● 09.06.10

● Links 6/9/2010: AUSTRUMI Reviewed, Linux Mint 9 Fluxbox Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When talking about Linux, it helps to distinguish what kind of Linux you are referring to. The core Linux kernel is amazingly capable and flexible, and has made its way into as many devices as there are CPUs to power them. It’s important to take note that Linux on the server is a world of difference away from Linux on the desktop, in both purpose, use, and functionality.

Desktop

• What this means is that at this point in time, the statistics that have been made available regarding the market share that Linux currently holds cannot possibly be accurate. You cannot measure how many users have wiped their Windows systems off their computers to install Linux. You cannot know how many individuals have began using Linux as a result of a friend giving them a disk or coming to their home and installing Linux, which by the way is how I first got introduced to Linux, when a friend gave me a disk and helped me to install Linux.

• What the statistics do tell us is that a 1% market share margin for Linux can be confirmed. The numbers cannot account for all the undocumented installs and uses of Linux. Also the numbers do not account for all the computers that came pre-installed with Windows and were later formated and replaced with Linux.

• One thing is sure: when my Linux computer finally stops working, at least I will know that my OS did everything possible to keep it alive. Windows, on the other hand, just tells you that your computer is not “good enough” to run the OS. But I learned that, for Microsoft, no currently available computer is good enough to run the latest version of Windows anyway. Mark my words: your nice computer running 7 today will be “obsolete” by the time Microsoft releases Windows 8. However, we know that, although some of the hardware might have become “older”, what is actually obsolete for the Redmond software company is their OS, not the computer itself. And they have no regrets about spending any amount of money to fool you into believing that your hardware is to be blamed!

• I have a few moments this morning, and I’ve been stacking up screenshots just for kicks. Here are a few from the slowest machine in the house — a 120Mhz Pentium Classic running Crux Linux on 80Mb at 800×600.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• It was three years ago on this day that we were the first to detail AMD’s open-source strategy. Yep, it’s only been three years since AMD became public with pushing out NDA-free GPU documentation and register specifications, open-source code for the xf86-video-ati and Mesa drivers, and employed a small set of developers to contribute towards their open-source Linux stack. It was also three years ago from this month that the now deceased RadeonHD driver was launched.

Applications

• Cardapio can work in two modes: as a panel applet (in which case it is an alternative to Gnome’s application menu applet) or as a stand-alone launcher (in which case it is an alternative to the simplest use-cases of Gnome Do). It has a beautiful gtk-native interface and includes plugins for performing inline searches of Files (via Tracker), Software Center, Google, Wikipedia, and much more!

• Anamnesis can be used both via command line and with a GUI. It doesn’t come with a notification area icon / appindicator and can only be triggered by using a keyboard shortcut – but as I’ve read in the comments to our “Best Linux Clipboard Manager” post, a lot of you want this feature in a clipboard manager. If so, maybe Anamnesis is what you’re looking for!

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

• Although I am one to prefer a clutter-free, minimalist desktop, I know the majority of users prefer a much more standard, fast-access type of desktop. This means icons. Not the kind of icons you see on many users desktops (you know the ones, where there are so many icons it’s impossible to make sense of what is there), but icons that allow you to launch the applications you use most often.

• With KDE and GNOME there are different ways to add icons. With one desktop, the process is very obvious. With the others? Not so much. In this article I am going to show you the process for adding desktop icons (aka launchers) to two of the most popular Linux desktops: KDE and GNOME.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

GNOME Desktop

• First Siegfried managed to fix the startup time by creating an extension for Zeitgeist that populates the histogram in the bottom. Querying events for 90 in days in one query per day makes itself noticeable, so his approach of a dedicated API from zeitgeist was the best solution. However it did not improve the navigation time.

Distributions

Reviews

• Unfortunately, the GUI and speed aren’t enough to make me recommend this distro, at least not for regular use. The auto-login problem and unusual installer lead me to believe this isn’t so much a distribution for day-to-day work as it is a strong demo. It can show people unfamiliar with open source how fast and flexible Linux can be. That in itself, I feel, is enough to suggest a look at this distribution.

• After a lazy weekend where I tended to my aquariums and spent time with the kids I really enjoyed taking some time with Elzje and PCLOS LXDE.

