● 09.18.10

● Links 18/9/2010: Wayland at XDS 2010, Canonical Controversy

Posted in News Roundup at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Now that Oracle has largely ended support for OpenSolaris, many Solaris users and customers that continued to be on the fence about the OS will finally be making their decision to either stay with Solaris or move over to Linux. Unix migration to Linux has always been a mainstay for enterprise Linux adoption, and while the low-hanging fruit is becoming more sparse, there is still plenty of Unix migration to Linux to come. We have seen cases in Linux communities where the most significant Unix in their world is OpenSolaris, and while we hear similar things regarding Solaris and its continued market presence, there is no question OpenSolaris — a fully open source OS with available binaries — was a much better fit for the growing ranks of Linux-savvy developers and administrators.

• The purpose of this post is to make you aware that beginning in September, Cloud Servers customers will be billed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on a monthly rather than hourly basis. Due to changes in our subscription arrangements with Red Hat, we can no longer offer Cloud customers hourly billing for RHEL licenses. Rackspace will begin charging our customers a monthly licensing fee, starting in September. This license fee will not be prorated.

• Moving over to the GP-GPU world, the NVidia GPU Conference is next week, I was going to attend, but I had a scheduling conflict come up. Look for some good stuff to come out of this event. Since I won’t be on the west coast next week, I will probably attend the one day HPC Financial Markets event in New York City. This show used to be called “High Performance on Wall Street,” which has a small, but free exhibit.

• Reviewing HPC hardware is not easy. You usually need to travel to a data center and look at a rack of servers while someone tells you where they landed on the Top500 list. One could review a server, but basically they are all pretty much the same inside. They are running Linux and use either AMD or Intel processors. In addition, testing a cluster takes time because running meaningful programs that exercise the whole system must be done carefully. And finally, clusters are not sitting on the “shelf” as they vary by customer due to possible packaging, interconnect, processor, and storage choices.

IBM

• When I look back upon my long career, one of the major factors shaping my views of business, strategy and innovation is the creative destruction that I saw buffeting the IT industry over most of that time. In particular, having lived through IBM’s own near-death experience, respect – if not fear – for the hurricane-power forces of disruptive change is edged deep down in my psyche.

Ballnux

• Today in New York, Samsung announced the launch of the Samsung Media Hub. The service, which features Next-Day TV Shows, Movies, and sharing (for up to 5 media hub enabled devices), will be available for Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S devices.

• The Galaxy Tab is the first in a number of Android tablets that have been announced or rumored for release either in late 2010 or early 2011. At 7″, Galaxy Tab may well be the new stocking stuffer for Android fans, but for now, customers will have to wait to find out when they can buy it and for how much.

Kernel Space

• Our two prior articles have detailed the performance results from a new patch, bcache, that uses SSDs to cache hard drives. We’ve looked at the throughput and IOPS performance of bcache and — while it is still very new and under heavy development — have found that in some cases it can help performance. This article examines the metadata performance of bcache hoping to also find areas where it can further boost performance.

Graphics Stack

• Nothing too exciting was learned during this time about Wayland, but there was a brief demonstration of this lightweight display server that leverages kernel mode-setting, Mesa EGL, and other technologies.

Applications

• What this means is that if I resize an image, shrinking it from whatever large size to 600 pixels wide, gThumb remembers this, and the next time I resize a picture, 600px is the default value, and all I need to do is click a box and I’m done. Since I’m often (or usually) resizing everything to the same size, this is a feature that’s saving me tremendous amounts of time.

