● 11.07.10

● Links 7/11/2010: GNOME Boston Summit 2010, GNOME 3 Adds New Font

Posted in News Roundup at 9:18 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• So, I installed the Debian package from unofficial.debian-maintainers.org and voila! It worked. Perhaps Monday if I cannot get the anti-virus working again on the XP machine GNU/Linux will go on in its place.

Audiocasts/Shows

Community

• It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me at a tech conference. But it is the first time I’ve spoken out about it in this way, because I’m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it. I’m tired of the fear. I’m tired of people who think I should wear something different. I’m tired of people who think I should avoid having a beer in case my vigilance lapses for a moment. I’m tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression.

• But I don’t give the wrong impression, and it’s simply not true that guys can’t read me right. I don’t want to be assaulted, and the vast majority of guys read that just fine. It is not my job to avoid getting assaulted. It is everyone else’s job to avoid assaulting me. Dozens of guys succeeded at that job, across the week. In the pub, in the stairwell, on the MARTA, in my bedroom.

• On Friday, June 11, 2010 at Southeast LinuxFest near the end of the party, a man made uninvited sexual remarks to one of the women in attendance. When she hurried off to tell one of the organizers, he approached a different woman from behind, put his arms around her, and attempted to force a kiss on her without permission.

• Today many communities, including both KDE and Ubuntu, have codes of conduct that are culturally relevant and which emphasizes mechanisms of respect as part of their core tenets. In fact, they tend to be documentary of the existing cultural norms and expectations rather than prescriptive. For OpenRespect to add to that conversation and bring real additional value, it needs to be similarly documentary rather than perscriptive and what it should describe, at least in my opinion, is what it takes to bridge between communities.

Kernel Space

• Phoronix has published the results of benchmarks performed on 26 Linux kernels dating back five years, from Linux 2.6.12 to a pre-release version of the upcoming Linux 2.6.37. Despite the addition of numerous features over the years, the results show remarkable consistency.

Graphics Stack

• Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement this week that Ubuntu will eventually dump the X.Org Server for Wayland has resulted in a great deal of media coverage for this emerging display server project that up until now was really only talked about and covered by Phoronix from the point in 2008 when we introduced the world to Wayland. While there’s still many months of work ahead before all of the pieces of the Linux desktop stack will be ready for a Wayland Display Server by default, it seems many people are already taking a look at Wayland.

• After installing Ubuntu 10.10, I had a strange feeling I was seeing something that was already old. Yes, Ubuntu is a fantastic desktop system, and yes it’s better than Windows. But today, in 2010, that’s almost a given. And that’s not enough. The IT world is changing, and PCs themselves as a whole are getting old. The mass is moving towards tablets, mobiles machines, and netbooks. Ubuntu, the way it is today, might be the best choice in a dinosaur world. I can’t read Mark Shuttleworth’s mind, but I can only guess this is exactly what he felt when he decided to switch to Unity (for the UI) and Wayland (for the graphics architecture). Let me explain what all of this means.

• Intel is gearing up to release their xf86-video-intel 2.14 DDX driver in the coming weeks, which will be their quarterly open-source X.Org driver update for their Intel IGPs. In preparations for this release and the forthcoming release candidates, Intel’s Carl Worth has tagged the xf86-video-intel 2.13.901 driver in Git, which is an intermediate development snapshot.

Applications

• ‘Ease Presentation editor‘ for the Gnome desktop aims to make presentation creation easy whilst providing all the standard features you’ll likely need to create slick, visually impressive presentations.

• ‘Ease Presentation editor‘ for the Gnome desktop aims to make presentation creation easy whilst providing all the standard features you’ll likely need to create slick, visually impressive presentations.

• A few months back, I attended a seminar on share trading and investing. Since then I have – in a small way, started investing in a few stocks. I came across numerous websites providing free portfolio management services. But I was on the lookout for a desktop solution – to track my stock investment.

• I’m happy to release Massif Visualizer v0.2. This is mainly a “fix the build-system” release, no new features have been added.

