● 08.31.10

● Links 31/8/2010: KDE 4.5.1, Linux 2.6.36 RC3, ACTA Threat Looming

Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Corporate America is playing a cruel joke on Linux desktop. Businesses benefit from free Linux, improving their bottom line on the shoulders of Linux — all the while ignoring (and damaging I think) the Linux desktop.

• Linux servers toil in back rooms bringing big bucks to companies smart enough to use them. What do these companies install on their employees’ desktops? Windows, of course! It is no small irony that some (if not most) of Linux’s biggest beneficiaries are Linux desktop’s worst sponsors.

• This hardly seems fair, and worse, seems almost unethical. The ultimate irony is that Corporate America spurns a technology it loves — a technology poised to reap benefits much like the benefits of Linux servers.

Desktop

• The first part of that procedure is to take care of our substantial amount of E-waste we have collected.

• We have a bunch of it.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has just done a Sunday afternoon release of the Linux 2.6.36-rc3 kernel. With the merge window for the Linux 2.6.36 kernel having closed a few weeks ago, the third 2.6.36 release candidate isn’t too exciting unless you were affected by one of the kernel’s outstanding bugs.

Graphics Stack

• The NVIDIA 256.53 Linux driver release doesn’t really bring anything different from the 256.52 driver…

Applications

• Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.6 released, this new version comes with a major feature called – Desktop recovery.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Today, KDE updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1, new releases bringing a number of important bugfixes on top of 4.5.0. 4.5.0 was released only three weeks ago and receives monthly service updates. 4.5.1 is the first in this series of bugfix and translation updates. These releases improve stability and the user experience further, while not bringing major new features or bigger changes to the user interface. 4.5.1 is a safe upgrade for anybody running 4.5.0. 4.5.1 has been dubbed “Cronjob” as it is one of the regular releases published by KDE, just like a cronjob does.

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• Vyatta has announced that IDG’s InfoWorld has honored the company with a third consecutive Bossie Award.

• The 2010 Bossie Award for the Vyatta open routing and security software once again validates Vyatta’s long-standing technology leadership and provides further impetus for the industry to standardize on open source networking.

Fedora

• Let me share one example from the open source world that has blown me away. Over the years, The Fedora Project, at least from where I sit, has been a model of a leadership culture.

• I’ve watched as one great leader after another, from Michael Johnson, to Cristian Gafton, to Greg Dekoenigsberg, to Max Spevack, to Paul Frields, has finished a successful stint as Fedora Project Leader and then willing passed the baton on to the next leader in line. In fact, Paul just finished his turn as leader a few months back.

• Paul’s note announcing the new Fedora Project Leader made me happy. It articulated all three of the points above, showing leadership, humility, and a willingness to do what it takes to serve the project purpose above personal aspirations. I remember Max and Greg expressing similar sentiments as they were ending their terms as project leader.

• The concept was first introduced to me in the Fedora Project wiki. The Fedora marketing organization holds regular meetings, mostly by online chat, and they publish notes on the wiki. Their meeting guidelines mentions the Law of Two feet and asks contributors to use their best judgment in which meetings they choose whether or not to attend.

Debian Family

• Can I see myself running Ubuntu again? Sure. But I can’t see a time when I won’t have a use for more than one instance of Debian.

• Frans was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a Debian Listmaster, editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as well as a Dutch translator.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Think you all knew this already, the c-korn/vlc ppa has been removed by the author himself. You can’t live without PPAs in Ubuntu especially for most downloaded apps like VLC. Guys at LFFL have made a dedicated PPA for VLC. I just gave it a try and it worked awesome.

• The old world depends upon case studies, press releases, and such. The new world feels more fluid to me: it’s Puppet Labs’ wiki that allows users to self-identify their Puppet adoption. It’s Twitter campaigns. It’s word of mouth, individual to individual.

• After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful… So I decided to give OSS4 a try. After some googling, installing a few packages and some minor configuration, OSS4 was up and running, and I must admit the improvement in sound quality is rather significant!

