Showing all newswire headlines

I have been a faithful user of the Microsoft Windows operating systems for over two decades, starting with Windows 3.1 back in the early 1990s. Over the years, I upgraded to Windows 95, 98, Millennium, 2000, XP, Vista, and finally Windows 7. When I started using GNU/Linux in about 2004, I happily used GNU/Linux and Windows side-by-side, effortlessly switching between the two operating systems. However, Windows 8 would take me along a path that I cannot follow. It is time for me to finally get off of the Windows train.

It's amazing how frequently we still hear from entertainment industry folks or politicians pointing to Hadopi as an example of "success" in a three strikes program. Of course, the reality is that it has been a colossal failure by nearly every measure possible. The industry has had to seriously massage the statistics, but they can't deny the simple fact that it hasn't helped drive sales, which really seems like the key metric. In fact, the latest reports show that music sales -- including digital sales -- have continued to drop. Even more telling: the decline in sales in France has outpaced the decline elsewhere. In other words, nothing about Hadopi worked.

Here's one that touches on both patents and copyrights. Last year, we wrote about how some academic journals were ridiculously claiming that law firms, who made copies of journal articles to submit to the US Patent and Trademark Office to show examples of prior art, were infringing on their copyrights. Yes, they were arguing that you couldn't use their journals as examples of prior art without paying them for the privilege.

New York City Comptroller John Liu is about to do something we need to see more often in government. This week, his office is open sourcing the code behind Checkbook NYC, the citywide financial transparency site—but the open-sourcing itself is not what I'm referring to. After all, lots of governments open source code these days.

Holder of numerous awards and accolades, The Swapper is an atmospheric puzzle platformer set in the furthest reaches of space. Players wield an experimental device able to clone the user and swap control between them. Dropped into a character and world as mysterious as the workings of the device itself, The Swapper is a game of exploration of a very personal nature. All of the art in The Swapper is constructed using clay models and other everyday materials.

Chakra is a user-friendly and powerful distribution and live CD based on Arch Linux. It features a graphical installer, automatic hardware detection and configuration, the latest KDE desktop, and a variety of tools and extras.

The most ambitious Linux Mint yet is one of the best desktop distros ever made. Linux Mint is at a tipping point. Our interview with Clem and his team revealed their plan to move away from the GNOME back-end. They feel it’s been holding them back somewhat, and now that Cinnamon and MDM are feature complete in their eyes, now is the time for the next step in the distro. Linux Mint 15 then is a preview of a mature, more independent Mint that will allow for great innovation over the coming year.

In a move that shouldn't be much of a surprise, given the close collaboration between Canonical and Inktank—not to mention Mark Shuttleworth personally—around the open source Ceph storage system for Big Data and the cloud, the two companies on Monday announced a deal to provide full support for Ceph on Ubuntu. Here are the details, and what they mean for the channel.

Installing Debian may be a trivial task for someone. It has never been so easy for me. To start with, my first attempt to install it failed epically. Installation of Debian 6.0 Squeeze without a network connection was a serious mistake. Has installation improved in Debian 7.0? It was my task to study this.

There may be no part of the channel in which open source is better positioned to dominate than Big Data. Not only are open source solutions such as Hadoop and Ceph enjoying huge popularity for building Big Data infrastructure, but open source relational database technologies are also proliferating among enterprises looking to cut software costs. Survey results released Tuesday by EnterpriseDB on PostgreSQL adoption show just how much that's the case.

Android is a lot more free than iOS, but there are limits. We need to break through those. At its birth, Android was the horizontal and open solution to the problem of Apple's vertical and closed silo. On Android, hardware makers and software writers could build devices and apps, free to operate outside the walls of any vendor's closed garden.

On June 4th, the 4.1.0 release of the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform arrived. This is the first major CloudStack release since its March 20th graduation from the Apache Incubator. This release includes numerous new features and bug fixes from the 4.0.x cycle. It also includes major changes in the codebase to make CloudStack easier for developers; a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages; and completes the changeover to using Maven, the Apache software project management tool.

The development team behind the GNOME Boxes project announced a few days ago the second unstable release of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.10 application, a GNOME utility that allows users to manage remote or virtual systems.

Some features on the WordPress Jetpack plugin are duplicated by other plugins. However, if I need a function that’s available in Jetpack, I’ll try running that version first before installing another plugin to do the job. Why? I’ve already got Jetpack installed, so why install another plugin if it’s not necessary? If I’m not happy with the way the Jetpack version works–and sometimes I’m not–I can always go plugin hunting to see if I can find another solution.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: June 4, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI: http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced a partnership initiative with Big Data Cloud (http://www.bigdatacloud.com/) -- a not-for-profit organization evangelizing the new technology movement regarding Big Data and the Cloud. The partnership initiative will promote events and other educational resources for LPI alumni on topics related to Big Data and the Cloud. Big Data Cloud hosts annual events and monthly meetups and has over 2700+ members. It is founded and operated by Third Eye Consulting Services & Solutions LLC (http://thirdeyecss.com/).

Valve has released the results of the hardware and software survey of May. As part of this monthly survey, Steam users are being asked what CPU, graphics card or operating system they are using.

Monit is a free open source tool used to manage and monitor processes, programs, files, directories and filesystems on a local or remote LINUX/UNIX systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced last evening, June 3, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of his popular Snowlinux 4 operating system.

The Epiphany development team announced a few days ago that the unstable version 3.9.2 of the Epiphany web browser for the GNOME desktop environment is available for testing. The good news in this release is that the developers removed the support for the WebKit1 API layer, in favor of WebKit2, which is far more advanced. Moreover, Epiphany 3.9.2 is now able to start up with Wayland, and it allows users to run a standalone instance with a custom profile.

The White House announced a set of executive actions on Tuesday to crack down on abusive patent infringement lawsuits. The steps will rein in firms, described by detractors as “patent trolls,” which acquire portfolios of patents and make money by suing other companies. Critics of these firms say they do not create new products themselves and hamper innovation by tying up legitimate businesses in costly court fights.