● 07.26.10

● Links 26/7/2010: Linux Mint 10 Called “Julia”, OliverPad Runs Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Most of our work…work done by The HeliOS Project involves working with kids one-on-one. We find children that do not have computers due to financial disadvantage and do our best to give them one. It is indeed gratifying work. I have not had many chances to work with kids in large groups before…I mean working with them in a technical environment.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

Mesa

• Mesa 7.9 is shaping up to be one hell of a release. Mesa 7.9 is already set to carry many ATI Gallium3D driver improvements along with enhancements to the LLVMpipe driver that uses the CPU for rendering, the early R600g driver, various Gallium3D architectural and state tracker improvements (MSAA, Stream Out, etc), more OpenGL 3.x functionality, and tons of other changes. But there’s still more coming! Intel’s Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa development list that they would like to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa in August.

Applications

• Being able to touch type is the ability of typing without looking at the keyboard. When touch-typing, the individual uses all fingers instead of just a few fingers. Consequently, typing speed increases dramatically.

• Open Source and Linux provide rewarding surprises. And one of these surprises is the software Synfig.

• Neil Patel is the Technical lead for Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Unity at Canonical Ltd. With the current drawbacks with Gwibber’s UI in mind, Neil have created some really good looking Gwibber UI mockups.

Instructionals

• In this article series by John Ward,author of BIRT 2.6 Data Analysis and Reporting we will be looking at a practical example of building a reporting site. In this part of the article, we will be looking at a scenario where we have a Bugzilla instance setup with a series of bugs related to BIRT. We will look at a series of requirements and build the reports necessary to fulfil those requirements.

• We just wrapped up the Ohio LinuxFest call for presentations, so pitching presentations is on my mind. Regional, volunteer-run conferences are not only a good way for people without a travel budget to see some big names in open source, they’re also a way for first-time or inexperienced speakers to hone their presentation skills. Regional conferences also provide an excellent forum to educate users about your favorite project or topic.

Games

• 25th July 2010 – v0.65 is now available.

• * Added the next part of the story * Dying and then being stunned by a Centurion no longer leaves you immortal * Fixed a crash when creating the Fire Shield

Desktop Environments

• I compared a couple of ideas on the desktop to a piece of art by Cezanne. In it, I explained that this expressionist painting was able to make people who looked at it, understand that although it is expressionism, you still understand the shapes and forms in it and relate them to elements in real life. Later, I received this comment “A desktop is a tool, not a piece of art.” Is this true? I want to put this question to you all.

Distributions

New Releases

• PelicanHPC is a live CD for high performance computing cluster and is based on Debian. The latest version of the distro is PelicanHPC 2.2 RC and runs only on amd64.

Fedora

• Whenever I make a major jump to a new computer and/or operating system, there’s usually quite a bit of distro-hopping instability as I try to figure out what works best for my hardware, my work and my moods.

Debian Family

• For the past four or five days I have been running the Mebius laptop as my home file server, torrent slave and music player. I jumped to put a larger hard drive into the machine when I realized Debian could configure the network, the sound card and the hard drive (at its full 120Gb size!) without any extra effort from me.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I ended up having to obliterate Quickweb off the drive in favor of the much more feature-rich but still very fast booting Ubuntu. Now i’m not going to sit here and preach how good Ubuntu is–just go out and try it. Download the Live CD, you don’t even have to install it to try it (although it wont be fast unless you physically install it). But Ubuntu, thus far anyway, runs like butter with the Core i5 and 8gigs of ram. Much faster than any other OS i’ve had experience with (Yes, even you, OS X).

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 10, based on the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”, will be released in November this year under the codename “Julia”.

Devices/Embedded

• The PobBox reportedly runs a customized version of Linux 2.6 as its internal operating system, on a RISC-based Sigma Designs SMP8643 system-on-chip (SoC) processor. For more specs and features, including details on the device’s hardware and its supported multimedia formats, read our earlier PopBox coverage.

• Pros: This tiny home theatre box is the perfect partner for streaming HD content to your TV, or as a mini Linux entertainment system

Phones

• Linux will dominate mobile devices by 2015. That’s according to a new report from technology analyst ABI Research.

Tablets

• Olive Telecom has announced the launch of OlivePad – VT100, India’s first 3.5G Pad.

• Designed as a multi functional device, Olive Pad operates on an Android Operating System and supports 3.5G HSUPA, Wi-fi, and Bluetooth.

• The situation is pretty simple to explain: As Microsoft scrambles to position Windows Phone 7 against Apple’s iPhone, and Windows 7 for tablets against the iPad, Google keeps lining up more and more hardware partners to build tablets running Google Android.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• It’s my favorite conference, I think. I love the smaller, more focused events too, but OSCON is a gathering of the tribes and we need one of those.