Proprietary

• For extensions developers, from now on if you drag’n’drop extension’s config.xml file onto Opera a separate list is created in Extensions Manager which is titled ‘Developer mode’. Each entry on this list has additional buttons: ‘Reload’ (you don’t have to install and uninstall to see the changes now, just click ‘Reload’) and ‘Open containing folder’ which we think can be quite useful.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• In preparation for the first tarball release of The Board, I thought it would be a good time to start setting up some minimal tools for collaboration. In practice, this means generally using GNOME’s infrastructure.

• The GNOME project is proud to announce the participants of the Outreach Program for Women internships. Thanks to generous sponsors, Google, Collabora and the GNOME Foundation, GNOME was able to accept eight really strong candidates. These eight women from North America, South America and Asia will be working on GNOME technologies from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011.

• “Google actively encourages students to get involved in software development through free software,” says Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google. “Google is proud to help support this innovative global program for technical women and GNOME.”

• The font, a ‘Humanist sans-serif’ family titled ‘Cantarell’, isn’t actually that new* – it’s already available as one of Google’s ‘web fonts’.

Distributions

Reviews

• Sabayon 5.4 E17 is one of several “Experimental Spins” of Sabayon Linux released just this week. It is based on E17, version 0.17 of Enlightenment, a multi-platform stacking window manager and desktop environment. This is the first time in more than two years that I have reviewed a distribution using the Enlightenment desktop environment. It was still under heavy development then, and I thought it was about time I took another look at it.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the November 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Debian Family

• The Debian Installer team has announced the first beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze. This release is dedicated to Frans Pop who recently passed away.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s been a wee while since I last spoke about the elementary mail application ‘Postler’ but, in the last few days, the project has finally come to Launchpad.

• The Ubuntu Ubiquity Slideshow is a project which uses Webkit that provides a slideshow when you install Ubuntu.

• I personally look forward to a future where 80% of the computers in the world run some GNU/Linux distribution. 10% will run an Apple OS and 10% will run Windows. If you think that this is madness, please come back and revisit this article in about 2022 when this will be the reality. This article will still be here

• Given all this, I wonder what will happen to Linux Mint and other derivatives of Ubuntu after this. In fact, now that we know that Canonical’s future plan is to ship Unity or an evolution of it based on Wayland as the default environment in Ubuntu, what will happen to the official derivatives, like Kubuntu and Xubuntu? Will Canonical actually put effort into helping migrate KDE and Xfce onto Wayland from X/11, or will they just be left out to rot? I’m anxious to see what comes of all this in the coming years.

• X is a great thing for schools, permitting thin clients and all kinds of teacher-tricks to work well in classrooms and labratories. Unfortunately there are not many details available. A major difference between X and Wayland is that the compositor will be in-line between the client applications and the kernel. That’s a rational improvement in performance but the picture does not show what happens to networking and it would seem that VNC or RDP might be plugged in as a hack.

• But you ain’t seen nothing yet, folks. Mark Shuttleworth called me personally earlier today to let me know that Ubuntu has decided to drop its terminals (all of them) for a generic DOS prompt.

• I was surprised by the passion generated by my blog entry last week about Ubuntu’s decision to replace GNOME with its own Unity desktop. Apparently, contrary to the pundits and usability experts, users have strong feelings about their interfaces of choice. But, when I stop to think, I should have expected that. For many free software users, the choice of desktop is still a deeply personal matter.

• This is a good time to ask this, because Ubuntu just announced that it’s ditching the X Windows display server in favor of Wayland. And at the same time ditching Gnome in favor of Unity. And this decision is being made by people who think like Eleven is Louder, who simply trumpet things like “X11 is unmaintainable. It’s also quite large.” (- compared to what?) and then compares it to Windows: “it’s not quite as advanced as Quartz or Windows’ GUI layer.” – Bzzzzt! Wrong answer! That’s all I’ve been hearing since the day I installed my first tar.gz is “We gotta turn Linux into I-Cant-Believe-Its-Not-Windows(TM)! WindowsWindowsWindows!” and the people saying that have been nothing but wrong every single time.

• So, at some point in the future (I’ll be back to say I told you so) I’m anticipate that I’ll be hearing a lot of wailing and grief-driven rending of garments over not having X11 and Gnome any more when 99% of everything in Ubuntu is coded to the X11/Gnome world. And suddenly the rest of you will get a sip of the cider I’ve been pounding for years.

