● 10.14.10

● Links 14/10/2010: Mozilla’s New CEO, More on IBM Joining OpenJDK

Posted in News Roundup at 2:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux has been far more successful at just about every application for one simple reason. Linux has the flexibility and ability to easily fill, without overflowing, any container it is poured into and it is not surprising either. It is all due to the real focus of Linux which should not be split.

CLI

• “Like everything else in life, it boils down to having the right tool for the right job … and the command line is like that all-purpose screwdriver that we all have,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “It opens paint cans, makes a handy chisel, pry bar and wedge — we grab it, get the job done, and move on.”

• It’s getting close to Halloween but the Command Line shouldn’t be something that you are spooked about. The good old command line has been around for ages. And it’s still around today and as popular as ever. Why? Because it’s extremely powerful, and allows you to get to the root of most operating systems. Sure, the nice GUI-based applications are great and all, but the command line can greatly simplify some tasks.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Alfresco is a leading open source alternative for enterprise content management (ECM).

• Guests: Luis Sala, Chief Community Officer and John Newton, CTO for alfresco.com.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Intel’s Ian Romanick has just written an e-mail message entitled What I’m working on to the Mesa development list. With Intel’s new GLSL compiler being used by Mesa and can be found within the Mesa 7.9 release, Intel’s open-source graphics developers have worked onto working on some other areas of their 3D driver stack.

Applications

• This week’s entry looks at a unique new audio editor, some important updates, and a very cool programming environment for graphics (and much more). As always, some tasty treats are cooking in the Linux audio kitchen.

Proprietary

• Opera has a legion of very devoted users. And one feature that those users have been waiting patiently for, version after version, is extension support.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Revenge Of The Cats: Ethernet is a fast-paced, moddable, freeware, multiplayer first-person shooter…

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• While we already know that by the time KDE Software Compilation 4.7 rolls around it may optionally support OpenGL 3.0 within the KWin compositing manager, but with time KDE’s Plasma may begin using more OpenGL too. Aaron Seigo has written a lengthy blog post about what he hopes to achieve with Plasma and its library going a few releases out into the future. This includes a rather extensive rework of Plasma and its drawing, which would include the use of more OpenGL to allow for greater hardware acceleration.

• As you probably know, you can download a lot of additional Marble maps with the “Get hot new stuff” framework. The reason for this entry is that OpenCycleMap is now using a different server for their map storage. For all users of the OpenCycleMap in Marble it means that they will have to update their map configuration if they want to see updated maps.

• In case you’re sleeping under a rock today, KDE is celebrating its 14th birthday.

• First of all: Thank you everyone for you comments and suggestions. They really got me on the road and showed my that there indeed is interest enough to do some more serious work. So I sat down and made myself a little planing and even some (small) coding today.

• That Faenza icon set. It gets everywhere. Not content with being one of the most popular icon sets of the year Faenza’s success has spawned an enviable army of ‘spins’ and derivatives including a ‘green’ Faenza-Mint version and the following Mac OS X inspired ‘Faenza-Cupertino’ set.

Distributions

Reviews

• If after reading this, you want to try Arch Linux, it is a great idea, but it might not be as good as you think if you are beginning with Linux, if you are a newbie, start with Linux Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora.

• Once you know more about Linux, switch to Arch Linux, you will never miss any other distribution. Arch Linux gives you almost the same control you may find in Gentoo, but it is a lot easier to run.

• The more user friendly distributions, make a lot of things for you, but then, maybe that is not what you need. I mean not always the same configuration is good for everybody, you need to tweak your configuration to fit your needs, and your likes.

New Releases

• The Parted Magic developers have released version 5.6 of their open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the call for papers is now open for the seventh annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. These premier open source events will take place May 3-6, 2011 in Boston at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center.

• Already a long-time user of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite Jeppesen has migrated business-critical systems to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation.

Fedora

• Rather than coming up with the codename for the next Fedora release deep within Red Hat, the community is leveraged with anyone being allowed to propose a potential name prior to these names being reviewed by Red Hat’s legal department and the voting on the final name then commencing by Fedora contributors. With this open process, there’s also more than a few interesting name proposals with each release. Case in point, Fedora 14 could have been called Fytnargin. With the release of Fedora 14 now being just a month out, name proposals for Fedora 15 have started.

Debian Family

• Even though both distributions work with KDE very well, they both have certain issues: MEPIS: When opening kmplayer, KDE crashes. I think that it is because of the mess I made with codecs trying to install VLC. Sometimes MEPIS suspends the composition and the effects are therefore disabled temporarily. MANDRIVA: The clock sometimes freezes (only in the netbook). This is corrected by enabling the display of seconds in the clock options.

