● 07.02.10

● Links 2/7/2010: First Look at GIMP 2.7, ‘Android Is Unstoppable’

Posted in News Roundup at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Package managers and repositories were a lifesaver for Linux. As the package management tools grew in sophistication and popularity, their associated repositories grew with software that was mostly guaranteed to work, and not muck up your system. I called it “staying in the box”. As long as you stick with what was provided by the default package managers of your distribution, you more than likely won’t run into the kind of dependency conflicts that were common in the earlier days of Linux.

• A couple of systems have made the news recently that are targeting “scale out” cloud workloads, and Linux is likely to be the OS of choice on these systems. The SeaMicro SM10000 and the Quanta S2Q take different approaches, but the theory is the same: Cram a lot of low-powered cores into a system to handle workloads with massive amounts of small transactions. Sounds like a job for Linux!

Desktop

• To be blunt about it, Gnome is my Operating System; it just happens to require a real OS to sit upon.

Security

• It’s been a long time since I’ve had to install a piece of proprietary software because generally my needs are met entirely by Debian’s packages or at very least by tools distributed as source. Recently though I needed to temporarily install something for interoperability reasons in order to extract some information from an opaque blob of data.

• The world has come on a long way since I last did this and the vendor in question had a Linux version of their software. So far so good. Unfortunately the install instructions for this piece of software were, to paraphrase, “download this binary and run it with root privileges, following the on screen instructions.”

• I beg your pardon? You expect me to take some piece of code with no explanation of what it is going to do and run it, not just with access to my own files but complete unrestricted access to my entire system? Are you mad? Or more to the point, do you think I’m mad?

• A lot has been said about why Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. However, after reading this post (dated July 1, 2010) from PC Advisor, I realized that, right now, the security problems in Windows can actually be promoted by Microsoft. In fact, the security policy of the company has to do more with its business model than it does with costumer support.

Server

• For operators having to upgrade billing systems, expensive hardware is often no longer an option, and for that reason they are looking to low-cost Linux-based systems that deliver more bang for the buck.

• Growing demand for always-on connectedness and real-time rating and charging, for example, have made Unix a cost-prohibitive option, even though hardware costs have come down significantly. With that in mind, Intec today released performance numbers for its Singl.eView v7.0 charging, billing and customer care system. The purpose of the release is to demonstrate its performance on platforms that cost less than traditional Unix servers.

Ballnux

• No further details were provided, but as noted, the earlier N210 and N220 were equipped with the Linux-based HyperSpace environment (created by BIOS vendor Phoenix but recently sold to HP).

Kernel Space

Applications

• The GIMP development team has unleashed today (not yet on the official website) another development release of their popular image manipulation software. The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 2.7.1 comes with lots of improvements, new functions and many bugfixes. Among these, we can mention support for layer groups, support for multi-column dock windows, improved single-window mode, Photoshop CS4 keyboard shortcuts, RGB565 support, GEGL updates, and many more. Without further ado, we’ve listed below some of the changes in GIMP 2.7.1. Don’t forget to check out the installation part, for the Ubuntu 10.04 PPA.

• We would all like to think that, since we are using Linux, we will never really need a backup of our data. Now, let’s look at this realistically. Even if your OS is 100% rock solid, with nary a nanosecond of downtime, that hardware running that OS can not possibly give 100% forever. Add to that the irresistible urge to upgrade hardware and you have the serious makings for the need to back up.

• Want to write your story, create a screenplay, block out a storyboard, or create a comic? Put down the text editor, and pick up Celtx. Based on Firefox, Celtx is an all-in-one tool for media pre-production.

Proprietary

• For me Opera 10.60 best opera web browser i used so far, and things listed up there are the main pros i noticed on Opera 10.60

• Cons: i didn’t like the speed dials a lot cause it’s limited to 25 speed dial max, i usually use more than 25 speed dials on other web browsers like firefox and Google Chrome.

• Everyone in the Wine community is driving to release Wine 1.2 the newest and best version of Wine.

