● 08.14.10

● Links 14/8/2010: ASUS Linux-based Tablet for $300, OpenSolaris Phased Out

Posted in News Roundup at 10:19 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Yet, even this is not totally new, as various projects have invited volunteers to share their computer resources for years. Some of these projects have been open-source-based, others have been highly proprietary, while a few have supported both. Motivations for these projects range from how to accomplish a task when you have almost no money to support it, to having money, but machines with the power you need are just not available.

IBM

• “Linux is on parity with AIX,” Healy told InternetNews.com in response to a question about how IBM is positioning AIX against Linux. “Linux enables choice. I think that’s one of the basic tenants of the faith.”

Kernel Space

• Kernel-based Virtual Machine, or KVM, is a growing Linux technology for virtualization. Speaking at LinuxCon this week, Red Hat Senior Engineer Chris Wright noted that the open source project is on track to meet some very lofty goals.

• “We’re on track for total world domination,” Wright told the capacity crowd.

• He might be joking, but KVM is certainly on a tear. The project has amassed a number of big-name contributors, like IBM, Novell and Intel. Red Hat itself jumped into KVM in earnest with its $107 million purchase of Qumranet in 2008, thereby setting the stage to distance itself from Xen, the rival open source technology it had previously used.

• This week’s LinuxCon show featured some lively discussions over the fate of the fast-growing open source operating system, says eWEEK. Hosted by the Linux Foundation (LF), the event explored cloud computing, social networking, Android integration, GPL licensing, Linux kernel challenges such as multicore processing and code complexity, and MeeGo, among other issues.

Applications

• Radio Tray isn’t incredibly feature-filled, but on those occasions you just need a simple unitasker, it’s perfect for getting the job done and staying out of your way. Just start it up and right-click on the menu bar icon to add a radio station. Radio Tray supports most media formats as well as PLS, M3U, ASX, WAX and WVX playlist format. You can even bookmark the stations you really like for easy access, which is pretty nice too. Also keep in mind that if your favorite station doesn’t have a standard M3U or PLS playlist posted on their web site, you can always find the stream’s URL by other means.

• If you’d rather avoid spending $700, there is an alternative called the GIMP. It stands for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It’s a full-featured open source photo editing suite with an impressive community supporting it. Anything you can do in Photoshop, you can do in the GIMP. To get started, check out some of the tutorials you can find by clicking here.

Instructionals/Technical

• The GNU build system (the “Autotools”) makes it easy for developers to create software that’s portable across many Unix-like operating systems.

Games

• Edit #2: In response to an audience question about Linux support, Carmack stated that it’s “really hard to justify the benefits” of porting to Linux, and projects like Wine “make more sense”, but they’ll continue to support open source at id. Previous high-profile id efforts for Linux (Quake III: Arena in particular) had “pretty negative” results, but he believes that Linux will have a role in future cloud gaming efforts.

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, said the open source community has fallen behind Google and other proprietary web services developers and must write more Affero GPL-based web services, integrate them better with the Linux desktop and offer hosting services for open source web services such as Gobby.

Distributions

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Not everyone is as happy with Dell as Tom is. In response to my post “Where are Dell’s Ubuntu PCs?” there was quite a debate over the relative merits and evils of companies that will or will not offer some systems with Ubuntu preinstalled.

• Some Gripe Line readers expressed fears of a collusion with Microsoft to scuttle Ubuntu; others suggested that software should never be preinstalled on computers at all; and a third camp decried Ubuntu as a “toy” operating system.

• Gripe Line reader Alex offered a unique solution to Dell’s Ubuntu conundrum: “We want Ubuntu options on all of their machines!”

• Today we had the pleasure of playing a little with the new Ubuntu installer, present in the latest daily build of the upcoming Maverick Meerkat (Ubuntu 10.10) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. The installer is completely revamped and accessible by Linux beginners.

Flavours and Variants

• The latest release of Puppy Linux, version 5.1, is codenamed “Lucid Puppy” as it is now binary compatible with the packages available for Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. The announcement and release notes say that because of this compatibility the time now taken to produce “packages that are tested and configured for Lucid Puppy is extremely short”. Lucid Puppy can now be downloaded (direct download) as a 130MB Live CD ISO file. Work on Puppy Linux 5.1 has focussed on improving the “lean and fast” distributions user interface, with friendlier dialogues and enhanced graphics, along with upgrading the many packages and tools of the distribution.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The next big Android phone could be really fast. How fast? Well, faster than any other smartphone yet built. Rumored to be coming from HTC — and going by the puzzling name “Glacier” — the smartphone could come with a dual-core processor and possibly a hefty battery to power it.