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The phones combine a superior Android touchscreen experience with updated MING styling and features, and include the MT810 for China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network, the XT806 for China Telecom’s CDMA-2000 network, and the A1680 for China Unicom’s WCDMA network.

• Remember the mini Droid slider that emerged in late July? It’s back, but this time, it’s in much clearer form. Hit the jump for a few images and videos of the device in the wild, showing a very MOTOBLUR-ish UI. Thanks to Mobiflip.de, we know know that this little fella has a BACKTRACK pad (Backflip, Charm) and runs Android 2.1 under the hood.

Tablets

• You Want A Top Performer. In addition to Samsung, it’s likely that Toshiba will enter this market at the IFA show as well. Details about the Folio 100 with its 10-inch touchscreen leaked earlier this week and if correct, the specifications show a high-powered device thanks to Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor. Carrypad has benchmarked the Toshiba AC 100, a smartbook that has similar guts to the Folio 100, and found that certain performance marks exceed that of the Google Nexus One running Android 2.2 by a factor of three. The device can also flawlessly play back a 1080p video file at 13 Mbps bit rate, showing performance prowess that could sway some from an iPad to an Android tablet.

• ViewSonic have today announced the ViewPad 7, the world’s first 7″ Android tablet with phone capability. Click through to learn more…

Free Software/Open Source

• Open-Xchange software integrates e-mail, calendar, contact and task management with advanced groupware features such as information management and document sharing. Users’ productivity is enhanced through unique teamwork features, like team view, single-password document sharing, and shared calendars, contacts, tasks and documents. With mobility support, users can have access to their data anywhere, anytime and with virtually any device.

Events

• Over 20 sessions from LinuxCon 2010, held Aug. 10-12 in Boston, are now available for free online viewing courtesy of the Linux Foundation. The sessions span a wide range of topics, including: open source licensing; technical considerations pertaining to the Linux kernel, applications, and tools; server, mobile, and cloud computing issues; business considerations; panel discussions; and more.

Web Browsers

• With the GPU process in place, the developers are now able to begin accelerating the handling of some of the content in the browser. Pages are divided into multiple layers, with some being rendered on the CPU such as those containing simple text and images and some being rendered on the GPU, such as CSS styled text, images and videos or WebGL or 2D Canvases. The layers are the composited into a single page for display. Currently, the browser does this composition on the CPU, eliminating most of the performance gained with the previous use of the GPU, but if the –enable-accelerated-compositing flag is used when starting Chromium, the composition will happen within the GPU allowing the performance gains to be realised. A design document explains the new GPU accelerated rendering architecture in more detail.

Databases

• EnterpriseDB has received a strategic investment from KT (formerly Korea Telecom) and has accepted venture capital funding from new investment partner TransLink Capital.

• The new funding will enable EnterpriseDB to expand its product and marketing operations to capitalize on the upheaval in the database market caused by consolidation and an enterprise platform shift to virtualized and cloud infrastructure.

Project Releases

• Today we announce the first beta in what we hope is a very short pre-release cycle. Dharma has been in development for over 9 months now, and we’re quite happy with the result.

• The improvements are too many to name, but head over to the milestone page to get an idea. By far the biggest new feature is the Add-ons system. Our community is full of talented script-writers, skinners, and designers; we wanted XBMC to display their full potential. The result is a powerful and flexible system that allows for complete customization of the XBMC experience. Gone are the days of digging for the latest version of buggy plugins, or incomplete skins in our forums. Most of our users probably never even made it that far.

• xzibit 0.01 is now available for download. xzibit is a per-window VNC system; its development is supported by Collabora Ltd. This version is just a taster of what’s possible: there’s a fair amount more in existence that you won’t see unless you play around. More of it will be more easily visible in later releases.

Open Access/Content

• Google wouldn’t even announce its “invention” of eBooks for about 5 more years, Project Gutenberg wouldn’t have 10,000 titles for another 2 3/4 years, so just think of the changes we have in store by 2020, the next decade.

