● 12.02.09

● Links 02/12/2009: Fedora 13 Naming, Haystack 1.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:05 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• There has been a lot of debate on where the next desktop platform will actually reside. A lot of people in the Linux camp, myself among them, are pointing towards more of a mobile/smartphone-like device rather than the “traditional” PC platform.

• It comes as little surprise that when I and others make this argument, there is quite a bit of counter-argument that goes along the lines of: “you’re just changing the rules of the game because Linux can never win on the true desktop. This is just fancy rationalization.”

Server

• “This is something that worked really well for us during the launch of Last.fm for Xbox and it’s one of the reasons we were able to handle the launch without hiccups. The SSDs are made by Intel. We actually contacted a few guys and said, ‘Give us your craziest, most cutting-edge SSDs,’ and the Intel ones came out on top. Beyond that, our streamers are all running Linux and using MogileFS — which is an open-source distributed file system, which is a little bit like a software RAID system.”

• Cisco Systems is expanding its push in the small and midsized business segment of the networking marketplace. Today Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is unveiling a series of new product, partner and service initiatives as it continues its year-old $100 million effort to target the SMB market.

Kernel Space

• The first step of that new endeavor is the Phoronix kernel test farm. As of this morning, the first system — of hopefully many to come — is online and operational. At least one more system should also go online this week in time for the Linux 2.6.33 merge window. These test systems are to automatically install the latest Linux kernel every morning (using the code from the Linus Git tree) and then they spend the day running benchmarks. With the set of tests currently being run, the testing process for each kernel every day runs for 13 to 14 hours! There are more than 50 tests being run through the Phoronix Test Suite and they include multiple disk, ray-tracing, computational biology, server, compression, audio/video encoding, physics, cryptography, and tests representing many other areas of interest. Results are then uploaded to Phoromatic automatically from this Linux test farm (temporarily being built out of my living room, actually).

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 7.7 is planned for release by Christmas and now being less than a month out from this targeted release, Ian Romanick has announced the first release candidate in the 7.7 series.

• X@FOSDEM 2010 will just be on Sunday, the 7th of February, in Brussels, Belgium. A one day X conference will allow for seven talks that span the course of the day, but on the previous night there may be the usual X.Org dinner at a local restaurant. Available now is the X.Org FOSDEM 2010 Wiki along with Luc’s announcement.

Applications

• The developers behind the Xine multimedia player have announced the release of xine-lib 1.1.17. This isn’t the major Xine 1.2 library update that is expected to offer significantly better Blu-ray disc support along with support for NVIDIA’s VDPAU interface, but the 1.1.17 release does carry some interesting features.

Instructionals

GNOME

• For all of you who don’t know the project, I can say that its a project whose aim is to bring to Slackware distribution the gnome desktop. Thats about it shortly.

• This week… 1770 commits, in 169 projects, by 229 happy hackers (and 274 were translation commits).

• Many GNOME development packages are being released this week in preparation for the next GNOME 2.30 development release (2.29.3). While GNOME 2.30 will not be released as GNOME 3.0 as was once planned — but instead has been pushed back to September 2010 — there are still plenty of exciting changes. Zeitgeist, the “activity journal” that will officially premiere with GNOME 3.0 to make it easy to find and browse files and events from your computer, has reached version 0.3 today.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat dominates the market for Linux, the open-source computer operating system (OS) that is the chief rival to Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, according to Hoover’s. In addition to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS, the company’s product line includes database, content, and collaboration management applications; server and embedded operating systems; and software development tools. Red Hat also provides consulting, custom software development, support, and training services. The company’s business model is a mix of providing free, open-source software paired with subscription-based support, training, and integration services.

• OpenLogic have announced that they are expanding their commercial support services for open source packages to include CentOS Linux. The company offers indemnification for a certified range of around 500 open source packages and a choice of either Developer Support with a four hour response time during business hours or Production Support with a one hour, round-the-clock response time. In what CEO Steve Grandchamp says is a “natural extension of our business”, the company has now added CentOS Linux to its support offering.