• Concerning performance and ease of use, both distributions can satisfy the needs of users who lack technical computer knowledge or formal Linux training. I feel that SimplyMepis might be a better choice for users who want a simple system and do not really care much for eye candy. In addition, Mepis comes with Java pre-installed, whereas you must install it in Mandriva.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’ve been running 10.10 betas and the RC for weeks, and had been running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a few machines before that. Honestly, it’s hard to see much difference between the two. Plus several points for consistency, but that doesn’t add up to rushing to upgrade at the first opportunity.

Flavours and Variants

• This Screencast shows you how to install the lubuntu control center, to have all your lubuntu settings in one place.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Up until recently, if you wanted to hack your Palm Pre, you hopped over to the Pre-Central forums for all of your hacking needs, where you could find concise and usually simple explanations from the experts of WebOS Internals and the like. It was all at your own risk, of course, but you were treading a path that someone who knew more than you had already trail blazed (and uploaded screenshots in a how-to form). Well, those days seem to be over–and for the better. Palm has made Rod Whitby’s Preware Homebrew Documentation available for download, and with it they’ve put the knowledge, tools, and know-how of a few years worth of hacking into every WebOS users hands. Now everyone can have thousands of well-made and free applications, patches, themes, and assorted customizations all rolled into one package by a supportive community.

Android

• In a post on its Facebook page, Motorola has confirmed that, from next week, it will start user trials of an over-the-air (OTA) upgrade for its European Milestone smartphones that will upgrade the onboard version of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system to version 2.2, code named “Froyo”. The company says that, once the trails are completed, it will go into the approval stage and a roll out to all users is expected by the end of the year.

• Have Android app, will travel. In the digital age, managing the steady deluge of information that confronts you every day can be a challenge. But with the right apps, the Android can be a powerful tool to help you stay on top of that deluge.

• There are Android apps to manage your news feeds, gather the weather, find the scores of your favorite sports teams, track your finances and keep up-to-date with your appointments and updates of all kinds.

• To help you find the cream of the crop, here’s a list of 35 of the best Android apps for tracking, managing and updating your information.

Sub-notebooks

• Its been a little while since my last post and some might be wondering whats been going on in technology here at the PMC, especially since the last post promised insight into some of our production software.

• Well, thats all still coming. We DID get in our new desktop for our Media Center, and I am working on compiling a few videos showing its construction. I’ve also been working on updating and testing the production software to give everyone a better picture of what can be done with our Open Source resources. All that is coming, and you can now receive shorter updates and info through the PMC Tech Blog Twitter and Identi.ca feed (For those of you unaware, Identi.ca is an Open Source microblogging service, similar to twitter). Follow me and get much more frequent updates about things going on here at the PMC and in the Open Source world in general.

Free Software/Open Source

• For developers, including social networking technologies into modern Web applications is often a key priority. The OpenSocial standard, originally developed by Google, is one mechanism that developers can leverage for social networking applications.

• But standards are one thing, and implementation is another. That’s where the Apache Shindig project comes into play. Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container that enables developers to handle OpenSocial application content and gadgets. The project recently hit its 2.0 milestone as it continues to track the latest OpenSocial standardization efforts.

• Open source groupware provider Zimbra has announced the arrival of version 2.0 of its Zimbra Desktop client. The new version of the open source, web-based mail and calendaring solution includes significant performance upgrades and introduces a number of new features.

• New open source projects launch all the time and there’s so many great ones out there it’s hard to find the diamonds in the rough. Here are 10 promising young FOSS projects to keep an eye on as their development grows. Download or use them in the meantime as they develop, they are awesome!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I’m very happy to introduce Gary Kovacs as our new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation. I think he’s going to be great for Mozilla, and that our broad community will like him and be well served by him.

• Prior to joining Mozilla, Gary held senior leadership roles as Senior VP of Markets, Solutions & Products at Sybase (through its acquisition by SAP earlier this year), as General Manager and VP of Mobile & Devices at Adobe and as VP of Product Marketing at Macromedia (through its acquisition by Adobe).

• Mozilla has hooked itself up to Twitter and created an “Army of Awesome” for Firefox users needing help with the browser.

• In other words, those surfers with a short attention span can now find out all they need to know via 140-character bursts.

Oracle

• Today’s announcement that IBM is going to join forces and work with Oracle on OpenJDK is good news for Java, and by extension for Eclipse. All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform, enhances the business value of Java and offers the hope of an increased pace of innovation.

• IBM and Oracle are going to bring their combined resources together to collaborate in OpenJDK. The natural question arises about what this means for the Apache Harmony project.

• List of the people working on Harmony. Not only is the list apparently out of date, it has such a strong IBM contingent (I wonder how many of those “independents” are actually IBM or Intel contractors) that I am amazed it has escaped Apache Board scrutiny for so long.