• Google executives outlined 12 new “Voice Actions for Android,” including phone calls, reminder e-mails, direction search, and music search. (Searching for generic links, a traditional function of Android, is number 13.) The app is called “Voice Search,” requires Android 2.2, and is available in the Android Market now, Google executives said.

• Scooping speculators, Engadget claims it can exclusively reveal Sony Ericsson’s plans to introduce a brand new gaming handheld. What’s more, the handheld will run “Gingerbread,” the codename for Android 3.0, Google’s mobile Linux/GNU platform rumored to be deploying already this October.

• Rockbox is an open source project offering software that can replace the default firmware on a number of portable media players including Apple iPod models as well as some media players from Archos, iRiver, Cowan, Toshiba, SanDisk, and Olympus. Now it looks like some developers are working on retooling Rockbox so that it can run as an application rather than a complete software environment in its own right — and the goal is to get a Rockbox app up and running on Google Android.

• Strength in numbers – One possibility is that the FOSS community finally has a smartphone they can stand behind, since the iPhone doesn’t prove to be very popular with those who don’t want to support Apple products or philosophy. The sheer number of people in the open source community who pounced on a phone with the a platform that’s near and dear to their hearts may be enough to drive sales numbers through the roof.

Tablets

• Asustek Computer plans to launch its long awaited Eee Tablet with an 8-inch LCD touchscreen in October for around US$300, though prices vary by market.

• [...]

• Asustek says the device will run for 10 hours before needing a recharge. It has 2GB of internal memory for storage and a MicroSD card slot to add more capacity.

• The Axon Haptic is a tabula rasa of a tablet. It comes as an empty, OS-less shell, waiting for you to install your choice of operating-system. The hardware of this ten-inch tablet is designed to work with almost any OS, from various Linux flavors through Windows to OS X. Yes, this little baby is hackintosh-ready.

• In all this commotion in the tablet community Linux has take a backseat. Until today when ASUS and Axon Logic released information on their respective tablet’s that showed Linux as an option for consumers. ASUS showed they will be releasing the ASUS Eee Tablet(pictured above) in October for $300 in a Linux model. Axon Logic a relatively unknown also released their plans for a tablet that will not only be able to run Windows and OSX but it will also run Linux, their tablet the Axon Haptic and it’s set to cost about $800.

Free Software/Open Source

• As Dieter Spaar has pointed out in a mailing list post on the OsmocomBB developer list, he has managed to get a first alpha version of TCH (Traffic Channel) code released, supporting the FR and EFR GSM codecs.

• In addition to support for OpenCL 1.1 and the embrace of Ubuntu and RHEL among it supported platforms, ATI Stream SDK v2.2 expands Linux and Windows compiler support and includes a host of other upgrades, which you can peruse here.

• The city and county of Denver, Co. is taking a big dive into the world of open-source – another sign of a global trend by government organizations to adopt open practices to benefit its citizenry and to better improve often archaic technology infrastructures.

• The survey results also found that IT executives were much more pragmatic about increasing open source usage and that software developers — who tend to favor open source usage — are increasingly important to product selection decisions. Thus, there’s a potential for a collision between the business’ mentality of “use what’s most appropriate,” and developers’ mentality of “we want open source everywhere possible.”

• Even as adoption of open-source platforms usage across organizations increases, the potential for collision of developer and IT executives’ interests intensifies, Infoworld reported.

• A recent report drawn from five Forrester, Eclipse Foundation and “Dr. Dobbs” surveys over the past two years showed that nearly 80 percent of organizations are using open source software in IT development projects.

• Positioning itself as a start-up, eZuce has launched a software-based, open source unified communications solution targeting enterprises with 200 to 10,000 users. Industry veterans and creators of SIPfoundry, Dr. Martin Steinmann and Jerry Stabile, are company co-founders.

• Second, “how many companies plan to contribute” isn’t the right metric. One of the things I’ve learned from my involvement in industry is that the most successful and effective groups are small. The right metric is “are there enough contributors to move the project forward?” For the key projects (like Apache), clearly the answer is “yes.” “Enough” is much more important than “how many.” The last thing we need are projects that slow to a crawl because of the bloated development-by-committee that characterizes many corporate environments. In the late ’80s, I worked for a startup that developed (among other things) a FORTRAN compiler. We sent our 10-person compiler group up to DEC for a meeting, where they found out that DEC’s FORTRAN compiler group had 2,000 people. DEC couldn’t understand how we got anything done. More to the point, our guys couldn’t understand how DEC got anything done.