• The way the naming works is there is a certain relationship between the names. According to Fedora:

Debian Family

• A week ago we found out that Nouveau would be pulled into Ubuntu 10.04 as the default NVIDIA graphics driver replacing the current open-source NVIDIA driver mess that is known as xf86-video-nv. The Nouveau driver stack isn’t stable or officially released yet, but the 2D portion is in good standing and the 3D portion written to use Gallium3D is progressing (recent status update). The Nouveau driver has been used by default in two Fedora releases, but on the Ubuntu side it will be the default starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx”, including the DRM / kernel mode-setting bits.

• This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 8 (Helena) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 8 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 9.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

• In his blog, Canonical coworker Jorge O. Castro announces his so-called “b-sides” of Ubuntu, software that didn’t make it into Ubuntu’s standard installation.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• From one handset in 2008, Google’s Android has become one of 2009′s fastest-growing smartphone platforms. HTC continued to support Android with some good new handsets, and Samsung made a good start, but we were particularly taken with offerings from the newer entrants, Motorola and Huawei.

Sub-notebooks

• Acer plans to launch a Google Chrome operating system-based netbook, which the company has been developing since mid-2009 in the second half of 2010, according to industry sources.

• Not that Acer itself has said so – the claim comes from an unnamed industry insider cited by DigiTimes, though the site notes Acer chairman JT Wang has said his firm will be first to launch a Chrome-based netbook.

Free Software/Open Source

• 3) Open source can’t create products of equal quality to closed source, because nobody’s getting rich. I think that Firefox, Linux and MySQL users would disagree with this, as would I. It’s true that many open source project never achieve professional-quality polish, but that’s mostly an issue of poor project management and leadership. I think you only have to look at the work HappyKillmore did on the ArduPilot configuration utility, or how Mike Black improved our GCS to see this: I’d argue that both are better than any of the ground station and configuration utilities from the commercial players in our space (and some, including Flexipilot, don’t have groundstations at all). Note that these contributions were made not because someone was getting paid, but because the contributors had their own reasons to want better software. And because we set an open source standard, they chose to share their work so that others could build on it.

• So, to sum up: I understand why commercial developers dislike the entry of an open source project into their market and hope it will fail. But the trend lines are clear on this one: open source is here to stay and is spreading, mostly because it leads to more, cheaper products faster. ArduPilot, for example. went from concept to maturity (with the 2.5 code, now in the hands of beta testers) in a year, including a full suite of supporting tools. There is no commercial autopilot that has come close to that speed of development. And as the DIY Drones community grows and our tools of group development improve, we are extending that to a host of new products created by the members here. To hire this many engineers would be ruinous, but by creating a community of shared interest and a culture of collaboration, we can do so at almost no cost at all. It’s really quite magical.

• Built with open source tools, Blogbooker culls all the posts from your WordPress, Blogger, or LiveJournal blog and generates a high-quality PDF that you can print or send to a Publish On Demand (POD) publisher like Lulu or Cafe Press. Alternatively, you can print your book with a laser or inkjet printer, design a cover, then have it bound for you at a local bookbinder.

• Here’s how the sorry story unfolds. FreeBSD 8.0 was released last week, and the latest version of the UNIX-like OS was generally received with approval. FreeBSD enjoys a good reputation with its followers, and many OSes and products contain code based on or borrowed from the OS, including Juniper routers, and — ironically, as we shall see — Mac OS X.

• This latest release includes network stack virtualization using a new virtualization container, an improved USB stack, binary compatibility with Fedora 10 Linux, and an update to version 13 of the very wonderful ZFS. And, as they say, much, much more.

Twitter/Microblogging

• In my explorations of a hypothetical decentralized Twitter, at first I thought the clients would be where decentralization would happen. But, lately I’ve come to realize that it probably won’t happen there because as the market has evolved they’ve become too dependent on Twitter Corp, and are unlikely to do anything that might threaten a friendly relationship with the company.

• Can we liberate tweeting from Twitter? It’s an open question.