• The basic announcement today was that IBM would join with Oracle to work on the OpenJDK. The reciprocal IBM announcement said the same thing.

• Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and IBM today announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment.

• Apparently it can even affect the grades of students although it did not mention anything about causing kittens to die. The quotes appear to have come from case studies and press articles from the last four years, most of which are hosted on Microsoft.com.

• Open-source office suite OpenOffice.org is apparently getting under software giant Microsoft’s skin – so much so, in fact, that it appears to be starting a propaganda campaign to protect its revenue stream.

• Microsoft Office is one of the company’s biggest selling products. It’s near-ubiquitous in the world of business computing, to the point where its file formats have become the norm for sharing content – at the expense of locking out cross-platform, open standards.

• As ODF celebrates its fifth anniversary, Oracle said they applaud its efforts and renewed their committment to OpenOffice.org. “Oracle’s growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community.” This might be seen in the continuing efforts of developers to release 3.3.x snapshots as well as previews into some of the new features and tools. For example, Ingrid Halama recently posted of some of the new features coming to Chart, (part 1, part 2). Niklas Nebel also shared some improvements in DataPilot.

• This all comes a month after the formation of The Document Foundation and the announcement of LibreOffice. Charles-H. Schulz recently reported that LibreOffice was downloaded 80,000 times its first week and a new user forum quickly followed. A second beta emerged on October 11.

CMS

• Though the games have only one more day to go (they were from October 3rd to October 14th this month), the XIX Commonwealth Games website runs on Drupal, and looks great. This 2010 Commonwealth Games were held in Delhi, and is the largest multi-sport event conducted to date in Delhi and India. Certainly a big win for Drupal!

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Network management vendor GroundWork Open Source (GWOS) is updating its flagship product suite this week with the release of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.3.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today that it has published an initial set of criteria for endorsing computers and other devices. The FSF seeks both to obtain feedback on the criteria, and raise interest in the program among hardware manufacturers. Ultimately, the FSF plans to promote an endorsement mark to be carried on products that meet the criteria: respects your freedom.

• “The desire to own a computer or device and have full control over it, to know that you are not being spied on or tracked, to run any software you wish without asking permission, and to share with friends without worrying about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)—these are the desires of millions of people who care about the future of technology and our society. Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers have until now relied on close cooperation with proprietary software companies that demanded control over their users. As citizens and their customers, we need to promote our desires for a new class of hardware—hardware that anyone can support because it respects your freedom,” said Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF.

Government

• With the US mid-term elections coming up, the direction of the US government may be set to maintain its current direction, or change significantly, depending on who wins what election on Nov. 2.

• Whether you think a change (or lack thereof) is a good thing or a bad thing, one direction many governments are trending towards in this economy is the use of open source.

• Faced with budget tightening and cost-control measures that threaten to deplete government services to beyond the bare minimum, local, state, and Federal organizations are taking a very hard look at the cost and performance benefits of open source software–to the point where it’s not a question of if governments will widely adopt open source technologies, but when.

Openness/Sharing

• One of the inherent concerns about crowdsourced crisis information is that the data is not statistically representative and hence “useless” for any serious kind of statistical analysis. But my colleague Christina Corbane and her team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC) have come up with some interesting findings that prove otherwise. They used the reports mapped on the Ushahidi-Haiti platform to show that this crowdsourced data can help predict the spatial distribution of structural damage in Port-au-Prince. The results were presented at this year’s Crisis Mapping Conference (ICCM 2010).

Leftovers

• A federal judge on Wednesday approved Dell Inc.’s $100 million settlement with the government of civil fraud charges.

• Approval of the settlement by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon came after company Chairman and CEO Michael Dell assured Leon in a hearing that the computer maker will carry through the reforms it promised.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission had said that Dell improperly used payments from Intel to pump up its profits to meet Wall Street targets over five years.

• An Austin businessman has sued Entrepreneur Media, publisher of Entrepreneur Magazine, after the publication sent a cease and desist to him for registering EntrepreneurOlogy.com.

• When two quarrel, the third rejoices: while ARM and Atom were slinging mud at each other, MIPS could advance unhurriedly. And the abbreviation MIPS – with a different meaning – plays an important role in chip manufacturing, too.

Science

• After Sunday’s first glide flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, one of the first thoughts going through the head of test pilot Peter Siebold after coming to a stop on the runway was that it all went by too quickly. He and co-pilot Mike Alsbury had been released from the mother ship, Eve, just 13 minutes earlier at 45,000 feet.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• They’re tracking a college student in Silicon Valley. He’s 20, partially Egyptian, and studying marketing at Mission College. He found the tracking device attached to his car. Near as he could tell, what he did to warrant the FBI’s attention is be the friend of someone who did something to warrant the FBI’s attention.