• Its been two years since Wine 1.0, and weve really made huge strides. This version will include the beginnings of genuine 64-bit support, along with major Direct3D improvements, and improvements in a huge number of other areas.

Instructionals

• * Mailbag * News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff * Pixie Chronicles: Part 4 Kickstart, by Henry Grebler * Tacco and the Painters (A Fable for the Nineties), by Henry Grebler * Knoppix Boot From PXE Server – a Simplified Version for Broadcom based NICs, by Krishnaprasad K., Shivaprasad Katta, and Sumitha Bennet * Procmail/GMail-based spam filtering, by Ben Okopnik * Linux: The Mom & Pop’s Operating System, by Anderson Silva * HelpDex, by Shane Collinge * Doomed to Obscurity, by Pete Trbovich

Games

• KDE has recently launched the “Supporting Membership Program” to raise funds for Developer Sprints, Akademy conferences and other activities of KDE e.V, the legal and financial representatives of KDE. President of KDE e.V. is Cornelius Schumacher and at the launch of Join the Game he made a pact with GNOME release manager and board member Vincent Untz that they would each join their rival’s support programme. And talk about it to the Dot. And so…

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Free thinkers. Curious people collaborating across borders. Pioneers pushing back the boundaries of what is possible. Teams building upon the work of others. People trying things just to see what happens.

• Those are all phrases that could be applied to KDE – or to scientists. The scientific mindset shares a lot with that of free software and so it is no surprise that there are plenty of scientists within our community, nor that KDE has some strong applications in the world of science.

Distributions

New Releases

• After 64 prereleases, 626 commits, 52,742 lines of changes, and tons of work by many, many people, Syslinux 4.00 is now officially released.

• Syslinux 4.00 is the first of a set of major code restructuring releases. The single biggest new features are btrfs and ext4 support, and support for disks larger than 2 TiB.

• Do you have an old PC that you want to “donate” to your children? Or are you looking for a way for them to use your PC without messing things up? Kiddix might just be the answer: It’s a Linux-based operating system with a child-friendly interface, software, and loads of parental controls.

• It is a great pleasure announce the first release of the Imagineos. Imagineos is born from GoblinX Linux following the same path started more than five years ago.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• A recent report in LeMagIT, claims that Arnaud Laprévote, the company’s chief executive, has found unnamed investors who are prepared to rescue the company, following months of rumours of financial turmoil, unpaid staff and other troubles.

Red Hat Family

• Linux vendor Red Hat is out this week with the second major milestone for the next generation of its enterprise Linux release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL), as the Linux player ramps up development for its flagship operating system.

Debian Family

• By shifting to a Debian base we have eliminated the mediocracy inherent within software developed in a meritocratic distribution. We believe in providing fit, finish, and stability while bringing the newest software possible meeting these guidelines. Usability is one of our core values. Our release philosophy is simple, it is released when it is ready. Patches, and software updates are rolled into the distribution on an on-going basis eliminating the requirement to “upgrade” the distribution every six months. Users will find respins released on a schedule which roll up existing updates making patching simple for new installations.

Devices/Embedded

• # The ZonePlayers use embedded Linux as their internal operating system. Hey, what’s not to love about that!

• What’s a Pogoplug? Basically the device is a tiny, low-power, inexpensive ($129) device that runs a customized Linux-based operating system. In its normal modes of operation, it works in tandem with web services supplied by Cloud Engines at Pogoplug.com. Until now, the gadget’s main purpose has been to enable you to remotely access the contents of USB-connected hard or flash drives over the Internet, as illustrated below.

Nokia/MeeGo

• The MeeGo project is happy to announce “Day 1″ of the MeeGo Handset user experience project. Many of you will remember this “Day 1″ concept from March, when we first made the MeeGo core OS source code available and started development towards the MeeGo 1.0 release. Today, the handset baseline source code is available to the development community. This code is being actively developed as MeeGo 1.1, which is scheduled for release in October. The team has been preparing MeeGo Gitorious with all the sources and infrastructure to perform the weekly builds for MeeGo 1.1 development. The MeeGo UI team has also been busy creating the handset reference user experience and preparing the MeeGo UI design principles and interaction guidelines. This milestone marks the completion of the merger of Moblin and Maemo as major architecture decisions and technical selections have been determined. Today, we are also opening the MeeGo Build Infrastructure.

