● 04.20.10

● Links 20/4/2010: Linux Foundation Video Winners, NetWalker Becomes Tablet

Posted in News Roundup at 4:40 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Listen to Tom and Larry discuss this announcement in the April 20 episode (#100) of the Going Linux Podcast.

• Of the 109 people asked, 71 did not know. 24 of them responded with the generic equivalent of “It’s some sort of computer program”. The remaining number were able to accurately describe Linux as an operating system or a server solution. Out of that 109 queried, 7 used Mac exclusively to run their businesses. I did not pre-choose the businesses I spoke to. They were chosen from a three block downtown area of Austin and a large business park located in North Austin.

• I am pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 We’re Linux Video Contest. We had quite a few amazing videos to choose from, many of which captured the spirit of Linux.

Applications

• Bombono is a simple to use DVD authoring program that doesn’t have the steep learning curve of many others in its field. Or in the words of the Web site: “Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is easy to use and has nice and clean GUI (Gtk).”

Instructionals

Games

• Shadowgrounds Alien-battling carnage festival Sacred: Gold Edition Action role-playing game Awesome Soccer Modern day homage to the legendary Sensible Soccer and Kick Off 2 Mad Skills Motocross Fast and furious arcade motocross action Jack Keane Colorful and cartoon like adventure in the spirit of Monkey Island KreiselBall 2D action platform game with a classical game play with puzzle elements Mystic Mine Navigate your cart to collect coins against the clock Brukkon Puzzle game slightly inspired by Sokoban

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Hello, my name is Thiago Macieira, Brazilian, 28 and I’m currently living in Oslo, Norway. I graduated with a double degree in Engineering in 2004 and I am also holding an MBA. I am now working for Qt Development Frameworks in Nokia and still somewhat involved in KDE activities (but not as much as I used to be).

• When did you first hear about KDE? Oh, sometime in 1998 or 1999. I don’t remember exactly. I remember being on IRC somewhere and someone pointed me to www.kde.org, which had that picture of a computer and was asking if Unix was ready for the desktop. I remember thinking, “yeah, right, this project will never be successful”.

Devices/Embedded

• In August last year Sharp introduced a new device it referred to as an ultra-compact netbook. It was named the NetWalker, and went to market in September.

Android

• According to mobiles.co.uk, during the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, a rep said that the X10 is due for a very “big” update come second half of 2010, around September maybe.

• You have to give Motorola credit for not churning out the same handset over and over. It’s simple to take the route of either a slab phone or sliding QWERTY, yet Motorola keeps coming up with various form factors for Android. Take a look at the pictures below and you’ll see the first images of a Motorola phone which borrows a tad from the KRAVE ZN4 design.

• We previously reported that several hundred myTouch 3G Slide phones were gifted to select T-Mobile employees last week in Las Vegas. These units were handed out early in a joint effort by T-Mobile and HTC so users could test out the phones and provide their feedback before launch. One of our sources was lucky enough to receive this phone and they were nice enough to provide us with a 30 minute virtual hands on.

• If you don’t know by now( and you probably do), the HTC Desire is a top-notch smartphone. Featuring Android 2.1, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, and a 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED screen, the Desire is loaded up with HTC’s custom Sense user interface, which many find classier than stock Android.

• Is Google perfect? Of course not, but at least with respect to Android, they are a more welcome dance partner than Apple at present.

• As a good friend recently commented to me about a situation out of my control, “you cannot always make other people do the right thing”.

• Let’s hope Apple relents and we can continue loving and hating them based on technology alone.

• Google is reportedly working on a tablet computer based on its Android operating system, not the Chrome OS. Google has declined to comment on the tablet rumor, but that hasn’t stopped analysts from mulling over the operating system choice.

Sub-notebooks

• The OLPC program provides rugged, low-cost, connected laptops to children in developing countries. The program seeks to encourage learning by engaging students in a range of educational software undertaken both individually and with eachother via the XO laptop. The software, called “activities” in the OLPC system, come pre-installed on the laptop for immediate use, or they can be adapted to suit local needs, or supplemented by wholly local content. OLPC Oceania is one of three programs carried out under the Pacific Plan Digital Strategy with the support of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. The Solomon Islands trial was also undertaken with the technical and resource support of the region-wide initiative, “One Laptop per Pacific Child”.

Free Software/Open Source

• Can open source tools replace all closed source software? That is, are open source tools – freely downloadable software – really just as good as software you have to pay for?

• In a lot of cases, the answer is yes. In fact, in some cases, open source tools offers features or performance benefits that surpass their commercial counterparts.

