● 08.03.10

● Links 3/8/2010: KRunner Gets Dictionary Plugin, Android Deployments Up 886%

Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• One of the biggest challenges we face when we get on site is in familiarizing the child with their new Linux system. Most kids have had Windows exposure from the first time they touch a computer. Getting them through the initial system shock of a new environment has had its challenges.

• In some cases, we’ve done a 30 day check-in to see how the child is doing with their new computer and have found the parent or guardian has put Windows on it. Maybe because the child wasn’t familiar with it…

• [...]

• I am soliciting researchers, ideas, coders, artists, volunteers, and bloggers to help us move this project forward. Sure, the current parameters are pretty loose but that’s why I have put this in front of you.

• And of course he used Linux to save on the Windows license fee.

• A recent poll found 20% or respondents indicate they would switch to GNU/Linux as a result of the ending of support for SP2.

Server

• Vox Communications, which offers a feature-rich, low-cost, high-quality alternative to traditional phone services by providing VoIP and smartphone applications, has exceeded 20,000 VoIP lines on its award-winning Voice over Internet Linux-based server clusters.

Google

• With the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh the first week of May, a slew of open source rock stars were in our hometown. Chris DiBona, Public Sector Engineering Manager at Google, was able to visit the Red Hat office and talk with us during his trip. The focus of his talk was the enormous culture of participation that companies like Google and Red Hat—and technologies like the internet—attempt to embrace and extend, despite naysayers and proprietary business habits.

Kernel Space

• A rather simple kernel update released recently is all what it takes to turn a ten-years old Transmeta-powered computer or appliance into a functional computer again.

• By “functional” we mean one which is able to run the latest Linux software without crashing. And that happens because of the work of one stubborn Arch Linux contributor. The main problem is that Transmeta´s original Crusoe CPUs really implement the full i586, which is the Pentium I, or more appropriately, a “crippled i686” implementation, that lacks one particular processor instruction “long NOPs”.

• The technique is one of a number of new features that come with the latest update of the open source operating system kernel, Linux version 2.6.35, which Linus Torvalds released on Sunday.

• In addition the usual round of bug fixes and optimizations, the new version has a number of new features to make it more usable in today’s bustling multicore, networked environments.

• The 2.6.35 release also includes new improvements to the Btrfs filesystem, continuing efforts begun by the previous Linux 2.6.34 kernel, which debuted in May to add and enhance support for additional filesystems.

Applications

• Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.

Instructionals

Wine

• The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.

• Whats new in this release:

• * Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer. * Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop. * New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program. * Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory. * Translation updates. * Various bug fixes.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• KRunner is one of the reasons (but not the only one) that I love KDE SC. With this new plugin, it just become a lot better. It will not be included in KDE SC 4.5 (since it is supposed to be released tomorrow :p), But, hopefully, it will make it to KDE SC 4.6.

Distributions

Debian Family

• The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, would like to invite you to participate in the upcoming Debian Conference which will take place from August 1 to 7, 2010, at New York City’s Columbia University in cooperation with the Columbia Computer Science department. This year’s conference is the first DebConf to be held in the United States in the 11-year history of the event. This year, more than 300 developers from all over the world, including Brazil, Argentina, Bosnia, Mexico, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Venezuela, and Latvia, will participate.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu kernel developers tagged the 2.6.35 kernel as Ubuntu-lts-2.6.35-14.19 in their repository. For a step by step article to to compiling the 2.6.35 kernel follow my how to compile article.

Devices/Embedded

• B&N plans to free up room for Nooks in part by shrinking space devoted to CDs; in this era, you gotta think that it probably would be deemphasizing sales of music on shiny discs no matter what. It says it’s not going to carry fewer dead-tree books.

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• Cinemo, developers of performance enhanced embedded multimedia technologies for in-vehicle infotainment, consumer electronics, and industrial embedded computing, have announced full implementation of its solutions for the MeeGo open source Linux platform.

Android

• Two separate reports today place sales of Android handsets ahead of Apple’s iPhone for the first time amid a frenzy of Froyo, or Android 2.2, update news for major smartphones including the Evo 4G and Droid.

• Verizon’s Android 2.2 update for the Motorola Droid — and perhaps Droid X — should begin by next week, and news of the upgrade comes on the heels of Sprint’s announcement that Android 2.2, dubbed Froyo, is going to start rolling out tomorrow for the HTC Evo 4G.

• International smartphone trend reporting firm Canalys released its Q2 2010 report today highlighting the growth of Android compared to the previous year and the continued success of Nokia, though the release was quick to point out that the competition is closing the gap.

Sub-notebooks

• As Google continues to twiddle it’s fingers over Chrome OS a rival ‘cloud OS’ called ‘Jolicloud’ has been making waves for the last few months. Jolicloud Operating System was developed by a company which was started by the founder of Netvibes; the OS has been gaining popularity and already seems like a viable alternative to Google’s Chrome OS.

Tablets

• Looking at the Kindle more closely, one can see the similarities with existing tablets on the market; Freescale ARM-11 CPU running at 532 MHz, 4GB internal memory, Wi-Fi and running a Linux-based OS. The only things missing are a decent colour touchscreen and a clear commitment from Amazon to proceed further.

Free Software/Open Source

• As the saying goes, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” But in the world of programming, stretching boundaries is just part of the fun. The PHP community has never been one to shy away from bending their favorite language more ways than a shopping mall pretzel, and as the ten wild projects introduced in this article indicate, the fervor for experimentation is as strong as ever!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• August has arrived. Time for a browser market share update. There is quite a bit of news this month, which, depending on your view, can be modified in virtually any direction you prefer. Microsoft likes the version in which IE has gained market share and pushed back Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla may like the one that embarrasses Microsoft and shows that it is about to overtake IE in Europe and Google will most likely state that there is a very good chance that it has now more than 10% of the market.