Android

• The more you look at Android today, the more you have to think back to the fact that early last year, people wondered whether Google’s mobile operating system would even survive. There were countless columns in March of 2009 trumpeting the fact that only one Android handset was shown at Mobile World Congress that year. Now, Android is spreading out far beyond just the many smartphones it appears on. This week, Cisco announced a new tablet based on the OS, and that’s just one new direction for Android.

• Laptop-like smartbooks with keyboards (like the AC100) are much better served with a full-desktop Linux due to the fact, that on these devices, buyers will expect full-fledged applications like OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox…etc. Android would be very limiting for the use cases expected from a netbook/smartbook (editing complex text documents, spreadsheets, using a full-fledged browser, email client…etc). Tegra2 with 1Gb of fast RAM could run OpenOffice and other desktop software with good performance. Instead, it will be reduced to run mini, Android versions of the real stuff (what is available for Android instead of OO and such).

• However, at the same time, there is one thing that I would point out as an Android, even at this time: the fact that an Android phone is a complete peer to the PC and not a slave to it in any way.

Sub-notebooks

• This is the HP Mini 100e, a netbook which looks are fully customizable. There’s an option for SUSE Linux as the operating system. It’s nice to see something different in operating system options, too bad the other 2 options are windows versions (XP and 7)

• It reminds me of a set from Dr. Who or the original Star Trek – all those primary colors for every object in the room. Very cool in a flashback kinda way.

Free Software/Open Source

Mozilla

• KidZui turns Firefox into fun, kid-safe browser and online playground for kids in the age group 3-12, with over a million kids games, YouTube videos, and websites. Or in other words, KidZui Firefox extension turns Firefox into a place where your kids would love to be. With Internet becoming such a useful tool for people of all ages, it is unfair to block Internet access to your toddlers and KidZui is exactly what you want to ensure safety of your kids from the hidden dangers of the Internet.

SaaS

Business

• “Open Core is the New Dual Licensing Model” is the last of a chain of interesting posts against or in favor of open core, coming from different realm of experience: the analyst guy Stephen O’Grady, the free software evangelist Simon Phipps, the hacker Brian Aker and last but not least the entrepreneur Mårten Mickos.

• Let’s dig now deeper into what is open core to business, and why it is not a business model.

Licensing

• Backup Copy

• From Adobe reader (for Android)’s end user license agreement:

• 3.3 Backup Copy. You may make one backup copy of the Software, provided your backup copy is not installed or used other than for archival purposes.

• [...]

• Which leads one to wonder what, if any, point is served by using a service of a Certification Authority – which presumably is supposed to certify something – if you indemnify them when they stuff up.

Open Access/Content

• Today, FooCorp announced a strategic alliance with OpenHatch to encourage wider adoption of free software and allow greater involvement with FooCorp developments.

• Note the similarities to the UC rationale, including the triple-digit price increase, the recession, and the importance of speaking out against the business practices that harm research.

• It’s tempting to distinguish two phases of the serials pricing crisis. In the Early Crisis, universities resented hyperinflationary price increases and spoke out against them, but generally made painful cuts elsewhere to meet them. In the Late Crisis, universities lost their ability to cut further and spoke out against harmful and unsustainable business models, not just harmful and unsustainable price increases. UC is not the first sign of the Late Crisis, but it’s size and clout make it one of the most influential.

Programming

• Following up on my post from a few weeks ago, I’d like to give you all some more statistics about our Google Summer of Code™ program participants this year.

• • We have 69 student countries represented this year. New countries represented by students include Jamaica, Morocco, and Cambodia. • For the first time we have mentors from Chile, South Africa, Taiwan, and Peru. • We have mentors from 52 different countries this year. • We had 3,464 students submit a total of 5,539 proposals in all. Last year we had 5,885 proposals submitted by 3,496 students. • The open source organizations participating this year received an average of 36 proposals to review. We have 150 participating organizations this year.

