Binatone is known better as a maker of phones than a crafter of Android tablets, but it already has a couple of Homesurf models under its belt. The Homesurf 705 is the latest.

It costs a hundred pounds, has a 7in screen and Wi-Fi. But the savings may be offset by the cost of blood pressure medication, should you choose to buy it. The Binatone Homesurf 705 is among the smaller tablets on the market. Where the has a 9.7in screen, this tablet makes do with a smaller 7in display, like the and. That’s not small enough to make it pocketable, but the Homesurf is highly portable. Aside from the slightly tacky logos that adorn its front and back, the Homesurf 705 is an entirely inoffensive-looking device. The back is textured matt black plastic, which resists greasy smudges and fingerprints almost completely, and the front is tablet-standard glossy black, also plastic.

In-between, forming the sides, is a strip of metallic silver – it’s all very, but here this strip is plastic not stainless steel. Below the screen sit three navigation buttons. They look just like touch-sensitive panels, but are actually traditional clicky buttons, acting as Menu, Home and Back commands within the Android OS. Connectivity is fairly basic, though. Aside from the power button on the right edge, all the sockets are kept down on the bottom.

There’s a microSD slot, miniUSB (not the standard microUSB) port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. You miss out on a video output, SIM card slot and a full-size USB (admittedly uncommon in tablets), but otherwise the Homesurf 705 has the essentials accounted for. The matt black back is entirely blank apart from a logo, a discrete reset button and four little rubber feet, one at each corner. Quite what the latter are there for, when the contours of the tablet mean they don’t actually stick out beyond the backplate, is a mystery. You may also notice the lack of a camera on the back, a situation that isn’t alleviated by the presence of a front camera, because there isn’t one. We imagine, however, that many of you won’t care a jot.

Jan 23, 2016 Amazon: Eveready ELD 15-Watt CFL (White and Pack of 3) @ 299.00 (46% off) Shipping: Rs 40 on orders less than 499.

Contents • • • • • • Linux is one of the most secure and stable operating systems around, and yet, its user base hasn’t really grown as everyone expected it to. There are many reasons for this, and we won’t go into those right now. However, if you, like any other Linux user, are disappointed by the current market share stats, we can tell you some simple tips that will help you convince your Windows or Mac-crazy friends into using Linux. Now, many Linux users have already tried to coax their friends and family members to try out this popular and newbie-friendly distro called Ubuntu.

A select few have succeeded and many have failed. So here, we will give you some important tips to help you spread the word about Linux without sounding like that arrogant nerd who has nothing but contempt for Windows or Mac. • Now being in Orlando for the UDS-P summit, but with the event not officially getting underway until Monday (beginning with Mark’s keynote where something will be announced), there’s time to catch up on a few things (especially as the beer is crap and the weather is less than ideal for VFR flight at the moment). In deciding what to write about next, I was looking at the most popular Phoronix stories from this calendar year.

• Kernel Space • The PCI subsystem pull for the Linux 3.2 kernel was published on Friday evening. If you were hoping it would rework PCI-E ASPM (Active-State Power Management) to be more like the Windows implementation or for more PCI drivers to be setting the bits directly to support it (effectively white-listing drivers/hardware), it didn’t happen yet. • Graphics Stack • There’s a new driver to the DRM subsystem in Linux 3.2 and it’s the Samsung Exynos SoC driver. This DRM driver is only for the Exynos 4210 SoC at the moment. It supports kernel mode-setting, but doesn’t expose any 2D/3D hardware acceleration or any user-space interfaces.

Samsung doesn’t have a full open-source driver stack for this ARM SoC, so the capabilities of this driver just come down to mode-setting in the kernel right now. Samsung has been working on this driver for a while. • In September the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey came to an end, but due to Oktoberfest, AMD Bulldozer Linux testing, OpenBenchmarking.org developments, and other matters, I didn’t have time to look at the survey results until this weekend when getting ready for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Here’s the 2011 results looking at what Linux desktop end-users are running when it comes to graphics cards and drivers as well as their key concerns. • Applications • Ekiga did not start as a simple instant messaging software but as GnomeMeeting – a Linux alternative to Netmeeting. One of the purposes of Netmeeting was video chatting between people.

What was less noticed is that it was compatible with the H.323 standar and thus interoperable with professional videoconferencing environments. Ekiga is still the only client available on GNU/Linux software and able to communicate with H.323 hardware. • • • Instructionals/Technical • • • • • • • • • • • • • Games • • Tactical MMORPG Wakfu, Sequel to the incredibly successful Dofus, finally gets an official release date after a long period of beta testing. A brand new Trailer reveals thast it launches February 2012. • Desktop Environments • GNOME Desktop • It never stops! Here comes the first development release of the 3.3 development cycle.

We are off to a slow start, with most features still on the drawing board or in early development. Expect things to become more exciting in the next development release. But for now, we want you to download, compile and test this release. [.] This release is a snapshot of early development code. • • Phoronix recently hosted a near Gnome User Survey, which surprised me, given Gnome Developers’ general “We know what’s best, bug off” attitude. • • • Jolicloud Personal Cloud Jolicloud is getting ready to roll out a new cloud-based service that the company says will offer a new way to interact with all of your online services from one place — and that place can be a web browser, smartphone app or tablet app. When Jolicloud first launched, the company made an operating system for netbooks based on Ubuntu Linux.