Open Hardware

• As any typical Open Source project, more people got involved and the thread hit more than 1000 posts in 2009. Then they decided to build a dedicated website for the still unnamed project. Finally, after long discussions, the project was named Apertus.

• [...]

• I think, Linux users are probably the best at understanding the importance of this project and its limitless possibilities. “Once you got used to working with a truly open system, you will suddenly realise how limiting your previous one really was”, thats exactly how I feel right now being a Linux user for the past 3 years.

Programming

• It does matter. No one should be able to use trademark law to control truthful speech about a product. The Examining Attorney in the Lua application raised this point, but it wasn’t a good enough sell for the TTAB. Indeed there is a legal theory – nominative fair use – that says one can use others’ trademarks to refer truthfully to the others’ products, but this is a judge-made doctrine, not statutory, of varying parameters in different courts, and not even accepted by all of them.

• Developed by the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a graphical programming language for children age 8 and up. Since its release in 2007, over one million projects have been shared on the site. That sharing aspect is important as projects posted are available to others to download and remix. Scratch is available free of charge, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers. For those working in Scratch, the new Scratch Wiki is a good resource.

• The R programming language could be coming to a workplace near you — if it hasn’t arrived already. The big deal about R is that it can analyze Big Data, those exploding data sets that have traditionally defied analysis.

• R is the brainchild of Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (known as “R” and “R”), academics at the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since Ihaka and Gentleman wrote the original R paper in 1993, R has become the lingua franca of analytic statistics among students, scientists, programmers and data managers.

Leftovers

• 1. WarGames WarGames is a film about a young hacker who unknowingly gains access to WOPR, a United States military supercomputer programmed to predict possible after-effects of nuclear war. He gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, initially perceiving it to be a computer game, which caused a national nuclear missile scare and nearly initiates World War III.

• But no – the story’s true, albeit with a technological twist that makes the move sound only 1% less suicidal: Murdoch’s new paper (launching ‘by the end of the year’) will be available only on tablets like the iPad. And readers will have to pay to view it. Oh, Rupert, you crazy old lunatic.

• THE RUMOUR MILL has spun out a yarn claiming that Cisco is about to buy the Voice over IP outfit Skype.

• This is unexpected as Skype is getting set to go public. For Cisco to succeed in a bid it will have to write the cheque before that happens.

• My advice to managers is to consider the value of the experience that the techies bring. With age frequently come wisdom and abilities to follow direction, mentor, and lead. Older workers also tend to be more pragmatic and loyal, and to know the importance of being team players. And ego and arrogance usually fade with age. During my tech days, I hired several programmers who were over 50. They were the steadiest performers and stayed with me through the most difficult times.

• Finally, I don’t know of any university, including the ones I teach at, that tells its engineering students what to expect in the long term or how to manage their technical careers. Perhaps it is time to let students know what lies ahead.

Science

• Despite many of the scientific disciplines mapped having more ancient origins, I have restricted the map to modern science starting from the 16th century scientific revolution.

• “Most of your sensation of speed is a visual sense, but at Bonneville it’s just a huge open plain of salt. It’s all white,” he says. “If you combine the relative lack of visibility with the lack of visual reference points and add in the control tests you have to do, you don’t quite get the sensation of speed I expected.”

Health/Nutrition

• It’s true that the FDA is charged with assuring food safety. But really, the government can’t do that. The task is too big and too complex. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to do it, because the pressures of competition force producers to make sure their goods are clean and wholesome.

Security/Aggression

• The Post article says that Lynn “puts the Homeland Security Department on notice that although it has the ‘lead’ in protecting the dot.gov and dot.com domains, the Pentagon — which includes the ultra-secret National Security Agency — should support efforts to protect critical industry networks.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In theory, carbon offsets are a way to lower the cost of emissions reductions. Credits are awarded when a project is less greenhouse gas-intensive than it would have been in the usual course. These credits can then be sold to polluters and used to satisfy their emissions reduction obligations which would have been more expensive to undertake directly. In practice critics have pointed to numerous problems with offsets. Most fundamentally, they fail to incentivise the kind of structural transformation toward a low-carbon future that we desperately need.