EU

• Open e-PRIOR (electronic PRocurement, Invoicing and ORdering) has been published as open source by the Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT) of the European Commission. The software is made available at the OSOR Forge, the open source software development platform of the Commission.

• European health care organisations should study the use of the US-built Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), says Thomas Karopka, head of eHealth department at the IT Science Center in the German city of Putbus.

• Karopka, chair of the European Federation for Medical Informatics Libre/Free Open Source Software Working Group, is one of the organisers of a workshop on free and open source software in health care ((FLOSS-HC) that will take place in Luxembourg next April. He hopes to make more colleagues aware of open source health care systems, including VistA.

Programming

• Haystack 1.0.0-final has been released (via the packages at PyPi or GitHub). You can also install it via “sudo pip install django-haystack“ or via git from GitHub.

Standards/Consortia

• It’s official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.

• Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn’t play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn’t yet ready and isn’t supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity… or rather, the machinery.

• CommonJS is a grassroots campaign to quickly produce standards and a standard library for JavaScript. Our man on the inside reports on JSConf Europe, where the effort to produce interoperable JavaScript embeddings was evident.

Leftovers

• Google is in talks with TV execs to stream commercial-free TV shows on YouTube for a buck ninety-nine each on the day after they’re originally broadcast.

• This was not a case of uploading pictures of potential lady friends from Eastern Europe. No, this was a rather more imaginative downloading of software that searches for extra-terrestrial life.

• The Republic’s sleuths got their hands on documents that suggest Niesluchowski was encouraged to resign after he downloaded free University of California (the terribly forward-thinking Berkeley branch) software that uses idle computers to examine information collected by radio telescopes.

• Less than a week after administrators at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire halted the release of the student newspaper because of stories dealing with drinking, smoking and teen pregnancy, staff members said they were told they had less than two hours to produce a paper without the controversial stories, or receive failing grades.

• Google has strict policies against what’s known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren’t deceived into clicking through to a site that’s not what they were expecting. While the anti-cloaking policies are important for users, they do create some challenges for publishers who charge for content. Our crawlers can’t fill out a registration or payment form to see what’s behind a site’s paywall, but they need access to the information in order to index it.

Data/Transparency

• Civil liberties groups European Digital Rights (EDRi) and the German Working Group on Data Retention (AK Vorrat) are calling on the European Union to repeal the 2006 directive on the data retention of electronic communications.[1] In the event that the directive is not repealed, they demand that it is amended to introduce an opt-out right allowing Member States to decide whether or not to require the retention of communications data.

• Digital content remains dependent on the physical world too, since data has to be stored somewhere, and some machine built of atoms is needed have to process it. The ‘digital world’ is really a hybrid world, one where analogue and digital co-exist, where the physical and the virtual come together in a mutually dependent relationship.

• The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as “Byzantine” and “opaque”. The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.

• Blair has a commercial consultancy, called Tony Blair Associates, plus jobs advising a US bank and a Swiss insurer. He has a multimillion pound book deal. He also has a charity, the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, and another called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. But much of the income, which includes charitable donations from other sources, has been funnelled through a structure called Windrush Ventures No 3 Limited Partnership. Our contest asks: what is Windrush?

• One privacy lesson in the WikiLeaks disclosure is that high-tech communications gadgets create information that can surface years later, Spafford said. Nothing is private, he emphasized.

• As I’ve noted many a time, the UK government has been one of the most backward when it comes to adopting open source solutions.

Oppression

• High court judgment says suspects cannot be detained without being able to answer charges made against them

• A BBC photographer was stopped from taking a picture of the sun setting by St Paul’s Cathedral in London. A real police officer and a fake “community support officer” stopped the photog and said he couldn’t take any pictures because with his professional-style camera, he might be an “al Qaeda operative” on a “scouting mission.”

• It is the ‘several phone calls’ which is the most unsettling. Put simply, it is a fundamental breach of privacy for parents to have their criminal records checked by school administrators. One wrong turn; a case of mistaken identity; or even a call to the wrong person (e.g. the parent’s employer) and an innocent person could be unfairly branded for life.