The “cloud” part of the name signified two things: the ability to “install” web apps to your desktop so you could launch them quickly just like native Linux applications, and a social element that let you share your recent activity with your peers. • Red Hat Family • Microsoft stirred the bee’s hive by announcing new requirements for manufacturers who want to ship Windows 8 systems, including a feature called ‘Secure Boot’.

It means only Windows 8 will be able to run on that hardware, locking GNU/Linux out, shutting all windows on Linux on these computers. • Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu together with Red Hat, have weighed into the controversy surrounding the so called Secure Boot setup that requires OEMs to lock down your BIOS allowing only “approved” software to boot from it.

This is of course being pushed by Microsoft. • A few years ago I got up on stage and briefly talked about how the Linux community contained far too many people who were willing to engage in entirely inappropriate behaviour, how this discouraged people from getting involved and how we weren’t very good at standing up against that sort of behaviour. Despite doing this in front of several hundred people, and despite the video of me doing so then being uploaded to the internet, this got me a sum total of: * No death threats * No discussion about any of my physical attributes or lack thereof * No stalkers * No accusations that I was selling out the Linux community * No accusations that I was a traitor to my gender * No real negative feedback at all[1] • • Today we’ll look at Red Hat (RHT), a leading provider of open source operating systems based on Linux. The rise of cloud computing has been increasing demand for Red Hat’s open source solutions, which are often less expensive than comparable offerings from Microsoft and other rivals. • Cisco and Red Hat offer RHEL with FlexPod: FlexPod, as you might remember, is the NetApp/Cisco virtualization project, essentially a blueprint for deploying a pre-configured interoperable virtualization environment specifically designed for scalability. Now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be part of that mix, and will be part of Cisco’s Validated Design (CVD) program. Ideally, Red Hat now has another avenue to find its way into enterprise data centers, potentially even through Cisco VARs.

In addition to the CVD induction, Red Hat will also be made compatible with Secure Separation, a process that ensures secure “separate multi-tenant environments for non-virtualized workloads, alongside virtualized ones.” • Fedora • • Debian Family • If you checkout Dropbox’s Linux download page, you will see that Debian packages are provided. Up to a few days ago, they only provided packages for Ubuntu and Fedora.

• Derivatives • Canonical/Ubuntu • Ubuntu announced the 10.04 Netbook Edition and Ubuntu for ARM products 18 months ago, on April 29, 2010. At that time, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 18 months for these specific products. • I’ve come to enjoy launching and switching between applications via the Launcher. Making the distinction between running and not running applications less important and having stable targets for the most common applications is nice. But only as long as it’s about single window applications, as having to juggle windows after using the launcher just feels like a hassle.

The single top bar switching between title and menu is great with maximized windows. This is barely enough to tolerate the shortcomings.

• Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has a silly name, but it is a very decent and polished product. • • • • What do you do when your partners also become some of your most important customers? That’s a challenge Canonical executives grappled with recently as they moved to restructure Canonical’s relationship with OEMs. Here’s what’s changed at the company, and what it means for the open source channel. As Canonical CEO Jane Silber pointed out in a recent blog post, OEM partnerships have been key to distributing Canonical’s main product, the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.

Agreements with server manufacturers in particular have helped Ubuntu gain a significant presence on enterprise machines. • Flavours and Variants • That’s where my time with Kubuntu ended. Barring a few Rekonq crashes which could be fixed by Mozilla Firefox, Kubuntu is absolutely amazing. It is stable, polished, and really, really fast. Plus, it brings with it the benefits of a familiar interface (compared to Ubuntu’s Unity) along with the large package selection and the PPA system of Ubuntu.

I would strongly recommend that newbies try this, and if the trend of improvements is an indicator for future versions, I might just consider installing Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” on my laptop as my main distribution, now that I know that it will be supported for 5 years. It, along with Linux Mint, Chakra, #!, and Pardus, is now a contender. Bravo Kubuntu! • • • Xilinx Adds Open Source Linux Support as Xilinx Continues to Build out Development Model for its ARM Processor-Based Programmable SoC • Phones • Android • Keyboard lovers, get ready – the DROID4 by Motorola is coming and according to our sources, has the best slideout they have “ever seen on a smartphone.” In this set of glamour shots we received, you can get a taste for what’s to come which means ultra-thin slider with DROID RAZR styling and wait for it.4G LTE. You asked for it and Moto appears to have made it.

• Motorola Mobility recently announced third-quarter 2011 financial results, posting net revenues of $3.3 billion, up 11 percent from third quarter 2010. Mobile device revenue came in at $2.4 billion, up 20 percent from Q3 of last year.

Motorola smartphones have been flying off shelves, with 4.8 million smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2011, up 1 million from Q3 of last year. On the flip side, Motorola’s XOOM tablet hasn’t been doing so well, with only 100,000 XOOM’s shipped in Q3 (apple ships that many iPads a day). There’s also a few tidbits in there about the Motorola/Google merger, with around 18 million in expenses going towards the merger, which will seek stockholder approval on November 17th. The merger will also require antitrust clearances in the U.S., by the European Commission, and in Canada, China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey. • The Google TV platform contributes to this evolution by enabling new content creators to add to the programming you already enjoy on your TV. Given so much choice, we’re committed to delivering the best way to discover and engage with the high-quality entertainment on your television, whether that comes from your cable or satellite provider (DISH, Comcast, DIRECTV, etc.) or from the Web (YouTube, Netflix, and thousands more). The initial version of Google TV wasn’t perfect, but launching it gave us the opportunity to learn.