• One of the myths about open source software is that IT organizations adopt it because it’s free. But it turns out that while cost is definitely a factor – especially in these tough economic times – the bigger issue is flexibility.

• There’s a lot of administrative overhead associated with testing and deploying proprietary software in the enterprise. In contrast, open source software can generally be downloaded and tested by virtually any member of the IT staff without a whole lot of interaction with vendor salespeople and internal purchasing departments.

Events

• Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.

• This week in Boston, the Linux Foundation held the second annual Linuxcon, a gathering of the developers, administrators, users and executives that call Linux home. All told, the conference touched on nearly every corner of computing—an indication of how broadly Linux has spread. Check out these highlights from the conference.

• A three-day camp on free and open source software called “FOSSilize” is going to be held at IIT Guwahati campus on September 3-5. The goal of the event is to increase the awareness, integration and adoption of free and open source software (FOSS) tools among the students. The emphasis is on building the capacity of the students to use FOSS. The event will bring together students from both the technical and non-technical colleges in the region. The aim is to use this event – and subsequent activities – as an opportunity to broaden expertise, forge new ideas and connections, and encourage the creative use of FOSS within the different projects and initiatives in the region.

SaaS

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, will host briefing sessions in New Zealand based on cutting through market hype to reveal the true value of cloud computing for businesses.

• The free, half day business seminars are sponsored by IBM and will address why cloud computing is one of the most significant shifts in information technology to occur in decades, as well as why it offers local organisations a very real opportunity to thrive in the current economic climate. The sessions will also unveil how open source tools and services can unlock the potential for cloud computing, as well as covering:

Databases

• When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems it also bought MySQL AB, the company behind the open source MySQL database, which Ingres CEO, Roger Burkhardt, says was hardly intentional and resulted in the company staving off a “future competitor”.

• “MySQL is not a competitor to an enterprise-class database,” Burkhardt said. “It’s a lightweight Web-oriented, easy to develop for offering.”

Oracle

• The clouds of uncertainty over OpenSolaris under Oracle have parted, but while what we see behind them was perhaps expected, it is certainly still disappointing. I’ve included the original sources below, but here are the key sentences (emphasis added) from the internal Oracle memo regarding OpenSolaris:

• * We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.

• Well, Oracle seems determined to make this a memorable Friday the 13th. Just as the open source community reels from the impact of an Oracle lawsuit against Google for alleged Java patent infringements, it has now been revealed that Oracle has internally killed OpenSolaris.

• In an apparent internal memo addressed to Oracle Solaris engineers, Oracle outlined plans to effectively end the OpenSolaris project.

• I don’t think Oracle suing Google over the use of Java in Android has much to do with Android at all. I think it has everything to do with Oracle monetizing Java anyway it can. That spells big trouble for any company or developer who uses Java but hasn’t obeyed the letter of Java’s intellectual property laws. I’m looking at you, Red Hat/JBoss; Apache/Jakarta; and members of the JCP (Java Community Process). Get ready. Legal trouble is coming your way.

• I am not a lawyer, but I don’t think you need to be one to figure out why Oracle is doing this. Java and all its associated technologies are very valuable. Sun was never able to squeeze much money out of Java’s IP (intellectual property). Sun preferred to make its money by building programs around Java.

• When Google joined the Open Invention Network and pledged to protect Linux in August 2007, six months after Oracle had done the same, Jerry Rosenthal, then-CEO of Open Invention, told CMP TechWeb that no patent holder has ever sued Linux developers or a Linux distributor and that none likely ever will.

CMS

• The hosted version brings yet another option for those companies who want to use Webvia, but lack the resources to host it themselves.

Education

• To be honest, for a couple of years now I have been pretty skeptical about the future of Free and Open Source software in Finnish schools and education sector in general.

• In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is “Open Source” and “Linux”. This should be a great foundation to get open source software to all public schools (and public institutions).

• [...]

• Another good news is that there are several projects raising awareness on Free and Open Source software for schools. There are blogs and newsletters, webinars and get-together events. The outreaching and educational activities seems to be today professionally carried out and well organized. Still, I would claim that the information provided on the topic is far too technical and as such irrelevant for most of the decisions makers. The people making decisions on the educational technology are not really interested in the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project). They want solutions. It looks that we are still missing credible providers of solutions.

