● 09.18.10

● Links 18/9/2010: GNU/Linux in Dell China, Wine 1.3.3, Mageia (Mandriva Fork) Launched

Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Want a finished product not requiring installation? Why not buy a PC with GNU/Linux installed for presents. Recipients will remember your generosity for years of trouble-free use and top performance.

Desktop

• Late last year I did a posting detailing how Windows 7 crushed Ubuntu 9.10 in the area of 3D performance. Nine months later I am happy to say:

• Linux out performs Windows 7 in OpenGL benchmarks!

• Dell, in China, has no qualms about putting Ubuntu before consumers. On their site they do “recommend that other OS” according to Google Translate but the Mini-10 comes in two models, one with Ubuntu and one with that other OS. That other OS is RM100 higher price. They even have N series with FreeDOS or “Linux Ubuntu 9.10“. Isn’t the outside of the USA a different world?

Ballnux

• In it, a man and a woman are both lounging by the pool trying to read. But the man is having trouble reading on his iPad (which starts at $499) in the sunlight. He leans over to ask the woman how she is able to keep reading “in this light.”

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The X.Org Developers’ Summit in Toulouse, France just ended and it’s time in the morning to head to Oktoberfest to meet with many Phoronix readers at this annual outing. XDS 2010 turned out to be a wonderful event and more organized than some X.Org events in the past. Thanks to the wonderful organization by Matthieu Herrb, the venue itself was nice, the social event last night was terrific, the Internet and power at the event was plenty, etc. Stay tuned for Phoronix notes and some audio/video recordings to be published in the coming days, beyond what has already been reported. At XDS 2010 it was also brought up where to host XDS 2011.

• It was brought up whether to host the 2011 X.Org Developers’ Summit in Brazil, simply on the basis of the X.Org events usually being in the United States or Europe, even though that’s where a vast majority of the X.Org developers are located. No real reasons in favor of an XDS Brazil event were provided and there isn’t even any X.Org developers presently living in Brazil that could organize such an event. There were plenty of concerns though regarding the cost of transportation, the time needed to fly to Brazil for both Americans and Europeans, and just the overall location being inconvenient for everyone.

• The last talk of the 2010 X.Org Developers’ Summit was regarding X.Org Server 1.10. The good news is that nearly every X.Org graphics driver will not be merged back into the xorg-server repository.

Applications

Wine

• The Wine development release 1.3.3 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): – Improved support for right-to-left text. – Support for CMYK JPEG images. – Beginnings of a Game Explorer implementation. – Improved 64-bit support in MSI. – Stub inetcpl control panel applet. – A number of fixes to crypto support. – Translation updates. – Various bug fixes.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don’t think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

• The Mandriva Linux distribution has been forked by a number of Mandriva contributors with the fate of this distribution formerly known as Mandrake being unknown due to financial troubles and layoffs facing Mandriva’s parent company. This new forked version of Mandriva is being called Mageia.

Red Hat Family

• UBS strategist Thomas Doerflinger says in the note that the forces driving M&A activity include the economic slowdown and low interest rates. Also, the potential buyers have strong balance sheets and ample cash.

• Red Hat’s market cap is close to $7.3 billion. The company employs about 2,800 worldwide.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’m not talking about valid criticism or difference in philosophy either, I’m talking about people who personally attack rms and/or simply lie about the FSF (ala recent attempts to suggest the FSF supports software patents to attack non-GPL software [1][2]).

• I’m not sure how the Self-Loathing Free Software User gained traction in Ubuntu (or in any community for that matter), but it seems at odds with the messaging coming from Mr. Shuttleworth.

Devices/Embedded

• These forecasts not only predict a growing number of devices being used by consumers, but also a growing amount of online content to feed those devices. Taken together, these projections create an optimistic short-term picture for the ereader market.

• Turning to this week’s news: we’ve got announcements from Elonex, Ectaco, and Velocity Micro, as well as an update on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Free Software/Open Source

• Earlier in the year Linux Australia approved a grant for the production of a research note on the Trade Practices Implications of Infringing Copies of Open Source Software. The note has been completed and reviewed by the Linux Australia committee and is now ready for open release.