These are still early days, and we’re working hard to move forward with each update. • I’ve long held the opinion that the most effective way to get Internet-based content onto a TV is to simply hook a laptop up to the flat screen with an HDMI cable. The laptop acts as an oversized remote control.

You get a full Flash-based Web browser, hard drive and keyboard on your TV. • • The original Motorola Atrix smartphone was a powerful device that doubled as a pseudo laptop or AV centre – you could connect it to an HDTV in your living room or the LCD on your desk and run a Linux variant with full keyboard and mouse. • Before I follow up with a story on Nokia Qt’s news of the Qt platform now moving to a completely pure open source status, I thought I would also make mention of LinuxCon as I had to select just one from the two events and chose to have my beer German flavoured this year with Qt. LinuxCon will reportedly feature a keynote/Q&A held between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about the kernel and 20 years of Linux. So 20 years in as we are, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will detail the biggest challenges we still now face and what the next 20 years looks like. While Chairman Emeritus at the IBM Academy of Technology, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger will present “Linux – A Short Retrospective and an Opinion on the Future”.

• Events • • Web Browsers • Mozilla • The only reason we have Firefox today is because Microsoft used their signature anti-competitive business practice to butcher Netscape. Google helped Firefox to generate revenue so as to create a competitor to Microsoft’s fossilized Internet Explorer and bring the Web to the highway. Firefox used Google as its default search engine. The open source browser signed a deal with Microsoft recently to also use Bing as a search option. Just today the open source browser announced another deal to feed the hand that bites it. The Mozilla foundation has announced a version of Firefox with Bing as the default search engine. Microsoft is an abusive monopoly which kept all other players out of the PC business.

When Linux emerged as a contender they started attacking all Linux players over unknown patent issues which Linus Torvalds called bogus. • Firefox, which was created from the ashes of Netscape, which was burned down by none other than Microsoft, is now going in bed with the same Microsoft. The interesting point is Microsoft’s Bing gives out ‘confusing’ results. We did a test and searched for Open Source Office Suite.

The results were obvious for any user. You must see OpenOffice and LibreOffice as top results.

When we Googled. We got the expected Results. • It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape’s 0.9 version of its Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994 was clearly the beginning of a new era. For a few years, Netscape was the centre of the Internet universe – it’s home page was the first you checked each morning for news about what was happening on this strange new Web thing that the company was doing so much to define.

Of course, Netscape went from Net hero to zero remarkably rapidly, but its influence is still felt in multiple ways. Perhaps most importantly, Netscape Navigator gave rise to Mozilla and thus Firefox.

It also gave us JavaScript. Or rather, Netscape’s Brendan Eich gave us JavaScript. Eich is not so well known as some of his colleagues around that time, and that’s a pity, because he was one of the key figures in this formative time. Today he is CTO of Mozilla.

A few weeks ago I met up with him, and we looked back at the amazing ride the Web – and he – has had since the founding of Netscape. What follows is the first part of that interview, dealing with the birth of JavaScript and the origins of Mozilla.

Next week the story will look at Firefox and more recent developments. • SaaS • • • • Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems.

In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.

First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases. * Low initial costs. Specifically, you can get a cloud server for less than $20. Even the cheapest dedicated servers (and I wouldn’t recommend the cheapest) will cost more than $50.

For new companies, this can make a difference. * Fast deployment times and hourly billing.If you have variable traffic and you’re not having problems scaling your data persistence layer, you can fairly easy spin up and spin down servers quickly in response to usage patterns. It’s worth pointing out that I specifically mean variable traffic rather than growing traffic. From purely an ease of deployment standpoint, handling even quickly growing traffic is fairly easy on both cloud and dedicated platforms.

* Cheap CPU performance.If your application is purely CPU bound, then you can end up with great price/performance ratios. Most cloud servers allow a single small node on a physical server to use more than its fair share of CPU resources if they are otherwise underutilized — and they often are.

One of the last bits of our infrastructure still on the cloud is CPU bound and even though we pay for very small Rackspace cloud servers, we get the performance of dedicated hardware. • • • Databases • • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice • Yesterday’s filings of significance all came from Oracle, beginning with a letter to the judge disagreeing with Google’s request that certain copyright issues be disposed of by the judge before the trial commences. (566 [PDF; Text]) Google had suggested that the following issues related to Oracle’s copyright infringement claims were a matter of law and should be decided by the court before the commencement of the trial to make the trial proceed more efficiently: • I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite.

In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense). • Business • • Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, and the Asterisk open source community, today released Asterisk 10. Asterisk is a communications platform that allows developers to create powerful business phone systems and unified communications solutions. Since its introduction 12 years ago, Asterisk has been used, free of charge, in nearly every country of the world to power telephone and other communications systems. It has been downloaded millions of times, including two million last year alone, establishing Asterisk as the most popular open source telephony engine. • The VAR Guy continues to ask the question: Can Digium and its open source IP PBX technology Asterisk make inroads in the telecom space? Now that Asterisk 10 has been released, more signs are pointing to yes.

