● 09.09.10

● Links 9/9/2010: PlayStation 3 Shuts Again

Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You probably interact with Linux on a daily basis without realizing it. Around 50% of the Internet uses Linux to serve websites and perform other web server tasks. Linux is the preferred server OS choice for smaller businesses and organizations because Windows server 2008 web server alone costs several hundred dollars. Other versions of Windows Server 2008 cost over $1,000 with only a few user licenses.

• The next big feature of virtual machines is the ability to migrate them from one piece of hardware to another. In a recent FLOSS Weekly episode the guys from Virtual Box discussed a test they do by pushing a virtual machine around the office. The test isn’t successful until they have pushed the machine from all of the major operating systems in a big circle. This is a silly example, but if you had a server in one data-center that needed to be shut down for maintenance you could easily push the virtual machine either across the data-center or around the world. This technology makes it easy to get the machine to a safely running system with no issues.

• Sony has closed a loophole that allowed users to run software that enables pirated games to be played on the PS3 console.

• So the good news is that Microsoft (owner of Hotmail) may be the motivation for her to move to Linux. Don’t you just love the irony?!

• What’s the opposite of “Conclusion”?

Kernel Space

Graphics Items

• Cairo 1.10 is a recommended upgrade for all users as it brings many new features and improvements. Cairo 1.10 introduces a new image back-end that’s designed to be much faster with polygon rasterization and the tessellator has been overhauled. This image back-end is not just faster but more visually perfect with the elimination of visual artifacts.

• While Unigine Corp has been busy finishing up their first in-house game, OilRush, they haven’t stopped work on further refining their upstream game engine. Unigine Corp has just reported on some of the most recent advancements to the Unigine Engine, which includes many enhancements and an updated terrain system.

Applications

• Have you run a virus scan lately? Nope? Don’t need to, you say. That’s because you run a Linux OS.

• Think again. To quote the title line of Bob Dylan’s third studio album, “the times they are a-changin.’”

• Yes they are. And part of that change is the greater risk of malware attacks to the Linux operating system. It used to be that Linux was so iron-clad safe security-wise that virus intrusions did not exist.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The 2D multiplayer shooter project Warp Speed had its second alpha release last month…

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• It is about time I blogged again. So I will just blabber out what I was doing for the last two days: Facets – again. Why again? Well, this is my third attempt at creating a generic facet framework for KDE and the fifth in total I think. Alessandro Sivieri started writing smart facets in his GSoC project 2009 (yes, I will write a summary of GSoC 2010 – I will get there eventually), then continued with a simplified version in his SemBrowser. Then I stepped in, trying to make his facets generic by separating GUI from core which looked nice in the beginning but eventually failed since certain things could not be solved when separating GUI and core. In the end I decided that Facets are a very GUI kind of thing and went back to Alessandro’s SemBrowser design of facets: each facet is a QWidget.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Studies have shown that investors who buy stocks after hitting yearly highs during a bull market achieve higher average returns that the broad market indexes. This is a great example of the trader adage that “the trend is your friend.” However, these historical results are based on large averages—and some bullish momentum in the market. It is much more difficult to say whether RHT, as a single stock, will continue to hit new highs. But for the time being, things look promising.

Fedora

Debian Family

• Reading the Debian Planet, I stumbled upon a blog post which states that Chromium Browser has been removed from Debian Testing which means it won’t be included in Debian Squeeze, the next stable Debian release.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Notice: In Lubuntu 10.10 Beta 1 (and probably 10.04) Chromium seems to be looping when sending an automatic bug report. Please try it either manually or use another browser like firefox.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Android and Chrome OS are directly based on Linux and wouldn’t exist without previous Linux development. The team at Canonical helped develop Chrome OS, under contract, and I doubt whether Google would have proceeded with that operating system without being able to assure hardware compatibility and other important things through long-standing previous software development.