• Guayadeque is built using the wxWidgets toolkit, a popular C++ library designed for writing graphical applications, and is included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories. Let me list some of the major features Guayadeque offers:

• - 10-band equalizer, including presets - sortable playlists with column attributes which can be added or removed - music library, which show artists, albums with covers and labels - static and dynamic playlists - support for online radios - Last.fm integration and song submission

• PeaZip 3.3 is released, this release brings various fixes and an improved user interface focused in better integration with web search (optionally on multiple search engines at once) and in launching favorite applications, scripts or websites/web services from PeaZip.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux five times this year, and added support for Mozilla FireFox, Apple Safari, Google SketchUp, VLC Multimedia player and updated to the latest IrfanView release. Bundled Wine 1.2.0, added support for Pulse Audio, updated and cleaned up our custom winetricks script and we also fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.

Distributions

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has penned an interesting post about their involvement and contribution to the open source/free software community. He is responding to some criticism that Canonical is not giving enough back. Mark makes an excellent point that there are many ways to give back and Canonical and Ubuntu have focus on making Linux more accessible to a wider audience. To me this makes perfect sense and Canonical should be applauded for their contributions to the community.

• Up next, let’s pull from the Planet Gnome FAQ, “It generally helps to write a few words about you and your contributions to GNOME, or why you think your blog should appear on Planet GNOME”. Looking at the bug that was filed we find no explanation as to why it should be added other than “I contribute via Canonical”. This phrase is going to be flogged by those people that were/are irked with Canonicals level of contributions upstream.

• Lastly, since Mark is the CEO of a company, does this mean Gnome supports his company more than say…CEO of Red Hat or Novell since those CEO’s are not added on Planet Gnome? Does this constitute a conflict of interest? Does it signal favoritism? If one person believes it to be this way, everyone loses…because there will be a debate about it and it WILL divide people and not unite them.

• To be honest, I can’t believe Mark even asked to be on Planet Gnome as the CEO of Canonical. He should know right out of the gate that it would look bad if he was added in…if it were me, I’d remove myself immediately.

• Here at Ubuntu we love to give training sessions over IRC. Since Developer and App Developer Week cover the more advanced end of the spectrum we have something for normal users — Ubuntu Open Week: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• With a resigned CEO and the head of the smartphone division, all is not well with Nokia. What I am actually wondering is, how impossible is it to manufacture Android based devices? Yes Symbian is great, but it looks more like a dying breed to me. Is it at all possible that the two platforms could be marketed side by side to the myriad of markets that Nokia is found in?

• While Android is all poised to become the most popular mobile phone OS by 2014, what about the other open source, *truly* Linux, mobile OS platform, MeeGo? Well, MeeGo might just become the most popular open source In-Vehicle Infotainment platform!

Android

• Today finds another leak that basically confirms all the Android devices we saw listed. TmoNews has obtained a pair of internal T-Mobile accessory listing that makes reference to multiple phones, some by their project names. If you weren’t already doing it, start looking forward to Motorola Begonia, Motorola Jordan, LG Optimus T, and myTouch HD.

Sub-notebooks

• If you need to do some serious typing (or run out of the battery of both the tablet and phone-core), you can dock the tablet into a stand with a keyboard which makes the device a proper netbook/laptop and gives you an extra 12000 (!!!) mAh battery capacity. When this happens, you may switch the computing core to a full Ubuntu Linux from the Android you used on the MID. This is done with a dedicated hardware button (called the AI button).

Free Software/Open Source

• Sonar is a Stable and well-mantained code, with an high mark in Maturity (3.5 years old) and Stability. Sonar is becoming increasingly popular among developers, unfortunately there are not available books yet.

• - Doug Cutting, Chairman - Jim Jagielski, President - Greg Stein, Vice Chairman - Noirin Shirley, Executive Vice President - Geir Magnusson, Jr., Treasurer - Craig Russell, Secretary - Sam Ruby, Assistant Secretary

Events

• New Delhi, Delhi, India, Saturday, September 18, 2010 — (Business Wire India)

Web Browsers

SaaS

• Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview Monday, Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist of audience and cloud computing research at Yahoo, noted that the Internet company has not been involved in “many cloud conversations” today as these revolve around “low-level cloud services”, but it is still very much in the game.