• The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation on Monday proposed a fuel economy label overhaul to reflect how electric and alternative fuel vehicles stack up against gasoline passenger vehicles.

• The federal agencies released two new labels that officials expect to be finalized early next year and used in 2012 model year cars. The published labels will be available for public comment for 60 days.

Finance

• The sad reality is that cheaper money won’t work. Individuals aren’t borrowing because they’re still under a huge debt load. And as their homes drop in value and their jobs and wages continue to disappear, they’re not in a position to borrow. Small businesses aren’t borrowing because they have no reason to expand. Retail business is down, construction is down, even manufacturing suppliers are losing ground.

• Since the financial crisis, Wall Street banks have gone further down market as they look to collect fees and stay competitive in the league tables.

• Silicon Valley has passed an important milestone that may mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.

• This dividing line in history was revealed this summer in the latest report from the National Venture Capital Association, which showed that 10-year returns on venture capital investments had turned negative at the end of 2009, and nose-dived during the first quarter of 2010. Let me translate what might sound like some insider mumbo jumbo: Venture capital investing, the lifeblood of the valley’s innovation economy, has become a sucker’s bet.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The ubiquity of smartphones with geolocation capabilities (i.e. the ability to pinpoint you on a map) means that we’re now starting to add our physical location to the mass of data we hand over.

• An audit of 155 of the 432 local authorities allowed to use the ­database showed that the DVLA’s ­system was accessed 750 times a day in the 2009/10 financial year.

• However, it was discovered that ­councils were using the system to track down people for a variety of offences including horse fouling, littering and owning out-of-control dogs.

• The DVLA sent out letters to chief executives of 56 authorities where ­serious breaches of the system had been uncovered and the councils received a red coded warning.

• In April I wrote a column about the secretive habits of three large police departments in Virginia’s Washington, D.C., suburbs: Fairfax County, Alexandria, and Arlington. As Connection Newspapers reporter Michael Pope showed in a series of reports that began in March, they are among the least transparent departments in the country, having interpreted Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act in a way that allows them to turn down nearly all requests for information.

• Recently there have been a couple of attempts to make Virginia’s law enforcement agencies more transparent. As I reported in June, Nicholas Beltrante, an 82-year-old former cop and Navy medic, started the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability. And in January, state Sen. John Edwards (D-Roanoke) introduced a bill that would force police to turn over public records in cases where the investigation has been completed.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• As the large telephone and cable companies continue to push fibre deeper into their old copper networks to offer increasing broadband speeds and new services to their customers, the CRTC affirmed Monday the incumbents must continue to rent space to third party ISPs under its mandated access policy and the Commission’s speed matching rules.

• My August Publishers Weekly column reports in on my experiment to see which of the major ebook stores would carry my books without DRM, and with a text disclaimer at the beginning that released readers from the crazy, abusive license agreements that most of these stores demand as a condition of purchase. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM — even though my publisher and I both asked them to.

• In the eyes of Wind’s critics, the firm is just another pawn in Mr. Sawiris’s global chess game. He has made no secret of his belief that telecommunications around the globe will inevitably be dominated by just a handful of giant firms. With Mr. Sawiris already in merger talks with Russian carrier VimpelCom Ltd. to create a sprawling telecom titan worth about $25-billion, his vision of an age of huge global providers seems near indeed.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Last week, Statistics Canada released its latest report on the commercialization of intellectual property in Canadian universities. Canada spends billions of public dollars on research funding each year and the government has been increasingly focused on how best to commercialize the results. While there are several possible approaches to doing this, the government and some universities have been focused on building patent and IP portfolios as part of a conventional commercialization strategy. The alternative could be an open access approach – encourage (or require) much of the intellectual property to be made broadly available under open licences so that multiple organizations could add value and find ways to commercialize. The universities might generate less income but would better justify the public investment in research by providing the engine for larger economic benefits.