Read on for the feature list of Asterisk 10, and a little perspective on how it could shape the VoIP world • • Semi-Open Source • • • LogoZenoss, the open source server and network monitoring software provider, says 2011 revenues grew 300 percent year over year (YoY). The company claims IT service providers increasingly opt for Zenoss rather than management platforms from IBM, HP, CA Technologies and BMC. Anecdotal evidence suggests Zenoss’s annual revenues will easily exceed $10 million in 2011.

But is Zenoss really disrupting the Big 4 IT management software providers? • Funding • Hadapt, creator of the first big data platform to integrate Hadoop with a structured data store to allow for high performance analytics across both structured and unstructured data, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Bessemer Venture Partners. Matthew Howard, general partner at NVP, and Felda Hardymon, partner at Bessemer, have joined Hadapt’s Board of Directors. • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC • My problems with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been simplistically condensed to either being a knee-jerk reaction to anything the FSF has to say, or else part of a broader conspiracy to hate all free software. • Licensing • In the Python world the GPL is frequently frowned on, with most people preferring to use a more permissive license such as BSD, MIT, or Python’s.

It’s understandable then when people get angry because I’ve licensed Lamson under the GPL. Many people just hate the license, since they feel it goes contrary to the spirit of Python. Jaan Tere Naam Movie Download Hd.

However, I’d like to explain why I use the GPL after decades of writing open source software and after a couple of “successful” projects. These are my reasons for using it, and only apply to me and what I want to do with my software from now on. You are free to your own opinions and choices, and I hope you’ll respect mine.

[.] I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Because I have a solution to that too. • It was the late summer of 2008 that I found myself sat listening to Sun Microsystem’s then CEO Jonathan Schwartz explain how the open source model would work for customers in practice. Sat as I was at the last JavaOne conference before Oracle’s acquisition of the Java innovators, Schwartz said something like: “Hey, the software is free. When you want the services that go with it, we’ll be there to provide them for you.” For ‘provide’ you can obviously take it that he meant ‘sell’ of course.

So how do companies now continue to justify the open source model and validate their option to sell a commercially provided service, support and maintenance package in this space? • Openness/Sharing • When we announced the initiation of the Open Compute Project earlier this year, we posed an audacious question to the industry: What if hardware were open?The benefits, if we could make it work, were clear enough: More openness and collaboration would likely mean a faster pace of innovation in infrastructure technology, greater accessibility to the best possible technology for us all, more efficiency in scale computing and a reduced environmental impact through the sharing of best practices.

• The StreetScooter is a $7,000 EV with a 74 mph top speed and an 80-mile range. It relies on leased batteries and uses a heat pump for heating and air conditioning, and shipping company DHL has already ordered 3,500 of them — but the most interesting thing about the vehicle is how it came to be. • There are 640 muscles in the human body, or maybe it is 639. Or maybe it is 850. It all depends on whom you ask. In any case, it is a lot. Stanford bioengineer Scott Delp knows; he has programmed almost every one into his latest work, OpenSim, a software application that helps medical professionals and bioengineers study, diagnose and correct abnormalities in how people move.

• • Programming • Serendipity logo Version 1.6 of the open source Serendipity blogging software has been released. The new update includes the jQuery framework so that plug-in and template authors can “provide extended functionality to the frontend” and, like plug-ins, templates can now also use config-groups. • • Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs.

Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal.

Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Reduce costs.

Those are your only goals. • Over the past couple of months the Hudson community has been working hard to ensure that its source code and libraries are IP and license clean in order to pass the stringent entry requirements of the Eclipse Foundation. I spoke briefly about this at my Hudson session at JavaOne and the response was so enthusiastic that I feel I need to bring the facts to a wider audience through this blog. The Hudson code that is moving to Eclipse is made up of its core components and plugins for SSH-Slaves, Git and Subversion. The initial upload was made up of around 1700 Java files, 125 XML files, 600 Jelly files and some 3700 property files.

The core elements (core, UITest and UpdateCenter) have now been approved and are around 8 of the external libraries but there is still some way to go. Each license is checked by both Eclipse’s automated system and by hand.

• Standards/Consortia • • • Security • • Environment/Energy/Wildlife • It’s quite clear that advocates on both sides of the current debate truly believe that the US can return to a growth path. Equally, they share an assumption that the supply of energy will adhere to a shift in the supply curve, which means simply that more supply or substitutes will be brought to market if the price level is sustained at high enough levels. • Finance • If these assets are made digital and put online, we can bring them to a wider audience, and preserve them for the next generation. They can have applications in education, tourism, or as a source for further art.

They can be used by developers and for online exhibitions to which members of the public can contribute. And they can boost our growth and jobs, including in the creative sector which represents 3.3% of our GDP.

Europeana is the focal point for all these efforts. It already holds 19 million digital items – from Principia Mathematica to Het Meisje met de Parel. Check out the site now and explore our cultural heritage! Contents • • • • • • Then there is Linux. It makes no promises, it offers no excuses. It is what it is and you can take it or leave it.

Linux has it’s beauty spots and it’s warts and they are both out there, side by side, for all to see. Linux has features that windows users see and they exclaim “I want this on my computer!” They claim this quite emphatically, sometimes even going so far as to actually installing Linux and using it for a while.

• In the larger scheme, however, Linux is arguably one of the most influential technologies of our time. It’s providing the backbone for tech applications that are changing the way the world works and plays. The most powerful computers in the world use it to crunch complicated algorythms.