• The main finding of the research is that a vendor selling an infringing copy of open source software is likely to be in breach of at least one section of Part V the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) relating to misleading or deceptive statements or conduct, and likely more than one. There are many cases in which such breaches have been found in relation to infringing copies of software. Even where a vendor only offers to sell (as opposed to actually selling) an infringing copy they are still likely to be in breach of the Act.

• Netcraft reports that Apache has 66% share of the servers on the million busiest sites, 57% of all sites (up 1% which Apache stole from M$ last month), Since this demonstrates FLOSS works, it’s hard to see whence all the doom and gloom for GNU/Linux on the desktop comes.

Databases

• “NoSQL” is a label which encompasses a wave of innovation now happening in the database space. The NoSQL movement has sparked a whirlwind of discussion, debate, and excitement in the technical community. Why is NoSQL generating so much buzz? What does it mean for you, the application developer? And what place does NoSQL have for apps running on the Heroku platform?

CMS

Education

• We have all read articles with 5 or 10 reasons to love/hate some facet of IT. I thought I would go for 50. It is not hard. What is hard is putting them in order of importance/preference. The first few are easy. The last few are a coin-flip, but there are many reasons to love GNU/Linux in education.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Other things that encourage both my use and support of free software are the heavy handed application of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Technical Protection Measures (TPM). These are methods employed in hardware and software to force your tech stuff to be subservient to the manufacturer. In many if not most cases DRM/TPM result in degrading the hardware or software, sometimes making it difficult to use, sometimes just crippling it so that things that should work don’t, and sometimes breaking it so that it doesn’t work at all. It used to be inadvertent “bugs” were the biggest problem in running software. Today it’s deliberate DRM. I suppose you could put DRM on free software but people would know what it was and correct it out. As far as I’m concerned, DRM is as much malware as spyware or viruses. If it is going to be allowed at all, it needs to be clearly labelled. The fact that it is not and consumers only know about it after they’ve purchased it is a huge government #fail

• The biggest thing free software has done to change my outlook is that it has changed my way of thinking. Because the principals behind free software can be applied in many more things. For me, it’s made me rethink the idea of copyright, and then rethink it again. It has in fact encouraged me to join what Cory Doctorow calls the copyfight. As a writer, I’m embracing the concept of self publishing, and I will be releasing my debut novel under a Creative Commons License.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Information generated and collected by public sector bodies represents a veritable gold mine: optimal access to and reuse of this public sector information (PSI) has a positive impact on market services improvements, but also on the democratic involvement of citizens in governmental decisions.

• This initially looked very promising: Mars, along with a number of collaborators (USDA, IBM, Clemson University Genomics Institute; Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture at the University of California-Davis; National Center for Genome Resources; Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at Indiana University; HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology; and Washington State University), have sequenced the cacao genome and released it “Open Access” and “public domain” for the benefit of all, at a site called the Cacao Genome Project…

• [...]

• Clearly, this data set has not been released as Open Access and certainly not released into the public domain.

• Instead of Open Access or public domain, they have a restrictive license, which allows gated access for a restricted set of uses.

Leftovers

• As with top-posting, not trimming your replies is lazy, and again, it’s rude. Some people don’t have the hard drive space you might, or the bandwidth to pull down such a noisy message. Cutting out the cruft, leaving the relevant pieces in, is considerate, polite and logically sound. Do you, and everyone else a favor, and trim your replies.

• Michael Jackson’s family has sued AEG Live claiming the event production company is responsible for Jackson’s death.

• Here’s the complaint, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court by Katherine Jackson on behalf of the family. The lawsuit claims AEG, president and CEO Tim Leiweke, Anschutz Entertainment and others are responsible for Jackson’s death because his contract with AEG for the planned “This Is It” tour created a legal duty to keep him healthy.

• It is both striking and important to recognize how relatively little the pre-modern state actually knew about the society over which it presided. State officials had only the most tenuous idea of the population under their jurisdiction, its movements, its real property, wealth, crop yields, and so forth. Their degree of ignorance was directly proportional to the fragmentation of their sources of information. Local currencies and local measures of capacity (e.g., the bushel) and length (the ell, the rod, the toise) were likely to vary from place to place and with the nature of the transacting parties. The opacity of local society was, of course, actively maintained by local elites as one effective means of resistance to intrusions from above.

