offers a larger display and more features than the 3.1-inch i1, but it lacks the phone’s push-to-talk capability designed for Sprint’s iDEN-ready Nextel Direct Connect service.

  • Sub-notebooks
    • HP netbooks get dual-core Atoms

      HP has revamped two of its 10.1-inch netbooks to include Intel’s recently announced, dual-core Atom N550 processor, along with optional Broadcom video accelerator chips. Both netbooks are available with Windows 7, but the Mini 210 also offers a Linux-based “QuickWeb” fast boot option, and the Mini 5103 is available with a full SUSE Linux installation.

  • Tablets
    • Archos releases five budget Android tablets

      In terms of the individual models’ hardware, the information Archos has disclosed is sparse. To assess the devices’ suitability as internet tablets, such details as their display resolution and battery life would be helpful. In terms of software, Archos offers its own Android apps for rendering videos, photos and music.

    • Haptic technology targets Android tablets

      Immersion Corp. announced technology designed to enable touch feedback effects for tablets and other devices running either Android or Windows 7. The “TouchSense 2500″ solution has already been built into Toshiba’s dual-screen tablet, the Libretto W100, the company adds.

Free Software/Open Source

• You can make money with open source. Literally.

  This is an old story–two years old, to be specific. But it was new to me when I heard it at LinuxCon, and it was new to a lot of others in the room too. And it was a great story, so I wanted to share it further.

  In 2008, the Dutch Ministry of Finance held a competition to design a coin that would honor the country’s architecture.

  To briefly describe the coin, on one side is a portrait of Queen Beatrix. But on closer examination, the portrait is made of of the names of Dutch architects. The names aren’t all readable with the human eye, which the designer describes as a “compact disc” of information in the ancient format of a coin.

• Open Source Problem-Solving Tool Helps FOSS Teams Stay Focused

  If you’ve ever been gridlocked in a group decision-making process, you know how quickly things can go from frustrating to downright unwieldy. Even with a common goal in mind, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and competing opinions. Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ACH) is an open source application that’s been helping the CIA with its research methodologies for years and it’s freely available to the public to help groups look at — and solve — problems objectively.

• Open Source, Low Cost GSM Cell Service Offered at Burning Man
• Web Browsers
  • Mozilla
    • Drumbeat: what’s next?

      But, the fact of the matter is, Mozilla isn’t naturally good at this. We’re more often than not too earnest about the web. We need to develop or lighter sexier side. Especially if we want millions of people across the web to join and support our cause. In terms of Drumbeat next steps, this is a major area we need to work on.

• SaaS
  • CloudBees Launches Hudson as a Service

    The vision of CloudBees is to offer a Java Platform as a Service. This is cool, but the market will take time to evolve. The interesting twist that CloudBees has come up with is to offer real services to the Java community as a Cloud based service (kind of like how SalesForce is useful to sales teams, CloudBees will initially be very useful to development teams).

  • Skygone Cloud Powers Open Source Web Mapping Suite – OpenGeo Cloud Edition

    Skygone Inc., a leader in geospatial cloud computing, today announces the launch of OpenGeo Cloud Edition; the first fully-supported, open source web-mapping software suite delivered to users via cloud computing.

  • How Facebook Scales with Open Source

    As Facebook has grown, the company has worked to develop a number of tools to handle this data, both in terms of the storage and the delivery of content, and it has open sourced many of these. Facebook has been built from the beginning on open source technologies, according to David Recordon, Facebook’s Open Source Programs Manager. But Facebook’s use of open source goes far beyond the LAMP stack (or even, beyond the LAMP stack plus Memcached). The company has also created and released several open source projects and participates heavily in others, most notably perhaps, Hadoop.

  • Have we reached a tipping point for cloud-based VoIP?

    Given the expectation that most people have now of being able to reach anyone, at any time by e-mail, IM or voice, that would seem to be the case. And by building upon the open source base, that will happen even faster.

  • “Open Standards Of Cloud Computing, Key Challenge To Open Source”
• CMS
  • Version 4 of Plone CMS released

    The Plone developers have released version 4.0 of their open source content management system (CMS). The developers have improved performance, included a new theme, reduced the system’s memory requirements and implemented an improved user and group management feature.

  • Vividwireless goes social, open source to attract uni students

    Like the Unwired site before it, vividwireless’ website has gone the open source route and is based entirely on the Drupal content management system; a second local win for the community after the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) also launched its Drupal site last week. The company charged with building the site, PreviousNext, has continued to work with the ABC in using Drupal to launch social networking initiatives as well as whole sites including the Hungry Beast, ABC Digital Radio and the forthcoming ABC Music site revamp.

  • ‘Diaspora’ – open source Facebook alternative launches September 15th
• Education
  • Kitsap Regional Library Catalog System Ailing

    King County libraries have based their software development on Evergreen, an open-source integrated library software system developed by a group of up-and-coming IT geeks for Georgia’s statewide library system.

• Business
  • Openmind Goes with Open Source BI from JasperSoft
• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
  • Software Freedom Day 2010
  • Ohio LinuxFest 2010: sudo install freedom

    The eighth annual Ohio LinuxFest is September 10-12 in lovely Columbus, Ohio. As always, this is a free event chock full of interesting hands-on Linux and free software solutions. Register at the Supporter level for $65 and you’ll get lunch, one of the gorgeous t-shirts pictured here, and that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting an event like this.

• Project Releases
  • Mahara: Who’d Have Thought?

    One of the things that warms the cockles of my heart is the widening ripple of open source. Starting, as it did, with core system software, it is now moving ever further into more specialised areas.

• Licensing
  • Open Contact with Open Compliance Officers
• Openness/Sharing
  • What would scholarly communications look like if we invented it today?

    I’ve largely stolen the title of this post from Daniel Mietchen because I it helped me to frame the issues. I’m giving an informal talk this afternoon and will, as I frequently do, use this to think through what I want to say. Needless to say this whole post is built to a very large extent on the contributions and ideas of others that are not adequately credited in the text here.

  • Open Hardware
    • Apertus Open Source Hardware and Software Targets HD Video Cam Market

      The success of a consumer-grade open-source HD video camcorder may not sound as appealing today due the declining costs and prices of consumer camcorders from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, JVC, and others over the years, but the prospect of a geek-oriented model makes the Apertus stand out in the crowd. The Apertus camera uses the open source Elphel software along with an open source hardware reference design, combining the Aptina CMOS sensor to accommodate C-mount and CS-lenses and a range of shooting modes, including RAW image files.

• Programming
  • GitHub launches “Pull Requests 2.0″

    GitHub has announced “Pull Requests 2.0″, a revamping of the Git pull request system which enhances the system’s collaborative capabilities. GitHub provides hosted repositories for Git, the distributed revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds, enhancing the system in its own web front end and tools. GitHub has become one of the most active venues for open source developers to share, discuss and develop their code, building on Git’s ability to allow developers to clone a code repository and work with the code without having to coordinate pushing changes back.

• Standards/Consortia
  • Web versus Apps: what is missing in HTML5

    3D gaming: There is at the moment no way to create something like the Epic Citadel demo, or Carmack’s RAGE engine on iOS. The only potential alternative is WebGL, that is (like the previous links) based on OpenGL 2.0 ES, and paints on the HTML5 canvas (that, in the presence of proper support for hardware compositing, should allow for complex interfaces and effects). The problem is that browser support is still immature – most browsers are still experimenting in an accelerated compositing pipeline right now, and there are still lots of problems that need to be solved before the platform can be considered stable. However, after the basic infrastructure is done, there is no reason for not seeing things like the current state of the art demos on the web; modern in-browser Javascript JIT are good enough for action and scripting, web workers and web sockets are stable enough to create complex, asynchronous event models. It will take an additional year, probably, until the 3D support is good enough to see something like WoW inside a browser.

Leftovers

• The Tweet Paywall

  I encountered for the first time today in accessing Steve Daniels’ book about Kenyan craftsmen, Making Do. Tweeting about the book (with my own verbiage) got me a digital copy of the beautifully illustrated book for free.

• `Top Gear’ Driver `Stig’ Named as Ben Collins After BBC Loses Court Ruling

  News Corp.’s HarperCollins revealed the identity of the “Stig,” a test driver who appears on the television show “Top Gear,” after the British Broadcasting Corp. lost a ruling to keep his identity secret.

  The publisher said racing driver Ben Collins is the masked man who tests the performance of cars on one of the U.K.’s most popular television shows. The announcement came after High Court Judge Paul Morgan in London refused a request from the BBC to keep the character’s identity secret. HarperCollins plans to publish the driver’s autobiography on Sept. 16.

• In Defense of Links, part three: In links we trust

  The history of Web linking has been a long chronicle of controversies we didn’t need to have: irrelevant debates over issues like so-called deep linking (if you really don’t want to be linked to, why are you on the public Web?) or the notion of a power-law-driven A-list in blogging (if you want to become a celebrity, other media are far more efficient). To this list, we can now add the “delinkification” dustup.

  It’s hard to imagine the benefit for ourselves, or for the Web, of a general retreat from linking. Writing on the Web without linking is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.

  A long time ago, I wrote a column titled Fear of Links about the then-burgeoning movement of webloggers. I urged professional writers to stop looking down their noses at links and those who make them: “A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.”

  That was 1999. Today, we live in that piece’s “tomorrow.”

• Science
  • God did not create Universe: Hawking

    God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

• Security/Aggression
  • Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system

    Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company’s transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter’s extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter’s OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter’s very own official client application for Android.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife
  • German Military Study Warns of Potential Energy Crisis

    This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, that warned of the risks posed by peak oil.

  • Friends of the Earth urges end to ‘land grab’ for biofuels

    European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).

    In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.

  • Tokyo Two: Online March for Justice

    Greenpeace anti-whaling activists Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato (the “Tokyo Two”) have been facing trial for nearly two years in Japan and now a verdict will be announced on Monday September 6th.

  • Gulf oil rig explodes off La. coast

    An offshore oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
  • Amazon Locks You Out Of Kindle Account, Ignores You For A Month
  • Reminder: You Don’t Own Your Ebooks; Amazon Locks Customer Out And Doesn’t Respond To Help Requests
• Intellectual Monopolies
  • Copyrights
    • Lawyer Offers Self Help To Sued BitTorrent Users

      In recent months thousands of US BitTorrent users have been sued for allegedly having shared movies such as The Hurt Locker and Far Cry. Because the settlement amount proposed by the copyright holders is less than hiring a defense lawyer, many defendants have not sought legal representation. Acknowledging this injustice, attorney Graham Syfert is now offering a cheap solution to the problem.

    • ACTA
      • The Truth about Fakes (and Piracy)

        My reading of this is that whatever the industries concerned might say about how awful, deceptive and damaging fakes and piracy are to the economy, ordinary people – and the newspapers that try to mirror their views – know that the true picture is rather different. It also means that ACTA is even more wrong-headed than even I thought.

Clip of the Day

MSI Company Profile

Credit: TinyOgg

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• This was the year of desktop Linux

  Desktop Linux is the same sort of deal. Linux believers always assume that next year will be the year of desktop Linux. Windows followers often chide those who seek Linux with that belief, both here and elsewhere.

  Before anyone starts thinking this Catholic boy has changed his stripes, my point is simply that, in the case of desktop Linux, Jerusalem is here.

  This is the year.

  This is also the year where the definition of a desktop has changed. Apple changed it with the iPhone and, now, the iPad. Microsoft has failed to deliver in both these key areas. Linux has not.

  Google gets the credit for that. As I noted yesterday Google Android has soaked up the excess demand for Internet hand-held devices that the iPhone left on the floor. My guess is that, once Chromium comes out, you’ll have the same experience there.

• [Linux Gazette] September 2010 (#178)
• Open source PS3 hack code posted

  The real bad news for Sony is that the software is being realised under an open source licence for free.

• Desktop
  • 7 Providers of Pre Installed Linux Laptops/PC’s

    If I missed out on any major providers of Linux pre installed laptops and PC’s, please do share in the comments below.

  • Eight Linux Tech Tips for Beginners

    7.) Linux is not Windows. If you are trying it with the expectation that it is a “Free version of Windows” you are going to be in for a world of frustration and disappointment. You should want to use Linux because it is a better operating system than Windows, not because it is cheaper.

• Kernel Space
  • LinuxCertified Aids Development and Testing of Linux Device Drivers

    LinuxCertified, Inc., a provider of Linux training and services, revealed the dates and venue of its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class. The class will be held from Sept. 20 – 22, 2010 in South Bay, Calif.

  • Graphics Stack
    • Mesa 7.9 Planned For Release In September

      Mesa 7.9 has shaped up to be one hell of a release with many new features and improvements throughout this open-source graphics software stack. For those that have been waiting for this to be officially released, there’s good news and that is Mesa 7.9 should be released by the end of September.

• Applications
  • 2 Smart Backup Apps Show You the Way to Go Home

    In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed.

    That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It’s just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.

  • Photography with Open Source / Linux
  • The 5 Best Instant Messengef Client for Ubuntu: Pidgin, aMSN, Galaxium, Emesene and Empathy.
  • PC File Manager: Another light weight file manager

    In the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect, light weight graphical file manager, I have gone through just about every one I can find. So far my favorite has been Thunar (see Thunar content on Ghacks for more information) which comes standard with a few distributions. PC File Manger can be found in the LXDE desktop environment and was totally rewritten by the creator (Hong Jen Yee) to resolve some on-going bugs.

  • Top 10 Applications For Linux

    1. Google Chrome 2. gtk-recordMyDesktop 3. OpenShot Video Editor 4. TeamViewer 5. OpenOffice…

  • Instructionals/Technical
    • Newsbeuter, Mutt and Google
    • How To Use Squid Proxy Cache Server To Control Internet Access
    • How to: Find the model and serial number of a Linux server
    • Use Ubuntu/GNOME Desktop as Alarm Clock
    • How to install PC-BSD on an encrypted ZFS file system
    • [HOWTO] Install hardware sensors for avant-window-navigator (awn) applets
    • Restore, Recover Deleted Ubuntu Top Panel
    • Rename a file based on inode
    • How to fix AVR-SIZE on Ubuntu 10.04
    • Dual Boot openSUSE USB Stick Installer
    • How to solve the PHP XCache error: /dev/zero: No space left on device
    • Tech tip #7: Browse Amarok’s embedded MySQL database.
    • OMG! 5! – Five ways to make Wine apps feel native in Ubuntu
    • Unix How-To: Checking Responses with ckyorn
    • How to Install Apps With Ubuntu Software Center
    • Best Practices with sudo on Linux
  • Games
    • Unigine Announces Its OilRush Game For Linux

      Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

    • Valve is Looking For Someone Who Can “Port Windows Games to Linux”

      Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

    • A snapshot of a Lan party.
• Desktop Environments
  • When warmistas attack

    Well, you filthy readers, see what happens when we don’t acquiesce? In case you haven’t heard by now, A gunman named James Lee, an Asian man with a years-long vendetta against the Discovery Channel cable network has entered the building and got an armed hostage taking situation going on right now.

    [...]

    I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
    • How to Use KDE Plasma Activities

      The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there.

      When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

    • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-09-01
    • Release: KDE Partition Manager Live CD 1.0.3

      Hard on the heels of the release of KDE Partition Manager 1.0.3 follows the new version of the KDE Partition Manager Live CD, now also featuring version 1.0.3.