• The fact that it was so surprisingly likeable rounds off this series nicely for me. It is good to end a project like this on a high note, and PCLOS LXDE did that.

• We have taken much longer than the original envisioned seven days. In this entry we decide on the best distro in each of the following categories: Grandma Distro, Elzje’s Favorite, Quintins Favorite, Best Utility Distro/Best USB Boot Disk, Best Ultra lightweight Distro.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 9 Fluxbox.

Free Software/Open Source

• Uriel Deveaud posted this story on BlenderArtists, it’s telling his experience of teaching Blender & Gimp to 4-8th grade kids from the villages in India.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Pieces keep fitting in for the Firefox 4 theme refresh. Recent development nightlies now feature the planned stop-reload-go button next to the location bar.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• To orchestrate change you need someone who can balance vision with pragmatism. In Eben Moglen the proponents choreographing the software patents debate have such a leader. A keynote speaker at the recent seminar on “Software Patents and the Commons” in New Delhi, India, Moglen, the chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, looked at the patents issue engulfing the free software world from a different perspective.

• Side stepping software patents, Moglen instead talked about the rise of Commons (umbrella term for all resources that are collectively owned) in the new digital economy, and the impending death of ownership.

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

• We worked with the Internet Archive and with Carl Malamud at public.resource.org. We built a system where users could download the RECAP plug-in and install it. While they used PACER, any time they purchased a docket or a PDF, whether it was a brief, an opinion or any motion, it automatically gets uploaded into our central repository in the background.

• The quid pro quo in that, as you’re using the RECAP plug-in, if we already have a document that has been uploaded by another user, that gets shown to you in PACER to say, “Hey, we already have a copy. Instead of purchasing another copy for $.08 or whatever it’ll cost you, just get it from us for free.”

• We now have about 2.2 million PACER documents in our system, which is actually a small fraction of the total number of documents in the PACER system. The PACER administrative office claims that there are about 500 million documents in PACER, with 5 million being added every month. So 2.2 million is actually a pretty small number of documents, by percentage.

Leftovers

• There were no reporters present in Laurel, Miss. when a jury handed down a $131 million verdict against Ford after an Explorer rolled over, killing a young man who was on track to play baseball for the New York Mets. Hours after the verdict, there was no coverage of a case that involved a high profile victim, a major corporation, and the possibility that more than four million Ford Explorers are dangerously unstable.

• Adam Penenberg heard about the verdict immediately from the defense lawyer. Hours later, he was amazed to see there had been no major media coverage at all. So he turned to Twitter.

• From 4chan — which has given birth to most of the Internet “memes” that many users are likely familiar with, including LOLcats and the RickRoll — the idea spread to other social networking sites such as Reddit, as well as Tumblr and even Facebook. A recent check showed that the account someone set up for Mr. Lashua’s birthday had 3,956 “likes” and over 500 comments, most of which were wishing him a happy birthday and thanking him for his military service. Someone on Reddit noted that in contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members “were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes” and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. “They were all being.. well, shucks… awful nice.”

Science

• One of the big, unsolved problems in explaining how life arose on Earth is a chicken-and-egg paradox: How could the basic biochemicals—such as amino acids and nucleotides—have arisen before the biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes) existed to carry out their formation?

• In a paper appearing in the current issue of The Biological Bulletin, scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents.

Security/Aggression

• EVEN AS President Obama claimed this week that the end of combat operations in Iraq “completes’’ a transition in which Iraqis have taken responsibility for their own security, he knows that the US pullout is not as thorough as he let on. The American presence takes the form not just of uniformed personnel — tens of thousands of whom will remain — but also of largely unaccountable private security contractors, whose numbers are likely to grow.

• The number of US troops in Iraq peaked at 169,000 in 2007, and by following through on a planned withdrawal Obama has at least signficantly lowered America’s official exposure. This is no small step in a war that President Bush began under false pretenses and that has cost the lives of more than 4,400 American soldiers, 10,000 members of Iraq’s security forces, and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

• An 84 year-old WWII veteran was riding his bike along the pavement in Sale, Greater Manchester when two Police Community Support Officers spotted him and promptly chased after him.