BSD

• In these benchmarks we compared the performance of the traditional ATA infrastructure in FreeBSD/PC-BSD 8.1 to that of the new CAM-based ATA infrastructure when using ZFS. The tests included LZMA compression, Gzip compression, Compile Bench, PostMark, and the Threaded I/O Tester.

Openness/Sharing

• Joi Ito wants to revolutionise the internet. His vision is of a world unperturbed by a complicated, costly and outdated copyright system, where everybody can collaborate and share content on the web as they wish.

• He doesn’t want to get rid of copyright, he just wants you to be able to adapt it to your needs. He wants to build a sharing economy.

Open Data

Standards/Consortia

• For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs.

• I first blogged about webm the day Google released it. It has taken some time but now I have full support for webm in my preferred Linux desktop distro (Fedora 13). I’ve been doing some testing and I have to say I’m impressed.

Leftovers

• Three people working with the Scott McInnis for Colorado governor campaign have resigned their positions. This comes as McInnis, a Republican, has been battling plagiarism allegations.

Science

• A new kind of time travel based on quantum teleportation gets around the paradoxes that have plagued other time machines, say physicists.

Security/Aggression

• Researchers found the widespread use of CCTV, ID cards, electronic registration systems, fob-controlled gates and fingerprint technology as schools attempt to crackdown on troublemakers.

• Staff at one comprehensive patrolled corridors and playgrounds with radios to make sure children behaved at lunchtimes, while teachers at a private school used technology to spy on children’s computer and internet use.

• THE owners of a new bar have defended their decision to install a CCTV camera in the men’s toilets.

• More than 21,000 fines of between £60 and £120 were issued for motoring offences such as stopping to drop off family and friends.

• Lorretta Cole says she was trying to teach her neighbour’s children a lesson after she claims the ball repeatedly landed on her property and even damaged her car.

• The Government has until the end of the month to decide whether to opt out of the scheme – which would give authorities in any country in the whole of the EU the power to order our police to produce evidence, or even interrogate or launch surveillance of suspects without their knowledge.

• West Sussex County Council has been described as showing ‘poor regard’ to the importance of protecting children’s personal information after an unencrypted laptop containing information about children was stolen from the home of one of its employees.

Environment

• In May, PRWatch reported on a controverisal new group, “Balanced Education for Everyone” (BEE), that is trying to stop public schools from teaching kids about climate change science. BEE argues that teaching climate change is too scary for kids and “unnecessary.” But BEE’s efforts also raised other questions, like what are kids learning about climate change in school, anyway, and who is influencing it?

• [...]

• Connecting the Dots: Hushed Relationships Between ACE and BP

• ACE was founded with an initial donation of $2.675 million in “private funding,” the source of which is undisclosed on ACE’s Web site. However, a September 30, 2009 article about an ACE school presentation says all of money to start ACE came from one person: Michael Haas, the group’s founder. A second article posted on Grist.com in July 2009 confirms this. So why is ACE so cagey about reporting this on its website?

• The Los Angeles Times reported last week that, “worst-case estimates place the total oil spilled in the gulf at about 126 million gallons over two months. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates the country disgorges that much hydrocarbon pollution to the air in 10 days.”

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson questions BP’s widespread application of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, as does everyone else. According to Jackson, the government is “uncharted waters” with the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. “The amount of dispersant being used at the surface is unprecedented,” Jackson says. BP is also applying the chemicals in the sub-sea environment. In addition, dispersant is stopping oil from collecting on water surface, where it can be more easily controlled.

• Leaders of the Gulf Coast states have designated Sunday a day of prayer for the regions affected by the oil spill that has sent millions of gallons of crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for the last 66 days.

• There’s something missing in the Coast Guard’s latest PR photos of oil spill cleanup workers: protective gear.

• NOAA, the FDA and the Gulf states have been rigorously testing Gulf seafood for oil—doing smell tests with teams of human sniffers, and performing chemical tests for the harmful polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, found naturally in crude oil.

• The oil is too dispersed to take advantage of the converted Taiwanese supertanker’s enormous capacity, said Bob Grantham, a spokesman for shipowner TMT.

• He said BP’s use of chemical dispersants prevented A Whale, billed as the world’s largest skimmer, from collecting a “significant amount” of oil during a week of testing that ended Friday.

• Rachel Carson ignited the debate over pesticide safety a generation ago. Its latest phase began today (July 15).

• Chemical farming interests have taken aim at Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) influential “Shopper’s Guide To Pesticides In Produce,” a popular consumer tool introduced more than a decade ago that has helped drive expansion of organic produce sales at the expense conventionally grown, pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables.