  • GNOME Desktop
    • Announcing this week’s Bug Day target – Empathy! – Thursday, 2 September 2010!
    • Should I get involved?
    • Grilo: Integrating Multimedia Content in Your Application
    • Behind the Scenes with Joanmarie Diggs
    • Writing simple, real-time games for GNOME
    • Gorgeous Elementary Firefox skin is coming soon
    • Ubuntu 10.10 Opera 10.70 skins – Opera has never felt this native!
    • Elegant Gnome Theme Pack 0.7 Released With Automatic Firefox Theme Installation, Lots More

      Elegant Gnome Theme Pack, one of the best dark themes was updated today and it now automatically installs a Firefox theme to match Elegant Gnome. But that’s not all, there are a lot of changes in the latest Elegant Gnome Pack 0.7:

      * New GTK+ theme version

      [...]

• Distributions
  • Larry The Cow Graphics Contest

    The top 3 contestants will receive three t-shirts in their design, donated by the Gentoo Foundation. The judging panel includes Dawid W?gli?ski, Alex Legler, and your host David Abbott.

  • The trouble with Linux: there’s too much choice

    Recently, the Fedora distribution decided to dump its long-standing photo manager application, F-Spot, in favour of an upstart called Shotwell. Shotwell doesn’t have anywhere near the features, stability or stature of its precursor. But it doesn’t use Mono either – the .NET-inspired framework that many people love to hate thanks to its third-party association with Microsoft.

  • Reviews
    • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 10 – Linux Mint XFCE

      Tonight the second of our Reader Voted Lightweight Distros. Linux Mint XFCE, the second Mint to grace this series.

      I couldn’t wait to check out this one. Linux mint has again become a favorite of ours, and the XFCE version of it promised to deliver.

      [...]

      We are nearing the end of this series. I am surprised to find so many good things to say about all the lightweight distros we tried so far. Linux Mint XFCE is a definite option if you are looking for a lightweight yet powerful distro.

    • ArtistX 0.9 Screenshots

      ArtistX is an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based live DVD that includes a pretty big lineup of free multimedia applications. The most recent version, ArtistX 0.9 is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and features the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3.5, Compiz Fusion, Ubiquity Installer, and more.

  • Red Hat Family
    • Red Hat @ Year Highs

      Red Hat is currently trading 4.23% versus its previous trading session close, and it has calculated support and resistance at $30.29 and $35.27 respectively. Clearly with this action this range has been penetrated, and traders will be reviewing price action to establish a new tradable range

    • Stocks Hitting 52-Week Highs: CRM, MCD, RHT, PGN, NHP

      Shares of the company touched a new 52-week high of $36.44 on Wednesday. Red Hat, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides open source software solutions to enterprises worldwide.

    • Fedora
      • Linux machines with no rebooting…? Is this what we want?

        The other day, I caught a message that KSplice was available for Fedora. I thought I’d be a wiseguy and I replied “Yeah, great. Call me in 20 years when it’s available for for RHEL”. Well, as several people pointed out, it turns out the joke is on me.

  • Debian Family
    • Debian Involvement

      This is my first step in the process of becoming a Debian Developer, so I hope to share the progress

    • Canonical/Ubuntu
      • Ubuntu In Clouds?

        Would you like to find out about how Ubuntu is being deployed in the cloud space? Would you like to see how KnowledgeTree uses Ubuntu for its SaaS offering? If so, please join KnowledgeTree and Canonical on Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 11 am Pacific (2 pm Eastern) for a joint webinar.

      • Happy Beta day everyone!

        Happy Beta day everyone!

      • An Ubuntu social network

        I will, however, leave you with a link that you might find interesting or useful: My Ubuntu Network, which is a social networking site with Ubuntu as its locus.

      • Flavours and Variants
        • Kiwi Linux 10.08 released with Chromium, Shotwell and more

          Finally, after a hiatus of over a year, the Ubuntu derivative tailored for Romanian and Hungarian Linux beginners is having a new release! Of course English is still available on the CD

• Devices/Embedded
  • Daughter cards expand I/O for TI’s programmable ARM9 SoCs

    Mistral announced two Linux-ready daughtercards for Texas Instruments (TI) evaluation modules (EVMs), the latter already available with the chipmaker’s ARM9-based Sitara AM1x and OMAP-L1x SoCs (system-on-chips) on board. The UART Expansion Module offers interfaces for soft UART, hard UART, and soft DIR, while the CAN Expansion Module provides soft CAN, and hard CAN bus interfaces.

  • Pogoplug ships simple business Linux server

    Pogoplug has begun shipping the business version of its Linux-based home media server, which allows people to securely access their files and media from any internet connection.

    In a blog post on Tuesday, Pogoplug said it is now selling its Pogoplug Biz device and its new Pogoplug Wireless Extender in the US. The Wireless Extender is a dongle that makes it possible to place the media server anywhere within Wi-Fi range of an internet connection, rather than having to hook it up to an Ethernet cable.

  • Phones
    • Android
      • Here Comes Motorola MILESTONE 2

        Motorola has introduced MILESTONE 2 enhanced with MOTOBLUR. Android 2.2 powered device offers more speed, more connectivity, more messaging, more storage, more web with Adobe Flash Player 10.1, more multimedia and more personalisation than the original MILESTONE.

      • China’s popular Ming phones get Android makeover

        Motorola announced three Android versions of its popular “Ming” family of flip-phones, again aimed at the Chinese market. The new low- to mid-range Ming line-up includes the Android 2.1-based XT806 for China Telecom’s CDMA-2000 network, the Android 1.6-based A1680 for China Unicom’s WCDMA, and the MT810 for China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA, running the Android-based OPhone.

  • Tablets
    • Froyo tablet touted for Tegra 2, eight-hour battery

      Hannspree announced a 10.1-inch, Nvidia Tegra 2-based tablet running Android 2.2, aimed at a European audience. The Hannspree Tablet offers 16GB of flash, HDMI output, 802.11/b/g/n, and claimed eight-hour battery life, and also supplies one key feature so far missing from many Android tablets: Android Market access.

    • Android tablets tipped from Toshiba, Samsung, and KT

      Toshiba’s is prepping a “Folio 100″ tablet that will run Android 2.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and offer a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, says a report. Meanwhile, the Tegra 2 scored strongly in benchmarks, the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab is tipped for a Thursday release, and Korea’s KT announced an “Identity Tab” Android tablet, say reports.

    • Five Archos Android tablets range from 2.8 to 10.1 inches

      Archos announced five new Android-based tablets running Android 2.2 on 800MHz to 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processors, all offering 720p HD video playback and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Shipping this fall, the tablets include the 2.8-inch Archos 28, the 3.2-inch Archos 32, the 4.3-inch Archos 43, the seven-inch Archos 70, and the 10.1-inch Archos 101, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• Choosing an Open Source Systems Management Solution

  The Little 4 may be smaller in terms of their bottom lines, but in terms of systems management capabilities, there’s nothing little about the open source offerings from Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWork Open Source, and The OpenNMS Group.

• Events
  • Nomination period open for Nordic Free Software Award

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

• Web Browsers
  • Mozilla
    • The Death of Firefox 3.5

      According to the download page for Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has already killed off this browser version.

    • Firefox 4 vs. Firefox 3 — Visible Differences
• Databases
  • PostgreSQL 9.0′s first release candidate arrives

    The first release candidate for version 9.0 of the PostgreSQL open source database has been released after four months in beta. The developers expect no changes in commands, interfaces or APIs between the release candidate and the final release, though there may be more release candidates before then, depending on bug reports. The most prominent feature in the new release is integrated replication using “Hot Standby” and “Streaming Replication” while other features include full support for 64-bit Windows, improved reporting queries, SQL standard per-column triggers, enhanced Perl and Python integrations and easier database permission management.

• Oracle
  • The end of OpenSolaris?

    Sun aspired to be central to the next network-inspired boom, and it was understood that to do that, you had to be promiscuous, available, familiar, and easy-to-acquire. Hence open source, and hence OpenSolaris, and hence creating an OpenSolaris distribution (rather than just offer the source).

  • The State of Oracle/Sun Grid Engine

    Let’s take a look at the good news. According to DanT’s Grid Blog Oracle has plans for Grid Engine. As Dan mentions, Grid Engine does not compete with any Oracle product and like other resource managers has applications outside of HPC, which probably means Cloud based solutions.

• Education
  • Open Source Goes to High School
• Semi-Open Source
  • Comment: The hype is over

    However, it didn’t quite work out that way: Commercial open source software, it turns out, is just the same as any other commercial software; the only difference is that one gets to take a peek at the source code (and often only certain portions of the code, see The H Open feature “Open core, closed heart?”) and can download a free trial version with varying degrees of functional restrictions from the internet.

    But what about vendor independence? There is only one company that can offer vendor support for SugarCRM. Lower costs? Commercial open source vendors need to cover their development costs just like every other software vendor. Low entry requirements? Not least because of the competition from the open source community, more and more proprietary applications now also offer free trial or community versions. And don’t you dare mess with the code if you wish to have vendor support.

    The “commercial open source” model, it seems to me, has outlived itself. Sure enough, vendors such as Alfresco or SugarCRM have established themselves in the market – because their products stand up to those of their proprietary competitors. Not because their software is open source, however – this “only” gave them an added edge compared to other start-ups. However, this effect is now gone, and companies who develop open source software are no longer considered extraordinary.

  • Open source 4.0: excellent for dancing

    By commercializing open source projects indirectly, through complementary products and services, multiple vendors are able to seize a commercial advantage and run with it without endangering the core open source project. As long as they continue to collaborate on the non-differentiating code, the project should benefit from being stretched in multiple directions.

    There will inevitably be some vendors that want to have their cake and it eat – benefiting from the work of others without sharing – but that is an inherent risk with community-developed open source, and I would argue that most have learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating than they do from forking and that it is in their own commercial interests to contribute to the common good.

• BSD
  • FreeBSD Will Continue Supporting ZFS

    Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode.

  • ZFS Support Will Continue In FreeBSD
• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
  • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry (August 2010)

    This month we welcome Jose Marchesi as maintainer of the new package recutils, Mike Gran as maintainer of the new package guile-ncurses, and long-time maintainers Bruno Haible, Jim Meyering, and Simon Josefsson adding the new package vc-changelog to their duties.

  • Software Freedom Day to be marked in Melbourne

    Software Freedom Day, a day observed worldwide to spread the message of free and open source software, will be marked in Melbourne on September 18 from 10am to 4pm at the State Library of Victoria.

• Government
  • Can councils rise to the Open Source challenge? Should they?

    There was an interesting little piece in the Guardian few days ago suggesting that local authorities could save £51 million by moving some council employees to Open Office* and ODF**, and away from Microsoft Office and their document format, with the total savings rocketing to £200 million if every council employee in the country moved over.

    This sensible proposal came from Cllr Liam Maxwell who’s reponsible for IT in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and I’m sure Cllr Maxwell would be the first to acknowledge it’s not a new suggestion. The office suite – as a commodity piece of software – has long been seen as one of the easiest ways to get open source onto people’s desktops and save money in the process.

    I’m certain Cllr Maxwell also appreciates that there are issues, some of which are mentioned in the Guardian, but they’re not made very clear and it’s worth expanding on them.

• Licensing
  • Could this Lawsuit Undermine the GNU GPL?

    As Welte says, this really is outrageous: it’s GPL’d code, and the embedded system manufacturer is somehow trying to claim that it has the right to stop someone else from using and modifying that code on those devices – as if the hardware made any difference. But the whole point of the GPL is that others must be able to take software distributed under it and use it as they wish.

    I suspect that with some careful explanation from Welte (and others), the company will see that it doesn’t have a case, and the court action will be quietly dropped. On the other hand, if the case were to go forward and resulted in a win for the company concerned, it would represent a major problem for the GPL. Stay tuned…

  • More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case

    Right now I’m facing what I’d consider the most outrageous case that I’ve been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.

• Openness/Sharing
  • The Sharing Economy

    Sharing. It’s one of the first things most children are urged to do.

    Few children, though, have the presence-of-mind to ask their parents when they last shared their weed-eater, their water blaster or even their car.

    The fact that virtually every garage has one of each of the above suggests the concept of sharing has some way to go in the adult world.

    Yet if dwindling resources and growing population is the biggest issue of our times, this will need to change. Everyone with one item of everything is not a sustainable thought.

  • The Case For Open-Source Design: Can Design By Committee Work?

    The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

  • Open Data
    • The ABCD of Open Scholarship

      We had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Dave Flanders (JISC) David Shotton’s (Oxford) group (#jiscopencite) and our #jiscopenbib (Cambridge/OKF) – more details later. We really believe these projects can make a major change to Open Scholarship. We came up – almost by chance with the ABCD of Open Scholarship:

      * Open Access
      * Open Bibliography
      * Open Citations
      * Open Data

  • Open Hardware
    • Arduino Projects: Getting Started

      Anyone who has ever hacked around in their PC will have been hit with an urge to take their tinkering to the next level and create a custom-built device, but few actually try – believing such things to be far too complicated. At least, until the Arduino appeared on the scene.

      Originally developed in Italy in 2005 as a tool for students building interactive design projects, the Arduino is a microcontroller-based prototyping board – but one that pretty much removes the barriers to entry that previous electronic prototyping systems had.

• Programming
  • September Project of the Month: GPL Ghostscript

    The end of the year is right around the corner (already!) but we’re not quite done showcasing projects that have been with us for 10 years or more. September’s Project of the Month is GPL Ghostscript, a complete set of page description language interpreters including PDF, PostScript, PCL5, PCLXL, and XPS.

• Standards/Consortia
  • Google now indexes SVG

    You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

  • 21 Ridiculously Impressive HTML5 Canvas Experiments

Leftovers

• Bill would let repeat offenders hide record

  Six state senators want to give a break to ex-convicts who might be haunted by their criminal records when they attempt to land jobs.

  Senate Bill 291 would remove court and police records from public view by allowing nonviolent criminals with multiple convictions to apply to seal records documenting their offenses after five years of clean conduct.

• Northern Ky. teacher wins $11 million judgment against gossip Web site

  A gossip Web site has been hit with an $11 million judgment for libel and slander after posting false accusations that a Northern Kentucky teacher who works on the side as a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader was exposed to two venereal diseases.

• Perhaps Avoiding Links Is Really A Way To Get People Not To Read The Details Of The Studies You’re Misrepresenting

  Earlier this year, as part of a discussion about Nick Carr’s most recent book we pointed to some reports that noted Carr appeared to misrepresent the scientific research to support his point. It appears that others are finding more examples of this as well. There was a little web-hubbub that I ignored earlier this year when Carr declared that links in documents were bad, and he was shifting all his links to the end. This was apparently based on some research, Carr claimed, that showed links in text are really distracting. Personally, I found that premise to be laughable, as I think after my second week online I stopped being distracted by links and quickly learned to use them effectively.

  Still, without having a chance to dig into the research, I didn’t have much to say on the subject. However, Scott Rosenberg is digging in and finding that, once again, it appears that Carr is conveniently misrepresenting the studies he relies on to support his anti-link thesis. T

• The new banana republic

  All governments need to be watched. You never know when one of them will slip in a nasty tax on the quiet or pass a seemingly simple notification that can be the undoing of entire communities or of the environment. That is the nature of the beast. But how vigilant can people be with a government that will try to alter the entire complexion of a critical law-in-the-making by sneakily replacing a clear-cut ‘or’ with a lethal ‘and’—under the very noses of the MPs opposed to legislation?