• Having little synoptic, aggregate intelligence about the manpower and resources available to it, officials were apt either to overreach in their exactions, touching off flight or revolt, or to fail to mobilize the resources that were, in fact, available. To follow the process of state-making, then, is to follow the conquest of illegibility. The account of this conquest — an achievement won against stiff resistance — could take many forms, for example: the creation of the cadastral survey and uniform property registers, the invention and imposition of the meter, national censuses and currencies, and the development of uniform legal codes.

Health/Nutrition

• The US Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA for permission to change the name “High Fructose Corn Syrup” to the much more innocuous-sounding “Corn Sugars.” This comes as 58% of Americans say they are concerned about HFCS’s impact on their health. HFCS is a heavily subsidized industrial byproduct of the corn industry, and is ubiquitous in American processed food — everything from Rice Krispies to “healthy” granola bars.

• Obesity costs the US economy at least 215 billion dollars a year in direct and indirect impacts including medical expenses and lost productivity, a new study showed Tuesday.

Security/Aggression

• This week will see the appeal by Paul Chambers of his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.

• He was convicted – and so given a criminal record – for what was, and what was intended to be, a joke contained in a tweet.

• [...]

• They send several anti-terrorist officers around to Paul’s workplace.

• (Unsurprisingly, Paul loses his job very soon after.)

• The police arrest Paul and keep him in custody for a number of hours.

• However, it appears that even the police do not think this is a serious matter.

• But again “process” means it needs to be taken further. And so the case is referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

• The CPS realise quickly that there is no evidence for Paul to be prosecuted under the bomb hoax legislation.

• NY jury convicts body-armor company founder of running $190 million stock scheme

• The founder of America’s leading supplier of body armor to the U.S. military was convicted Tuesday of charges that he ran a $190 million stock scheme.

• David H. Brooks, founder and former chief executive of DHB Industries Inc., was convicted of 17 counts, including securities fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he used the company treasury for personal luxuries, with more than $6 million in unauthorized expenditures.

• Usually the Pentagon expends time and technological effort to protect information. But now the far-out researchers at Darpa are looking for a few good futurists to help the Obama administration declassify reams of national security documents.

• Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a “massive cache” of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently.

• Assange, 39, has said the allegations against him are part of a “smear campaign” aimed at discrediting his website, which is locked in a row with the Pentagon over the release of secret US documents about the war in Afghanistan.

• Also on list: Royal Caribbean, Deutsche Bank, Chevron

• Almost three years ago exactly — Sept. 17, 2007 — a cadre of guards from the security firm then known as Blackwater shot and killed 17 Iraqis at a public plaza in Baghdad.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• But the idea of learning from the success of the Dutch is not far-fetched. The Netherlands resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply don’t drive them each and every time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are promoted as an attractive alternative to the car. Indeed, millions of Dutch commuters combine bike and train trips, which offers the point-to-point convenience of the automobile and the speed of transit.

• It’s an effort that has the support of top national leadership: in fact Chiyoda, home of the nation’s Imperial Palace and the Prime Minister’s Office, is one of the Eco-Cities. It has a population of 45,000 at night but swells with 800,000 government and business day tripper commuters. By 2050, the city portends a reduction in its volume of auto commuters: Chiyoda aims to reduce its greenhouse gases 50% from 1990 levels by that date.

• This is how all energy industry events should begin. The World Energy Congress kicks off today in Montreal and as delegates arrived at the conference venue, hundreds of demonstrators were there to tell them that the industry needs to go beyond oil, and that dirty and risky fuels weren’t welcome here.

• In the North, in Haparanda, Greenpeace activists marked and sealed off the potato fields that were recently discovered to be contaminated with the illegal, unauthorised genetically engineered potato, named Amadea. Simultaneously, activists protested outside the Swedish Board of Agriculture office building in Jönköping, calling for the authority to order a full destruction of the contaminated fields in order to prevent further spread.

• I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, this is the energy industry talking to itself. But the reality is – as I said to the Congress yesterday – that the industry and governments that regulate it are accountable to us, the citizenry. And comforting words don’t do much good for those people still cleaning up in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, those people who have had their waterways and their air polluted by dirty energy or those who are suffering at the hands of greenhouse pollution-driven climate change.

