● 08.17.10

● Links 17/8/2010: Linux in Portugal, ~55,000,000 Android Phones This Year

Posted in News Roundup at 12:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Last Summer while in hollidays in Algarve, I noticed at the supermarket cashier after a reboot that they were using Red Hat Linux.

• Well, this is a major Supermarket chain here at Portugal.

• So today i had the idea to make some calculations and figure out how much computers with RHL installed just for cashier POS.

• It’s not like this is breaking news or anything, but I was at EZ Lube today getting an oil change and noticed the tell-tale brown GNOME windows of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS era.

• From looking at the screen while I was paying the bill, One of the windows on the Ubuntu desktop said “LubeSoft,” which indeed is software for oil-change places — and which proudly runs in a Linux environment.

Google

• It’s For Netbooks. Is Chrome OS a server operating system that will do direct battle with Windows Server, or, for that matter, open source operating systems that reside on servers? Absolutely not. It’s aimed squarely at netbooks, a fast-growing part of the hardware market–but only part.

Applications

• Ranger is a neat option if you regularly use the console and would like a slightly more user-friendly option for file management than ls and the other shell builtins. I’ll certainly be using it again.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• For serious gamer folks in Linux, there is more good news. “Amnesia”, which many reviewed as one that is going to be among the scariest game ever and “And Yet It Moves”, a physics-based platform game, are going to have native Linux clients. Meanwhile, you may also want to check our listing of games for non-gamers in Linux.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The Search and Launch Containment Activity was only recently introduced in the 4.5 branch and is a fairly significant in the KDE desktop. In this article I am going to explain this Activity and show you how to take advantage of it.

• The KMyMoney team is pleased to announce the release of the first stable version built on KDE Platform 4. With over 15 months of development, this is the starting point for a series of KMyMoney versions leveraging the stellar features offered by the new Platform.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the operating system of choice at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Lahore Stock Exchange, New India Assurance, SBI Life Insurance, the Korea Federation of Banks and Quam Financial Services Group.

Debian Family

• What an asset to the Debian community she is. Her latest project is a Thank Debian website where we can leave messages of encouragement and thanks to the folks who make Debian work. What a cool idea!

• I have used Debian GNU/Linux for years and recommend it highly. It is the standard for general-purpose GNU/Linux distributions. No repository matches it. No supported architectures match it. No quality of releases matches, except, perhaps, RedHat and Suse.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Puppy Linux 5.1, code-name ‘Lucid’ as it is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages, has been released. The announcement and release notes say that because of the Ubuntu binary files, the development time to produce program packages that are tested and configured for Lucid Puppy is extremely short.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• As expected, Android-powered smartphones will see the strongest growth, especially with Samsung and LG committing to manufacturing their own range of powerful Android smartphones, helping to grow Android shipments in the second half of 2010.

• According to Lin, Android’s share of the worldwide smartphone market has risen from around 5% in 2009 to top 13.8% in the first half of 2010. At it’s current rate o growth, Android’s market share is expected to reach 24.5%, with shipments estimated to push 55 million units, a rise of 561% year on year.

• The original Droid smartphone on the Verizon network is still the top Android phone. The hot smartphone platform is definitely Android, and that is due to the number of hot phones are on the market. New phones are appearing almost every week which keeps things moving right along. Chitika Research, a division of the search-targeted ad network, is watching the Android space with interest, and have developed a real-time “Droid 2 Tracker.”

Free Software/Open Source

• This is a concern for some members of the FOSS community, like Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center and Software Freedom Conservancy. During the session, Kuhn expressed dismay that “too many people make money” working on FOSS funded by corporations, and not enough projects are being driven by hackers looking to scratch their own itch. Kuhn’s concerns are echoed by a number of contributors in the FOSS community, who say that a strong community should include developers who work on a project out of passion rather than for a paycheck. While Kuhn doesn’t say that projects should be without corporate contributions, he says that too many projects are initiated and driven by companies rather than growing organically and becoming useful to companies over the long run.