Finance

• That said, Goldman is potentially everywhere in the financial markets, potentially on any side of a particular risk situation. That’s what being, in effect, as one guest pundit echoed, a publicly-traded hedge fund means. Which is what Goldman Sachs currently is.

• Again, this is hardly news. Entertainment, when packaged sensationally in an hour-long format? Probably for the less-informed viewers.

• But certainly not news. Not really fair….and incredibly biased.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The ‘Worst EU Lobbying Awards 2010′, organised by Friends of the Earth Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory, LobbyControl and Spinwatch, seek to “clean up the lobbying scene in Brussels, discourage controversial lobbying practices by publicly exposing the worst offenders, and discredit the big business lobby among EU decision-making circles”.

• This year’s nominees were chosen for their attempts to influence EU financial regulation and climate change legislation, because “these two categories best show how EU policymaking has been captured by the corporate world,” according to Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe, who launched the awards at a ceremony in Brussels yesterday.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• In a post from last August, author Edward Hasbrouck explains why he and the ACLU are suing the US Department of Homeland Security to force them to disclose traveller records in response to Freedom of Information Act requests

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• 30 million Americans have experienced an unexpected increase in a monthly bill not caused by a service plan change, according to the FCC.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Red Bull has pulled the plug on its plan to have daredevil Felix Baumgartner skydive from the edge of space, because it is being sued by a California promoter who says Red Bull stole his idea.

• Canon has demonstrated Uniflow 5, the latest version of its document management system that can prevent users from printing or copying documents containing specific words.

• Uniflow allows printers, scanners, copiers and multifunction devices to be managed centrally.

• According to The Times’ Pollack, Monsanto’s troubles are two-fold: 1) the patent on Roundup, Monsanto’s market-dominating herbicide, has run out, exposing the company to competition from cheap Chinese imports; and 2) its target audience — large-scale commodity farmers in the south and Midwest — are turning against its core offerings in genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed traits.

• I agree with Pollack’s diagnosis, but I want to add a third and even more fundamental problem to the mix: Monsanto’s once-celebrated product pipeline is looking empty. As I’ll show below, its current whiz-bang seeds offer just tarted-up versions of the same old traits it has been peddling for more than a decade: herbicide tolerance and pest resistance. Meanwhile, judging from the company’s recent report on its latest quarterly earnings, the “blockbuster” traits it has been promising for years — drought resistance and nitrogen-use efficiency — don’t seem to be coming along very well.

Copyrights

• In the legal battle between Usenet community FTD and Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, some controversial allegations have been made. There are claims that not only did BREIN have as many as 15 undercover investigators working at FTD masquerading as regular users, but one of them – allegedly a direct BREIN employee – actually uploaded a ‘pirate’ movie to Usenet and posted its whereabouts on the site.

• Until a few days ago, Datz Hitz was broadcasting gospel and Caribbean music to Boston neighborhoods Mattapan and Dorchester—plus news and live discussion about local cultural and neighborhood events. Its 99.7 FM signal had a range of a few city blocks—maybe a mile on good days. One of the staffers, with whom we briefly spoke, described the operation as a community radio station.

• Scherba makes giant inflatable gorillas. See an example. A little improbably, it has a copyright registration for a 3D sculptural work called “Gorilla Inflatable”–the work being its inflatable product blown up.

• [...]

• So Scherba sued Google for copyright infringement for showing the picture of an inflated gorilla in its ad copy. All morning, I’ve been scratching my head trying to puzzle through the issues.

• Last week, in talking about how one of the guys behind Mulve was arrested by UK police, we noted the similarities to the arrest a few years ago of OiNK administrator Alan Ellis on “conspiracy to defraud” charges that were eventually thrown out as Ellis didn’t actually break the law.

• TorrentFreak now has the details of the Mulve arrest, where police are using the exact same charges, even with a failure to get those charges to stick against Ellis. And, the article details why such charges are even weaker against the Mulve guy they arrested. First of all, he had nothing to do with the software itself, but merely registered the domain and created the video highlighting how to use the software. But, much more interesting are the details behind Mulve. It’s not even a search engine by itself. It’s simply an interface for an existing search engine on a Russian social network, which anyone could sign up for and get access to already. In other words, going after Mulve totally misses the point, and it’s difficult to see how Mulve itself actually violates UK law.

• France’s strategy to combat illegal music downloads by contributing to the amount young people pay for them won European Union approval and praise for promoting cultural diversity.

• Under the scheme, French residents who purchase a card – the Carte musique – to download music from subscription-based website platforms, will only pay half the cost of a €50 ($70) credit included in the card, with the French government paying the rest.

• Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark effectively increases the value of the public domain by making works that are already free of copyright readily accessible to the public. The Mark makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to re-use material. Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain.

ACTA

• ACTA AS A BULLYING WEAPON FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES

• By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.

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