Finance

• As members of opposing political parties, we disagree on a number of important issues. But we must not allow honest disagreement over some issues interfere with our ability to work together when we do agree.

• AFR’s 250 consumer, labor, business, housing and grassroots groups, along with dozens of academics and think tanks, came together in an unprecedented effort to pool their expertise on complex financial matters to provide a counterweight to the big money lobbying onslaught and technical expertise of Wall Street.

• These numbers are much higher than what is reported in the media because CMD’s Wall Street Bailout Cost Table takes into account all 35 government programs, not just the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) managed by the U.S. Treasury Department. Still unpaid: $568 billion in TARP money and $1.4 trillion in Federal Reserve loans and investments.

• What is a corporation? In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the nature of the corporation has been the subject of considerable debate. While this is a very complex topic, two major points of view seem to be emerging, which we can use to book-end the different ends of a spectrum, with many hybrid positions in-between.

• [...]

• At the other of the spectrum, is the view of the corporation as an organization that will use all lawful means for its single-minded objective of generating profit and wealth. As we have seen with the financial crisis, that single-minded focus on wealth can degenerate into a behavior dominated by greed, where a relatively small number of people will do whatever they can to earn large sums of money without worrying about the impact of their actions on the larger society.

AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The “Chez Sludge” scandal in San Francisco, involving the city giving away free toxic sewage sludge as “organic Biosolids compost” for gardeners, took another turn on July 13, 2010. The Food Rights Network filed a formal letter of complaint with the California Bar Association, asking the professional society for California lawyers to investigate Chris Desser, attorney for Francesca Vietor, in Vietor’s threat of libel against the UK Guardian newspaper.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• I’ve been disagreeing with a lot of people about transparency recently, and even though it’s kind of going out of fashion on the edge of my community, I’m still going to stand up for the principle. Transparency, real and true, is a good thing for many reasons. It’s not magic fairy pixie dust that makes the world a wonderful place, and anyone who sold it as such needs to do their historical homework. What is does it complex, important, but not sexy enough for many activists.

• What a lot of people commenting on the debate about government transparency don’t get is that it’s not just about the information. Action always has an inherent politics to it; publishing data about itself is as much about telling government how it’s supposed to behave as it is about the data. Even if you’re wildly juking the stats, you’re at least communicating to yourself how different things should be. The action involved in transparency is the action of telling on yourself. No matter how subverted, two things remain true: you know that you should be doing better, and you’re going to accidentally expose incidental truths.

• It recently came to light (thanks to some good reporting) that the Government has been fishing around with ISPs for their support on a new and radical data retention policy. This would legally oblige telcos to retain large amounts of data about their customers’ communications activities in case law enforcement needed them at some point in the future.

• Members of the European Parliament are being asked to sign a written declaration that will, ostensibly, “set up a European early warning system for paedophiles and sex offenders”. In reality, it will extend the Data Retention Directive to search engines.

Copyrights

• A claim arguing both copyright infringement and moral rights infringement looked for $27 million in damages. (Plus, amongst other things, the goods and services tax on the monetary awards.) By the end, the Honourable Mr. Justice Russell of the Federal Court of Canada determined that the defendants’ copyright misdemeanor was confined to posting the plaintiff’s work on their website, without his consent. Justice Russell did not conceal his opinion of the plaintiff’s conduct; “The evidence adduced concerning infringement of copyright suggests that the Plaintiff’s claims are disproportionate and opportunistic.”

• A new study has been making the rounds, concluding that only 0.3% of all files available on BitTorrent are confirmed to be ‘legal’. The results of the study were promoted by anti-piracy outfit AFACT and have been picked up by several news outlets, including Ars Technica and ZDNet, who all failed to see that the report is bogus.

• [...]

• Unfortunately, the results of these type of studies are pushed by anti-piracy outfits and taken for granted by outsiders, even by respected news outlets on the Internet such as Ars Technica and ZDNet. In this case their reporters were completely taken in by the report.

• Just a few minutes into reading the study we were shaking our heads here at the TorrentFreak headquarters. Mistake after mistake is made in the report and conclusions are drawn based on painfully inaccurate data and methodologies. We’ll lay out the most critical errors below, which represent just the tip of the iceberg.

ACTA

• Just who is the bad apple at the ACTA negotiations, excluding the public and forcing discussions between the parties to be held in secret?

• Not us, says the EU, which has come in for some stick of late – not least from Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstroem – for its refusal to allow MEPs to disseminate anything from the talks back to their voters. Rather, the blame should be laid at the door of just one of the parties to the talks, but the official line is that they are staying schtum on just which.

Digital Economy

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