• The personal details of thousands of football fans who bought World Cup tickets from official FIFA outlets have been stolen and sold for up to £500,000.

• Investigators are now trying to establish who purchased the information, which includes the passport details and dates of birth of up to 250,000 supporters, amid concerns it could have fallen into the hands of criminal gangs or even terrorist groups.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Two anti-whaling activists were today found guilty of theft and trespass while attempting to expose embezzlement in Japan’s heavily subsidised whaling industry.

• Greenpeace members Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were each sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for three years. Prosecutors had sought 18-month terms for the “Tokyo Two”.

Finance

• Two years after the financial crisis began, foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are on an uptick. Milwaukee is seeing a steady rate of about 500 foreclosures a month, while in Wisconsin as a whole, August filings jumped 14% from this time last year. These are not families taking a loss on pricey investment homes; these are families that are being forced out of their modest homes and communities in a daily tragedy that is spreading well into the middleclass outer-ring suburbs.

• The former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who retired last week after 40 years at the central bank, says that the economy is in “a slow slog out of a very deep hole,” and that the Fed should consider additional stimulus unless the recovery shows signs of “decent progress.”

• Group of 20 leaders should use their November summit to make a serious push for the conclusion of stalled global trade negotiations, the head of the WTO said Monday.

• World Trade Organization talks aimed at a new global commerce pact – the so-called Doha round named after Qatar’s capital where the negotiations were launched in 2001 – have been unable to secure a final deal amid disagreement between developed and emerging economies over trade rules applying to agricultural and industrial goods.

• Under mounting pressure to intensify his focus on the economy ahead of the midterm elections, President Obama will call for a $100 billion business tax credit this week, using a speech in Cleveland on Wednesday to launch what administration officials said was a new policy push.

• A Chinese official defended the country’s trade record Monday as a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama visited Beijing amid renewed pressure by American lawmakers over Chinese currency controls.

• China’s deputy trade envoy, Chong Quan, rejected complaints that Beijing intentionally boosts its trade surplus by promoting exports while holding down imports. Speaking at a trade forum, Chong repeated promises to boost imports of resources and high-tech equipment and to ease costs for importers but announced no new initiatives.

• Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay – or none at all.

• Seeking ways to spur economic growth ahead of the November elections, President Barack Obama will ask Congress to increase and permanently extend research and development tax credits for businesses, a White House official said Sunday.

• Obama will outline the $100 billion proposal during a speech on the economy Wednesday in Cleveland, the official said. The announcement is expected to be the first in a series of new measures Obama will propose this fall as the administration looks to jump-start an economy that the president himself has said isn’t growing fast enough.

• There are a lot of things Congress doesn’t know right now. What to do about jobs, for instance. Who’ll be running the House come January. How to balance the budget. But there is one thing that both parties increasingly seem to agree on: You should work longer.

• Republicans are hoping to capitalize on voters’ economic disillusionment, frustration with Obama and tea party-generated enthusiasm.

• Democrats are relying on a financial advantage, a robust get-out-the-vote operation and, mostly, the ghost of George W. Bush to curb an expected Nov. 2 shellacking.

• World stock markets advanced modestly Monday as investors rode momentum from Friday, when an upbeat U.S. jobs report eased fears that the global economy could slip back into recession.

• With Wall Street closed for a holiday, however, trading was expected to remain light.

• The one described in the following reality-TV-show pitch sent to Gawker, about a “female player” who is dating four guys at once, including a Maserati-owning “34 year old Asian American VP at Goldman Sachs,” who is probably going to be identified and Atomic- wedgied by his colleagues … oh, right around now.

• Please, before you even consider getting your fingers all warmed up and to send a response saying, “Who the heck cares about anyone at Goldman Sachs at the moment? I lost half the value of my retirement fund and they are all the cause of it,” hear TWO points.

• First, the point of this piece is NOT to seek acknowledgment for these women, but for women in general. Bloomberg Markets took the time to write a COVER article on Goldman Alumni and did not do their homework. The media in general, and this article in particular, had the opportunity to make women leaders VISIBLE and they chose not to. Worse yet it was written by two women who one might think would be sensitive to the lack of women’s faces in articles such as these. I am taking the time by writing this to hold them accountable and to tell them they let us down.