• Why our jobs are getting worse

  And all this was enabled by technology. The modern supermarket – with its electronic scanning and inventory controls and price reductions decided by a software program run out of head office – is probably more hi-tech than any web-design firm. The result is that the man or woman in charge of your typical supermarket (or other chain shop) now has little to do with the selling or arrangement of goods: nowadays they concentrate on driving their staff to meet the targets set by head office. Their job is not so much retail-management as rowing cox.

• Science
  • Ancient brewers tapped antibiotic secrets

    of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

    The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

• Security/Aggression
  • Special constable jailed for Wigan ex-soldier attack

    A Greater Manchester Police special constable convicted of assaulting an off-duty soldier and lying about the attack has been jailed for three years.

    Peter Lightfoot, 40, was filmed hitting Mark Aspinall while attempting to arrest him after he had been thrown out of a Wigan club last July.

  • After Katrina, New Orleans Cops Were Told They Could Shoot Looters

    In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department.

  • Vladimir Putin says ‘unsanctioned’ protesters can expect police brutality

    Vladimir Putin today angrily dismissed protests against his regime as “provocations” and said anyone who took part in unsanctioned street rallies against the Kremlin should expect a “whack on the bonce”.

  • Hay-what?

    So, in essence, the outside public – including Iranians – are asked to believe that a) Haystack software exists b) Haystack software works c) Haystack software rocks d) the Iranian government doesn’t yet have a copy of it, nor do they know that Haystack rocks & works. (And who could fault them for not reading Newsweek? I certainly can’t). For someone with my Eastern European sensibilities, that’s a lot of stuff to believe in. Even Santa – we call him Ded Moroz – appears more plausible in comparison.

  • Andy Coulson discussed phone hacking at News of the World, report claims

    The prime minister’s media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and “actively encouraged” a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

  • Blair Almost Ordered London Plane Shot Down On 9/11

    Those who were in London on 11 September 2001 may recall the wild speculation flying around about potential attacks on our own city. Several hijacked planes were heading for London, the whole of Canary Wharf was being evacuated…anything might happen. Fortunately, we were hit by nothing more than rumour. But a new revelation from Tony Blair’s memoirs reveals how close we came to accidental tragedy.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife
  • ‘Phantom’ oil slick was a smear against Climate Camp

    What’s ironic about all this is that the big news on the Guardian’s website isn’t an investigation into whether or not the police deliberately misled the public by duping lazy newspapers into regurgitating a fake smear story. Rather, some journalists think that it’s the Climate Camp who are the ones supposedly controlling the media.

• Finance
  • Goldman feels heat in suit vs. Dollar Thrifty

    The investment bank, which is still trying to burnish its reputation after settling fraud charges brought this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, stands accused in a lawsuit of using information it gleaned from one client to win business from another.

  • Ex-Lehman CEO says regulators refused to save firm

    The former chief of Lehman Brothers told a panel investigating the financial crisis that the Wall Street firm could have been rescued, but regulators’ refused to help – even though they later bailed out other big banks.

    Richard S. Fuld Jr. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at a hearing that Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself in the fall of 2008.

  • No holiday for labor unions

    Labor Day this year comes draped in mourning. More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours, been forced to go part-time or seen other such problems during and after the Great Recession.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
  • The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

    Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
  • William Gibson jacks into Google’s cool menace

    I don’t like William Gibson’s Op-Ed piece on Google in today’s New York Times merely because, barely a week after I went all Jeremy Bentham Panopticonic on the cat bin lady, he writes that “Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google.” Even though it’s kind of a put-down (perennial!), still, great minds think almost alike, right?

  • India lifts threat of block on BlackBerrys

    Stepping back from the brink of a crackdown, India’s ministry of home affairs said RIM had made “certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these would be operationalised immediately”. It did not offer any detail on these concessions and RIM, which is based in Toronto, declined to comment.

  • Sneaky Senate Trying To Slip Internet Kill Switch Past Us

    Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
  • AT&T: Net rules must allow ‘paid prioritization’

    AT&T said Tuesday that any Net neutrality plan restricting its ability to engage in “paid prioritization” of network traffic would be harmful and contrary to the fundamental principles of the Internet.

    Telecommunications providers need the ability to set different prices for different forms of Internet service, AT&T said, adding that it already has “hundreds” of customers who have paid extra for higher-priority services.

  • AT&T calls net neutrality advocate a conspiracy theorist

    In a letter to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), AT&T tried to rubbish points made by the group, calling them “not exactly true”. The argument revolves around the notion of “paid prioritisation” of Internet connectivity, something that net neutrality activists are fiercely against.

    AT&T claims that the Free Press, in supporting Diffserv, is in direct contradiction to its support of equal packet rights. Diffserv is one of a number of mechanisms proposed to provide differing quality of service (QoS), though typically it is run on customers’ routers.

    The telecom behemoth argues that paid prioritisation will not create an Internet ‘rich club’, saying that small to medium businesses voluntarily take AT&T up on the offer. However the fact that a few firms purchase managed connectivity from AT&T doesn’t really change the fact that applying such policies at the network core is something that will concern the majority of users. Judging by the lengths to which AT&T goes to promote it, those fears won’t be allayed any time soon.

• Intellectual Monopolies
  • Mixing it up without IP

    Intellectual property exists to promote progress. Its purpose is not to ensure that no one’s ideas are stolen or that creative people can earn a living, unless those things are needed to promote progress in a field. The granting of temporary monopolies in the form of patents and copyrights is the price we pay for progress, not a goal in itself.

    It might be completely true that bartenders are shamelessly stealing from each other, and that’s certainly something we should condemn, but we probably shouldn’t get the law involved unless we can show that this theft is causing mixology to stagnate. Along with fashion, cooking, and even magic, we’re in an industry that’s arguably better off with weak IP. This decade’s boom in craft cocktails is a sign that we’re doing OK without stricter protections, and I’d be worried that additional threats of lawsuits would have a chilling effect on the sharing of new techniques and recipes.

  • Copyrights
    • Indian gov’t issues music royalty directive

      A long-standing issue over revenue terms between private FM radio stations and music labels here saw the Copyright Board issuing a directive Wednesday laying out a revenue-sharing model instead of the earlier fixed-cost structure.

      The Copyright Board, part of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, has been mediating a bitter dispute over the last couple of years between FM stations and music labels over establishing a revenue model between both parties. Private stations launched here over five years ago after the government auctioned licenses inviting private players in radio broadcasting.

    • Consumer survey on copyright access barriers

      Access to Knowledge: Reports of Campaigns and Research 2008-2010The biggest barriers that consumers face in accessing copyrighti works are those created by copyright law. Even so, consumers around the world will choose original copyright works over pirated copies, provided that they are available at an affordable price.

    • ZeroPaid Interviews Russell McOrmond 2 – Canadian Bill C-32 (Part 2 of 3)

      A law closer to the language of the WIPO treaties wouldn’t protect this practice. In the short term even the USA DMCA doesn’t protect this practise. Bill C-32 would legally protect this practise, given circumventing access control technical measures and even providing tools to change the locks on what we own are being made illegal.

    • Foreworld as Foretaste

      That is, piracy isn’t a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text – again, something that pirates can’t offer.

    • Compartilhamento legal! – Brazil is putting an end to the ‘war on copying,’ at R$ 3,00 per month

      An overlapping constellation of civil society and art actors focussed their submission on a single issue: file-sharing. Under the slogan “Compartilhamento legal! R$3,00 de todos para tudo,” this network is proposing to legalize non-commercial file-sharing in exchange for a levy on broadband Internet access. The idea is nearly as old as peer-to-peer file-sharing itself. It has been tested in technology and in law making a few times. Here and now in Brazil, it feels like it might actually become a reality.

Clip of the Day

emacs text editor

Credit: TinyOgg

Summary: A migration to Microsoft Exchange in the White House led to loss of crucial data which could help show how the United States entered wars and why

OVER THE years we have given several examples where Microsoft is said to have ‘faked’ loss of E-mail. A quick look at Comes vs Microsoft exhibits ought to explain why. It’s about elimination of evidence and thus obstruction of justice. The Bush government either deliberately or inadvertently moved from IBM to Microsoft, knowing damn well the consequences (as everyone knows). The following may seem like old news that we covered before, but it’s actually new and it’s about a report:

Report: Warnings about e-mails went unheeded in Bush White House

[...]

Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday.

[...]

Problems first arose when an e-mail record-keeping system established during Bill Clinton’s presidency failed to archive messages sent by the Bush White House as it started converting e-mail accounts from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Exchange program, the report said.

We heard this story before, but now it’s more validated. Microsoft can lead to data loss. Look no further than the SideKick disaster from last year. ?

Summary: Microsoft earns a patent monopoly on “[o]perating system shut down”; Patent monopolies prey on ideas that help preserve the planet

A LOT OF ATTENTION HAS BEEN GIVEN THIS WEEK TO MICROSOFT’S latest patent troll, Paul Allen (it’s still in the news). Not many people have paid attention to Microsoft’s patents pipeline, with which it occasionally feeds patent trolls [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

So, what’s one of Microsoft’s latest software patents? “Operating system shut down” — yes, what a broad title! Harish Pillay writes: “Yay! M$ get a patent for OS shutdown? I want to file one for OS Replacement!” [via]

A user interface and scheme is provided for facilitating shutting down an operating system. Aspects include the operating system receiving a command to initiate shut down, and automatically terminating graphical user interface (GUI) applications that delay shut down which do not have top level windows. Also, aspects provide a user, through a graphical user interface, the ability to automatically terminate all running applications in response to determining that a running GUI application has a top level window.

Microsoft has got some nerve claiming credit for it. But it’s just about accumulating many patents, not assigning/granting them to the right people or even doubting the true merit of this ‘invention’; even senior Microsoft developers are cynical about these patents. If the lawyers and bosses demand an application for a patent, most of their subordinates just obey, especially those with poor work security (e.g. those whom Microsoft brings on visas).

TechDirt points out that the wrong people have been put in charge of this system, which completely lost sight of its original purpose.

How The Patent Office Outsourced Its Job To Non-Expert Jurors

[...]

This is a pretty big problem when you think about it. Already, there are concerns that the supposed patent examiner “experts” often don’t have enough expertise to judge the non-obviousness of certain inventions. To then shift the burden to inherently unskilled non-experts to make that decision, even with advocates for both sides fighting it out in front of them, seems to go against the very idea that patents are supposed to only be allowed if they are non-obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art. Asking those not skilled in the art to make that judgment seems like a mistake.

TechDirt has found another new example where patents not only ruin competition but also ruin the planet. [via]

A trial program meant to speed the pace of innovation in green technology hasn’t unleashed the torrent of activity as hoped.

Launched in December, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Green Technology Pilot Program puts patent petitions related to environmental technologies at the front of the line for appraisal. The goal is to encourage economic activity in the sector.

Not yet enough with this patent madness? The planet cannot just wait for a bunch of solicitors in suits to bicker about patents rather than do what’s least harmful to the environment. Earlier this morning we wrote about "death patents" and this too is a close relative of them (euphemistically called “green patents”). We alluded to the subject about a year ago. ?

Summary: Microsoft turns to China, hoping that therein exists some way to rescue Xbox 360; instead, China brings competition to Xbox 360, whose price is going up, not down

Chips B . Malroy shared some interesting thoughts about Microsoft last night. We recently explained how to Microsoft and to Apple China is mostly about cheap labour that can be mistreated in sweatshops that exploit China, making it subservient (“creating jobs” is just a degrading euphemism, as “creating slavery” would sound more appropriate a description). Over the past year or so Microsoft also described China as strategic to Microsoft’s growth and tightened its political affairs there (a US congressman accused Microsoft of “enabling tyranny”). This carries on this week.

Apple makes no substantial money in China and “taken into account,” explains Malroy, “China might be just another cash sink for Microsoft in general.

“They will never get paid in China for Microsoft Windows and Office by the masses. Microsoft has educated people on how to be pirates.”
      –Chips B . Malroy“As Microsoft has taken control of Yahoo’s search engine and replaced it with Bing, Yahoo loses markets. Reaction to using Bing, causes first Japan and now South Korea to abandon Yahoo.

“They will never get paid in China for Microsoft Windows and Office by the masses. Microsoft has educated people on how to be pirates. [...] So far China has banned the defective product known as the MS XBox360 from being sold to Chinese consumers.”

China is now coming up with its own console. “According to AFP reports,” Malroy quotes, “the device, known as the eBox, will be a controller-free console that will be controlled solely through the use of gestures, not unlike Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released Kinect attachment for the Xbox 360.”

How can Microsoft survive this? Well, except for the possibility of trademark bullying, there is not much that Microsoft can do. It has already lost billions of dollars on this product and now the prices go further up: [via]

It’s been revealed today that Microsoft has increased the price of an Xbox Live Gold subscription by $10, meaning it’ll cost gamers $59.99 to gain access to the online service for a year. Of course, gamers opting for the free Silver tier (which doesn’t offer online play) won’t be affected by this.

The thing about Xbox lock-in is that Microsoft can change the cost at any time. How much will eBox cost and can it destroy the Xbox franchise for good? ?

Summary: Notorious “death patents” are being used against Novell

A COMPANY we never heard of before, called “Novell” (not the same as Novell Inc.), turns out to have finished a patent fight against Salix (not Scalix, which is property of Xandros now). This is fascinating becase there are quite a few companies called “Novell” and this one may be a sign of things to come from Novell Inc.

From the news:

The settlement calls for Salix and Norgrine to grant Novell a license to the patents covering Moviprep no later than Sept. 24, 2018. If approved by the court, the agreement will result in the dismissal of Novell’s claim that MoviPrep’s patents are invalid and a lawsuit by Salix and Norgrine to stop Novell from selling a generic version of the drug.

Watch what they are doing here. Killing generic drugs is often a death knell to many people who can only afford generics (c.f TRIPS [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). That’s what we call “death patents”.

In separate news, a company called Active Endpoints (for business process management systems) has someone who was bought by Novell inside its management now.

Chris Keller, Founder and Vice President, Product Development, has founded three technology companies. He was previously at Novell, GemLogic (acquired Novell/SilverStream), and LexiBridge (acquired by Level3 Communications).

It sure seems like a lot of Novell executives leave quietly. We wrote about Chris Keller some days ago. Perhaps all that will be left of Novell Inc. is other companies with the same name.?

Summary: New FUD from Microsoft staff and a reminder of what it is that really puts a price tag on Android (and it’s not Google)

OVER AT Business Insider there is a sort of ghost-written item which trolls Google’s CEO and uses people from Microsoft to hypnotise readers into believing that Android is expensive. Coming from the company which is taxing Android and saying that you should choose Microsoft to avoid lock-in, critical thinking is a must and someone is already rebutting this FUD, thankfully. Microsoft taxing Android at vendor level is probably the only substantial cost the buyer may feel when buying a Linux-powered phone from HTC, Samsung, or LG. In other words, Microsoft is the cost, not Android.

A recent Business Insider post provided, other than a nice retouched photo of Google’s Schmidt with menacing red eyes, a snippet of conversation with an anonymous MS employee that claimed that Android “free” OS is not free at all, and its costs are much higher than the $15 asked by Microsoft as licensing fees. Having had my stint on mobile economics, I would like to contribute some of my thoughts on what is actually implied by the MS employee, and why I believe that some parts of it are not accurate. Before flaming me as a Google fanboy, I would like to point out that I am not affiliated with Google, MS, anyone else (apart my own company, of course), and my cellphone is a Nokia. Enough said.