• A new European Union-funded report has declared that buying designer goods can benefit consumers and the companies whose brands are being ripped off.

Copyrights

• Music lovers take note: the classical music archive Musopen needs your help to liberate some classic symphonies from copyright entanglement. Museopen is looking to solve a difficult problem: while symphonies written by Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky are in the public domain, many modern arrangements and sound recordings of those works are copyrighted. That means that even after purchasing a CD or collection of MP3s of this music, you may not be able to freely exercise all the rights you’d associate with works in the public domain, like sharing the music using a peer-to-peer network or using the music in a film project.

• Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley has a world of trouble on his mind, and he hopes that Congress will lighten his load… by gutting the best part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Defending his copyrights in the digital age is just too hard for Henley and his labels, because it requires constant vigilance of both mainstream user-upload sites like YouTube and dodgier destinations like BitTorrent trackers.

• John Mellencamp, known for such ’80s hits as “Jack and Diane” and “Hurts So Good,” last week said the Web is the most dangerous creation since the atomic bomb. Stevie Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac songstress, concluded in an interview this week that the “Internet has destroyed rock.”

• Another odd chapter in NBC’s mixed viral video history: it can’t post two of the clips that have the best chance of catching on from the 2010 Emmys. Host Jimmy Fallon knocked it out of the park with an energetic Glee-esque opener to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, a mixed pre-taped and live-action number featuring Jane Lynch, Glee kids, Jon Hamm, Tina Fey, and a cameo by Tim Gunn that quickly got social media buzz. The clip should have been online before the next commercial break for NBC (NYSE: GE) to take advantage of that buzz—and to take ownership before others started passing it around.

• Just three days after filmmaker Simon Klose started a fundraiser to complete his upcoming Pirate Bay documentary, the seed funding goal of $25,000 has already been reached. The Pirate audience has been extremely generous, with a full 27 days left the counter currently sits at $28,099.

• Dubbed “the Ipod Minister,” Moore was one of the ‘forces’ behind last year’s Copyright Consultation and this year’s Digital Economy Consultation. Still, Minister Moore’s technical savvy seems limited to purchasing and promoting Apple products; this letter incident highlights Moore’s woeful lack of technical expertise, which ought to make him a poor choice to occupy a position of power over Canada’s digital economy or copyright reform.

• Canadians deserve to have legislators who at least understand the issues.

• A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain.

• Righthaven LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of infringement.

• Until now, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson’s sole announced client had been Nevada-based Stephens Media. Righthaven has issued more than 100 lawsuits since its spring inception on behalf of the Las Vegas Review Journal — Stephens’ flagship.

• Canadian Copyright is already strong enough to deal with nearly all legitimate interests of copyright holders. Bill C-32 doesn’t modernize copyright beyond the level it obtained in 1997, but largely pushes forward controversial ideas that originated prior to 1997. I believe that current Canadian copyright is better than it will be under C-32. While I think that modernizing Copyright is a good idea, I don’t believe C-32 moves towards that goal.

• “I think it’s important to lay down a marker about how the Obama administration views this issue,” he said of online copyright infringement. “As Vice President Biden has said on more than one occasion, ‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.”

ACTA

• Representatives from the United States Trade Representatives’ office told Reuters that the U.S. wished to resolve all remaining issues at these September talks. The exact date and location for these talks has not been released to the public, nor was a draft of the agreement after the last round of talks in Switzerland.

• Political uncertainty in Australia may hamper its role in approving a final ACTA draft, as the nation awaits negotiations between the two major parties and independents to determine whether the ALP or the Coalition will form government.

• Earlier this month, we noted that officials working within ACTA are saying that September is when the negotiations will be finalized. Another report has surfaced that seems to confirm these intentions.

• ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has had quite a roller-coaster of a ride over the years it was being negotiated. Negotiations started as far back as 2007, but we only heard about it part way through 2008 when one of the now earliest versions of the agreement leaked on to Wikileaks. By comparison to before, it must have been nice to work under the total veil of secrecy with no PR backlash working against the negotiators.

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