• Elaborating, he said that many of today’s cloud services such as those provided by Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are basically infrastructure products with “baked-in” apps that can be used straight out from the box.

• One of our key deliverables in keeping with this commitment was to publish a Governance process shortly after the establishment of the community, and to ensure that the process outlined contained active involvement and representation from the community.

Databases

Business

• Opsview, the open source network and application monitoring vendor, today announced it has teamed up with Canonical, the Ubuntu service provider, to help drive the enterprise adoption of Opsview Enterprise with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition. Opsview has grown rapidly within the managed service provider and financial services space; key strategic verticals for Canonical.

Semi-Open Source

• Having become the dominant supplier of enterprise services for both the Alfresco open source content management system and the Lucene/Solr open source enterprise search platform, this acquisition will broaden Ixxus’ technology and open source portfolio, giving them a new strong foothold in the financial services industry.

Funding

• Sonatype was founded by Jason Van Zyl, the original author of the Apache Maven build and project management software, and the creator of Maven Central, the primary cloud-based repository for software distribution in the open source world.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We are proud to announce that the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE) in collaboration with the FLOSSInclude Project will again be hosting a special event on Saturday, September 18th under the theme “Knowing the alternative software solutions”. The venue for this year’s celebrations is the AITI-KACE premises and the time is 9:30 – 15:00. This is the biggest international celebration and outreach event for Software Freedom globally involving hundreds of teams from all around the world.

Government

• Directgov Innovate strongly advocates the use of open source software and we want your views on the best ways to licence government and public projects.

• Which licence do you think would best suit our projects? While copyright would remain with the Crown, we could choose either a very permissive licence, perhaps MIT or BSD. These would allow the code to be used again in closed or open software. Alternatively we could require that the code is kept open, by using a licence like the GNU GPL. You can find a list of approved licences at the The Open Source Initiative website.

• The first project we are looking to release is Spark, a platform designed to share and showcase innovation from all areas of public and civil society. With limited exceptions the technology underpinning Spark is open source, including PHP, MySQL and the Symfony Framework. We host Spark on a Linux webserver.

Openness/Sharing

• While it got less attention, Google also opened up a bit more by allowing all OSI-approved open source licenses, including the AGPL on its Google Code, a move that was also met with cheers from some. This comes as a welcome change from Google, which had previously resisted the AGPL.

• The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• The QNX Momentics tool suite offers a comprehensive Eclipse-based IDE with innovative profiling tools to help developers gain maximum insight into system behaviour. Version 6.5 of the suite introduces support for the Eclipse platform 3.5.2, Eclipse CDT 6.0 and GNU compiler (GCC) 4.4.2. The compiler offers optimised dynamic linking, including lazy linking and GNU hashing.

Science

• You’ve probably heard of hand-held 3D scanners before, but CreaForm produces units specifically designed for “body capture”. No, they’re not ensnaring people in nets, but rather they take a 3D digital picture in the form of a 3D model. (Actually any of these formats: .OBJ, .FBX, .DXF, .STL, .VRML, .LWO, .MAYA, .HRC, .3DS). The awkwardly named “MegaCapturor 3D Body Digitizer” has an amazing sub-millimetre resolution even at a distance of over a metre.

• A new fuel cell is putting a twist on alternative energy from biofuels: The implanted device draws power from chemicals in living animals.

• Dubbed a glucose biofuel cell, the implant gets its juice from glucose—aka blood sugar—and oxygen, both of which are naturally present in the fluids between a body’s cells.

• In a recent study, researchers created a test version of their glucose biofuel cell and implanted it in a white lab rat named Ricky. The rat sported the device successfully for 11 days and suffered no ill effects.

• DOCTORS and nurses take note – rubbing your hands together in a hand dryer leaves them coated with more bacteria than just after you washed them. Even normal skin bacteria may be bad news for sick people.