• Lingering Lehman lessons. Dick Fuld, former chief executive of the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers, testified Wednesday morning that the government wrongly discriminated against his firm in forcing it to go bankrupt. Meanwhile, Lehman’s estate is investigating hedge fund operators that it suspects of encouraging Lehman’s demise.

• Nearly two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, some on Wall Street still wonder whether a handful of the nation’s most powerful hedge funds conspired to push the 158-year-old financial giant into bankruptcy while making big profits for themselves.

• Now, in search of a smoking gun, a law firm hired by the estate of Lehman Brothers Holdings has demanded trading records, e-mail and other correspondence for all of 2008 from a collection of prominent hedge funds and the venerable Goldman Sachs.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. spend $1.58 million in the second quarter to lobby the federal government on issues related to the financial regulatory overhaul that President Obama signed in July.

• The amount is more than double the company spent during the same quarter last year, $630,000.

• Jim Cramer posted an article on RealMoney, which is a part of theStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM), this afternoon entitled “Goldman’s Looking Tarnished.” This seems important. First, Cramer has previously been a believer in the stock and is also a former employee of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS). It was Goldman who gave Cramer his shot on Wall Street, and where he says he “learned the ropes” of the securities business. Now he is bailing on the firm.

• Axa, the French insurance and wealth management group, more than halved its stake in Goldman Sachs during the last quarter.

• Getting rid of Goldman. What had been Goldman Sachs’ biggest shareholder, the French insurer AXA, dumped half of its shares as the Wall Street firm dealt with a government lawsuit and public scrutiny.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc is closing its principal strategies desk as U.S. regulators try to limit trading risk that major banks take with their money, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

• In the post-TARP era, “sell night,” the Street’s annual August ritual of hosting steak dinners and strip-club expeditions, is over

• Antonio Garcia-Martinez was a PhD physics student at Berkeley when Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) got its hooks in him. He ended up signing on as a pricing quant on Goldman’s credit and equity trading floors, modeling credit-default swaps and other various weapons of financial destruction (I’m kidding). He left after a few years and now is trying to get a startup running. Fortunately for us, he’s written an eye-opening post about what’s it’s really like to work as a quant–burger eating contests and all–at Goldman Sachs.

• Some excerpts:

• “Giving sophisticated models and fast computers to traders is like giving handguns and tequila to teenage boys. Only complete mayhem can result (and as we saw recently, complete mayhem did result).”

• Outwardly Goldman Sachs might like to portray an image of nonchalance and disdain for the world at large. But inwardly, it is just as concerned with how it is viewed as the rest of us.

• The U.S. panel investigating the causes of the financial crisis issued a subpoena to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. after the Wall Street firm failed to hand over documents in a “timely manner.” The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission “has made it clear that it is committed to using its subpoena power” if firms under review don’t comply with information requests, the panel said in a statement today.

• The new Wall Street reform has gone a long way to prevent the kind of recklessness and financial sector meltdown that collapsed the economy and cost eight million Americans their jobs. Democrats passed that bill over virtually unanimous Republican opposition, on the strength of massive public support. There is plenty of political support among the voters to take the next step and break up the monopoly power of the big Wall Street Banks.

• After all, the only way to completely guarantee that no financial institution is ever again “too big to fail” is to invoke the yardstick that if it’s too big to fail, it’s simply too big.

• For a long time a group of sharp guys and gals on Wall Street have run one hell of a game on everyday Americans. We’ve been played for chumps. Isn’t it time for us to wake up and end a system where a few Wall Street Bankers have a license to siphon money out of the pockets of the middle class?

• Officials in Afghanistan are resisting US pressure for a wide-ranging clean-up of Kabul Bank, which is mired in allegations of corruption that have engulfed some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country.

• Many of the jokes at Wall Street’s expense this past year have been aimed directly at Goldman Sachs.

• They’ve been delightful, but we think the bubble has burst.

• Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when she meets with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: “so Lloyd, are you still selling securities that are designed to fail?” Or with Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf: “have you stopped juggling customer late fees to maximize the pain for consumers?” These are just some of the big bank tricks featured in our last column.