Free Software/Open Source

• Olliance Group and DLA Piper are proud to announce that Airbus, a European consortium producing the Airbus family of passenger aircraft will present a business case with the support of the Eclipse Foundation at the Think Tank Sept 28 & 29. Among the topics to be addressed are; long-term community support models, shared innovation between industry, vendors and the community, and open source in supply chain management. With more than five years of strategic use of open source, Airbus will present sophisticated questions for the Think Tank audience to deliberate.

Events

• For those interested in the X Developers’ Summit (XDS) that is taking place next week at a tobacco factory in France, a tentative schedule has now been published by Matthieu Herrb for the 50 or so people that will be participating in the summit.

Oracle

• OOO330 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.3.x releases.

• If you find issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org’s bug tracking system IssueTracker.

CMS

• According to Jo Wouters, Drupal was just featured on “De Canvascrack”, a quiz on Belgian television. I know it is a quiz, but I don’t think Drupal has ever been featured on television in such a mainstream way. Cool!

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSFE Newsletter – September 2010

Government

• The ailing National Programme for IT has been cancelled, although most of its multi-billion pound spending will go ahead.

• A statement from the Department of Health said a shift to more local procurement would work better, “whilst continuing with national applications already procured”.

• The Europe Union institutions copy more elements from the United States than I believe suit the dignity of the European Union. Even the “e pluribus unum“, you may also find that on the US seal, though the current US motto is “In God we trust”, ironically the EU started a competition to come up with a translation of the Latin phrase in its 27 member languages, and even reverse-translated it to Latin, in an odd fashion “In varietate concordia”.

Licensing

• The Linux Foundation used this year’s LinuxCon in Boston to launch its new Open Compliance Program, aimed at making it easier for companies that are new to using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to ensure that their products comply with open source licensing.

Leftovers

Science

• Martian soil could contain the building blocks of carbon-based life after all, a new study suggests, despite the negative results of an analysis performed by the Viking missions 34 years ago.

• When the Viking landers touched down on Mars in 1976 and scooped up soil samples, scientists were surprised that the two craft failed to unearth evidence that the Red Planet contained any organic compounds. The apparent lack of organic molecules — a basic requirement for carbon-based organisms — helped to cement the notion of Mars as an entity that would not easily support life.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

• At issue now, however, are the steep decline rates observed from shale natural gas wells. Don’t these decline curves imply, axiomatically, that the new miracle of shale natural gas production is doomed?

Finance

• Rome school district with its 150,000 children, and a cafeteria budget of 140 million euros (or $180.5 million), has already pushed the boundary of healthy food to even greater heights.

• If there is one city that has done the most to shape the Ministry’s guidelines, it is Rome. The city served its first organic menu in late 2007.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• This morning, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia issued its highly anticipated ruling in a hotly contested cell phone location privacy case. EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief and participated at oral argument in the case, arguing that federal electronic privacy law gives judges the discretion to deny government requests for cell phone location data when the government fails to show probable cause that a crime has been committed.

• A senior official at the Federal Trade Commission hinted on Wednesday that the agency is planning to prod online advertisers and Web companies to adopt new education tools and data-collection restrictions in an effort to protect consumer privacy.

• “Right now the consumers really don’t understand what’s going on. So I think that is the real issue that needs to be addressed,” Loretta Garrison, a senior attorney at the FTC, said here at the O’Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit. “We think they sort of know they’re being tracked, but they don’t really understand the wealth of information that’s being collected and the many different parties that are involved and the various ways in which [information] is being used.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The film industry is using pirate tactics to beat the pirates – by employing “cyber hitmen” to launch attacks that take out websites hosting illegal movies.

• A notorious Switzerland-based anti-piracy tracking company has to stop harvesting the IP addresses of citizens using P2P networks. The Swiss High Court ruled that IP addresses constitute personal information and when Logistep collected them without the owner’s knowledge, that amounted to a breach of privacy laws. From its eDonkey Razorback beginnings, via France through to yesterday’s conclusion, here is the full story.

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