• Google has been running its Summer of Code program since 2005. It has reached out to hundreds of open source programs and distributed millions of dollars to try to encourage more people to get involved with open source. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the pressing need that many projects have to develop more docs to go with the software they already have. Now Fedora is ramping up a “Summer of Coding for 2010, and yet again — it’s all about code doesn’t address any other forms of contribution.

• More generally, every project has to have some idea of the problem it is trying to solve. In some ways, that’s a far more important part of a project than any specific body of code or any specific developer. One of the best things about free software is that it’s alive; it will evolve and, with any luck, be better tomorrow. A project’s goals say a lot about how it can be expected to evolve. In your editor’s opinion, both Subversion and Ubuntu have set worthwhile goals, and both seem to be trying to work toward those goals. These are good things; our community is richer for the existence of both.

• Cisco has announced it has completed its £2.17bn acquisition of Norwegian video systems maker Tandberg and is launching a compulsory bid for the outstanding 8.9% shares it does not yet own.

• Marthin De Beer , Cisco’s senior vice-president for its emerging technologies group, said the company “strongly believed” that telepresence, would allow everyone, everywhere, to be more productive through the pervasive use of video and face-to-face collaboration. The full Tandberg product line is now part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio, he said.

Events

• I have just finished attending the Fifth Annual Open Source Think Tank, hosted by Andrew Aitken and I at Meritage in Napa Valley. Andrew and his team did a great job of organizing the event.

Mozilla

• A computer security researcher has launched a project designed to provide people greater privacy when using Google, as the company expands the scope of data its collects about its users.

• OK happily there has been a large speed up in 3.7.a4 as regards to the filtering.

• The filter operation in 3.7.a4 takes 6 times less than it did in 3.6.

• It does not look as if the reload time has seen any improvement.

• The improvements in 3.7.a4 are very encouraging but it makes you wonder what Google is doing to get such incredible sub 10sec times.

• Luckily as it is open source someone can go have a look

Education

• Over the last few years, open source adoption has been growing within India’s education system. Five years ago, the South Indian state of Kerala, pioneered open source in schools with its famous IT@Schools project, that now covers three million students from the 5th-10 standards, involves 200,000 teachers across 4071 schools. Since then, other Indian states like Karnataka, Gujarat, Assam, West Bengal and others have made open source a key part of their school education initiatives.

Government

• Twenty desktop PCs running the Ubuntu Linux distribution are used to manage the services at a shared office building in the Hague for all Dutch ministries, since the beginning of this month.

• The shared office building, called Rijkskantoor Beatrixpark, facilitates ministries working together on temporary projects, and offers the ministries extra office space when needed.

• Two hundred Romanians have signed a petition urging Gabriel Sandu, the Minister for Communications and Information Society, to support open source software on e-government projects. They also ask him to use open standards and to make government data public electronically.

• The petition was organised by APTI, a Romanian Association for Technology and Internet. It was organised on-line regarding the eRomânia project, a 500 million euro project proposal to make government services and information available electronically. The project has been discussed for the past few years, and minister Sandu is one of its supporters.

• The Portuguese government agency for public procurement has published a list of open source applications it deems suitable for use by public administrations.

• The selected open source applications are now part of the official software catalogue published by Portugal’s procurement authority, the Agência Nacional de Compras Públicas, ANCP. Included on ANCP’s list are the database management system MySQL, content management system Alfresco, email server Scalix and server and desktop operating systems Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux.

Licensing

• The most popular copyleft license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), has become a powerful enabler of collaboration, but a growing number of companies fall afoul of its requirements. Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) revealed last year that he finds an average of one new GPL violator every day. A GPL violation constitutes copyright infringement and puts the violator in a position where they risk having their license to use the software terminated. The SFLC and a handful of other organizations such as gpl-violations.org, attempt to educate companies about GPL compliance and help them conform with the requirements of the license.

Programming

• Groovy++, the static typing compiler extension for Groovy, is to be released as open source under the Apache Public Licence 2.0. The Groovy++ project started last year and at the time Alex Tkachman, project founder said Groovy++’s compiler “uses several pieces of technology, which our company uses and plans to use in our commercial products. It was not critical when [the] project started as [an] experiment, but now we need to extract these parts and replace/rewrite [them] with proper open-source alternatives”. Since Tkachman has now announced that the source will be released under the APL 2.0 this process appears to be complete.

Standards/Consortia

• A representative of the Spanish Ministry of Presidency, Miguel Angel Amutio Gomez, started the day explaining the crucial points of the Spanish law 11/2007: the right for everybody to use whatever digital technology they like best and the obligation for all Public Administrations to avoid discrimination of citizens based on their technological choices. In order to make this possible, the law stresses the importance of open standards, setting the goal that all e-government services and documents become available at least through such standards. In this context, Amutio said, the Spanish National Interoperability Framework (NIF) that A. Barrionuevo presented in the first day becomes an essential legal test for all Spanish organizations.