Watch Apple’s CEO throwing some insults at Android this week, claiming that Google counts upgrades as “activations” and then throwing some number out there without being specific about its meaning. That’s the same CEO who decided to sue Android rather than compete against it. Microsoft went directly into extortion mode, so no need for lawsuits, just threats.

Tim from OpenBytes calls it “extortion – The One Microsoft Way”:

Previously I wrote regarding Microsoft having a “double whammy” on Android phones, first being that there is a “deal”[1] in place with certain providers of Android and secondly the platform that Mr Ballmer was so quick to dismiss not so long ago, is now flavor of the month with Microsoft as it tries to push its Bing onto it (with, I hasten to add, “innovative features” which it appears Google already provides). I don’t personally blame Microsoft for trying their luck on a Linux platform and I am sure that they pick up a few new Bing users from charitable Android consumers. You can read that article here and I’ll let you decide if you think Microsoft’s actions re: “deals” and Android is a type of extortion or not.

Tux Radar asked last night, “what’s your favourite Linux improvement?”

They are talking about technical aspects alone but not legal. Linux has also a lot to do with a software licence, so sites like ours (or OpenBytes or Groklaw for that matter) might want to say something about laws, freedom, community, and so forth.

We’re gearing up to record our next podcast, and we want you – yes YOU! – to contribute your views in our Open Ballot section. This time the question is, out of all the changes we’ve seen in the Linux world in the last year, what’s your favourite? If you want to go big and say “all of Fedora 13″, or if you want to go small and cite the SSE improvements introduced into Glibc 2.11, we don’t mind as long as your stick to our simple rules: keep it short, and use a name other than “Anonymous Penguin.”

My favourite “Linux” (they refer to the whole GNU/Linux system) improvement is the decreased dependency on Mono, at least in some distributions. It helps “Linux” stay autonomous and safe. ?

“After sixteen months spent seeding the trade press, it was time to think of the end users. For this, Waggener Edstrom leaked exclusive Windows 95 puff stories to all of the important newspapers and publications.”

–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s Pam Edstrom

Summary: Another example of Bloomberg publishing misinformation, which in this case serves SCO and thus harms Linux

TECHRIGHTS is not a big fan of Bloomberg, a publication which occasionally squeezes in some Microsoft "puff" pieces. Newspapers that do this can be described as “whore journalism” and since they act like PR entities rather than informers it’s hardly surprising that they get their facts wrong, too.

The SCO case is a textbook example of a case where media misdirection created a real sense of fear out of an empty allegation (which even 7 years down the line SCO fails to prove). Now, watch what happens when Bloomberg relies on SCO — rather than an investigative journalist — for information (this even reached Slashdot‘s front page). The following text is false:

The Chapter 11 trustee for software developer SCO Group Inc. will sell the assets at auction on Oct. 25.

At a hearing last week, the bankruptcy judge in Delaware approved sale procedures where bids are due Oct. 15. No buyer is yet under contract. The hearing for approval of the sale will take place Nov. 8.

The bankruptcy judge called for a Chapter 11 trustee in August 2009, about one month before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in the company’s favor after six years of litigation with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell Inc. The case went back to the district court, where the judge and jury further clarified SCO’s rights in certain Unix software incorporated in software for network systems.

With the property interest clarified, the trustee is now selling the assets.

After bankruptcy in September 2007, SCO and an affiliate filed schedules listing combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million.

The case is In re SCO Group Inc., 07-11337, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).

“No wonder Bloomberg got it so wrong today [see News Picks],” Groklaw wrote. “That’s the trouble with fibs and spin. They detach your mind from reality. Over time, that can’t be good for anybody’s mental health.”

Bloomberg got its facts very wrong, like the hypnosis about Novell as an "open source" company (which it’s not). Groklaw has already responded to the above in detail:

Heh heh. They are incorrigible. Not exactly the whole story, eh? What he won was a jury trial to *determine* the ownership of UNIX and UnixWare copyrights and contract rights, but the jury at the trial said Novell retained ownership of the copyrights for UNIX and UnixWare in 1995-6, and the judge ruled that Novell had the right to waive contractual violations, so SCO lost completely, despite the Court of Appeals granting SCO that extra bite of the apple with a jury trial. Which, I must point out, reached exactly the same conclusion that the first judge had on summary judgment way back in August of 2007. Singer’s bio makes it sound like SCO prevailed. No wonder Bloomberg got it so wrong today [see News Picks]. That’s the trouble with fibs and spin. They detach your mind from reality. Over time, that can’t be good for anybody’s mental health.

To annul spin and deception (e.g. “SCO owing UNIX”, “Microsoft ‘IP’ ‘stolen’ by Linux”, “Linus Torvalds ‘stealing’ from MINIX” etc.) reporters will need to do some homework. Receiving answers from marketing people is easy; receiving truth proves to be a lot harder and “professional” reporters have time constraints, not just editorial control which imperils judgment/expression. ?

Summary: A look at Novell’s decreasing relevance wrt to Red Hat and other companies that actually produce and distribute Free software, not proprietary software

Novell has lost over 5% of its value over the past month, which puts it at almost a quarter the value of Red Hat, even though it depends on what’s measured and when.

Novell Inc. (NOVL) [Chart - Analysis - News], another industry peer, has lost ground during the past year. NOVL has lost 35 cents (5.79 percent) during the past month and is currently trading below its 20-day and 50-day moving averages but above its 200-day moving average.

More financial news about Novell can be found in [1, 2, 3]. It keeps changing and it changed a lot throughout the week.

“Novell’s PR is banging on the Vista 7 drum again. Still looking for love in all the wrong places?”To Novell, there’s somewhat of a “death spiral” thing going on. Customers realise that Novell is up for sale and with uncertainty in mind they move over to Red Hat for the most part. Novell cannot quite recover from this, but one of its hypocrites says that CA buying Arcos is a case of “Filling a Hole with Too Little Too Late” (look who’s talking).

Novell’s CMO has been pondering a marketing strategy, having attempted some things in vain (Novell’s marketing team is promoting Vista 7). Novell’s PR is banging on the Vista 7 drum again. Still looking for love in all the wrong places? Novell’s legacy/proprietary software keeps getting rusty and vulnerable [1, 2], so what’s an aging software company to do?

There is Novell’s proprietary Fog Computing, which IDG continues to promote [1, 2, 3] (Novell buys ‘studies’/whitepapers and advertising from IDG). Sonia Arrison, with her history of attacking Free software, is back to ECT after a long time and this time she is promoting Fog Computing by daemonising Richard Stallman.

Here is some of Novell’s proprietary side, based on a new press release:

idOnDemand, pioneers in smart identification, today announced a program aimed at making it free for new Novell SecureLogin customers to implement a standards based, highly secure, single identity for access to all enterprise resources, buildings and IT. Companies eligible to participate in the Free SmartID program are new Novell SecureLogin customers or existing customers who purchase additional licenses. They will receive a license for 50 free SmartIDs from idOnDemand when they purchase 500 SecureLogin seats from Novell or 100 free SmartIDs when they purchase 1,000 SecureLogin seats. This is up to a $5,550 value, and the program runs through December 31, 2010.

This is what Novell’s business is about, it’s not about GNU/Linux

Looking at the area of Novell that’s actually Free software they have the valuable OSB. SUSE is sometimes used to connect to Fog Computing though.

OBS does not magically turn source files into packages. OBS cannot simply be fed a .tar.gz — developers must still prepare their software in the .rpm and/or .deb format, but afterwards, they can sit back and watch as OBS handles the rest. It will create a repository to host the file, and at no cost to the developer.

In summary, a stronger Red Hat and weaker Novell would be just fine. A stronger Novell means more proprietary software (and Microsoft ‘Linux tax’), whereas Red Hat uses financial resources to produce more Free software and resist Microsoft. It’s really that simple. ?

Summary: Novell is still up for sale and the financial market expects some announcement to come sooner or later

“One company that has been the subject of takeover speculation is, Novell,” says this new article and another item from the news says:

One of the downsides to companies with no agreed deal is that the timeline can be inauspicious. For example, Novell Inc (NOVL) received an offer in early March and has yet to announce a deal.

Might VMware be the one to buy some/all of the company [1, 2]? Novell is said to be negotiating with 3 parties [1, 2] and John Paulson is possibly one of them. Novell needs to find a sugar daddy fast; Novell’s CFO says: “Depletion of the original Microsoft certificates this year makes for a challenging year-over-year comparison.” ?

Summary: Microsoft warns about VMware lock-in as it attempts to sell proprietary hype [sic] V

V

MWARE, MICROSOFT, AND NOVELL are all proprietary software companies (yes, Novell too) and recent rumours suggest that VMware can/will buy Novell [1, 2]. Earlier this week, a Novell senior vice president spoke at VMworld, which is VMware’s event. From Novell’s PR blog:

Novell Senior Vice President and Global Alliances General Manager Joe Wagner was interviewed during a session at VMworld today. Wagner responded to questions regarding Novell and VMware’s recent expansion of partnership and new agreement terms.

“Microsoft douses VMware with cold cloud shower,” says the Microsoft booster. It’s because VMware poses as a certain threat to Microsoft, which lies about virtualisation market share by only measuring what looks good (be careful of false figured that are floating around right now). SJVN says that “VMware doesn’t like Windows” and that Microsoft accuses VMware of “lock-in”.

In fact, we know Ballmer isn’t happy with VMware. On the very day that Maritz was throwing dirt on Windows’ grave, Microsoft had taken out a full page ad in the USA Today urging people to not sign long-term contracts with VMware. This is rich: Microsoft — yes, Microsoft! — warning companies of the dangers of being tied into long-term enterprise license agreements.

If VMware bought Novell, it would inherit projects like Mono and Moonlight. Combined with the background of VMware’s current managers (several including the CEO came from Microsoft), it would only align them more closely to/with Microsoft, not the other way around. VMware is quite instrumental here and therefore we’ll keep an eye on it. ?

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Aussie gamer loses Playstation court fight

  A gamer who sued Sony over an upgrade that removed functions from his Playstation 3 console has lost a court claim against the company.

  Adelaide man Michael Trebilcock wanted $800 in compensation, claiming the upgrade meant the console could no longer be used as a computer.

• Ukraine to Create is Own GNU/Linux Distro

  I’ve been writing for a while about Russia’s on-off idea of creating its own GNU/Linux distro. It looks like Ukraine is following suit. Via Google Translate:

  its purpose is to optimize the expenditure of budgetary funds and the solution using unlicensed software in state bodies.

  According to estimates from officials, the savings of switching apparatus to free software can be 87%.

• Desktop
  • An Application Dock for Linux

    I am a PC, Mac, and Linux user. At night I dual boot between Vista and Ubuntu and during the day I use a Mac almost exclusively. As a result, there are many things I like about using my Mac at work and would not mind seeing them on my home desktop. Since buying a Mac right now for personal use is out of the question I have to make do with what I already have. At any rate, one of the Mac features I actually like is the Dock. For those of you who are not Mac users, the Dock is basically a bar at the bottom of the desktop where application icons can be displayed that will launch the application once clicked on. It’s attractive and useful and I have wanted one on my non-Mac desktops for some time now.

  • My Linux Experience

    Long story short, I use Ubuntu because it was the first distro that actually worked without pulling teeth, and it still works fine for everything I do. I’ve had a few issues with it, I think they push some changes too soon without ironing bugs out – which incidentally is why I don’t use Fedora, I like my stuff to tend towards stability rather than cutting edge. I’ve tried Debian but it seems TOO slow moving. Ubuntu just works, it does everything I want it to, and I have never really been left wanting.

  • Is your company afraid of Linux? (3 of 3)

    Most Linux distributions are free to download and use, although, there are a few Linux enterprise shops that provide licensing and professional support for their product. SUSE (now a division of Novell) and RedHat are two of the most popular. SUSE’s enterprise server license ranges form $400 to $1500. RedHat is anywhere from $400 to $1,200. These license plans “include” professional support anywhere from email-only support to 24×7 phone support. Each license is renewable yearly because of the licenses focus around their professional support plans.

  • BE: Political party moving to a complete open source desktop

    Ecolo, a green political party in Belgium, is planning to complete its move to a complete open source desktop system by the end of 2011. On the 220 workstations in its main office, it will gradually replace the underlying operating system to Ubuntu Linux, says Sebastien Bollingh, the party’s ICT manager.

• Google
  • Google Adds Phone Calls to Linux Gmail Use

    Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

  • Google Voice/Video Chat Available For Linux
• Kernel Space
  • Graphics Stack
    • 2010 Linux Graphics Survey
• Applications
  • Top 10 Open Source Bug Tracking System

    All IT projects needs a bug tracking (or issue tracking, or defect tracking) system.

    Sure, we need a bug tracking system for a software development project. But, what about a sysadmin team, dba team, network team? They all need some help to track their work, and issues of their system, database and network.

    I’ve listed 10 open source bug tracking systems, that you can experiment, and choose based on your taste and requirement. This is not a comprehensive list by any means. I’ve used all the systems listed in the top 5, and I strongly recommend that you choose one from the top 5 list.

    I love bugzilla, and have been using it for several years. If you don’t have time to play around with multiple systems to figure-out which one you like, just go with Bugzilla.

  • Twitter’s OAuthpocalypse Today – Upgrade Your Gwibber!

    Today is Twitter’s OAuthpocalypse: Twitter is shutting down basic authentification so all clients not using OAuth will stop working and one of these Twitter clients is Ubuntu’s default microblogging client: Gwibber. That means that you need to upgrade if you want to continue using Gwibber.

    An official Gwibber PPA for both Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat has been created – for testing purposes! – with an updated Gwibber version which uses OAuth.

  • Proprietary
    • [Opera] The End of an Architecture

      After ending support for PowerPC, we will be able to focus more on our high quality browser to make sure that it meets the need of the modern web browser user on the popular architectures.

  • Instructionals/Technical
    • Measuring and monitoring system performances through sysstat
    • ftpfs in gentoo (curlftpfs)
    • Project management the open source way
    • Drive and partition backups with dd
    • Ubuntu 10.04 fix for USB Drive not mounting on pc with Floppy Drive
    • Juniper NSM Tip: starting and stopping NSM services in Proper order
    • How to relocate device logs on juniper NSM server to a different directory
    • One Click FTP, Create FTP Server Transfer Profiles
  • Games
    • Vera Blanc Episode 2 “Ghost In The Castle” Is Out !

      The GNU/Linux friendly company Winter Wolves has released a demo of squeal to Vera Blanc: Full Moon which is a manga inspired heavy dialog mystery detective game.
      Vera Blanc Episode 2 “Ghost In The Castle” demo is now out and you can download it from here.

• Desktop Environments
  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
    • KDE SC 4.5 Falls Short

      It’s great that the new focus has been on solidifying the desktop, but with new regressions and no major must-have features to make this release worthwhile, I simply can’t recommend it in its current state. For now, I recommend sticking with KDE 4.4 for the time being and blocking this release if your distribution allows it. I’m confident though that future point releases will solidify KDE 4.5, and when that happens I may consider taking another look.

    • Reviewed: KDE 4.5

      Trepidation. That about sums up the feeling of upgrading to a new version of KDE. You want to like it, but are afraid that whatever has been fixed will be counterbalanced by something rather sucky. This version of KDE has seen 16,022 bugs fixed and 1,723 new feature requests added, so the balance is in favour of not-sucky. Or is it?