• After five months, the oil well that had spewed millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico is on the verge of being plugged once and for all.

• SEVEN FOREIGNERS working for French companies were kidnapped in a uranium mining region of Niger yesterday.

• BP and its partners in the blown-out Gulf well said on Monday that thousands of fishermen, seafood processors, restaurants, hotel owners and others may not yet have the right to sue over the spill, according to court papers.

• BP and its partners such as Transocean Ltd and Halliburton Co said the majority of alleged victims who have brought about 400 lawsuits must first take their claims to a $20 billion fund established by BP.

Finance

• In China, whose economy this year officially surpassed Japan’s as the world’s second largest, the number living below the international poverty line fell from 60.2 percent in 1990 to 15.9 percent in 2005. By 2015, it is forecast to be 5 percent.

• The new small business legislation intended to support startups is based entirely on debt — getting banks to lend money to small companies. But the only kind of debt that most tech startups know is credit card debt. Little tech companies grow by selling equity, not borrowing money. Short-term debt goes on plastic at 18 or 23 percent because no bank has — or will — lend to real tech startups in any significant amount.

• They’ll finance new Burger King franchises, but lend money for electric cars or new kinds of data storage or — shudder — software? Forget about it.

• Presidents Obama and Bush didn’t know this, Fed chairman Bernanke doesn’t know it, nor does Treasury secretary Geithner. None of these men have a minute’s experience with tech startups, yet our economy is almost entirely dependent on those startups for real recovery.

• In conclusion I suspect that is the way they want it. After all, as far as I can tell, Basel is a set of self-imposed rules by the banking system and their regulators and they are primarily concerned with their own survival, not the well being of the economy from a monetary standpoint. It should be no surprise that they avoid the larger question of systemic stability by monetary self-regulation. Beware of the invisible hand, it may be robbing your back pocket!

• A Commissioner of Cuyahoga County in Ohio was arrested by FBI agents early Wednesday morning as part of a larger federal probe into corruption in the county.

• Seven other Cuyahoga County officials, labor leaders, and business people have also been arrested.

• Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, age 55, is accused of using his public office to obtain free home improvements, prostitutes, and trips.

• In all, banks repossessed 95,364 properties last month, up 3 percent from July and an increase of 25 percent from August 2009, RealtyTrac said.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The latest documents come from a court case brought against Wyeth by around 14,000 patients who developed breast cancer while taking Prempro, the hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

• The open access journal PLoS Medicine, acting with the New York Times, argued successfully in court that 1,500 documents which detailed the ghostwriting should be placed in the public domain, because they represent information on a potential threat to public health.

• Now, PLoS has published the first academic analysis of these documents, which is free to access online.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• AN EXERCISE is currently underway to enter every resident in India on a database. In a few years, the unique identification (UID) is intended to become a ubiquitous number, to be used in many operations: enrolling in a school, maintaining a bank account, ticketing for travel, seeking treatment in a hospital and having one’s death recorded in a mortuary register.

• The sales pitch for the UID is, like most advertisements, intended to mislead. Enrolment is said to be voluntary. But, and as is now acknowledged, other agencies may refuse to provide a service if an individual is not enrolled, making it compulsory. The Working Paper of the UID Authority of India (UIDAI), which has been the basis of many discussions, starts with a claim that the UID will bring down barriers that prevent the poor from accessing services; but quickly adds: “UID will only guarantee identity, not rights, benefits and entitlements.”

• Participants from throughout the world are gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week for the fifth-annual Internet Governance Forum.

• The IGF is an annual United Nations-sponsored event where representatives from governments, nonprofits, academic institutions, and businesses worldwide discuss a broad range of policy issues including online safety, privacy, rights of children, equality issues and other topics pertaining to the way the Internet is affecting every country.

• The goal of IGF is “to foster the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the Internet.”

• The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Why do we suspect that cable operators see online video as a threat and may try to use “managed services” exceptions to Net Neutrality rules to crush it? How about deals like this.

• Time Warner Cable has decided not to do any deals with the premium movie channel Epix, home to movies from studios like Viacom, Lions Gate, and MGM. Why? Because Epix decided to cut a deal with Netflix for streaming access to its movies.