• “When you rub your hands, you bring a lot of bacteria to the surface from the pores of your skin,” says Anna Snelling of the University of Bradford, UK. She asked 14 volunteers to dry their hands for 15 seconds using three different types of air dryer, sometimes rubbing their hands together and sometimes not.

Security/Aggression

• The point here, though, is that in 2010 we are still looking for a method to connect to systems without having to register with all of them. And with all our current solutions, we still have not quite got that problem solved. And if someone mentions web of trust I might scream. Because, after all, that is the root of the problem, or at least one of them.

Finance

• 1) someone at Goldman got his or her panties in a twist when their “shitty deal,” email went viral, and is now insisting that Partners, VPs, Managing Directors – everyone at Goldman – waste their time, stop their train of thought, and fart it up with nicer words that feel unnatural and nobody really uses, and 2) that is ridiculous (much like the upcoming slideshow) and 3) the senate would have been just as furious if instead of “shitty deal,” “this is not a good deal” had been written, we’ve created a slideshow of swearing by “role models” like Gary Cohn and Jamie Dimon on Wall Street.

• Last month I suggested that the little hook downward in California employment, reported for July, was a troubling sign. Today, fresh data was released from the State of California, and the downward move has continued. Whereas employment levels had just managed to hang on above the 16 million person level in July–in August they slipped back below, to 15.968 million. | see: California Employment in Millions 2000-2010.

• President Obama picked a woman Wall Street loathes to crack down on unscrupulous behavior in the financial industry.

• Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren will launch the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, answering directly to Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the President announced Friday.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• One said Toxic Sludge is Good for You was “one of the top five most important books in my lifetime.” CMD’s founder, John Stauber conceived of the book, and this watchdog group, while fighting PR spin and intimidation efforts from Monsanto. Increasing corporate influence and ever-stealthier lobbying and propaganda techniques make this book more relevant than ever.

• Two national watchdog groups have filed separate complaints against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce requesting criminal investigations for tax fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance violations. The first, filed with the Washington, DC FBI Field Office by StopTheChamber.com, was predicated on a letter sent to the organization´s attorney, Kevin Zeese, from an insider at the Chamber who alleged in significant detail that the Chamber and its CEO Tom Donohue are engaged in a massive scam to support Mr. Donohue´s “lavish lifestyle.” Mr. Zeese wrote:

• “On August 4, 2010, we received a letter from a purported Chamber of Commerce insider in response to our latest reward offer. In short, the insider compares Tom Donohue to Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and Bernie Madoff, in the manner in which he is scamming clients to serve his own interests rather than the interests of the business community. He alleges fraud, campaign finance violations and financial impropriety that could be uncovered with a criminal investigation. Equally troubling is that he alleges that Mr. Donohue does not fear the FEC or Congress and has a plan in place to attack the Department of Justice if the DOJ investigates him.”

• A year-old, anti-Muslim email has resurfaced and is curculating once again, riding the latest wave of U.S. anti-Muslim bigotry. The email urges people to boycott a U.S. postage stamp that recognizes the Islamic holiday of EID. The stamp, which rumor-mongers refer to as a “Muslim Christmas Stamp,” was first issued about ten years ago, and is one of six seasonal postage stamps the United States Postal Service sells that commemorate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, EID, snowmen and music makers.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.

• David Ramli: Why did you choose to name your free software system GNU?

• Richard Stallman: Because it’s funny. And since we announced the movement in 1983, which was 27 years ago, to call it the new system would be extremely misleading.

• DR: The Government’s planned mandatory ISP filter is practically dead now. Should people keep talking about it?

• RS: Australia already has Internet censorship and it has censorship of links. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) made a link to a foreign political website and it got threatened with a fine of $11,000 per day if it did not remove that link. This is censorship and it has to be abolished.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Intel threatened legal action Friday against anybody who uses its proprietary crypto key — leaked on the internet — to produce hardware that defeats the so-called HDCP technology that limits home recording of digital television and Blu-ray.

• “There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

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