Showing all newswire headlines

A few days ago, a new proposal was put forward in the HTML Working Group (HTML WG) by Microsoft, Netflix, and Google to take DRM in HTML5 to the next stage of standardization at W3C. This triggered another uproar about the morality and ethics behind DRM and building it into the Web. There are good arguments about morality/ethics on both sides of the debate but ultimately, the HTML WG will decide whether or not to pursue the specification based on technical merit. I am a member of the HTML WG. I was also the founder of a start-up that focused on building a legal, peer-to-peer, content distribution network for music and movies. It employed DRM much like the current DRM in HTML5 proposal. During the course of 8 years of technical development, we had talks with many of the major record labels. I have first-hand knowledge of the problem, and building a technical solution to address the problem.

December 2012 saw the final release of Slax 7.0 after more than three years without an update, quickly followed by several bug-fix point releases. In 7.0.3 the ability to act as PXE server was re-introduced, which had been present in earlier versions but was missing from the early 7.0 branch. I tried it in VMware Player, VirtualBox, from Live CD as intended and installed to external USB connected to an Acer 5551 laptop with ATI graphics, 4 GB Ram and a Phenom II X3 processor.

I’ve recently been involved in several discussions that are variations on, "Which open source or free software license should I choose for my project?" Here is my way of looking at the large and growing collection of licenses in the wild. First, let's make sure we all understand that I Am Not A Lawyer. This is not legal advice. Depending upon your needs and your comfort with risk around your software, you'll want to confirm your legal choices with counsel in your jurisdiction.

Another busy week for Red Hat

Let us be non-mainstream. In the world of Linux desktop environments, Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) is not your typical first or second choice. Most people will mention Gnome, KDE, perhaps Unity. You may have heard of Cinnamon and MATE lately, and Xfce is also a solid, longtime niche player. LXDE keeps slipping under the radar.

The Reiser4 file-system has been ported to run on the Linux 3.7 kernel. Separately, TRIM/DISCARD support for Reiser4 on solid-state drives is being discussed amongst the remaining Reiser4 developers...

Don't ask, don't get. That's why we rang up Canonical and requested an early build of Ubuntu for the Galaxy Nexus. (Politely declined.) Next, we asked if maybe the company could speed up development of its dual OS solution for Android, since we're really looking forward to it. (Funny looks.) Finally, we wondered if there was any possibility of dropping by the London HQ and interviewing someone in charge. ("Come on over!") We promptly found ourselves sitting across a desk from Richard Collins, who left the Symbian Foundation 18 months ago to work at Canonical, and who has a very firm grasp of how Ubuntu is going to be hauled into the mobile era. He explains everything after the break, so if you have a big OS-shaped gap in your belly, or if you're just intrigued to hear the proposition of a new player, read on.

The first (and only planned) point release to QEMU 1.3 is now available. The QEMU 1.3.1 release fixes just over two dozen bugs, including critical issues for OpenBSD guests...

Another patch landed in mainline Mesa today that's capable of providing a small performance boost for some OpenGL workloads with Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver...

No server, desktop, or laptop install is complete without Vim, and yet, there are times when I still see questions pop up on IRC about how to do basic editing of config files with vi. I remember, years ago, asking some of the same questions of an older Unix guru, and asking why I should bother learning such an eccentric and “outdated” text editor. His answer has stuck with me, he said “Because it is the only text editor guaranteed to be on every server, and some day you will need it, and have no other alternatives.” Vim, short for “vi improved” is ubiquitous, but it is also so much more, and the time you spend learning it will be repaid to you tenfold in productivity.

The lineup of value-added Big Data solutions for the open source Hadoop platform grew a little larger this week with the introduction of new data transfer and replication features from Attunity, an information-management vendor focused on the enterprise. The move also highlights the steady demand for integrative software packages that fill in the missing pieces for organizations aiming to build Big Data platforms based on open source tools.

This is a bugfix and stability release with several improvements.

Oracle Corp. President Mark Hurd says the Sun Microsystems acquisition, which occurred three years ago, has absolutely paid for itself in terms of cash flow vs. the purchase price, and thanks to acquired technologies like hardware and Java. Here’s the background from Hurd.

Jack Wallen takes another look at the GNOME 3 desktop and is surprised at what he finds. A desktop that is the target of much derision might deserve another chance.

Until recently it was illegal to jailbreak your own iPhone, and after Saturday it will be illegal to unlock a new smartphone, thereby allowing it to switch carriers. This is a result of the exception to the DMCA lapsing. It was not a mistake, but rather an intentional choice by the Librarian of Congress, that this was no longer fair use and acceptable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation among other groups has detailed the many failings of the DMCA Triennial Rulemaking process, which in this case led to this exception lapsing.

Pick up most items, from the soup can, to the library book, and you will find a data tag. In most cases, that tag is the simple, ubiquitous bar code that seems to have been around forever. They are the lineal representation of numbers in a machine readable format that most people do not even pay attention to any more (although some of us are old enough to remember a time before they were so common place). More recently, the shippers UPS and FedEx have moved to more complex data tags to help expedite the automated sorting and shipping of the thousands of products that they handle every day.

Microsoft has released a summary of the study compiled by HP on the Linux migration in Munich. In an article, German magazine Focus Money Online had last week quoted figures from an unpublished study that Microsoft had commissioned from HP. The study concludes that at €60.6 million (approximately £51 million), the City of Munich's Linux migration was considerably more expensive than reported by its council last November. However, last week, Microsoft Germany had emphasized that the study was compiled for internal purposes.

YALI (Yet Another Linux Installer) is the installer on Pardus, an original distribution (it is not based on any distribution). Development has, for now, ceased. And, as far as I know, it is not likely to be restarted, at least not by the original developers.

Today I am happy to announce our first public Bodhi images for the MK802 Android stick.

After only a few months Acer's Chromebook already accounts for 5 to 10% of Acer's US shipments and HP will soon be launching its own Chromebook. In the meantime, Windows 8 PC sales remain anemic.