      For the most part, the improvements in this version of KDE aren’t the things that you see, but the things that you don’t see any longer. Chief among the long list of user grievances in 4.4 was the behaviour of system notifications – no longer. Now the notifications look better and don’t clog up the screen for 10 minutes every time you try to copy a file somewhere it can’t fit.

      [...]

      Our Verdict: Now with less suck, the 4.x series moves from being merely usable to almost desirable. 8/10

    • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-08-31

      This week on KDEMU, Paul sends a shout-out, Gamaral sends a shout-out and Jeff sends a shout-out right after sharing what Amarok, KDE Sysadmin and CampKDE are all about.

  • GNOME Desktop
    • This Sound Menu idea is way too cute not to want

      This Sound Menu idea is way too cute not to want

    • Pidgin Guifications theme for Gnome

      If I say so myself, I was impressed with the result! A very nice popup which matches Gnome popups almost exactly.
      [NB: There a glitch in Guifications which means email notifications don't appear unless you deselect 'Email' from the 'Notifications' tab in the Guifications configuration window and then reselect it again after changing themes. Bear this in mind if you try alternative themes.]

    • 3 Amazing Ubuntu 10.10 Wallpapers

      There are no “best wallpapers” or “best themes”, as it depends on one’s taste.

    • My gThumb bug is fixed in 2.11.90 – and I couldn’t be a happier user of free, open-source software
• Distributions
  • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
    • A Good Reason to Use PCLinuxOS 2010

      CFS trades higher kernel overhead for maximizing interactive performance. On mobile devices, the higher overhead means running the processor at higher speeds, which builds more heat. Heat is the enemy of every mobile device.

      For a bit of background, Con Koliva developed the Rotating Staircase Deadline scheduler, which inspired Ingo Molnar to develop CFS. Seeing the problems with CFS, Con Koliva designed BFS (Brain Fucked Scheduler), an expression of how he felt about writing yet another scheduler. Con Koliva designed BFS for those devices with less than 16 cores, which, to the best of my knowledge, covers all mobile devices, and older non-mobile desktops.

      Although it first appeared in September of 2009, there was not an immediate rush to switch from CFS to BFS. Android has a development branch that includes BFS. It was not included in the Froyo (Android 2.2) release, as a customer survey did not show any differences. At this time, only Zenwalk 6.4 and PCLinuxOS 2010 use BFS as the default scheduler. As it matures, you may see BFS appear in other mobile projects, such as MeeGo.

    • PCLinuxOS
  • Gentoo Family
    • Two magic words: “merged upstream”
    • State of Gentoo Prefix
  • Red Hat Family
    • You can help the defenders.

      Here’s a brief snippet of what I wrote to the advisory-board list this morning:

      Red Hat Legal provides numerous services as counsel to the Fedora community, including defending Fedora trademarks against possible encroachment. Occasionally, people who have no connection to our community attempt to use the Fedora trademark to signify business efforts that have no connection to the Fedora Project, our distribution, or the Fedora community. Red Hat Legal is currently working on just such a defense. They’ve asked me to pass on a request for assistance in gathering physical evidence of our use of the Fedora logo worldwide prior to January 30, 2007.

    • Today: Open Your World webcast with Stefan Lindegaard on the Open Innovation Revolution
    • Fedora
      • Ksplice for Fedora!

        Fedora will join Ubuntu Desktop among our free platforms, and will give Fedora users rebootless updates as long as Fedora maintains each major kernel release.

      • Preupgrade Test Day this Thursday
  • Debian Family
    • A day of failure with Debian

      The Broadcom driver has been annoying me since I got the ProBook. The only distro on which I managed to manually install it is Fedora. On Ubuntu, I now connect to the Internet using my ZTE MF110 modem and use Hardware Drivers (jockey?) to automatically install it. On a side note, I couldn’t do that with Kubuntu, because KNetworkManager is too buggy to let me connect to networks that do not support 2G data (which Digi Mobil Romania is).

    • Canonical/Ubuntu
      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 208

        Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Natty Narwhal, I am tickled pink to announce the details of the next Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place in Orlando, USA from 25th – 29th October 2010. We also have a brand new Ubuntu Developer Summit website which provides all the details about how to get there and why UDS is interesting if you are in our community, if you are an upstream, and if you are a vendor.

      • Default Wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.10 – Looks Like the Inside of a Barf Bag

        I made no secret of my dislike for the “Aubergine” wallpaper in Ubuntu 10.04. If you had asked me when that was released if I thought Ubuntu/Canoncial could come up with something worse, I would have said no.

        Unfortunately, I would have been wrong. Ubuntu has revealed the default wallpaper for their 10.10 release. I swear to you, it looks like the inside of a barf bag. Every time I look at it, I get a very strong urge to contribute more to that bag… Take a look for yourself. Read the comments. Ugh. Bletch.

      • Flavours and Variants
        • Reviewed: Linux Mint 9 KDE

          Despite this, Mint is up there with Kubuntu as a coherent KDE desktop. If you’ve used Gnome Mint, but fancy lots of apps with a capitalised K in the name, this is the logical choice.

• Devices/Embedded
  • Phones
    • Palm Reveals webOS 2.0 SDK Beta

      Palm released new information on webOS 2.0, the Linux-based mobile OS that powers the Palm Pre and Pixi.

      The announcement highlighted 7 core features new to webOS 2.0. It’s confirmed that webOS 2.0 will feature multi-tasking in the form of Stacks. Stacks groups related applications into fanned stacks similar to a deck of cards, reducing clutter. webOS 2.0 automatically groups similar applications together, but it’s possible to manually group applications as well.

    • WebOS 2.0 Pushed to Developers
  • Tablets
    • Hands-On With Stream TV’s Surprising, Open Source-Friendly Tablet

      If anyone unseats the iPad, the victor might be the one that doesn’t try to beat Apple at its own game. We checked out Stream TV’s eLocity Android tablet first-hand, and this plucky contender may put up a serious fight.

      To say that the eLocity A7 isn’t going directly head to head with the iPad isn’t to say that it’s not out to impress. The solidly built 7-inch tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s beefy, dual core Tegra 2 processor, will run Froyo out of the box and is capable of outputting a plethora of formats at 1080p via an included HDMI cable.

Free Software/Open Source

• XBMC 10.0 Beta 1 features new Add-ons system

  XBMC 10.0 Beta 1 is available to download from one of the project’s mirrors. XBMC source code is hosted on SourceForge and is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The most recent stable release is version 9.11 from the end of December, 2009.

• Time for IBM to become an open source hero

  I’m not asking IBM to do something against its interests here. Quite the contrary. It is very much in IBM’s own interest that it step up and lead the open source movement. That’s something IBM representatives have been telling their customers and business partners for some time, that you give in order to get.

• Web Browsers
  • Mozilla
    • Firefox’s New “JaegerMonkey” JavaScript Engine is Revving Up, About 20% Faster Already

      Firefox 4.0 is probably going to be one among the most important release Mozilla team has ever made. Competition is breathing down its neck like never before. Even IE, in its latest avatar(read IE9) is fast becoming a better piece of software. Mozilla’s answer to all this lies in upcoming Firefox 4.0. Already a lot of improvements have been made. But the biggest change is going to be the the new JavaScript engine called “JaegerMonkey”.

• Databases
  • Famous Online Game and Online Word Processor use CUBRID Database

    Today is a Big day at Naver.com, Korea’s No.1 Search Portal with 34 million subscribers and 17 million daily unique visotors. Today Naver launches its new Online Word Processor Service backed up by CUBRID Database Server in an Open Beta state. The Word Processor service runs on CUBRID 2008 R2.2 with High-Availability feature ON. There is an approximate estimate that CUBRID Database will be process several million batch requests every day.

  • EnterpriseDB: Open Source Database Attracts More Funding

    EnterpriseDB, which provides enterprise-level open source PostgreSQL database services, has announced its completed a round of funding, adding KT (formerly Korea Telecom) and TransLink Capital to its list of investors. Here’s the story.

    While the company didn’t disclose the financial terms of the investments, EnterpriseDB’s press release says that TransLink Capital co-founder Jay Eum has joined their Board of Directors. At TransLink, Eum is also responsible for managing investments in companies like Carbonite and XSigo, so he has experience in the IT space.

• CMS
  • Drupal Releases New Code of Conduct

    Drupal released its new Code of Conduct on Monday with the intention of preserving the community and environment that has sprung around the open source content management system.

    “The new Drupal Code of Conduct states our shared ideals with respect to conduct. Think of this as coding standards for people,” Moshe Weitzman said in the announcement on Drupal’s website.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
  • Interview with Bradley Kuhn of the GNOME Advisory Board

    At that time, Richard Stallman asked me to remain on the GNOME advisory board as a volunteer, primarily to provide ongoing continuity to FSF’s representation on the Advisory Board. From 2005-2010, that position was in fact the only official duty that I carried out for FSF. But, as a side point, non-profits are very different from for-profits in this regard; it’s quite common for important roles to be held by volunteers. Since non-profits operate in the public good, many experienced professionals are willing to give their time without compensation.

• Openness/Sharing
  • Open Access/Content
    • Access to Knowledge: A Guide for Everyone

Leftovers

• Holy Smokes! At 5.2 GHz IBM Chip is Super Fast

  IBM today announced that it has developed a computer chip that has a record-breaking clock speed of 5.2 GHz. The chip — dubbed z196 processor — is going to be used in a new IBM mainframe system, the zEnterprise 196. IBM developed the chip for big honking computers whose primary job is to crunch copious amounts of data, especially for banks and retailers who are seeing a big shift in their business with the rise of mobile.

• Science
  • Announcing PLoS Blogs

    Today we are pleased to announce the launch of PLoS Blogs a new network for discussing science in public; covering topics in research, culture, and publishing.

    PLoS Blogs is different from other blogging networks, because it includes an equal mix of science journalists and scientists. We’re excited to be welcoming our new bloggers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum to the network.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife
  • Road to cut off Serengeti migration route

    LOOK out wildebeest, here come the cars. Tanzania’s government plans to build a commercial road in the north of Serengeti National Park, cutting through the migratory route of 2 million wildebeest and zebra.

    The road would cut the animals off from their dry-season watering holes, causing the wildebeest population to dwindle to just a quarter of current levels, says the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Germany. It could also be a collision zone for humans and animals, leading to casualties on both sides, and there is a risk that transported livestock would spread disease, the society adds.

  • Ohio Tea Party survey to candidates: “The regulation of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere should be left to God and not government and I oppose all measures of Cap and Trade as well as the teaching of global warming theory in our schools.”

    One merely need replace “carbon dioxide” with, say “toxic air pollutants” to see how absurd and self-contradictory the statement is. Or one could replace “Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere” with, say, “crime” — that’s what the 10 Commandments are therefore, no? But that all does assume these folks are open to even a modicum of logic.

  • Facebook faces campaign to switch to renewable energy

    Social networking website Facebook is coming under unprecedented pressure from its users to switch to renewable energy. In one of the web’s fastest-growing environmental campaigns, Greenpeace international says at least 500,000 people have now protested at the organisation’s intention to run its giant new data centre mainly on electricity produced by burning coal power.

• Finance
  • Will we ever recover from the financial crisis?

    Well, define recovery. If recovery is getting back to the low unemployment levels that preceded the crisis, then no, we might not ever recover. If recovery is just getting back to some more normal-looking growth and job numbers, it’s still going to take a very long time.

  • Obama says reviving economy the most urgent task

    President Barack Obama says his central responsibility as president is to restore the nation’s fragile economy and to help put the millions of people who lost jobs back to work.

  • 10 bailed-out banks spent $16.3M lobbying in 1H

    The 10 banks that received the most bailout aid during the financial crisis spent over $16 million on lobbying efforts in the first half of 2010, as the debate over financial regulatory reform reached its height.

  • Fed officials discussed further stimulus steps

    Federal Reserve officials signaled at their August meeting that they would consider going beyond a modest program to purchase government debt if necessary to boost the economy.

  • SEC says it lacked authority to charge Moody’s

    The Securities and Exchange Commission has declined to seek fraud charges against Moody’s Investors Services over its ratings of risky investments that led to the financial crisis.

    But the SEC said it decided against seeking civil charges only because it determined it lacked authority to charge a foreign affiliate of Moody’s.

  • Tradition ends: No Michigan state fair this year

    Rabbit breeder Rob Usakowski typically spends the week before Labor Day helping his daughters show their Jersey Woolies and Holland Lops at the Michigan State Fair.

    This year, he and his family are home after Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm canceled the fair, saying debt-ridden Michigan could no longer afford to subsidize it. Granholm’s decision makes Michigan the only Midwestern state and one of few nationwide without a state fair.

  • Hands off Social Security

    The White House deficit commission is reportedly considering deep benefit cuts for Social Security, including a steep rise in the retirement age. We cannot let that happen.

    The deficit and our $13 trillion national debt are serious problems that must be addressed. But we can — and must — address them without punishing America’s workers, senior citizens, the disabled, widows and orphans.

  • Source: JPMorgan Chase halting proprietary trading

    JPMorgan Chase & Co. is shutting down its proprietary trading desks and eliminating around 80 jobs to comply with new restrictions on investment banks, a source familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

    The source spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because JPMorgan Chase isn’t formally announcing the move.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
  • Ecommerce directive: EU Commission sneaks out filtering review

    The review of the E-commerce Directive asks whether network filtering can be effective and whether there are liability issues for “web 2.0 and cloud computing”. Given that it is under the remit of the French Commissioner, Michel Barnier, how are we to read this strange approach to a consultation which specifically does NOT want to hear the citizen perspective?

    In the middle of the summer holidays, when few were around to notice it, the European Commision has sneaked out a highly controversial review of the Ecommerce directive. The review is consulting on the use of Internet filtering and monitoring and search engine linking. It appears to have been influenced by the pharmaceutical, luxury goods and copyright industries. And in a move that is sure to inflame the user community, the Commission has specifically ruled out responses from citizens’ groups and NGOs.

• Intellectual Monopolies
  • Does Steven Levitan Also Want A Cut Every Time You Buy A TV?

    We recently wrote about how TV producer Steven Levitan was publicly complaining that content creators deserve a cut of any IPO proceeds that Hulu gets, if it does go public. We pointed out what a ridiculous sense of entitlement was involved in such a sentiment, but rather than back down, Levitan is apparently only just beginning. The Hollywood Reporter interviewed him about his views on this, and he simply kept on repeating the same ridiculous concept that as a content producer he somehow deserves the money that Hulu makes. He also complains that TV companies should either keep shows offline under the false belief that TV shows are less likely to be pirated (no, stop laughing, he’s serious) and that if they must go online, they should include all of the commercials seen on TV. Because, apparently, recognizing that you’re dealing with people watching shows under very different circumstances and in very different ways apparently has not occurred to Levitan.

  • Copyrights
    • If Fashion Copyright Harms So Many, Why Is Congress Pushing For It?

      It’s even worse than that, actually. In many cases, there are plenty of us willing to speak up about the harm caused by greater protectionism, and the vast amounts of actual evidence and research showing how these policies are inherently going to do more harm than good — but very few people in Congress listen. Why? Because the industry has done a rather impressive targeted PR job of branding anyone who actually presents evidence and facts about the harm done by copyright law as simply supporting “piracy,” which then gets lumped in with all sorts of other awful things. It’s really a shame.

    • Introducing Copyright
    • Edwyn Collins stopped from sharing his music online

      he Scottish star’s manager has criticised MySpace and Warner Music for not allowing the singer to stream A Girl Like You, claiming he didn’t own the copyright

    • ACTA
      • It´s a bird, it´s a plane… no it’s “ACTA light”.