Linux has paved the way for companies’ move of information into “the cloud” and for the general spirit of collaboration that has fueled everything from social networking to Wikipedia. This year, Linux turns 20. The computing community is celebrating the anniversary of the date when Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds released Linux to the world, looking back at Torvalds’ vision for modern computing and looking ahead at some of the ways Linux might change business in the future.

• Want to watch a Blu-ray on your PC? That’ll be £50 please. Simon, for one, is fed up of this game. Join him as he looks at one of the many wheezes the proprietary software and hardware industry are still trying to pull I’ve just opened up my e-mail mailbox, to be greeted by press releases for another round of product announcements. The one that caught my eye, as it does every year, is the release for another piece of DVD playback software.

In this case, it’s Corel WinDVD Pro 11, although it’s not the only offender. And if you’re looking for an example of the wheezes the proprietary hardware and software industries pull, then look no further. • Desktop • Linux Inside Where will you find Linux Inside your phone? In your living room? Open Source Software has long been at home in the data center, providing the engine to drive everything from web servers to high performance computing to Cloud. Its versatility, combined with low cost and massive community are pushing it out of the raised floor and into your pocket.Let’s take a look inside a typical consumer router as an example.

Chances are, you’ll find Linux at the core. • Ubuntu has found some new horizons in China.

In a post on Canonical’s blog, it was announced that Canonical and Dell will bring PCs loaded with Ubuntu to the Chinese market. According to the post: “The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.” • • Audiocasts/Shows • • • Kernel Space • • Applications • Linux for education is a great win, for all PC users. I have read about schools making the move to open source and Linux in the classroom, with countless success stories.

I have been a GNU/Linux user for many years, and I admit that I have never really dug into the open source educational software that is available for the Linux desktop, until recently. I also read many articles written by Windows users about how Linux is dead on the desktop. Is it really?

When I see articles that put down the Linux desktop, I am almost 100% assured that the author has not even tried to download a copy of GNU/Linux, installed some software and actually given it a test drive. For those that have actually used GNU/Linux enough to know what it is, you generally hear a completely different tone. Linux is definitely not taking over the market, but it is FAR from dead; there is a huge amount of software that comes with each and every GNU/Linux distribution that a lot of people are not even aware exists. To me, this makes the Linux desktop a very viable and economical solution for educational environments. It is also fine for business and personal use as well, but that is a harder nut to crack. As I have found for myself, it is definitely worth taking a look at what software is available; I guarantee you will be surprised. • • Instructionals/Technical • • • • • • • • • • • Penetration (Pen) testing and security auditing are now part of every system administrator’s “other duties as assigned.” BackTrack Linux (is a custom distribution designed for security testing for all skill levels from novice to expert.

It is the largest collection of wireless hacking, server exploiting, web application assessing, social-engineering tools available in a single Linux distribution. • I’ve always liked those smaller more obscure Linux distributions. The good ones usually offered a unique personality and the atmosphere around those projects were friendly and accessible. Kwort was one of these.

However, it had faded from my memory since my last tests until I noticed on Distrowatch.com that a third release candidate for 3.2 had been released. Because it’s been four years since my last look, I thought another was waaay overdue. The first thing I did was look back at my old reviews of Kwort. Back then it was based on Slackware (a big plus in my book) and featured Xfce as the desktop.

These days it appears Kwort is now based on CRUX and uses Openbox for the desktop. Well, CRUX is cool I hear. Openbox is a little too minimal for my tastes usually, but let’s take a look anyway. • New Releases • • • • • For some important needs of international computer forensic experts and our community, we decide to release this micro update that allows you to create the “super timeline” using log2timeline (0.60) utility. • Red Hat Family • Tim Burke, VP of Linux technology development at Red Hat, gave a keynote speech at Linuxcon in Prague this week. Overall he expressed that the Linux community is essential to the open source operating system’s progress.

• • Linux distributor Red Hat has joined the Open Compute Project. The OCP was founded by Facebook and develops specifications for building highly efficient data centres, ranging from specifications for motherboards, server chassis and cabinets, to ones for transformers for connecting to the high voltage electrical grid. • Debian Family • Derivatives • Canonical/Ubuntu • • • • Phones • Android • • Two startups are about to go “chrono y chrono” with competing Android smartwatch gizmos. The “I’m Watch” exclusively targets smartwatch applications, whereas the “WIMM Platform” is meant to create “a new market of connected wearable devices that deliver timely, relevant information at a glance” — of which smartwatches are but one example. • Google unveiled Google TV 2.0, which will roll out on Sony TVs and Logitech Revue boxes Oct. Featuring Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”), the upgrade includes a revamped interface featuring a new customizable home screen and app shortcuts, provides hundreds of Android Market apps, and offers improved search for TV and YouTube, says the company.

• Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless began selling the Droid Razr Android smartphone on pre-order for $300, with shipments promised by Nov. Meanwhile, a 3.5-inch Motorola Fire XT Android smartphone was announced in Italy; Motorola Mobility announced strong third-quarter earnings of $3.3 billion; and more evidence piled up regarding an imminent release of two Motorola Xoom 2 tablets. • Here at OStatic, we regularly do posts designed to surface unsung but very impressive open source projects. Occasionally, an early look at any one of these unsung projects leads to ongoing coverage. For example, this site broke the news about the Eucalyptus cloud computing project at U.C. Santa Barbara long before there ever was the commercial entity Eucalyptus Systems. If you’re looking to expand your open source arsenal with some tools you’ve never heard of, here are some good resources.