PR

• Everyone likes to imagine they are rational, fair, and free from prejudice. But how easily are we misled by appearances? Noola Griffiths studies the psychology of music, and she’s published a cracking paper on how what women wear affects your judgment of their performance. The results are predictable but the context is interesting.

• A new right-wing group, “American Action Network,” has entered the 2010 election with ads attacking Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin. The American Action Network (AAN) was created by right-wing politicians and their funders around the time the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United decision that expanded corporate rights to spend more money than ever influencing elections. AAN does not disclose its funding sources for the $25 million it plans to spend this fall, but its board is filled with politicians and millionaire businessmen on the right.

• Old tobacco industry PR flacks don’t go away, they just defend different products for money. So it is for former Tobacco Institute spokesman Thomas Lauria, who is now defending bottled water.

• Seems benign enough. After all, fighting for water — even in an over-commercialized, overpriced and polluting form — instead of cigarettes would seem to be an improvement for Lauria. But just as he battled efforts to educate people about the health hazards of secondhand smoke, Lauria is now battling efforts to educate people about the hoax that is bottled water.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• These days, Craig and the company he founded are being demonized in courts of political and media power as sex peddlers. The service — which Craig is quick to point out, he does not run; he means it when he says he is its customer-service representative — just took down its adult ads in the U.S., replacing the link with the word “censored.”

• The argument has been that craigslist ads are used to serve human sex trafficking. Except craigslist has been openly and consistently helping police in their efforts to arrest traffickers. The adult ads were paid and more trackable than free personals on craigslist or ads in many other places online and in print. Now the trade, whatever its scale, is only more distributed. Gawker has a guide to post-craigslist paid sex and craigslist has pointed out that even eBay has sold party favors of another sort.

• Two people familiar with the site’s internal politics, who asked for anonymity to discuss them, say that moves are already afoot to restrict Assange’s role. One of them says some activists, concerned that Assange had misused WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed to suggest the Swedish investigation was the product of “dirty tricks,” are discussing whether to limit his access to the service. Since the sex probe was originally opened on Aug. 20, the Web site has been down for “scheduled maintenance” on multiple occasions.

• Fidel Castro is back from the dead (his words) and has been reincarnated as an Internet junkie. Not only is he a prolific blogger on Cuba’s online Granma newspaper but, it turns out, the 84-year-old greybeard consumes 200 to 300 news items a day on the Web and is fascinated by the WikiLeaks site, with its trove of 90,000 formerly secret U.S. documents on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The Metropolitan Police is to examine new evidence about the extent of phone hacking involving journalists on the News of the World.

• Assistant Commissioner John Yates told the BBC new information had emerged that would be considered by the police.

• Former reporter Sean Hoare has claimed the paper’s former editor, Andy Coulson, asked him to hack into phones.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A company has sued Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle, claiming she reprinted two Las Vegas Review-Journal articles on her campaign website without permission.

ACTA

• The negotiating text emerging from 10th round ACTA negotiations in Washington DC (August 16-20, 2010) was not shared with the public because the United States successfully opposed its release. The US was the only negotiating party to have taken this position on transparency.

• Knowledge Ecology International has posted the latest leaked version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) text, the Washington DC August 2010 text. The following statement can be attributed to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII):

• “We are disappointed the EU still wants punitive measures against patent infringements in ACTA. The FFII analysis shows punitive measures do not work in fields where infringement is often unavoidable.

• The software field is plagued by patents. Holders of huge patent portfolios may decide to eliminate competition from startups, small and medium sized enterprises and open source projects, on their own, or by using a proxy, a patent troll. Patent trolls acquire excessive power. This is bad for the European small and medium sized enterprises, which provide for most of Europe’s employment.

• Perhaps the most important story of the latest draft is how the countries are close to agreement on the Internet enforcement chapter. The Internet enforcement chapter has been among the most contentious since the U.S. first proposed draft language that would have globalized the DMCA and raised the prospect of three strikes and you’re out. In the face of opposition, the U.S. has dropped its demands on secondary liability but is still holding out hope of establishing digital lock rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by its own courts.

Digital Economy (UK)

• The music industry scored a controversial success in April when the last government passed the Digital Economy Act, which would sanction the removal of people’s internet connections if they were suspected of sharing copyrighted music online.

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