• Disclaimer: The information presented here has been gathered and analyzed in my capacity as a graduate student at Indiana University. This data was gathered and analyzed on my own time, without using federal government resources. This data, and the analysis I draw from it will be a major component of my PhD dissertation, and as such, I am releasing it in order to receive constructive criticism on my theories from other experts in the field.

• Two years ago, a US judge ruled that a guy with an encrypted hard drive did not have to hand over his encryption key to the police, as it would be a violation of the 5th Amendment (the right not to self-incriminate).

• Alan Johnson said he may grant Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon extra time to apply for judicial review of his US extradition case, but the home secretary insisted he was powerless to stop the forced transfer.

Environment

• Energy suppliers are to be responsible for installing smart meters in all households in the UK by 2020.

• Giovanni Bisignani, the director general and chief executive of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), is a worried man. As the head of the global civil aviation’s main lobby group, which represents companies such as American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Qantas, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, Bisignani (right) has been frantically working to ensure that IATA isn’t stripped of its its exemption from the Kyoto Protocol at the COP15 conference, which opens in Copenhagen next week.

• Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data – dubbed Climategate – have agreed to publish their figures in full.

• Phil Jones, the Director of the Climate Research Unit, announced today that he will step down from his position pending investigation into the matter of the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia servers.

• Despite these investments and Chrysler’s prior promises, its new foreign owner, Fiat (which purchased the company’s assets and debt after Chrysler filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection), has fired the company’s Envi brain trust, and now FIat’s CEO, Sergio Marchionne, says “I do not believe much in EVs and I think that electric cars would represent just one or two per cent of Chrysler`s sales by 2014″ (or roughly 60,000 cars), a far cry from the half a million originally pledged. But Fiat did decide to keep Chrysler VP Lou Rhodes on to oversee its meager “commitment” to EV, saving at least one American (executive’s) job.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs employees received a voicemail announcement instructing them not to organize private Christmas parties for the firm’s employees even at their own homes, a person familiar with the matter said.

• The firm has canceled its annual holiday party, just as it did last year. It also instructed the smaller business units that they should not organize their own smaller parties, which had been a long tradition at the firm. The parties are banned even if no firm money goes to pay for them.

• But Goldman employees were surprised to hear that even parties within private homes fall under the ban. The firm apparently believes that it would be inappropriate for its employees to be seen partying while the economy is still so shaky and unemployment is so high.

• The Center for Media and Democracy’s BanksterUSA campaign released a new video today, “It’s NOT Such a Wonderful Life,” saluting the classic film by Frank Capra. Our short video takes footage from the 1946 black and white film to make a point about today’s financial crisis and the need for Congress to step up efforts to regulate banks so that this type of catastrophic financial meltdown never happens again. You can view our video at our BanksterUSA website or on our new youtube channel. We hope you’ll share the video with your friends.

AstroTurf

• Move over, health care reform, climate change, and the economy. Judging by White House visits by various government agency heads, the Obama administration instead appears preoccupied with the re-regulation of communications, media, and the Internet. The Administration has just released logs of all visitors to the White House and Executive Office Buildings from Obama’s inauguration through August—including a staggering 47 visits by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski. By contrast, no other major agency head logged more than five visits. Chairman Genachowski obviously has an audience with those at the highest levels of power, including the President himself, but this raises questions about just how “independent” this particular regulator and his agency really are.

• Healthcare lobbyists have scored a major victory in convincing European Commission President José Manuel Barroso to give responsibility for pharmaceuticals to the new health commissioner.

• How are these companies able to keep after-tax net earnings so high while everyone else’s costs of premiums and doctor’s bills are going up, up, up? It’s by leaving people out, and it’s time Congress fixed this.

Internet Censorship

• Two bloggers in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso, economist Adriana Vandoni and lawyer Enock Cavalcanti, were ordered by judge Pedro Sakamoto on 10 November to withdraw all comments from their blogs (www.prosaepolitica.com.br and paginadoenock.com.br) that were “offensive” to José Riva, the president of the Mato Grosso legislative assembly.