• The countdown has begun.

Devices/Embedded

Sub-notebooks

• In summary I would say that Jolicloud is a very nice netbook operating system, I like it considerably more than Ubuntu Unity. It it likely to get even better with the upcoming 1.1 release. I could easily recommend it to others, and in fact I may do exactly that for those who are currently running Ubuntu Netbook Edition pre-10.10 release, and who want to upgrade without changing to Ubuntu Unity.

• Overall, eeePC is snappy and revvy when running UNR Lucid, taking fairly minimal resources. Even for someone who dislike low-end machines, I find the performance to be extremely good, including network speed.

Free Software/Open Source

• The decision of quality open source makers to offer their software at bargain basement prices even to enterprise customers who are used to pay prices many times more-pricing is the reason open source software is taking a long time to command respect in enterprise software.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• When we launched SUMO back in the days of Firefox 2, our TikiWiki based software was a great choice. But by the beginning of 2010 it became clear to us that we’d need something new to be able to keep up with our ever growing community of Firefox users, so we decided to write a completely new support system (named Kitsune) from scratch. Over the spring and summer we released new Contributor Forums, a new Search module and the support Questions App. The next major piece that we’ll release at the end of the month, is our new Knowledge Base.

• In our first Prospector experiment, Speak Words, we helped Firefox learn what words you might want to type into the Awesome Bar. We have taken that idea to help you find words in your open tab in our latest experiment.

Licensing

• The non-profit Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), which recently formalised its presence in the country by opening an office in New Delhi, has set up a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) defence centre.

• Founded in 2005 in the United States, the SFLC provides legal representation and other services to protect FOSS in the legal domain. Since its inception, it has legally supported and taken up the cause of many major free software and open source projects and organisations, including the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Apache Software Foundation, the Drupal and the Gnome Foundation.

Openness/Sharing

• The Open Source Way shows how to (and how not to) engage the community members that influence your projects – it distills years of knowledge our community members have gained while running open source projects.

Open Data

• A few weeks ago, after a happy hour in Rome, people started spontaneously to share links on Italian open data and tools to crunch them with. With a few others, I thought it would be nice to collect these links in one place, a sort of one stop shop for people interested in transparency not just in theory, but in the practice of extracting information from public data. One thing led to another, and today Spaghetti Open Data is born. We aggregated 32 databases; not bad when you consider that data.gov, with all the firepower of the Obama administration, had 47 at launch.

Programming

• While Java’s future appears far less unclear than news reports may suggest, IT decision makers should still evaluate Java alternatives in the enterprise.

• Why? Because few of today’s new college graduates consider themselves simply “Java developers.” Rather, they are familiar with multiple programming languages. Many even moonlight with PHP or Node.js. By allowing developers to use those skills for certain enterprise projects, IT decision makers could help accelerate application delivery.

• Plus, increased technology competition within your IT department ensures that technology ecosystems, such as Java, Node.js, and .Net, and the vendors in those ecosystems don’t become complacent or ignore innovation occurring in another ecosystem.

Standards/Consortia

• At the start of the year, only 10% of all web video was available in HTML5 format. Today, 54% of all web video is.

Leftovers

• In 2007, MAKE projects editor Paul Spinrad sent me a link to a YouTube video of a wind-powered cart, made by a Floridian named Jack Goodman, that seemed to be able travel directly downwind faster than the wind. How could a wind-powered cart outrun a tailwind, we wondered? Intrigued, Paul and I asked contributing editor Charles Platt to repeat the experiment and report on the results for MAKE.

Science

• Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have fabricated transparent thin films capable of absorbing light and generating electric charge over a relatively large area. The material, described in the journal Chemistry of Materials, could be used to develop transparent solar panels or even windows that absorb solar energy to generate electricity.

Health/Nutrition

• Older Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, but they live as long or even longer than their English peers, according to a new study by researchers from the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

• Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography.