• I started the wiki because I think we need it. Just over the past few weeks we’ve been treated to news coverage of a joint proposal from Google and Verizon, which I found muddled in ways that show why we need a finer understanding of the many topics involved. The FCC has released a request for comments that shows they’re trying to hone in on the distinctions. And a recent article where I made an initial stab at dissecting the arguments was well received and summarized in Forbes online.

Intellectual Monopolies

• She even goes so far as to post a list of websites “illegally” using her name, as well as a copy of the cease and desist letter (pdf) her lawyers will send you. Now, it may very well be that some of the sites in question are, in fact, violating her trademark (and at least one of the pages I’ve found does appear pretty questionable from a trademark standpoint) but the blanket claim that “it is illegal to use the name on any website without prior written permission” is simply false. That’s not how trademark law works. Dr Ann De Wees Allen does, in fact, have a trademark on her name, used in commerce related to dietary supplements, but just because you have a trademark, it does not mean you have complete control of the mark.

Copyrights

• Emmanuel Nimley, 22, yesterday received a 6-month sentence for filming movies with his iPhone at The Vue cinema in Harrow and uploading them to silverscreen.com. His motive: self-glory. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) say this is the first-ever UK prison sentence for ‘camming’.

• Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, is currently down having been DDoS’d. They are joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA’s website, also currently under huge and sustained attack.

• Lately, I’ve been playing around with various music locker services, just to get a better understanding of how they work and to be able to access my (legally purchased) music collection on various machines and devices. So far, they’re all a bit limited, but it shouldn’t be long until they get better. However, the industry has always hated music locker services, and insisted that they somehow violate their copyright, even when the lockers simply allow individuals to place shift their own legal music. There’s an ongoing lawsuit over Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes for which a decision is expected shortly. At the same time, Apple has been trying to quietly enter the market without disturbing the record labels.

• So how much did this entertainment-industry driven mess cost UK taxpayers? Well, police refused to release that information for a while, claiming that it “could undermine any ongoing and future investigations and cause potential damage to the criminal justice process.” Uh, right. About the only way it would do that is when people realized how much money was being wasted on bogus investigations. Eventually, however, it came out that the investigation itself cost about £29,000 — including £7,800 on overtime (OiNK after dark?) and £4,300 on “travel and subsistence.” Of course that doesn’t even get into what the actual trial cost taxpayers, which I’m sure is many times greater than that.

• In the most unique screening experiment we’ve heard of in a while (sorry, Jonah Hill), Magnolia Pictures and the Green Film Company will offer a pay-what-you-want preview of Freakonomics: The Movie on Sept. 22 for audiences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Denver, and Seattle. The adaptation of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s best-selling book applies economics-based thinking to everyday human behavior, using a “dream team” of documentary filmmakers like Seth Gordon (The King Of Kong), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), and Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room) to examine everything from Sumo wrestling to baby names to students who are paid to study harder, and by participating in this screening—which requires filling out a short questionnaire—you’ll actually become part of a Freakonomics study yourself, in keeping with the book’s examination of how people interact with a pay-what-you-want bagel service.

• But, really, the bigger issue, is that in suing and sending takedowns over this video, all Fox has done is draw significantly more attention to the story itself and the negative impression of Blunt. If I had to guess, I’d say that Carnahan has never been so happy to be sued. It’s tons of free advertising on an attack ad on her opponent. And, of course, if the video is found to be fair use — as I would bet it would be — we’ll have yet another example of how the DMCA’s takedown process is a clear violation of free speech. Even if the video is eventually allowed back online due to a counter-notice, copyright law was being used to silence political speech in the middle of a campaign.

ACTA

• The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) is an international non-profit association that endeavours to promote a favourable environment for interoperable ICT solutions. Its members include both large and small companies in the ICT sector such as IBM, Nokia, Oracle, Opera, and Red Hat.

• A representative from Internet Society (ISOC) proposed to extend the open and global multi-stakeholder approach of the IGF, its unique and sucessful governance model, to other processes such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations. The ACTA addresses Internet Governance issues along Camembert and is negotiated by a small coalition of supportive trade administrations.

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