        Today in the European Parliament in Brussels Luc Devigne from DG Trade briefed the International Trade Commission in a closed door meeting on the latest round of the ACTA negotiations. He gave the impression that thanks to the EU many things were being “scaled back” to calm the worries of citizens and certain industries such as Internet Service providers or generic medicine producers.

        He insisted that lots of progress was made in DC on most topics and that now the text was “less complicated”. At the same time he stated that there was a still a “long way to go” to bridge the gap between the US and the EU on issues of scope of rights covered in border measures (EU broader, US narrower), geographical indications, industrial design and border measures concerning not only import but affecting goods being exported and in transit. The US only wants trademarks, and copyright in border measures that will be limited to imports (as established in TRIPS), while the EU wants this extended At the same time he repeated that all patents were out of border measures and criminal sanctions and that nothing in ACTA would affect “access to medicine.”

Clip of the Day

Object Oriented Programming

Credit: TinyOgg

Summary: Centrify and Likewise get sued, having attempted to outdo Free software by faking it and adding software patents to it

TO FREE SOFTWARE, THE BIGGEST patent problem (as far as software companies are concerned) is Microsoft, not Apple or IBM (here is a new analysis about Oracle). Microsoft has already grown some patent tentacles, which include patent trolls like Paul Allen and several offshoots created by former Microsoft staff. Two such Microsoft-affiliated software patents proponents put patents in UNIX and Linux. They are called Centrify [1, 2, 3] and Likewise [1, 2, 3, 4], which are merely a nuisance to Samba. It’s probably obvious that Samba is strongly against software patents (it was an early adopted of GPLv3), unlike those Microsoft patents boosters who are only good at publicity and faking “open source” (Likewise falsely markets itself as “open source” when it's actually 'open' core, i.e. proprietary).

We are somewhat pleased to see Centrify and Likewise getting sued for patent violations as they very much deserve it for their stance on software patents (which hopefully they will rethink now). Quest Software has just sued them both.

Aliso Viejo-based Quest Software has sued competitors Centrify Corp. and Likewise Software, Inc., the firm said late Friday, claiming that the two firms infringe on one of its patents, U.S. Patent No. 7,617,501. According to Quest, the patent covers the extension of Windows Group Policy into Unix, Linux, Mac, and other non-Windows computer systems. Quest said it is seeking damages and injunctive relief from Centrify and Likewise.

Centrify, which accumulated patent monopolies, is using its software patents to sue back [1, 2, 3].

This is in response to a patent infringement lawsuit that was recently filed by Quest against Centrify and another software company.

Centrify alleges that Quest Authentication Services infringes its US Patent 7,591,005, a key technology of Centrify DirectControl that facilitates the capability for UNIX and Linux service accounts and root accounts to be authenticated within a centralised directory.

They are battling over Microsoft protocols. It’s another reason to avoid Mono and Moonlight, for example. ?

“Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat.”

–James Plamondon, Microsoft Technical Evangelist. From Exhibit 3096; Comes v. Microsoft litigation [PDF]

Summary: Microsoft wants European GNU/Linux users to pay through the nose, but first it needs to use lobbyists like Zuck (above) to change the law in Europe, by pretending to speak for small businesses

TALKSTANDARDS.COM AND OTHER LOBBYISTS of Microsoft’s interests in Europe (including ACT and Microsoft Florian for example) lobby for RAND or defend the practice of RAND, knowing damn well that it is not compatible with Linux and therefore can justify ‘Linux tax’ over there (this issue was covered in the previous post). The RAND lobby from the usual suspects even spawns public events where the purpose is probably to sway politicians and change the law (ACT does this a lot, with Microsoft funding). There is nothing more abhorrent than lobbying to change laws by foreign companies such as Microsoft. As FFII has just put it, ‘Would you let this person “transform” your “government”?’

“It is wrong to corrupt foreign governments”
      –FFII“Transformational government means hostile takeover,” says FFII at Twitter. “How dare you transform our government? Transform yourself!”

Citing unjust clauses in ACTA, the FFII says that “It is wrong to corrupt foreign governments” (that’s what Microsoft is doing in Europe right now).

Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen, who keeps pretending to do charity (another bogus publicity stunt), has just officially become a patent troll who uses software patents to harm large businesses. The ‘Microsoft press’ says in a blog’s headline that “Paul Allen Needs More Money” (Microsoft Florian seemingly defends this man and the Microsoft-funded pressure group ACT pretends that SMBs benefits from all that).

Katherine Noyes has just explained why “Software Patents Hurt Everyone, But Especially SMBs”:

Taken together, all this recent legal action provides a vivid illustration of many of the problems plaguing the U.S. patent system today. Software patents do far more harm than good to both the industry and consumers, and they put small and medium-sized businesses at a particular disadvantage.

Watch the lawyers fight back with their self-serving lies. It didn’t even take long.

Using the Paul Allen litigation as a hook, a piece entitled “Software patents hurt everyone, but especially SMBs”, written by PC World’s Katherine Noyes, rehashes a lot of the old arguments made against software patents. It’s a remarkably unsurprising piece that adds nothing to the debate.

Watch them just shoot the messenger claiming that a dosage of reality “adds nothing to the debate.” This site is run by patent lawyers, so nobody should be surprised by this reaction.

Should policy about software not be written for software developers with consultation from them? Why should foreign monopolies, their lobbyists, and their lawyers hijack the system? ?

Summary: Microsoft uses Linux-powered phones not just to make income (patent tax) but also to spread Microsoft propaganda, which includes Linux insults

REDMOND-BASED PARASITE MICROSOFT is losing its ability to compete online and to compete in mobile, including tablets. What does it do? It extorts Linux, which increasingly leads the way in these two strategic areas. Here is another Samsung/Android phone for Microsoft to make money from owing to patent extortion (patents never named) and another HTC EVO 4G clone will receive similar treatment. It’s just a Verizon Android rumuor at this moment, just like the old rumour that Microsoft paid Verizon half a billion dollars to force all customers to use Bong [sic] ‘search’ [1, 2] — a ‘search’ which is prefiltered to yield Linux-hostile results. Microsoft loves to spit in the well. Oh, well…

Now that Microsoft is shoving Bong [sic] into Android phones, Tim from OpenBytes responds as follows:

It comes as no surprise to me when we learn that Bing now has an Android app. Microsoft really wants you using its search decision engine and if that means putting it on an massively popular Android platform (which they are starting to make money from via “deals” with HTC et al) then so be it.

The author acquired an HTC phone just days before Microsoft declared that it had successfully extorted HTC and will therefore be paid by HTC for Linux, per unit. To Microsoft it’s important to ‘tax’ mobile Linux because shipment volume there is far greater than on the desktop. The way it’s done is akin to racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Let’s remember this next time Microsoft says it “love” Open Source. Who doesn’t “love” to extort and exploit things? Linux is working pretty well for Microsoft, as long as Microsoft uses invisible software patents to claim to be the owner of Linux. ?

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Linux Journal Insider – October 2010
• Software and licensing requirements for vCloud Director

  I personally welcome the fact that vCloud Director is based on Linux.

• So Apple’s live streaming to everyone tomorrow…except Windows and Linux users.
• Server
  • CaminoSoft Announces Enhanced File System Archiving Software for OES-Linux Servers

    CaminoSoft Announces Enhanced File System Archiving Software for OES-Linux Servers

• Kernel Space
  • ZFS as a Linux kernel module
  • Torvalds Causes Mob Scene at LinuxCon Brazil

    The Linux Foundation today kicked off its two-day debut of LinuxCon Brazil. Attendees got a rare opportunity to see both Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton on stage, together, and in person. Based on this snapshot from Intel’s Dirk Hohndel, I think attendees were very excited about that opportunity.

• Applications
  • Proprietary
    • AutoCad

      That is changing as AutoDesk announced that AutoCad is coming back to MacOSS. As the same hardware runs GNU/Linux and MacOS is a UNIX-like OS it is quite possible that a release for GNU/Linux will appear sooner rather than later. That should shut up some of the trolls who insist availability of one app is the cause for GNU/Linux to have a small share on store shelves.

    • SYCODE Ships 11 Translators for ARES

      “We see tremendous potential for the ARES CAD platform from Graebert,,” explains Deelip Menezes, Founder and CEO of SYCODE. That’s the reason why we took the initiative of studying the internal working of this new robust platform. We appreciate the assistance and support received from Graebert while developing the data exchange add-ins that we have released today. We are continuing the cooperation with ARES versions for Mac and Linux. In that regard we have already started the enormous task of making all our code cross platform so that we are able to support ARES on the Mac and Linux as soon as possible.”

  • Instructionals/Technical
    • Samsung N150 Plus Netbook – Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04
    • How to Configure Gwibber Social Client in Ubuntu 10.04
    • How To Set Up MySQL Database Replication With SSL Encryption On Debian Lenny
    • Installing development tools with fink
    • Why should a hard drive be partitioned?
  • Wine
    • New Wine: Running Windows Music & Sound Applications Under Wine 1.2

      Wine runs many Windows programs nicely these days, including more and more serious music applications. Dave profiles some of those applications running under the latest & greatest Wine 1.2

  • Games
    • Best online Ubuntu (Linux) games

      Ubuntu games can be found in the operating systems by clicking Applications, then Ubuntu Software Center. Also, Linux gamers can find lists of online Ubuntu games all over the Internet, but finding the good ones is the hard part. Regarding native online-playable Ubuntu games, here is a list of the best so far.

• Desktop Environments
  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
    • KDE 4.5: Your New Desktop Awaits

      Not only is KDE 4.5 a far superior desktop to its predecessor, I would go as far to say that it has finally surpassed 3.5 in both usability and performance. That’s a bold statement considering how the desktop has evolved.

      But what have the developers done to make 4.5 so much better than that all other iterations in the 4.x branch? What they did was work some serious developer Kung Fu. The difference between 4.4 and 4.5 is very noticable. Let’s take a look at some figures from the KDE bug statics:

      * 16022 bugs fixed
      * 1723 feature requests filled

• Distributions
  • Will Google’s Chrome OS Be a Huge Hit?

    Back in April of 2008, I wrote about a small company working with Google and delivering a PC running a Googleized version of the Linux Operating System. Notably, that company is still around while similar attempts in the end-user Linux arena such as Jolicloud are getting much more press.

    Many, back then, mistakenly took the gOS name as the Google Operating System. It actually stood for Green Operating System (and apparently is now a Linux build called the Good Operating System).

    Google is expected to introduce the Chrome OS in the fourth quarter of this year and there have already been a variety of leaks pointing to hardware displaying the product. Google also owns Android which is already a rapidly growing hit in the mobile market. One Google employee commented recently that, at some point, the two projects by Google will likely converge.

  • Chakra
    • Chakra 0.2.0
    • Chakra GNU/Linux 0.2.0 Screenshots

      This recent release of Chakra GNU/ Linux, codenamed ‘Jaz’, provides users with many new features. Chakra 0.2.0 features the Linux kernel 2.6.33.7 with LZMA support, KDE SC 4.4.5, X.Org 1.7.7, access to 5670 software packages, a new cinstall multi-tool for creating and managing bundles and packages and many other enhancements. Read the official release announcement for details. I found several useful applications setup and ready to go including K3B burning, Bluedevil bluetooth management and Bangarang for connecting to media and TV.

  • New Releases
    • GParted 0.6.2-5
    • RIPLinuX 10.8
    • IPCop 1.9.15
    • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 112

      · Announced Distro: NetSecL 3.0
      · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9 Xfce Edition
      · Announced Distro: Fedora 14 Alpha
      · Announced Distro: Vyatta 6.1
      · Announced Distro: Zenwalk Linux 6.4
      · Announced Distro: Parted Magic 5.4

  • Red Hat Family
    • Ganart Technologies Builds Financial Transaction Cloud on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

      Ganart endeavors to bring consumable banking to the masses by developing software and systems in a cloud that offers its customers consistency with their financial services from end to end. When it first began developing these systems, Ganart built a datacenter based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

    • Increased Clientele for Red Hat

      A leading provider of open source solutions, Red Hat Inc. (RHT – Snapshot Report) continues to support organizations with a varied business demand in the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. IT based organizations are aggressively adopting Red Hat’s open solutions and Virtualization technology to grow their businesses.

    • Fedora
      • Ksplice Now Free for Fedora Users

        Ksplice, the technology that allows Linux kernel updates without a reboot, is now free for users of the Fedora distribution. Using Ksplice is like “replacing your car’s engine while speeding down the highway”, and it can potentially save your Linux systems from a lot of downtime. Since Fedora users often live on the bleeding edge of Linux development, Ksplice makes it even easier to do so, and without reboots!

      • A story about updates and people

        A bit of discussion about update policy in Fedora has been brewing lately and I’ve been reading and thinking (and stewing and moaning and wringing my hands) about the discussion a lot.

  • Debian Family
    • Debian developer Frans Pop passes away

      Early in 2006, he became the release manager for the Debian Installer project, taking over from veteran Joey Hess.

      According to the Debian project, Frans was a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu
      • Get the Linux Mint GNOME Menu in Ubuntu

        Ubuntu is far and wide the most popular Linux distrobution, although Mint certainly has its advantages for beginners, such as the menu organization. Ubuntu Forums member KdotJ shows us how to add Mint’s GNOME menu to your Ubuntu desktop.

      • Ubuntu for Non-Geeks
• Devices/Embedded
  • Linksys WRT160NL

    Linux-based and with a decent set of features, this wireless router supports many new technologies, and can be quite exciting. It includes Wireless-N, detachable antennae, USB and third-party firmware support. The last bit here would arouse the enthusiast inside you, but can this make for the area where it comes up short?

  • Asus RT-N16

    Like motherboards, the hardware Asus is known for making, you can use many different third-party router operating systems (aka firmware) on the RT-N16. Equipped with an overclockable 480Mhz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the router performed great in our trials when it was running DD-WRT, one of the most well-known Linux-based open-source router firmware options.

  • Navigation display SoC gains Linux development support

    Lineo Solutions and Timesys have collaborated on a new LinuxLink subscription supporting the 500MHz Renesas SH7724 SoC (system on chip). The Timesys LinuxLink subscription supports Renesas’ SH7724-based MS774 development board and offers a Linux 2.7.33.6 kernel, drivers for touchscreens and other peripherals, plus the usual LinuxLink tools and services.

  • Phones
    • Ready or not: how mobiles became so much more than just phones

      Powerful operating systems such as Android have allowed developers to increase mobile phones’ potential to become all-round portable communication devices. Being lost is impossible with the latest mobiles and you can already get applications that use a mobile’s GPS receiver to find your nearest pubs, cash machines and hospitals. That information can then be routed through another application that will show you a map to get to your destination. All of that on top of the social networking, the newspapers you can download and the life organising you can do – all on the move.

    • Android
      • Android Fork Brings Froyo To 12 Smartphones

        The CyanogenMod team uses an instance of Google’s gerrit tool for code review and patch submission, helping make this former backport of Android 1.6 to T-Mobile’s G1 into thriving development for the G1/MyTouch/MyTouch 1.2, Droid, Nexus One, HTC Aria, HTC Desire, HTC Evo 4G (minus 4G and HDMI output), Droid Incredible, and MyTouch Slide. HTC Hero (including Droid Eris) are coming soon for 6.0, with Samsung Galaxy S devices expected to be supported in 6.1.