• Web Browsers • • Mozilla • Despite these flawed results of Bing which are kind of filtering out open source technologies, Firefox is going with Bing. So, next time when someone searches Microsoft Firefox, they will not find LibreOffice or Linux on the first pages. Well, it seems like Firefox has made its choice. What is your choice? • SaaS • Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 developers jumped this year, with jobs requiring those skills increasing 70 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, according to a survey of the tech jobs in London by recruiters Adzuna.

Adzuna collated every tech job advertised for London last month, a total of 100,000. HTML coders are still the most in demand, but also the most poorly paid – both at entry and top levels. • Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform designed to rival VMware and create competition for Amazon Web Services, but it’s likely only the first of many.

• • Databases • NoSQL type databases have become increasingly popular over the last several years as a way to deliver better scalability and performance. There are a number of different types of NoSQL databases, including a graph database structure, which is what open source startup Neo Technology is all about. Neo Technology is the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Neo4j NoSQL database. This week the company is launching its Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 release, bringing the database to the popular Spring Java framework. The company has also just completed raising $10.6 million in Series A funding. • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice • Have you heard about those great LibreOffice extensions but have had a problem locating them? Well, those extensions (and templates) are going to be easier to find now thanks to The Document Foundation’s new online repository.

• Business • I make no apologies for being a huge fan of the Asterisk open source PBX project. I’ve been a user since the 1.0 release, which is coincidentally the first time I ever wrote about the project, all the way back in 2004. • Digium Thursday confirmed the release of Asterisk 10, the latest version of the 12-year-old Asterisk open-source telephony platform that’s slowly but surely gaining traction in the broader telephony market. Digium, which is Asterisk’s primary developer, announced the release in line with this week’s AstriCon conference in Denver. According to Digium, the freely available Asterisk platform has seen millions of downloads in the past few years, including 2 million in 2010 alone. • Project Releases • The Orion project is pleased to announce the availability of its 0.3 release. If you’re using Orion Hub, then congratulations on successfully upgrading to the new release!

If you don’t have an account, sign up for free here. If you’re the kind of person who still likes to download and install tools, you can find the latest server on our download page. • Public Services/Government • • BSD-based operating systems are considered very secure.

More so than Linux, in fact. Now, there are many reasons why this may or may not be so, including the market share, the speed and quality of software validation, the release cycle, the internal security mechanism, the skill and mentality of developers, administrators and users, the deployment setup, and many other factors, all of which are highly debatable. • Science • • Security • • Defence/Police/Aggression • New York firefighters removed about a dozen gasoline cans and six generators from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have camped for almost six weeks, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. About 30 to 40 firefighters were sent to the park along with the police department’s community affairs unit, Bloomberg said today on his weekly WOR radio show.

The equipment, which helped power computers and mobile phones and keep people warm as temperatures dipped near freezing, are safety hazards and illegal, Bloomberg said. Forecasts call for rain and snow in the metropolitan area tomorrow.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife • Wisconsin’s environment and the health of its population might be on the chopping block as state Republicans push for mining deregulation in the name of “jobs.” • Finance • • • • • • • • • As the Occupy movement spreads from coast to coast, an attack in Oakland, California on protesters Tuesday night was the buzz of an impromptu march on New York’s lower Broadway on Wednesday night. Amid chants of “New York is open, open is New York,” demonstrators moved freely with a growing police presence behind them. Inner City Press photographed, beside City Hall, police horses of the type injured in Times Square only ten days ago. • “AS THOUSANDS have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, in a recent letter to investors.

“And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain—but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.” • Disturbed, disillusioned and ashamed: Those aren’t emotions you expect a Wall Street quant to express when asked why taxpayers were obliged to bail out wealthy bankers. Unless, of course, the quant is Emanuel Derman, a particle physicist and former head of quantitative finance at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “I am ashamed at the hypocrisies of the system,” Derman writes in “Models.Behaving.Badly,” an erudite yet pleasantly readable exploration of why financial models failed during the U.S. Mortgage meltdown and why modelers must learn to use them more wisely. • Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933bn), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30m), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn’t care.

The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn’t fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter – designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that’s another story.) • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying • The “Occupy” movement has been inspired in part by the increasingly outsized political power of the top 1%, which has made elected officials more responsive to deep-pocket donors than those they were elected to represent.

In response to the other 99% being left politically and economically disempowered, former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur has announced plans to work toward amending the U.S. Constitution to get big money out of politics and restore representative democracy.

• With Ohio voters looking to overturn Governor John Kasich’s union-busting Senate Bill 5 through a statewide referendum, national Republican donors, strategists and corporations are pumping money into the state to defend the Governor and his bill. Contents • • • • • • • Canonical, together with Red Hat, today publishes a white paper highlighting the implications of these requirements for users and manufacturers. The paper also provides recommendations on how to implement “Secure Boot”, to ensure that users remain in control of their PCs. • Desktop • Dell might have scaled back its Ubuntu Linux offerings in the west but in China – the market that really matters – the firm is rolling out a range of machines running Ubuntu in 220 stores. Unlike its solitary US web-store offering, Dell presents Chinese punters with a range of Ubuntu Linux systems and better still the firm said its staff will promote the benefits of Ubuntu Linux to consumers. • Audiocasts/Shows • • • Kernel Space • • • DAY TWO of Linuxcon Europe included a keynote from Intel about the last 20 years of Linux since its creation. Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux technologist at Intel, gave the talk this morning and counts himself lucky to be one of the people to get involved at the very early stages of the project with Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.