• Many enterprise development teams often struggle with releasing software projects on time. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the multi-vendor open source Eclipse Foundation, which for the last seven years has consistently shipped releases from multiple projects on time.

• This week, Eclipse Helios shipped with 39 projects in what is known as the Eclipse release train. How does Eclipse manage to organize so many projects and year-after-year hit their release targets? What’s the secret?

Leftovers

• The European Commission will ensure that devices with always-on connectivity, like Apple’s iPhone, don’t lock consumers in to proprietary technology, Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for the ‘Digital Agenda’, told EurActiv in an exclusive interview. A yearly scorecard will measure the industry’s progress.

• A new web service Tweegle [J] by Usagifrask Co., Ltd. [J] looks very similar with Google Search, but it is a web-based Twitter client.

Security/Aggression

• The equipment will remain under the protection of the feds. INC expect that new research data or technology could help them break the security codes. Opportunity Group reported that the two programs used in the equipment are available online. One is called Truecrypt and is free. The programs were used due to suspected espionage.

Environment/Health

• Nearly 50 members of Congress warn State Deptartment against rubberstamping 2,000-mile tar sands pipeline as Obama insider John Podesta says fuel source “cannot be our energy future”

• British Petroleum has stooped to a new low, if that’s at all possible.

• As if spewing over 80 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico were not a sufficiently criminal activity, they are now attempting a cover-up and have facilitated, working alongside the police of New Orleans, a blockade of sorts of hard-hitting journalists from getting their hands on what’s actually taking place in the ravaged Big Easy. It is truly a sham of epic proportions.

• [...]

• The Tail That Wags the Dog: BP Telling the Louisiana Police Who’s Boss

• In a situation resembling the nefarious military contractor Blackwater leading operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in place of the regular standing military, something that is probably much more commonplace than we will ever know as common citizens, BP’s private security has also been in the lead on “policing” efforts on the Gulf Coast in New Orleans. Yet, rather than policing the real criminals — BP — the Louisiana Police force has instead formed a quid pro quo relationship with BP and is policing the honorable journalists exposing the criminals. Indeed, they have things backwards.

• The Washington Post published a misleadingly-titled article June 30 about the environmental effects of dispersants BP is using in the Gulf. The Post article’s headline reads,”Oil dispersant does not pose environmental threat, early EPA findings suggest.” But neither the body of the article, nor the Environmental Protection Agency’s’s press release about studies the agency hastily performed on eight dispersants, indicates that there is no environmental threat from using them. The agency also gives no assurance about using dispersants in the quantities BP is applying them.

• Anyone else sick of living in a country with a government that is so clearly for, by, and of the corporations?

• US President Barack Obama has taken the fight to BP. But it is time that he picks a fight with the American public. American energy consumption is at the root of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, but Obama preferred to sidestep the issue in his Tuesday speech.

• Conservatives may have moved quickly to dissociate themselves from Representative Joe Barton’s apology to BP, but many on the right still believe that the establishment of a $20 billion escrow fund violated the legal rights of the company.

• A federal judge certified a class-action lawsuit yesterday that demands Philip Morris USA Inc. pay for chest scans to diagnose whether heavy Marlboro smokers have early signs of lung cancer, a ruling that a lawyer for the plaintiffs called the first of its kind in the country.

• Nearly two years after lawyers for two named plaintiffs sought class certification, US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner granted the request and said she would let the case go to trial on claims that the cigarette manufacturer designed a product that delivered excessive levels of carcinogens. Certifying the class-action suit means the judge has opened up the legal action to other plaintiffs with similar circumstances.

• President Obama is calling a big part of the health care reform bill he signed into law last March a “Patients’ Bill of Rights”, suggesting that many of the consumer protections contained in the new law were the same ones the health insurance industry succeeded in killing time and again over many years through a fear-mongering campaign it secretly financed.