Security

• A former University of Akron student was sentenced Friday to 30 months in prison, followed by 3 years of supervised release for conducting Denial of Service Attacks on the sites of several prominent conservative figures as well as infecting several systems with botnet zombies.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Full credit for this story goes to Ishtar Enana, an Iraqi citizen journalist and blogger who has undertaken the monumental task of translating the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs into Arabic. Through her in depth digging through the logs, Ishtar reported (here, here, and here) that she found evidence in the war logs to substantiate the case brought forth in 2007 against Donald Rumsfeld by two American “security contractors” employed in Iraq. The two, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, were abducted and imprisoned by U.S. forces, where they experienced a range of American torture and abuse along with Iraqi inmates. The suspicion was that they were whistle blowers concealing a greater amount of information than they had revealed, and all rights were denied to them. Very little about this case has been previously publicized, this one being one of the leading accounts (a few more at the bottom).

• As Vance and Ertel make clear in their lawsuit, in 2006 they were “indefinitely detained without due process of law in a United States military compound located on foreign soil. They were not charged with any crime, nor had they committed any crime” (p. 1). They were denied access to an attorney and were subjected to abuse. They specifically point to Donald Rumsfeld for instituting a series of unconstitutional policies that would deprive anyone deemed to be an “enemy combatant,” even if American, any of the rights inherent to due process.

• Appearing on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, the president joined a small pantheon of acting and former heads of state like Pervez Musharraf, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Evo Morales and Bill Clinton to sit down for some casual conversation peppered with quips and yuks.

• After almost a full minute of wildly enthusiastic applause from an audience that probably still has their “HOPE” bumper stickers, the president took a seat across from Stewart for a mostly jovial back-and-forth in which Obama spoke about health care reform, financial regulatory reform, insurance premiums, the misuse of the filibuster, negative campaign ads, stabilizing the stock market, staggering job losses and a fragile economy that marked what he called “the two toughest years of any time since the Great Depression.”

• And, yet, there was one subject that was never discussed, not even in passing, during the 25-minute interview. That’s right – you guessed it – the $1.1 trillion invisible campaign issue, America’s pernicious nine-year-old War on Terror (oh yeah, the war … ).

• A judge in Los Angeles today sentenced 28-year-old Johannes Mehserle (shown at left), former BART transit officer, to two years in prison for shooting an unarmed man on an Oakland train platform. Oscar Grant, 22 years old, (shown at right) died.

Finance

• Obama must break his devil’s pact with the banks in order to succeed.

• Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure — to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

• As Krugman rightly stipulates, Monday-morning quarterbacks should say exactly what different play they would have called. Paul’s answer is that the stimulus package should have been bigger. No disagreement: I was one voice calling for a much larger program back when. Yet this answer is not sufficient.

• The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

• Long-term benefit claimants could be forced to do compulsory manual labour under proposals being put forward by the government, it has emerged.

• Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is set to outline plans for four-week placements doing jobs like gardening and litter clearing.

• Attorney General Tom Corbett today announced that a consumer protection lawsuit has been filed against an Erie debt collection company accused of using deceptive tactics to mislead, confuse or coerce consumers – including the use of bogus “hearings” allegedly held in a company office that was decorated to look like a courtroom.

• November could be an interesting month for investment banks trying to keep the intricacies of their lucrative high-frequency trading businesses behind closed doors.

• Two criminal trials are scheduled to begin later this month in which former traders are accused of stealing the proprietary computer code used to execute the lightning fast trades at Societe Generale and Goldman Sachs.

• (For LB readers who are unfamiliar, high-frequency trading is a system where banks can profit by using computers to buy and sell securities at extremely fast speeds.)

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• There is an easy way for a mediocre politician to grab headlines: upset the Israel lobby. Karel de Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, discovered this to his cost in September when asked about Middle East “peace” talks on the Flemish radio station VRT.

• Deviating from the official EU script, de Gucht rated the chances of the Obama administration resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict as extremely low. After describing the Zionist lobby as the “best organised” in US politics and inferring that it was a major obstacle to progress, he expressed a view about how Jews in general perceive Israel. “There is indeed a belief – it’s difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right,” he said. “And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• “While I think Facebook does a good job on this issue, I worry that third parties might accidentally disclose information inappropriately,” said Larry Magid, co-founder of ConnectSafely.org.