• With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members. • GERMAN CAR MAKER BMW spoke about how it might use Linux for in-car entertainment at Linuxcon Europe in Prague today. In a panel on providing high performance we heard that we could see Linux being adopted for use in car entertainment systems in future BMW vehicles. The firm is looking into it and thinks that it’s a valid possibility. • Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers sat down for a question and answer session at the first LinuxCon Europe.

Lennart Poettering, creator of PulseAudio and systemd, served as moderator for the panel, which consisted of Torvalds, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner, and Paul McKenney. The four took prepared questions from Poettering, as well as responding to impromptu audience member questions on every topic from version numbers to the future of the kernel project itself. • The Linux 3.1 kernel was released earlier this week and it further enhances the Intel Sandy Bridge graphics support while also prepping the open-source kernel driver for Intel’s next-generation Ivy Bridge processors.

• Graphics Stack • It seems to be a good time to clean-up the Linux graphics driver stack. After old hardware support was dropped in Mesa in August, more Mesa code was dropped, and most recently the classic ATI R300/R600 drivers are to be killed (this is set to happen this Friday). Now Intel’s Daniel Vetter is chopping up some DRM code. • Last month during XDC2011 Chicago it was publicly talked about how Intel wants OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa and ideally before year’s end. But how’s that goal coming?

For those not tracking the Mesa mailing list, there’s been a continual stream of new patches arriving for Mesa that ultimately work towards this GL3 goal. Intel developers and others (namely the VMware developers and other independent contributors) adding support for new OpenGL extensions, work towards GLSL 1.30 compliance, or cleaning up parts of Mesa to facilitate future support. Just earlier this week a patch series arrived for adding interpolation qualifier support for i965 as needed by GLSL 1.30 and lots of other work. • • Applications • Writing is a key skill in the modern world, whether it’s directly how you make your living or not. Whether it’s writing memos or emailing clients, most jobs include at least some use of the written word. Even outside of work, more and more communication is moving to the written word.

Don’t rush through these things – take your time and get them right. Develop writing as a skill, because it will reward you. But it’s a lot easier to do if you have the proper tools. • jEdit is a cross-platform text editor written in Java. The current stable version at time of this writing is 4.3.2, and it’s available at Besides the cross-platform capabilities, jEdit offers other features, such as a sophisticated plugin system, syntax highlighting for 130 languages, a built-in macro language and extensive encoding support. I wrote this article using jEdit, and I demonstrate some of its features here, especially some of the plugins I have found useful. • Instructionals/Technical • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Desktop Environments • Before anything, this article is for those using KDE and GNOME and start feeling the need for more, or something else.

This is not a trolling article (we hate that), nor is a rant against the two DEs. We respect the freedom of choice, and the Open Source world is all about freedom of choice. With this article we only want to show you what other options you have, the pluses and the minuses, with no bias whatsoever. We’ll go less than technical with this article, and we hope we’ll widen your perspective and help you use something that’s really fit for your needs. All you need is a working Linux machine and the minimal knowledge of knowing how to install software on it, plus the use of an editor of choice. Since your DE/WM is something you work with every day, it’s more important to your productivity than it could appear at first look. You may have to learn some new commands, but if you feel it’s right for you and it makes you more efficient, it will be worth it.

Plus your system will run faster, since KDE and GNOME are full of features for everyone, but that comes with a cost. Before we start, let’s get some terms clear. • It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of the Enlightenment desktop. I recently got into contact with the project’s lead developer “Rasterman” and we did a little bit of a question and answer session. If you aren’t sure on what all the Enlightenment desktop and the EFLs are exactly please see my post here. • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC) • If you are interested on digital photo management, I would encourage you to take a look at digiKam, and specifically at the newer 2.x version. The 2.0 release announcement was made at the end of July, and they are now already up to version 2.2.

Here is a short recap of the reasons I choose to use digiKam rather than the other obvious candidates: • Today I would like to introduce you to Inqlude, the Qt library archive. The goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive listing of all existing libraries for developers of Qt applications. So if you are creating applications using the Qt toolkit, and are looking for libraries, components or modules to use, Inqlude is meant to be the place where you find all information and pointers to get started. • Because Kubuntu is gaining popularity I thought some users might be needing some additional help with network configuration and settings.

Of course there are many ways to handle your network settings, but for new users, setup is extremely simple. Upon installation network settings are generally detected and configured automatically, but on occasion we all run into problems.

Finding all of your network settings when using Kubuntu also is quite simple, and help is always available when needed. You can always check the official Kubuntu help documentation provided upon installation to get additional help with advanced topics. • GNOME Desktop • So, Ubuntu 11.10 is here and GNOME2 is gone Even if you had an option to run GNOME2 in previous release of Ubuntu 11.04, there is no more this option in 11.10.

It is only shipped with Unity interface. Does it mean GNOME is fully gone?