Databases

Oracle

• A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we’re just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public.

• OpenSolaris is far from alone in the orphanage. However, there are several organisations showing an interest in helping Oracle’s unwanted stepchildren. Since the takeover was completed, Sun’s former chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has been involved in setting up ForgeRock, a company which provides a new home for a host of Oracle’s apparently unloved and unwanted open source projects.

Project Releases

• An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

Openness/Sharing

• Here’s the thing, software isn’t the only Open Source industry. In fact, many other open source businesses are very profitable and are generally skills that have been around for quite some time.

• Let’s think about Open Source for a moment. The first line of the Wikipedia article states…

• To me, it’s just the way we’ve always done things.

Open Access/Content

• In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds.

Leftovers

• The Federal Trade Commission announced a milestone this week: its Do Not Call registry has just passed 200 million numbers.

• It’s quite amazing that any of this came to pass, really. When the registry was being considered back in 2002, telemarketing opposition was fierce, and for obvious reasons. The industry was large, powerful, and willing to be unbelievably annoying. It also saw quite clearly that a tough Do Not Call rule would chop off its business at the knees.

• Police officer Joseph Uhler was caught on film charging out of his unmarked car and waving his gun at a unarmed motorcyclist pulled over for speeding. When the footage was uploaded to YouTube, authorities raided Anthony Graber’s home, seized his computers, arrested him, and charged him with “wiretapping” offenses that could land him in jail for 16 years.

Security/Aggression

• Radio frequency ID tags embedded in U.S. passports can be read hundreds of feet away, potentially making it inexpensive and easy to pick American tourists out of crowds for illicit purposes, a demonstration at Black Hat 2010 showed.

• I’m not willing to argue that involuntary transparency–or as we’re calling it in this case, a leak–is by definition wrong in all cases. And leaks are hardly new–think of the WWII military refrain, “Loose lips sink ships.” History has been changed, sometimes clearly for the better, by involuntary transparency. If you’d like to consider it further, George Mason University has a webpage devoted to the history of leaks. And more than one person, including Daniel Ellsburg, has noted that it’s difficult not to think of the WikiLeaks story as the 2010 version of the Pentagon Papers.

• The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, thanks to “a combination of logic flaws and misconfigured systems which provided access to a testing login page that could be used with user credentials that were not fully “registered” (e.g. no payment received). “

Environment/Wildlife

• Sinar Mas group is notorious for its destruction of millions of hectares of Indonesian rainforest, peatland and wildlife habitat. Two divisions within the group lead the destruction: pulp and palm oil. Recently, the group has diversified into coal.

Finance

• Local New York City residents are up in arms over a plan by Goldman Sachs to replace a discount shoe shop, a pizza joint, a recently closed New York Sports Club gym and a budget inn outside its new $2.1 billion headquarters with a string of designer restaurants and a luxury hotel. The Telegraph reported that the bank is being accused by denizens of “breaking promises.”

• Iceland’s failed Glitnir Bank hf and other lenders claiming they were stung by internal fraud during the financial crisis are winning U.K. court orders freezing the worldwide assets of ousted executives with ties to Britain.

• Glitnir in May froze the assets of Jon Asgeir Johannesson, its former principal shareholder, and won a second court victory last week after he violated the order by paying bills. Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, which defaulted on $12 billion of debt, and Intercontinental Bank Plc, the bailed-out Nigerian lender, won similar orders against former executives in the past year.

• Goldman has long been criticized for benefiting from the U.S. taxpayer bailout of AIG. Taxpayers pledged up to $182 billion to address problems at AIG’s financial products division.

• An emerging markets hedge fund affiliated to Citigroup (C) has sued Goldman Sachs (GS) for its alleged failure to uphold its part of a trade involving Venezuelan oil warrants.

• Emerging Markets Special Opportunities Ltd, a hedge fund managed by Citigroup affiliate EMSO Partners, claims that over a three-year period Goldman failed to deliver oil warrants it had paid for.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Have the copyright enforcers been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? The blog TorrentFreak today published its claim that the US Copyright Group, which has filed more than 14,000 lawsuits against anonymous P2P movie sharers, ripped off another copyright settlement group in crafting its own settlement website.

• As soon as you set up this bureaucratic structure, what really happens is that much of the money that could have gone directly to the artists (or to the artists’ business partners) goes instead into the massive overhead required to keep the “collection society” working in the middle. This isn’t a solution that helps musicians. It’s a solution that helps bureaucratic middlemen.

• A court decision this week may fundamentally change how composers, songwriters and publishers are paid royalties for public performances of their music, as the precedent created has laid the groundwork to shift many more music performances out of the hands of ASCAP, BMI and SESAC and into direct license deals with publishers and writers.

• It’s a trailer. The whole idea of it is to act as advertising for the movie and get people more interested in seeing the movie. And having people put it online for you makes it free advertising, which is even better. So why take it down at all?

ACTA

• The latest round of CETA negotiations took place last week in Brussels, with the GI issue (along with protections for industrial designs that cover the fashion industry) a top priority for the European delegation. The Canadian government unsurprisingly faces some opposition to the demands from domestic producers.

• Similarly, the ACTA negotiations, which have become increasingly acrimonious, have hit a major roadblock with the Europeans demanding extensive new enforcement powers — including criminal and civil penalties — for GI violations. The U.S. and Canada have been resisting the demand, leading Karel de Gucht, a European commissioner, to warn last week that this was a “red line” issue that could cause the EU to rethink the merits of the entire treaty.

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