      • ViewSonic ViewPad 7 official: Android 2.2 and ‘full’ phone functionality

        We know you’re positively giddy with excitement to get at this OlivePad rebadge and ViewSonic is today fanning those flames of desire with a little bit of pre-IFA PR. Made official today, the 7-inch ViewPad 7 will try to lure in Android lovers with its tasty Froyo parfait, underpinned by hardware that includes front- and back-facing cameras, 3G for both phone and data transmissions, and a full-sized SIM slot.

      • Hands On With Stream TV’s Surprising, Open Source-Friendly Tablet

        To say that the eLocity A7 isn’t going directly head to head with the iPad isn’t to say that it’s not out to impress. The solidly-built 7″ tablet is powered by nVidia’s beefy, dual core Tegra 2 processor, will run Froyo out of the box, and is capable of outputting a plethora of formats at 1080p via an included HDMI cable. Eye catching stats. When the eLocity team stopped by our offices, they were sure to tout its media muscle, showing off some truly impressive HD content stored on the diminutive tab, through either 4 GB of internal storage or Micro SD.

      • Archos adding a slew of Android tablets including the 101

        With two Archos 5 tablets in my rearview mirror, I am definitely looking forward to the new 101. The nomenclature is shorthand for the 10.1″ screen with 1024×600 resolution.

      • Motorola Charm Rooted!
      • Motorola launches three new Android devices

        The MING devices from Motorola are touch smartphones, with a transparent flip-screen to protect its touch surface. The devices have run on a home brewed Linux based operating system up until now, but Motorola has just announced three new MING phones, all running on Android.

      • Apple’s App Store Vs Android App Store

        Apple’s app store is well equipped with 250,000 apps and 70% apps from them are supplied purely through payment. Whereas, Android’s apps 64 % of the 95,000 are supplied at free of cost from Google’s Android market.

        [...]

        vAndroid is at present not having any approval process and this creating a chance for the hobbyist apps to float on the Android. Also, Android encourages its developers to use open-source and Linux platform. This is another primary reason for the apps availability at free of cost in Google’s Android market.

      • Android Apps Mostly Free, iPhone Apps Mostly Paid
      • Apps: why free rules on Android, paid rules on iPhone

        [O]n Apple’s App Store, roughly 70 per cent of the apps are paid while on Android Market, it’s almost exactly the other way around, with 64 per cent free apps.

      • Indian eCommerce Leader Adopts Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

        Of course, the other major selling point for many buyers will be this phone’s OS. It runs on Google’s Android 1.6 system, which is user friendly and open-source. The fact that it’s open source opens up the playing field to developers who might not otherwise have the financial muscle to develop their apps from the ground up. That means more apps for the user. Android has been around since 2008 but it’s only in the past 12 months that growing support from developers and handset makers has prompted some commentators to claim it poses a serious threat to Apple’s iPhone iOS dynasty.

      • Red Hat Outlines Its Cloud Strategy

        Last week open source software vendor Red Hat (RHT) laid out its vision for a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as a part of its Cloud Foundations.

  • Sub-notebooks
    • Indamixx Portable Studio Refreshes It’s Line of Mobile Music Making Netbooks. Portable Linux Daw, Releases It’s Fastest Netbook to Date.

      Trinity Audio Group Inc. announces their newest Netbook, a refreshed model that includes Transmission, a custom audio operating system and the faster 1.66 Ghz Intel Atom based CPU. New software additions and updated real-time Linux kernel are the highlights of this best selling product.

    • HP revamps Mini 210, Mini 5103 with dual-core Atom

      Software gives HP a minor edge as it has both the QuickWeb instant boot Linux front end as well as QuickSync for PC-to-PC data sync and an already-installed copy of the free Evernote app.

  • Tablets
    • Redstar Starts Pre-Orders for Shogo Linux-Powered Tablet [The Shogo Linux-Powered Tablet is Available for Pre-Order in Japan]

      The tablet may be based in Japan and while it wasn’t mentioned if the Shogo would dip its hand in the international scene, you have to wonder how it would far if it did.

    • Judge denies ban on JooJoo, TechCrunch still likely to win

      Fusion Garage today scored a partial but possibly ineffective win in its legal dispute with TechCrunch after a judge ruled out certain requests from the tech site in the lawsuit. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied a call for a preliminary ban on sales of the JooJoo tablet as TechCrunch wasn’t clear how much profit Fusion Garage would get and thus what kind of damages there might be. The judge added that there wasn’t clear an injunction would be needed to recover any perceived losses.

    • India’s $35 PC could chew Apple to a core

      Rather than use a proprietorial operating system such as Microsoft Windows, the new machine is expected to run on the open-source operating system Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source tools at heart of DARPA’s virtual satellite network

  next stage of development for the military’s advanced virtual satellite system that promises to replace monolithic spacecraft with clusters of wirelessly-interconnected spacecraft modules.

• Events
  • LinuxCertified Announces its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development Training course.

    LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from September 15th – 17th, 2010.

• Web Browsers
  • Chromium Graphics Overhaul
  • Chromium to get GPU acceleration
• SaaS
  • Cloudant’s BigCouch is open-source

    The Cloudant team is pleased to make available its ‘BigCouch’ software project as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license. We have been the beneficiary of countless open source projects while constructing this system, so it is only fitting that we share our efforts in hopes that people will not only find utility, but also assist us in making it better.

  • TierraCloud launches HC2 Open Source Project to Enable Enterprise Class Private Cloud Storage

    Source Code Licensed under GPLv2, Contains BSD Licensed Code from Sun’s Project Honeycomb

  • Eucalyptus and Amazon – A Twist Forms in the Open Cloud

    Earlier this summer, Rackspace open-sourced its cloud infrastructure and teamed with NASA to create OpenStack.

  • Trio of cloud companies collaborate on new private cloud platform offerings

    For its part, Eucalyptus Systems, an open source private cloud software developer, will offer infrastructure software that helps organizations deploy massively scalable private and hybrid cloud computing environments securely. MomentumSI comes in on the back end to deliver the solution.

  • Torry Harris inks integration partnership with WSO2

    The strategic integration partnership brings about a convergence of SOA, cloud and open source software

• Healthcare/Biology
  • Industry anticipates MUMPS decision on VA’s VistA modernization

    As the Veterans Affairs Department considers an open source development program to modernize its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) medical record system, officials eventually will have to decide whether to retain all or part of the existing computer language of the system, according to industry members involved in the project.

  • MUMPS to be retained for VA VistA system — for now
  • Open Source Biology: An Interview with Dr. Richard Jefferson
  • VA’s Baker: No wholesale dumping of MUMPS

    As the Veterans Affairs Department sorts through responses to a request for information on the viability of open source software as a component of the VistA electronic health record architecture, it’s also making clear that the MUMPS programing language will continue to underpin VistA in the near term.

• Funding
  • BIRT Generates Over $50 Million to Date and Continues to Lead Open Source BI Market
  • Ericsson invests in Chennai-based Novatium Solutions

    The company’s expertise lies in core computing environments like Linux development, hardware platform, media processing, product testing, research in networking and audio / video technology, network administration, Linux / Windows system administration, Linux internals, programming and X windows.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
  • FooPlug

    Set up your own plug computer to run GNU social — we built one, and called it the FooPlug.

• Project Releases
  • CEDET 1.0 adds IDE features to Emacs

    Version 1.0 of CEDET – a “Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools” – has been released and brings to the Emacs editor features typically found in Integrated Development Environments such as project management, smart code completion and help, symbol reference analysis, code generation, advanced code browsing and UML diagramming. The features are ones that “developers have come to expect from an editor” say CEDET’s developers and are focused on, but not restricted to, C and C++ development. For example, the completion engine is generic and can work with any language which has an appropriate parser; a per-language support matrix shows which features are supported with which languages.

  • Lightspark 0.4.4 open source Flash player released

    The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.4 of its free, open source Flash player. The latest version of the alternative Flash Player implementation includes a number of bug fixes and several new features.

  • Introducing fise, the Open Source RESTful Semantic Engine

    As a member of the IKS european project Nuxeo contributes to the development of an Open Source software project named fise whose goal is to help bring new and trendy semantic features to CMS by giving developers a stack of reusable HTTP semantic services to build upon.

  • Open Source Digital Voice Codec

    It is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

• Government
  • The future of the government forges

    It sounds obvious, but the idea remains revolutionary. For the first time, there would be a single repository for source code that could be shared between the hundreds of agencies, commands, and programs in DOD. Developers would be able to share their work in a familiar, web-based environment. A previous version of forge.mil was pulled for unknown reasons, but the current iteration is based on the TeamForge product from CollabNet. If you’ve used SourceForge, you get the idea. The DOD is the largest consumer, and one of the largest developers of software in the world. Much of this software is redundant, locked up by vendors and integrators, can’t work with other software, and nobody remembers how to maintain it. There’s no doubt forge.mil was long overdue.

• Openness/Sharing
  • The Four Freedoms of Free Culture

    This has led to a proliferation of harmful and incompatible CC-NC and CC-ND licensed works, mistakenly labeled “Free.” Mako Hill points out that while Creative Commons pursued its goal of “Balance, compromise, and moderation,” it failed to define or defend any core freedoms. Indeed, there seems to be no concern about what the “Free” in Free Culture means. To most it means, “slightly less restrictive than modern copyright.” Even so, most CC licenses are more restrictive than pre-1970′s copyright (because modern copyright’s extended terms and more draconian punishments for infringements still apply).

  • Open Source Education: Free Textbook Archive
  • Cassidy: Former Sun chief Scott McNealy’s better idea for school textbooks

    Curriki has a start and a long way to go. Jones says college professors, teachers and authors have uploaded 38,000 educational pieces to the site, www.curriki.org. It has about 135,000 registered users. No question the site needs to become easier to navigate, Jones and McNealy acknowledge. And despite the volume of contributions, there are considerable gaps for those looking for a complete K-12 experience.

  • CSR and Innovation Part III: Open Source

    More importantly open source proponents argue that opening the field up to the global population of software innovators allows for more brain power than keeping it ensconced in the limited framework of proprietary secrecy. This results in an overall better product as the aggregation of creative minds is more expansive. It also means speedier resolutions of software glitches. (Indeed, in one of the most secretive arenas of software development – quantitative trading – many have warned about the alarming number of simple coding errors such as the one responsible for the “flash crash” on May 6, 2010).

  • Interview With Jean-Claude Bradley – The Impact of Open Notebook Science

    And in the spirit of the open source software movement, he reached out to the wider scientific community in 2008, launching a crowd-sourcing project called the Open Notebook Science Challenge. “We have drawn up a list of different compounds and solvents that are priorities and students are asked to measure their solubility,” he says.

  • Open Hardware
    • Now, open source hardware

      The concept of open source is now generally well understood in relation to software, but can it be extended in a clear-cut manner to hardware too?

      Yes, say a group of open source hardware enthusiasts, who have been working on the draft version of a definition of open source hardware. They hope to finalise it at a summit, scheduled for September in New York.

      Open source in the context of software implies not only the free availability of source code, but also the freedom to modify and redistribute it. The concept has widened and is being applied in other domains too.

    • How My Dad Is Trying to Save the World With Open-Source Machinery

      But don’t take my word for it; go through the slideshow below, which was prepared for Maker Faire Africa and which describes four the four core interrelated machines, which can be used in everything from a village blacksmithy to a full-scale factory or trade school. The best part? Dad’s giving them away — this is an entirely open-source project. The problem? Getting people in the NGO/development community to even understand what a machine tool is and why one would be valuable. If you can help spread the word, please do! His contact info and links to more information are in the slideshow, so please check it out.

• Programming
  • Rails 3: New release completes integratation of Merb

    The Rails inventor said that more than 1600 contributors submitting thousands of commits over about two years have jointly made Rails “better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful”. New features include a router which allows declarations that are based on the REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture and an interface to simplify the addition and management of plug-ins. Overall, the new Rails is considerably more modular than previous versions and more dependency agnostic, allowing developers to easily use Test::Unit, Prototype or DataMapper and other libraries instead of Rails’ default libraries.

  • ? On Copyright Aggregation

    Communities whose members are termed “contributors” rather than “members” or “participants” may well be unequal places where your interests are subsidiary to those of the copyright owner. They are often dominated by users and fans of the software rather than by co-developers, since the inequality makes it hard-to-impossible for a genuine co-developer to align any fragment of their interests on equal terms. Indeed, this inequality is seen by some dual-license proponents as one of the attractions of the model as they seek a community of enthusiasts and (hopefully) customers that they can exploit without competition.

  • R-evolutionizing Predictive Analytics – New Market Report Published

    The R open-source data mining language is quickly becoming the lingua franca of the budget-constrained data analyst who wants to harness the power of predictive analysis without a steep, complex, and expensive learning curve. Taking advantage of a gap in the market, Revolution Analytics was formed to commercialize R and raise its applicability in commercial settings.

  • August 30, 2010
    Open Source R Language Could Revolutionize Business Intelligence

    The R programming language could be coming to a workplace near you — if it hasn’t arrived already. The big deal about R is that it can analyze Big Data, those exploding data sets that have traditionally defied analysis.

    R is the brainchild of Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (known as “R” and “R”), academics at the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since Ihaka and Gentleman wrote the original R paper in 1993, R has become the lingua franca of analytic statistics among students, scientists, programmers and data managers.

Leftovers

• Only Some Conspiracy Theories Welcome at Huffington Post

  Because today, the very same Huffington Post published this wonderful post from dangerous nutcase Jenny McCarthy about how autism is caused by vaccines and can be cured with experimental treatments that the established medical community doesn’t want you to know about. We can only assume that as soon as the editors discover this conspiratorial nonsense, they will promptly remove it.

• “Glenn Beck sex tape” one of few things beneath HuffPo’s editorial standards

  Yesterday, former Air America editor in chief Beau Friedlander had a silly little blog at the Huffington Post in which he promised a $100,000 bounty for a Glenn Beck sex tape. The post was actually a barely coherent, largely inaccurate history of neoconservatism, plus complaining about Glenn Beck, that ended with a paragraph offering “a $100,000 payday to the person who will come forward with a sex tape or phone records or anything else that succeeds in removing Glenn Beck from the public eye forever.”

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
  • American Politics is Getting All Koch’ed Up

    The grassroots pressure group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), that actively fought health care reform, boasts “our citizen activists” are “the heart and soul” of the organization. So AFP wants the public and the media to believe. But an exhaustive report in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, shows that the heart and soul behind AFP are really the oil billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, whose privately-owned oil enterprise has made them among the richest men in America.

  • Tiki Barber Hires PR Agency In Attempt To Repair His Image

    The paper reports that Barber is working with 5WPR to help change the perception of his affair with Johnson.

  • Tiki Barber’s image upgrade

    Tiki Barber has hired a third p.r. agency to polish his image after splitting with his then-pregnant wife, Ginny.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
  • Reading, Writing, and RFID Chips: A Scary Back-to-School Future in California

    According to a story from the Associated Press, the students will wear a jersey at school that has the RFID tag attached. The tag will track the children’s movements and collect other data, like if the child has eaten or not. According to a Contra Costa County official, this is a cost-savings move, as teachers used to have to manually keep track of a child’s attendance and meal schedule.

  • Judge Rejects Gov’t Request For Cell Tower Data, Noting Recent 4th Amendment Rulings

    We recently wrote about a somewhat surprising ruling by the appeals court in the DC circuit saying that long-term use of a GPS to track someone without a warrant violated the 4th Amendment. What was surprising about this is that, while state courts had ruled similarly, the federal courts had almost universally ruled that such tracking was legal.