• I’m writing course notes for a sophomore (college) level survey, with tomorrow’s material on Henry David Thoreau. All of a sudden, I got a a notification “The published version of this item cannot be shared until a Google review finds that the content is appropriate.” The “share” link is disabled. This means I can’t upload to my Google website from this page. I suppose I could cut and paste to another brand new document… but that might get me kicked off Google entirely if it still scans for and sees something “inappropriate”!

Web Abuse/Rights

• Liberty are condemning the Digital Economy Bill’s file sharing measures on human rights grounds, saying it “runs wholly counter to a human rights compliant approach”. While, like ORG, they believe copyright should be respected, they point out that the measures proposed cannot be applied easily without innocent people being affected, and point out that disconnection is intrusive and disproportionate.

• A lot of people have talked to me over the last week about Wi-Fi (open and closed, i.e. password-protected) and the Digital Economy bill. The more I try to find answers, the more ludicrous it becomes. For instance, last week it turned out that a pub owner was allegedly fined £8,000 because someone downloaded copyright material over their open Wi-Fi system. Would that get worse or better if the Digital Economy bill passes in its present form?

• So it seems I have a new beast to fight in the form of Virgin Media and Detica wanting to deploy Deep Packet Inspection for the purpose of spying on their customers for the Music Industry.

• This particular fight is going to make Phorm seem like a walk in the park, because this time we are fighting Peter Mandelson’s Section 17 of the Digital Economy Bill which looks like it is going to possibly make legislative changes requiring this type of technology to fulfill Mandelson’s 3 Strikes mandate. Furthermore, Virgin Media are about to launch a music service and it would be folly not to believe that Universal have told Virgin Media they need to tackle copyright infringement on their network in order to keep their license for their music service.

• Having forced tens of thousands of P2P users to pay up for costly pre-settlement notices, a number of European law offices and and anti-piracy companies suddenly find themselves on the other side of the gun: The German scene news site gulli.com asked local authorities to start criminal investigations against a well-known anti-piracy law office, and even mainstream news organizations like the Financial Times are starting to take notice. The issue at heart could not only derail current anti-piracy campaigns, but potentially even lead to disbarment of the lawyers involved with these cases.

• Canadian cable operator Rogers has constructed what’s essentially the dream business model for broadband executives. They’re launching a new broadband video portal that’s only available if you sign up for Rogers wireless, TV or broadband service — avoiding a stand-alone service in order to keep users from canceling regular cable. Rogers has also imposed low caps and high overages and the new service counts against your monthly cap — meaning Rogers is keeping content revenue in house while socking customers with per-gigabyte overages — up to $5.00 per gigabyte — for actually using an advertised service.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• In order to force a change in the law, last month a man reported himself for breaching copyright more than a hundred times, hoping an anti-piracy group would take him to court. The group’s lawyer said they would respond by today – they haven’t – so the Danish copyfighter is now reporting himself to the police.

• Earlier this year, we wrote about the UK music act Georgia Wonder, who was thrilled to be listed as one of the “most pirated” musical acts out there — recognizing the power of good promotion. Since then, we’ve watched with interest how the group has continued to really interact with fans and use new tools and new marketing ideas to get heard and build a following. Rose M. Welch alerts us to the band’s latest smart move. As they wanted to record a new album, they realized (as plenty of others have) that it’s expensive to record an album — buying studio time, equipment and instruments. So they did something different. They teamed up with a local music equipment shop, called Nevada Music and worked out a deal:

• According to Billboard, no new regulations have been enacted, but the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Service has begun using a much more restrictive reading of current regulations in approving visas. Formerly, artists wishing to work and tour in the U.S. needed to apply for a work visa (type “O” for solo artists or “P” for groups). The visa would then cover the artist for a period of time; up to three years for a solo artist and up to one year for a group. Additionally, a U.S.-based sponsor such as a label, manager or tour promoter was needed to apply for the visa.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayElisabeth Norris, manager of CitizenSpace (2009)Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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