Leftovers

• A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

• The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

Finance

• Paulson & Co., the world’s third- largest manager of hedge funds, may face civil litigation for its role in the collateralized debt obligations that led to the fraud charges against Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to Christopher Whalen.

• Financial regulators in London and Germany on Monday said they would open investigations to see whether Goldman Sachs’s sale of mortgage securities broke any local laws following the disclosure that two European banks had lost money on what U.S. officials allege were fraudulent transactions.

• It now appears that Germany may take legal action against Goldman Sachs because the New York-financial firm sold some of the CDOs to a German bank.

• Prime Minister Gordon Brown called yesterday for the U.K. Financial Services Authority to start a probe, saying he was “shocked” at the “moral bankruptcy” indicated in the Securities and Exchange Commission suit against Goldman Sachs. Germany’s financial regulator, Bafin, asked the SEC for details on the suit, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

• Despite continued evidence of an economic recovery, bank and broker bonds continued to soften Monday, eroded by a steady stream of negative financial newsflow stemming from the SEC’s probe into misconduct at Goldman Sachs (GS).

• The SEC investigation of Goldman Sachs could hurt California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who as CEO of eBay sat on the investment bank’s board.

• As Fabrice Tourre sat through a meeting on 2 February 2007, he appeared to know he was taking part in an unusual event. The Goldman Sachs executive, who is at the heart of the $1bn fraud allegations being levelled against the Wall Street firm, emailed a colleague during the meeting to describe it as “surreal”.

• The S.E.C. case revolves around how much say Mr. Paulson had in building the portfolio that he would eventually short, whether that role was disclosed to ACA and those who eventually bought the C.D.O.’s, and if Goldman’s clients were given the impression that Mr. Paulson’s interest was aligned with theirs on the deal, or against them.

• Mr. Tourre’s words, like Henry Blodget’s before him, have come back to haunt him after the crash, with the the S.E.C. citing two especially colorful bits in its filing:

• In this Too Big To Fail world, people at every investment bank share different views on the same investments. While Goldman was buying these mortgages, one of its vice presidents, Fabrice Tourre, wrote: “The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. … Only potential survivor the fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

• But a few desks away, Mr. Tourre and Mr. Egol were quietly working on the Abacus deals.

• They were, former colleagues say, something of an odd couple. A slight man with a flair for salesmanship, Mr. Tourre joined Goldman in 2001, after coming to the United States to study business operations at Stanford. At Goldman, he courted investors like European banks and big hedge funds.

• On a short-term tactical basis, Goldman Sachs clearly has little to fear. It has relatively deep pockets and will fight the securities “Fab” allegations tooth and nail; resolving that case, through all the appeals stages, will take many years. Friday’s announcement had a significant negative impact on the market perception of Goldman’s franchise value – partly because what they are accused of doing to unsuspecting customers is so disgusting. But, as a Bank of America analyst (Guy Mozkowski) points out this morning, the dollar amount of this specific allegation is small relative to Goldman’s overall business and – frankly – Goldman’s market position is so strong that most customers feel a lack of plausible alternatives.

• The financial reform bill pending in the Senate would have prevented the type of dealings that led to a civil complaint against Goldman Sachs, Sen. Christopher Dodd, the sponsor of the bill, said Monday.

• Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said failure to enact his financial overhaul bill would leave the American public vulnerable to “shenanigans” at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other large firms.

• The last 72 hours have left Goldman Sachs with a shattered reputation among the people who matter to them, their customers and the politicians they have courted. The SEC’s civil fraud suit over one of their synthetic CDO deals is bad enough, but it’s just getting worse and worse for them.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Big Brother is watching you. Actually, it’s the RIAA and the MPAA, especially if you’re parked on a BitTorrent client. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that both organizations–along with a few others–want to take the file-monitoring process a huge step further by infiltrating consumer PCs and deleting the infringing content off their hard drives. How? Through “anti-infringement” spyware developed and enforced by the government.

• This is no joke.

• Countries negotiating a major cross-border agreement to crack down on intellectual property crimes have agreed to release previously secret draft language of the controversial accord this week.

• The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has confirmed plans to publish the draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) this Wednesday, following a series of successful negotiations in the eighth round of talks on the agreement last week in New Zealand.

• USTR spokeswoman Nefterius McPherson said that the negotiating countries are very close to a final deal, though differences remain over the language concerning enforcement mechanisms for dealing with trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy.

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