  • Porn-browsing Oz minister quits

    The point of the Great Australian Firewall is revealed at last today – it’s to keep Aussie politicians in line.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
  • Companies reach “general agreement” on network neutrality

    Apparently, companies negotiating a network neutrality compromise at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) have reached a general agreement.

  • Time Warner Cable doubles fee to not list phone number

    That monthly $1.99 fee for something the company isn’t doing for customers is now one of the highest of its type in the telecom industry, and there appears to be nothing to justify it.

  • Telecoms Force Customers to Pay for Nothing

    Time Warner Cable has figured how to make customers pay more for a “service” that consists of doing absolutely nothing: it doubled its fee to not print customers’ names in the phone book. Time Warner now charges $1.99 a month, or almost $24 a year, for an unlisted number. Verizon charges $1.75 a month not to list your name in its phone book, and AT&T charges $1.25 a month not to provide the same service.

  • Indian eCommerce Leader Adopts Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

    Euronet migrates from Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  • Retired Gen. Hugh Shelton elected Red Hat chairman
  • Red Hat Appoints General Hugh Shelton As Chairman – Update
• Intellectual Monopolies
  • Beach towel designer roundly defeated in court

    More than three decades after Clemens Franek moved to Los Angeles and teamed up with aspiring actor Woody Harrelson and aspiring screenwriter Bobby Farrelly to sell beach towels whose circular shape helped beachgoers tan evenly, a Chicago appeals court has said the invention can’t be trademarked.

  • Copyrights
    • Zaptunes: Unlimited MP3 Downloads For Just $25 A Month. To Good To Be True?

      San Francisco based Zaptunes has launched offering unlimited DRM free mp3 downloads for $25 per month. They say they’re adding songs constantly, but have started with 8 million tracks from all four major labels and many indies. To kick things off, the $25 is waived for the next 30 days.

    • US Commerce Secretary Sides With RIAA: Warns ISPs To Become Entertainment Industry Cops

      It’s no secret that US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is quite confused over intellectual property issues. There has yet to be a case where he’s actually questioned a highly biased or debunked industry study on the issue, and he seems to enjoy celebrating with the entertainment industry, even as the government has debunked the studies he relies on. But it’s really sad that he doesn’t even seem to consider the other side at all. His latest move is to side with the RIAA and effectively warn ISPs that they need to become copyright cops for the entertainment industry establishment.

    • Making the case for patents by making a case against them

      I’ve been hanging around the ‘Balanced Copyright For Canada‘ Facebook group recently. The name of the group is a misnomer. Balance has nothing to do with what the founders of the group intend. In fact the impression that I get is that they think that the ACTA treaty is too lenient.

Clip of the Day

A Preview of Alice 3.0, Introductory Programming in 3D

Credit: TinyOgg

Monopolists championing proprietary software (proprietary giants) go hand in hand with patent monopolies and patent trolling

Summary: Wozniak helps prove that also departing co-establishers of proprietary predators defend patent trolling

APPLE and Microsoft are both patent aggressors and both have sued Linux (vendors) using software patents. Paul Allen is the latest patent troll to join the club and as Microsoft’s co-founder he helps demonstrate Microsoft’s continued legacy as a agitator that fights against software development. It turns out that Apple’s co-founder too complements his Free software-hostile rhetoric and now defends patent trolling:

Say It Ain’t So, Woz: Steve Wozniak Says Patent Trolls Are Okay

Via Joe Mullin, we learn the rather unfortunate news that, when asked about Paul Allen’s decision to sue lots of big tech companies over questionable patents, Wozniak comes out in favor of “patent trolls” and patent holders suing companies who actually innovate. For someone so beloved by the tech community, these statements seem really unfortunate. He starts out by repeating the myth that patents somehow help out the small guy (ignoring that we’re talking about Paul Allen, one of the richest guys on the planet):

I think this lawsuit represents the idea that hey, patents, individual inventors, they don’t have the funds to go up against big companies. So he’s sorta representing some original investors. And I’m not at all against the idea of patent trolls.

The interviewer, from Bloomberg TV, pushes back pretty quickly, pointing out that Paul Allen is not the inventor and there’s no indication that the inventors on these patents would actually get any of the money should Allen succeed.

The FSF has just launched a campaign against “Apple’s latest DRM patent”. It’s doubly malicious because it combines an attack on the user with a patent monopoly. From the FSF’s page:

Apple has a long history of imposing innovative restrictions on its users. The Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) used in the iPhone to prevent users from installing what they want or tinkering with their devices are well-known examples.

Yet not so many people expected their latest move in that direction — Apple’s recent patent application on a new spying technology revealed their plan to dedicate users’ devices to their unlimited control.

They say that they want to protect the devices from “unauthorized usage” (i.e. theft). For that reason, your device will take a photo of the person who uses it and the surrounding place, it will record his or her voice and it will record his or her heartbeats. Once it suspects something, it will send the information to Apple which will talk to the “responsible party.”

Going back to Allen’s frivolous lawsuit, some label is “an enigma”.

Paul Allen: When a Patent Troll is an Enigma

[...]

But given the notoriety of the case and the scope of its claims (the Journal, or at least its headline writer, has declared an all-out “patent war”), it seems like a good opportunity to dispel some common myths about the patent system and its discontents.

And then I want to offer one completely unfounded theory about what is really going on that no one yet has suggested. Which is: Paul Allen is out to become the greatest champion that patent reform will ever know.

Brad Feld then asks: “Have We Reached The Software Patent Tipping Point?”

As I was reading through some of the Paul Allen commentary this morning, it occurred to me that this might finally be a tipping point. Last week, Microsoft asked the supreme court to hear their appeal of the I4i patent suit. I hope Google steps up and really takes a stand here given that they are on the receiving end of both the Oracle and Allen suits.

There is increased consensus in the technology press that software patents need to go away

Software patent wars are killing innovation

The software industry is rapidly tying itself up in red tape as claim meets counterclaim in patent suits blossoming all over the US.

The latest example is Microsoft’s co-founder, Paul Allen, who has launched into litigation against Apple, Google, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube and five other companies. Apple has already had more than its fair share of court actions especially with Nokia and HTC. Oracle is gunning for Google. Every day brings some new accusation.

In almost every case, it is software nuances at the root of the problem. In some of the Apple cases, it seems that hand gestures are involved.

Oracle’s lawsuit is not forgotten either and Glyn Moody compares Ellison and Allen (yacht enthusiasts).

Amazon is actually the best counterexample to all of Interval’s claims. It was provably doing all the things that Interval claims it “invented”, and long before patents were even applied for. Against that background, suing Amazon would, of course, have been suicidal from a legal point of view.

But that still raises the larger question of why on earth Allen is doing this to anyone? As is well known, he is not short of a bob or two, so it can’t simply be for the money. Similarly, why did he wait for over a decade before blasting away at most of the top Internet players?

This is where I think the Ellison connection comes in. Allen’s action is part of the collective insanity which has gripped senior management at most computer companies. As more and more of these crazy software patent actions are announced and wind their way through the courts (or are quietly settled after much public tub-thumping), so the pressure on managers to join the feeding frenzy grows. It’s that old feeling that many of us get when some new fad takes off – that we might be missing out on something big, and that whether we think it’s really a good idea or not, we had better pile in now before it’s too late.

it’s considered “puzzling” too:

The 15-page document, filed Friday in United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, lists the four patents and their titles, and accuses each of the 11 defendants of infringing on one or more of them. But it doesn’t point to specific programs, products, or websites that violate Interval’s intellectual property.

Groklaw has that whole thing as text and it adds that “Microsoft is asking the US Supreme Court to overturn the huge loss it sustained in i4i v. Microsoft. It’s the largest patent infringement verdict ever to be sustained on appeal.”

we wrote about this case earlier this week, noting that involvement from SCOTUS may give it another go at eliminating software patents. Here is some more coverage:

• Microsoft (Again) Asks Supreme Court to Lower Clear and Convincing Standard
• U.S. Supreme Court could decide dispute between Microsoft vs. Canada’s i4i
• Microsoft Appeals Patent Verdict to Supreme Court
• Microsoft takes Word patent battle to US apex court
• Microsoft wins right to appeal Word patent ruling
• Microsoft v. i4i may head to top U.S. court
• Microsoft goes to US Supreme Court with i4i patent case
• MS appeals to U.S. Court over i4i patent
• Microsoft Asks Supreme Court to Overturn i4i Ruling
• Microsoft asks Supreme Court to intervene in i4i patent case
• Microsoft Seeks Review of i4i Lawsuit
• i4i’s battle with Microsoft nears finale

Can i4i contribute to backlash against sofwtare patents?

The courts are ignoring what everyone knows about software patents harming the Commons. Here is another new example of dangerous patents:

Thursday TWX, a member of our forums, brought to our attention a patent that was filed back on June 19th, 2008 and owned by XM Satellite Radio. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the basis of this patent is as follows:

“The present invention relates to a system and method for providing a broadcast radio service listener with the ability to generate a personalized radio channel play-list on a radio receiver from broadcast content as it is received. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system and method for buffering content from a set of channels selected from among the broadcast channels of a source stream(s) as they are received, and for generating a playback stream using the buffered content that provides a multichannel listening experience to the user with preview, reverse, fast forward and other navigation functions for the buffered content.”

– United States Patent Application #20090320075

Here is some background information from a lawyers’ source. It helps show how software patents came about and how they relate to business methods.

Even ten years ago, software patents were highly controversial. They were hotly debated in such forums as the U.S. Patent Office’s software patent public hearings of 1994. A number of courts, including the United States Supreme Court, struggled with whether software innovations could be protected and whether the proper mechanism should be patent or copyright law. Ultimately, the courts defined enough guidelines to judge what types of software innovations could be the subject of a patent.

The jurisprudence that developed through the software patent controversy paved the way for the ultimate acceptance of patenting innovations in business methods. As a result of the software patent controversy, courts assessed whether an invention could be the subject of a patent in a more abstract and general way. With courts growing more comfortable with software patents and their inherently abstract nature, the stage was set to apply that higher level of thinking in the context of a business method patent.

Both business methods and software patents are a area of dispute. ?

Summary: The Microsoft camp is attacking Oracle’s OpenOffice.org (OOOo) while pretending that Oracle is an “evil empire” (whereas Microsoft “loves” open source)

THANKS to Comes vs Microsoft exhibits, last year we posted Microsoft's blatantly anti-GNU/Linux (and highly confidential) presentation. it also covered and encouraged bribery (against GNU/Linux).

At the end of last year we also showed that Microsoft had begun hiring people to fight against OpenOffice.org adoption [1, 2, 3]. That’s how a monopolist works, by targeting any sign of competition and then derailing it or bribing those involved (see the Munich story for example).

As many people may know, OpenOffice.org is having an event in Budapest this week, but Microsoft too is said to be in town (same tricks used to steal ODF’s thunder). One commenter (not verified) wrote the following comment about Microsoft some days ago:

Nicer? Not really!
Here is an excerpt from an invitation for a seminar by Microsoft in Budapest/Hungary on 8.30.2010.

“Program:
9:30 – 10:30 The art of selling against free, opensource Office competitors by Moritz Berger /
Enterprise Tech Strategist (in English)
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 12:00 Technical teardown of OpenOffice by Moritz Berger / Enterprise Tech Strategist”

Be aware that Microsoft proponents still use Oracle’s lawsuit and contrast that with some cocky remarks from Microsoft’s Paoli (the “love” nonsense [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) to make Microsoft seem like a friend of “Open Source” while the steward of OpenOffice.org is the “new evil empire” (or something along those lines). ?

Update: Regarding the OpenOffice.org conference in the same city, Rob Weir told me that “Microsoft (@moritzbe) [Moritz Berger] has a presentation scheduled for tomorrow “Building Bridges”.“

Summary: Microsoft dependencies, Ballnux in Korea, and the ill effects of software patents there

Korea claims to be trying to get rid of Microsoft monopoly that’s reinforced by ActiveX in government and banking Web sites. This is an important issue, which the nation has complained about for years (and Microsoft was also found guilty by the courts there several times). Another problem Korea is having may have something to do with Samsung and LG, the Korean giants which not only pay Microsoft for Linux but also help spread Windows DRM. We believe that Samsung and LG pay Microsoft for Linux also because the law in Korea allows patenting of mathematics, which puts software companies at greater risk.

Yesterday we found the following news about Samsung and LG. It helps show how Ballnux — not Linux — spreads through Korea (allowing Microsoft to get rich at the expense of Linux/Android) and the last link shows that Samsung is still in Microsoft’s pocket.

• Samsung Galaxy Tab, in the wild and teasing CDMA
• Samsung Announces 1 Million Galaxy S Handset Sold in US
• Samsung’s Android-Based Galaxy S Eclipses 1M Shipments

  Samsung Electronics this week confirmed that it has shipped more than 1 million of its Galaxy S smartphones since the line debuted in mid-July, an impressive debut that indicates Android-based devices pose a serious threat to both Apple and Research In Motion in the hotly contested and extremely profitable smartphone market.

• KT released the first Korean Android Tablet. The Identity Pad.

  KT released the first Korean Android Tablet. The Identity Pad.

  The “Identity TAB” is ,according to KT, the Korean first real Android Tablet. Powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, the Identity TAB comes with a 7” Multitouch screen, 8GB only of internal memory, DMB TV Tuner, Gyro-Sensor, 3Mpix Camera Module, Wi-Fi, and SD Card reader.

• LG Pulls Back Curtain on “Optimus Pad”
• Exclusive: First Official Pictures T-Mobile G2

  We did it again, same as we were the first ones of obtaining the official pictures of the Samsung Vibrant, now we give you the first official pictures of the T-Mobile G2.

• Samsung N150 Plus Netbook

  Fourth, What a LOAD OF RUBBISH is on this poor netbook! The first and most obvious thing was the Norton Internet Security, which wanted me to activate whatever “Free Trial Period” was available. Abort that, and then uninstall it. Unfortunately that doesn’t get rid of Norton Online Backup, so that has to be uninstalled separately. Then the Google Toolbar, and at least half a dozen Windows Live packages and “helpers”, and Skype, including the Skype Toolbar. Then came the biggest gripe of all…

  Fifth, there should be a special place in HELL reserved for whoever decided to put Phoenix FailSafe on this thing. It’s bad enough to put a ton of crap on it, most of which is “limited trial” versions (FailSafe is a 30-day trial), but in this case it appears to be impossible to uninstall it. I’ve looked in the Control Panel / Uninstall a Program, I’ve looked in the Start menu, I’ve even looked directly in the FailSafe folder under Program Files. No uninstall. I’ve searched the web, and found that the only way to remove it seems to be to go to the FailSafe web site and REGISTER, and then ask to download the uninstaller. REGISTER, just to be able to uninstall it? I hope you all burn in HELL…

  Last, but not least, it also came with Microsoft Office 2010 Starter preinstalled. Although this is also complete rubbish, I find it rather fitting that a brain-dead version of Windows 7 comes with a brain-dead version of Office. Nothing but Word and Excel, apparently limited in the amount of screen space it can use, and with adverts running on the screen all the time. The only good thing about it is that there is an uninstall program…

How much does Samsung want to betray Linux? A lot of people would point out that there is Linux in these devices (tablets and phones) but not that it’s Microsoft cashing in and setting bad precedence. ?