● 08.20.09

● Links 20/08/2009: GNU/Linux Beats Vista 7, Shadowgrounds Survivor is Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 4:37 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• And this is where Linux can make a big difference. There’s nothing in Windows 7 that Linux can’t do, and in most cases, do it better. Our machines are quicker and more efficient. Our desktops are more innovative and less static. Our apps are more powerful, cheaper and less partisan, and Linux security has never been better. But best of all, we have complete control over the future of Linux, and it’s success or failure at the hands of Windows 7 is in our hands.

• I’m saying it early – I foresee that the PS3 Slim will having Linux running on it within a few weeks of the launch.

Games

• To be eligible for inclusion in the list below, games again needed to satisfy the following requirements:

• Free to play (no download charge, no monthly charge)

• Does not require Wine to run. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows software.

• Not in the early stages of development

• LGP Announced that Shadowgrounds Survivor from Igios is now GOLD. It has gone to replication and will be available in around 2-3 weeks. Survivor will be available both as a boxed product everywhere, and as a downloadable and rentable game from our download partners.

• That’s Crux, by the way. I expected laggy performance and skipping graphics. But framerates are exceptionally good, although I didn’t find a way to show a number on screen. I’m not a huge first-person shooter fan, but it’s fun to try out.

K Desktop Environment

• Once again: cheers to the KMyMoney devs and I hope you all managed a small celebration to commemorate your milestone and the great gift you have delivered to the world!

• The source of the material was a thread on the kde-devel mailing list where feature additions for KDE 4 was brought up, and in particular features that were in KDE 3 that are not in KDE 4.

• [...]

• I want to see the good ideas float to the top and get the attention they deserve (e.g. implementations) and the good ideas that need to be prioritized for later still get the attention they deserve so nobody feels neglected.

Distributions

• What I liked most in this distribution:

• 1. Inclusion of Update Notifier and Copy2Ram option. 2. Availability of OpenOffice 3.1, Firefox 3.5.2, Artha and many other useful packages in the repo. 3. Bloat-free attitude of Minime like its predecessors. 4. Adherence to KDE 3.5.10 + 2.6.26 kernel. 5. Stunning default wallpaper, bootsplash + ksplash.

• In less than two weeks, you’ll be able to give our latest operating system a go – UserOS Extreme 9.04. Based on the recent Ubuntu 9.04 release, we’ve built the new operating system from the ground up. You’ll be able to read in the October 2009 issue exactly what we did but we took a new approach to the operating system. It’s not based on an existing distro.

Red Hat Family

• Keep your “clouds” and your profits, and stop giving interviews in the self-appointed quality of “representative for the open source”.

Debian Family

• Ubuntu is just one of a myriad of Linux distributions, but no one can deny that its rise to fame has been meteoric, especially as a desktop OS.

Devices/Embedded

• All that being said, you don’t have to buy a netbook with Linux pre-installed to enjoy what this “alternative” OS has to offer. There are several versions out there which you can try today, no purchase required. And there are even more soon-to-launch distros which really get us excited.

Free Software/Open Source

• Karolina at BSD Magazine wanted me to let you know that she has posted three free .pdf issues online. The three cover FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Apparently BSD Magazine has survived a publishing scare and will continue for the foreseeable future. I may also have an article for FreeBSD out soon.

• What are the first things you should look at after learning of a sudden change in MySQL server performance?

• Today I want to start a little overview about the current work of the framework project community members. Fortunately we have some volunteers from RedFlag 2000 who work on several projects

• Blender third open movie project, code-named “Durian” is ramping up to production, and time is running out for the pre-sale campaign if you want to get your spot in the credits. This time the project is focusing on an adolescent audience with an epic-fantasy setting and a female protagonist (my son aptly dubbed this the “Chicks in Chainmail” genre). The only art yet available from Durian itself is the series of banner ads (by concept artist, David Revoy), but an impressive creative team has already been announced.

Leftovers

• Russian tech site 3DNews review has reviewed the x610 X-Slim series laptop even before it’s been officially announced by MSI. The reviewers discovered that the CPU change has put a big dent in performance and driven down battery life to two hours for the sake of a small cost saving.

• PayPal made some policy changes in June, but it’s likely that you haven’t heard much about them until very recently. That’s because the company quietly slid in extra fees that will affect nearly all users but failed to be transparent about the changes. Now, the Internet is slowly discovering what happened, and no one is happy about it.

• Some Democrats have blamed the chaos on astroturf operations: fake grassroots groups funded by special interests. But are the forces whipping up the anti-health care frenzy really astroturf—or a new form of corporate-funded campaigning?

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Los Angeles residents recently began seeing a new sort of Obama poster plastered across their city. Instead of promoting “hope,” these posters feature U.S. President Barack Obama wearing the Joker’s clown makeup from the Batman movie “The Dark Knight.” Even those outside of L.A. have likely seen this image somewhere as it soon took on a viral nature, appearing both online and in other cities across the country.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The alliance, consisting of about 80 companies — including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe — is the counterpart to the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

• The various monopoly privileges misnamed ‘intellectual property’ (copyright and patent) are relatively recent creations, historically. Both of them derive form something called the ‘Statute of Anne‘. More directly, the copyright and patent laws in the United States derive from a clause in the Constitution which explicitly stipulates that they should only last for a ‘limited time’, and are explicitly required to promote “science and the useful arts”. (Article 1, Section 8.)

• “During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.” -F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance 1941.

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