• Two brief comments on this. First, it should be apparent that any “right to be forgotten” conflicts mightily with free speech rights and press freedom. As I discussed at greater length in this review of Solove’s Understanding Privacy as well as my essay on “Two Paradoxes of Privacy Regulation,” the problem with enshrining expansive privacy “rights” into law is that it means there will need to be stricter limits placed on speech and press freedoms.

• Google is facing fresh complaints over Street View in Germany, after technical problems caused some properties to be visible rather than blurred in a preview of the service launched earlier this week.

• Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.

• A former No 10 insider told me on Thursday that David Cameron’s offices are like a drop-in centre for passing technologists: Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, can barely avoid bumping into senior people from Facebook or Microsoft as the prime minister’s people try to marry the “big society” with big technology.

• Google announced that it has received preliminary approval for its $8.5 million settlement of a class action brought against Google Buzz, the Gmail add-on that tried to turn the company’s online email service into a social networking tool.

• On November 8th, Cory Doctorow, John Perry Barlow, and numerous other digital luminaries will be gathering at the Minna Gallery in San Francisco for the EFF’s Pioneer Awards Party. Cory is going to be the MC and — when not featured on XKCD blogging from a ballon in a red cape and goggles…

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The FCC has—finally, mercifully—closed up its net neutrality docket. ISPs, Web companies, and public interest groups hustled to turn in last-minute filings yesterday, most showing a naked self-interest that was bracing to behold: Netflix want guaranteed bandwidth for its over-the-top services, cable operators went after the wireless industry, and the wireless industry just came right out and made the argument that Wall Street wouldn’t like net neutrality rules and therefore they shouldn’t be imposed on it.

• But the most intriguing (and one of the most self-serving) arguments came courtesy of Time Warner Cable: the real threat to “neutrality” and the “open Internet” comes not from ISPs but from broadcasters like FOX. Perhaps the FCC would like to go after broadcasters who try to strong arm the cable industry into better deals?

• That said, the most powerful reason I began this blog was that I simply could not believe that Usage Based Billing could be approved by the CRTC because it is such an incredibly bad deal for Canada since:

Intellectual Monopolies

• Of course, this ignores the bigger point, which is that the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957 and haven’t used the logo since then. On top of that, it’s not at all clear that the Dodger’s original trademarked logo would cover food at all. And, of course, it’s not as if anyone (moron in a hurry or not) would rush by the Brooklyn Burger restaurant and think “gee, the Dodgers have opened a restaurant!” The whole thing feels like yet another (in a long line of) intellectual property overreaches by Major League Baseball.

Copyrights

• The tale of writer Monica Gaudio hit the Web on Wednesday after she reported that her story, “A Tale of Two Tarts,” was apparently lifted and published by the print magazine Cooks Source with her byline, but without her knowledge or any compensation. After tracking down the editor at the magazine, Gaudio asked for an apology on Facebook and in the magazine, as well as a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism.

• The record label plaintiffs filed their appellate brief in the First Circuit this week, seeking to reinstate the $675,000 copyright infringement award against Joel Tenenbaum that the district court held was unconstitutionally excessive and reduced to $67,500.

• We were fortunate to get a chance to speak with New York attorney Ray Beckerman recently on the topic of P2P litigation. Mr. Beckerman is well known for his analysis and commentary on the RIAA litigation campaign and was nice enough to answer some of our questions.

• When Guy Hands – the multimillionaire private equity baron, founder of buyout shop Terra Firma, owner of historic music group EMI – made his explosive decision to sue Citigroup, he sought out one of America’s highest-profile corporate litigators, David Boies, to run his case.

• Mr. Hands, the high-profile British financier who is the chairman of Terra Firma Capital Partners, is represented by David Boies, one of the country’s most highly regarded trial lawyers. Terra Firma has sued Citigroup, accusing the bank of lying during the EMI auction and tricking him into buying the ailing music company.

• [...]

• A spokeswoman for Boies Schiller declined to comment on the episode. It hasn’t been a good 48 hours for Mr. Hands. Late Wednesday, a ruling by Judge Rakoff has effectively limited Citigroup’s exposure in the case to $2 billion from the more than $6 billion Mr. Hands originally sought.

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