Finance

• Yup, that’s right. The good old boys on Wall Street ramped up the gambling in energy and food commodities when the housing market went bust. They sometimes speculated on regulated exchanges. For instance, Goldman Sachs has a commodity index that helps investors gamble on foods like wheat, cattle, corn as well as natural gas and crude oil. But the real action was in the unregulated, “over the counter,” or dark markets. Harpers Magazine has an incredible story in its July edition exposing how Wall Street speculators bumped up food commodity prices 80% between 2005-2008 contributing to hunger domestically and around the world.

• Today, Goldman Sachs sent its second-highest-ranking officer to Washington, D.C. to tell the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that his company is staffed and managed by complete idiots. In an effort to evade investigation, Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer David Viniar claimed that his company really just doesn’t know how to do basic bookkeeping. It was a silly and transparent lie, but if it were true, every investor the world over would be pulling its money from Goldman as fast as possible.

• At this point, Goldman Sachs execs have made clear that are very good at making themselves look like jerks. Viniar’s comments at yesterday’s hearing follow a series of, let’s say, unflattering public appearances over the past few months involving fraud investigations, “shitty deals” and “God’s work.” But Viniar still had some real whoppers ready for the FCIC:

• “We don’t have a derivatives business.”

• “The government stepped into AIG’s shoes” and therefore had to honor its contract with Goldman, Viniar told the congressionally appointed panel investigating the financial meltdown.

• A Congressional commission questioned Goldman Sachs and the American International Group executives on Thursday about the way the companies set prices on complex mortgage securities during the financial crisis, when buyers for such assets were scarce.

• Economic forecasters say they believe that the Census Bureau eliminated about 235,000 federal temporary jobs in June. That huge cut in the federal work force will probably dwarf any hiring or firing elsewhere in the economy. The overall change in jobs — the headline number released in Friday’s report — could well show job losses. Beneath all those federal layoffs, though, glimmers of hope in the private sector might — or might not — emerge.

• Stocks fell Friday after a disappointing jobs report added to investors’ concerns about the economy.

• The U.S. economy created a modest 83,000 private sector jobs in June, adding to concern that the economic recovery is tepid at best and highlighting the political danger to President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats heading into a tightly contested midterm election cycle in which control of the House and perhaps the Senate are at stake.

• Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington announced Thursday that she’ll support a sweeping Wall Street reform bill, bringing Democrats one vote closer to securing Senate passage.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Remember Balanced Copyright for Canada, the shadowy “citizen’s group” that encouraged members to send form letters to media outlets skeptical about Canada’s new, US-style copyright law?

• Turns out it’s a front for the big US labels.

• But now a growing number of doctors are warning that toning shoes don’t deliver on their marketing promises and could cause injuries by, among other things, changing a person’s gait, or way of walking.

• Claims that toning shoes can significantly contribute to a person’s fitness are “utter nonsense,” says Barbara de Lateur, distinguished service professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine in Baltimore.

• I thought I’d seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an “unspoken agreement” that journalists are not supposed to “embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The European Commission this morning launched a consultation on key questions regarding the contentious issues of net neutrality and the open Internet.

• The consultation covers such issues as whether ISPs should be allowed to adopt traffic management practices, prioritizing one kind of Internet traffic over another. This has become an issue with the onset of broadband and Internet services which require more bandwidth, such as VoIP or online TV. Essentially, the EC wants to find out whether these practices would create any problems (economical, technical or otherwise) and have ‘unfair effects’ for users.

Copyrights

• After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.

• There’s a new meme in town these days: “rights of the artists”. The copyright industries have worked out that cries for more copyright and more money don’t go down to well when they come from fat-cat monopolists sitting in their plush offices, and so have now redefined their fight in terms of struggling artists (who rarely get to see much benefit from constantly extended copyright).

• Here’s a nice example courtesy of the Copyright Alliance – an organisation that very much pushes that line:

Digital Economy Bill

• Sections 11–18 of the Act were pushed forward on the basis of questionable figures and assumptions, will not significantly achieve their stated ob jectives of reducing copyright infringement, and are liable to have serious unintended consequences.

Clip of the DayCLUG AGM 24 Nov 2009 – Interfacing with the real world (2009) 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.