Healthcare

• Electronic data interchange vendor Emdeon Inc. is testing open source software to facilitate the exchange of clinical data.

Funding

• The reason: Viegas and Wattenberg didn’t like the open-source component of the News Challenge grant agreement, which requires that winners share all work done under the grant under a copyleft license that maximizes openness. “The licensing requirements weren’t right for us, or the project, really,” Viegas explained. (Their pitch was for a data visualization tool for news organizations; they declined to go into more detail than that.)

• [...]

• Winners can accept a grant and bind themselves to the GNU General Public License, which makes the code reusable or alterable by anyone else. Alternately, for-profits can choose to structure the winnings as a zero-percent interest loan that must be repaid. A version of the project would still need to be released under the GPL.

• Virgin America is one of the U.S’s newest airlines and its IT infrastructure is mostly open source. That’s the message coming from Ravi Simhambhatla, VA’s CIO who delivered a keynote at LinuxCon titled “Selling the Value of Open Source When Cost is Not the Driver.”

• While Ravi Simhambhatla told LinuxCon attendees that his IT staff has saved millions of dollars by going with FOSS, he emphasized it’s the fact that the software works so well that has made it a relatively easy sell to higher ups. He touted the company’s open source systems having 100% uptime with just one open source software systems admin.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The researchers found that the sensor messages can be sniffed and decoded from up to 40 meters (120 feet) from a passing vehicle with a basic low-noise amplifier and the openly available GNU radio platform (a GNU radio is comprised of hardware and software and can be used for intercepting radio signals).

Project Releases

• The most recent version of Objective Caml is 3.12.0. It was released on 2010-08-02.

• WeeChat 0.3.3 was released on 2010-08-07: many new features and bugs fixed (see ChangeLog for detail).

Openness/Sharing

• The map from Open Maps, which will be completed by the end of this month, will be an open-source map — meaning anyone can contribute to it, edit it and tweak it to their needs: It’s Wikipedia-meets-cartography, developing world-style.

• Some commenters may have scoffed when Mike posted about high-tech green farming using soil sensors, but with over-taxed aquifers causing reduced yields worldwide, more intelligent monitoring and usage of water resources should be a top priority. But soil monitoring isn’t just for professionals anymore. In fact, one hobbyist is working on an open-source garden monitoring system that might, if there is enough demand, allow for fully automated garden watering based on precise soil conditions. I, for one, am interested.

Programming

Leftovers

• In the wake of the mass exodus at ScienceBlogs, the old network lives on. A sizable chunk of core members has left, while other popular bloggers remain. Many former contributors banded together to form a new, independent science blog network—with an ethics code to their liking—at Scientopia. And PepsiCo still has its Food Frontiers blog in a dusty corner of the Web, where the requisite PR and legal teams carefully look over the R&D scientists’ posts.

• Defamation law can often be found dawdling behind technology, but a barely noticed judgement on hyperlinking may have moved things on a step or two.

• A question that remains to be resolved is whether a link to a web page that contains defamatory statements about someone is actionable. The high court’s decision in the recent Spectator case looks at the hyperlinking question from another angle. Can the web pages a publisher links to inform the meaning of an article?

• An incident known as “choir gate” is back in the news today. Churchill County Judge William Rogers has ruled against music teacher Kathleen Archey; saying that an article written about her by a high school student truthfully communicated information to the public, and that nothing written by the student was false, defamatory or negligent.

Science

• What makes a tropical depression turn into a hurricane?

• It’s a question that has puzzled hurricane chasers and scientists alike for years.

• But now Ed Zipser, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah, is hoping that research he and a team of scientists are doing this month will unlock the key to this mystery.

• The quest to understand the inner workings of tropical storms or depressions and figure out what turns them into full-blown hurricanes is like the quest for the “holy grail” for atmospheric scientists, Zipser said.

Health

Security/Aggression

• WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said Thursday his organization is preparing to release the rest of the secret Afghan war documents it has on file. The Pentagon warned that would be more damaging to security and risk more lives than the organization’s initial release of some 76,000 war documents.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Wildfires have also swept through northern Portugal, killing two firefighters and destroying 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of forests and bushland since late July. Some 600 firefighters were today struggling to contain 29 separate fires.

• Already hundreds of people have died as smoke from hundreds of wildfires burning outside Moscow blankets the city. Exposure to ground level ozone, toxic microscopic particles and other pollutants is likely to drive that number far higher.