• Sun’s purchase by Oracle highlights some dangers of corporate-driven FOSS projects, or projects depending too deeply on corporate largess. Many projects funded by Sun have floundered since Oracle took over the company, and other efforts — such as GNOME’s accessibility work — have taken a hit because Oracle laid off the only developers paid to work on those projects full time.

Business

• Not long ago, OStatic did an examination of Business Intelligence (BI) software applications and suites, and it got a lot of notice. That’s probably because BI is one of the fastest-growing categories in the whole open source arena. In fact, when we covered the results of North Bridge Partners’ 2009 Future of Open Source Survey, I noted that many of the respondents said that they see open source Business Intelligence applications as highly likely to cause disruption in the next five years. Now, there are new signs that BI software is gaining solid entrenchment.

Leftovers

Science

• There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.

Finance

• The crisis that has led to Greece’s “rescue” by European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system that itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such, but waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Last Friday, the district court in the Western District of Washington granted the motion to intervene that the ACLU filed on behalf of our clients in the lawsuit (PDF) challenging the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s (DOR) repeated requests for Amazon’s customer records in the course of its tax audit of Amazon. These customer records reveal highly personal and intimate details of people’s lives that DOR does not actually need for its tax audit, including what books people are reading, what films they are watching, and what other private and expressive materials they are purchasing. The First Amendment bars the government from demanding and collecting this information.

• According to the complaint, each of the Clearspring affiliates independently and knowingly authorized the company to track users, even on non-Clearspring affiliated sites. A Flash-based tracking cookie was allegedly installed by the affiliate sites without users’ knowledge, and would recreate itself by digging into the Flash storage bin for the same user information if deleted. Essentially, users who were trying to remain privacy-conscious by regularly deleting their cookies were not able to rid themselves of the cookies deposited by Clearspring.

Intellectual Monopolies

• This paper makes a simple point: If sustainability (however defined) is the goal, intellectual property rights in traditional knowledge do not move us toward the achievement of that goal. The reason is that the only social policy justification for recognizing intellectual property rights at all is that they supposedly serve as an incentive to create socially desirable works of authorship and inventions. They are not and should serve as a reward for past achievements. In other words, outside of their usual incentive function of promoting new technology, intellectual property rights in traditional knowledge have no role to play in the sustainability analysis. This is not to say that traditional knowledge is irrelevant to sustainability; indeed, there is good reason to believe that much can be learned from study and implementation of traditional practices in a wide range of fields. Nor is it to say that intellectual property rights in general play no role in advancing the goal of sustainability. The incentives supplied by intellectual property rights to authors and inventors may help induce new technologies and methods for preserving what is left of the natural state of the planet and its ecosystems. The point is only that intellectual property rights in traditional knowledge can do no good (in promoting sustainability) and may do much harm, by tying up knowledge in exclusive rights that inhibit its application to sustainability (or anything else) without any compensating social gains.

Copyrights

• My message was quite simple – and remains so today. We are living in an era when “free” is decimating the music industry and is starting to do the same to film, TV and books. Yet for the world’s internet service providers, bloated by years of broadband growth, “free music” has become a multi-billion dollar bonanza. What has gone so wrong? And what can be done now to put it to right?

• To my amazement, my speech was splashed across the world media. Partly this was due to the timing – President Sarkozy of France had just become the champion of the global music industry, tabling a new law requiring the telecom companies to finally crack down on internet piracy for the first time. But there were other reasons too.

• In their recent edition, Rolling Stone Magazine has issued a thank you letter to the record label executives. Hopefully they’ll read it and get the bigger picture. It is a very wise and concise note that brings to light the changing nature in which individuals discover and spread music. Hats off to Rolling Stone for trying to get the RIAA and the music big wigs to open their eyes.

ACTA

• The WP29 observed that the current text of the ACTA at the very least encourages the implementation of the controversial three strikes policy, which requires disconnecting purported intellectual property infringers, by collaboration between Internet service providers and right holders. Even worst, this policy does not seem limited to piracy and counterfeiting, which was the initial purpose of negotiating the ACTA, but it would extend to infringement of any kind of intellectual property rights, even patents (Articles 2.18.3 and 2.18.3 quarter).

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