Finance

• J.C. Penney Co. cut its profit outlook for the rest of the year, a sign of jitters that Americans, still stinging from the recession and worried about jobs, aren’t going to spend more any time soon.

• Germany’s economy surged ahead in the second quarter, growing 2.2 percent — the fastest pace for at least two decades and beating market forecasts — as a global recovery fed demand for its exports.

• The first-quarter growth figure for Europe’s biggest economy also was revised upward Friday to 0.5 percent — more than double the initial reading of 0.2 percent.

• ”The recovery of the German economy, which lost momentum at the turn of 2009/2010, is really back on track,” the Federal Statistical Office said as it released the preliminary second-quarter figures.

• Ten years ago, one of America’s leading economists delivered a stinging critique of the Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, titled “Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis?” With only a few changes in wording, the critique applies to the Fed today.

• This week rates fell to levels that many people in the mortgage business thought they would never see. Freddie Mac reported on Thursday that the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate loan was 4.44 percent, with 0.7 of a point in prepaid interest. [One point equals 1 percent of the loan amount.] Loans fixed for 15 years also hit a record low, 3.92 percent, with 0.6 of a point, on average.

• Jobless claims are up yet again this week. Worst week since February, in fact. Obama is signing a $600 million border enforcement bill today (can you guess how many senators it took to pass it?); broadband deployment is slowing; Daniel Indiviglio explains Treasury’s $3 billion program to help unemployed homeowners; and Brady Dennis profiles Elizabeth Warren. Oh, and some Arcade Fire for you.

• Somewhere along the line, Elizabeth Warren became a symbol.

• She’s either the plain-spoken, supremely smart crusader for middle-class families that her supporters adore, or she’s the power-hungry headline seeker her critics loathe, a fiery zealot disguised in professorial glasses and pastel cardigans.

• The criticism by affordable-housing advocates was notable because the Obama administration has so far paid much more attention to their concerns than previous administrations have. Advocates, for instance, had credited the administration with listening to community groups that argued that the government must do more to embrace rental housing for those who cannot afford to buy a home.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Labor’s controversial mandatory internet filter project is an attack on human rights, and Australians should beware of the project and other tyrannical government policies, free software luminary Richard Stallman has said in an interview ahead of a visit to Australia in October.

• Stallman is best known for his creation during the early 1980′s of the GNU Project, which combined with Linus Torvalds’ kernel programming efforts in the early 1990′s to form what we today refer to as the GNU/Linux operating system.

• Stallman also founded the associated Free Software Foundation in the mid-1980′s and is the original author of a bunch of popular software projects — such as the Emacs text editor (although it does far more than that) and the GNU Compiler Collection.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• You keep talking about turning this great place into an “open Internet.” But it already is an open Internet. One that really must stay that way. Net neutrality isn’t important because I don’t want to pay extra for Hulu, premium cable channel style. (Which I don’t.) No–it’s important because openness of the Internet is absolutely, fundamentally critical to the future of collaborative innovation. And I don’t mean this “public Internet” you keep mentioning. I mean just plain Internet. It’s all public. Open to all of our friends–even the ones we don’t really like.

• Despite a recent press event and a long blog post aimed at explaining that Google is still pro Net-Neutrality, Google did not convince. A number of folks aren’t buying it and believe that Google is turning its back on net neutrality and “not neutrality” has become the word play du jour. Those who are angry towards Google’s joint proposal with Verizon point out that Google basically is “OK” with the idea that wireless network won’t have to abide by the same standards of net neutrality than the landlines.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In short, artists are using the new means of production and distribution to control the creation, marketing, and sale of their work. It’s the inevitable outcome of what I described last January at Critical Mass regarding the future of books — the loss by the publishing, recording, and entertainment industries of control over the means of production and distribution of their products. As I wrote then, “[t]he entire publishing industry as we’ve known it is a walking corpse. You can almost imagine it as a zombie — composed of parts of Sarah Palin, Oprah, Dan Brown, and Tiger Woods — lumbering down Manhattan’s avenues.”

• This is, of course, the typical Innovator’s Dilemma, but it helps explain why so few companies are able to survive the innovator’s dilemma. Even if they know about it, they think they can wait. They think that they shouldn’t invest heavily in those new technologies and new markets until there’s a clear path to profitability, or a clear plan for how it “replaces” what’s already there. The problem is that by the time they have the answers to those questions, it’s too late.

• Japan’s second largest mobile operator KDDI’s au introduced several new lineups for their design-oriented feature phone series last month, and they have been running a promotion campaign collecting user-generated parody songs via Twitter.

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