No, it is still here But that’s not GNOME2. That is GNOME3, updated version which follows (or creates?) new wave of user interfaces. • The first development release for GNOME 3.4, which is marked as GNOME 3.3.1 in the 3.3 unstable series, is now available for testing. The release announcement with source download links to all of the packages can be found in this mailing list message. When scanning through the change-logs for the core and application components to GNOME 3.3.1, some of the items that stick out are listed below.

• As you may have seen, the Phoronix site is hosting a private survey about GNOME. The survey still has several weeks to run, but, so far, neither the circumstances surrounding the survey or the replies show the GNOME project in a favorable perspective.

The survey was begun by Felipe Contreras, who first raised the idea back in July on the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list. “Lately I’ve [been] feeling that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3,” he wrote. “Why not find for good what people are thinking with an user-survey?” • • • Phil Miller proudly announced a few minutes ago, October 27th, the immediate availability for download of the stable Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 operating system. Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.0.7 and X.Org 7.6, as well as the latest KDE Software Compilation 4.7.2 environment, updated toolchain, and WebGL and HTML5 support for Qt/KDE web-browsers. • It’s always interesting, and usually fun, to try out a new Linux distribution. I saw the announcement on DistroWatch this morning of a new release of SalineOS, and I have a bit of free time today, so this seemed like a good opportunity. It has turned out to be both – interesting and fun!

• Gentoo Family • Well it’s my third day on Sabayon Linux and I must say it definitely has a personality of its own. From its snappy performance to its unusual bugs it has left a huge impression on me. It’s also had me going through wikis and forums more than any distribution I have ever encountered on the “easy” side of the Linux distribution fence. • Red Hat Family • Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has joined the Open Compute Project, a project established by Facebook with the goal of building one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. With this, Red Hat will collaborate with the Open Compute Project and its members on technologies, design and development to redefine the next-generation datacenter. • • • In a blog post today, Richard Jones, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, announced the release of libguestfs 1.14, an open source set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images.

“I’m really charged about how the new tools let you analyze and fix alignment problems in your guests,” Jones tells NetworkWorld. • Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) hit a new 52-week high Thursday as it is currently trading at $49.08, above its previous 52-week high of $49 with 47,056 shares traded as of 9:36 a.m. Average volume has been 3.1 million shares over the past 30 days.

• Debian Family • I never really considered myself a GNOME user. I’ve used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore.

But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution. And more often than not, that’s GNOME 2. And I’ve been using Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2 since November 2010 — almost a year now — and using it for more of my work than ever. • Derivatives • Canonical/Ubuntu • Jason Perlow, ZDNet Sr. Technology Editor, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all Linux operating systems have. Then an accidental overdose of half-baked user interface interferes with his unique mental state.

And now, when Jason Perlow grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs. • Canonical and Dell are teaming up to sell computers with Ubuntu preinstalled at stores in China. The program, which could help improve the mainstream visibility of the Linux-based operating system, will span 220 retail locations. According to a statement that Canonical posted this morning on its official blog, the products will be set up with marketing materials that tout the virtues of the Ubuntu platform.

Retail staff will also be trained to explain the products to consumers. • On Wednesday in Beijing, Canonical and Dell announced the start of an exciting retail program to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu, initially rolling out to 220 retail stores in China. The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China. Primary Non Contributory Endorsement Isolation here.

• With the past few releases, Ubuntu has been focusing more and more on their homegrown desktop Unity. Some people love it, but a lot of us don’t.

Fortunately, as with all things Linux, there are many alternative options. For those of us who just can’t find a way to unite with Unity, here are 5 great options that you might find you like better. • • Orchestra is one of the most exciting new capabilities in 11.10. It provides automated installation of Ubuntu across sets of machines.

Typically, it’s used by people bringing up a cluster or farm of servers, but the way it’s designed makes it very easy to bring up rich services, where there may be a variety of different kinds of nodes that all need to be installed together. • • • When it comes to reporting what is happening in and around the Ubuntu community OMG! Reports the news as it happens, it seems like Joey and Benjamin along with other guest bloggers and writers never tire. The list of contributors to the OMG! Come from many areas of the community: Canonical, Debian, Zeitgeist, The Banshee Project, elementary OS, and more.

As one who personally reads 100’s of feeds, mailing lists, IRC conversations and more this is no small endeavor and one OMG! Seems to have down to a science. • What’s new about Ubuntu GNU/Linux? That is always the question that arises when the six-monthly release takes place and this time, with 11.10, the answer is probably best encapsulated by the project itself. The Ubuntu project site proclaims “Hey, good looking!” and nothing could be more true – most of the work since the last release, which saw the introduction of the Unity desktop, has gone into refining and beautifying the desktop and all its appendages. Ubuntu 11.10, aka Oneiric Ocelot (dreamy wildcat) now looks very good, has nice fonts and is easy on the eye. • • While those who do get sponsorship are naturally happy and motivated to be going to UDS, those who don’t get sponsorship support sometimes feel quite de-motivated, and some feel insecure about how Canonical or leaders in Ubuntu view their contributions and “why wasn’t I chosen, particularly given all my contributions to Ubuntu?“.

• • • MontaVista Software has updated the MontaVista Linux “Bare Metal Engine” distribution with dynamically configurable data plane features. Bare Metal Engine (BME) offers a single development environment that can scale from high embedded Linux services down to the “near zero overhead” bare metal environments used in network packet processing, the company says. • The system utilized a 32-bit ARM11 400MHz processor and the Linux OS • Xilinx launched an open source Linux platform and developer community for its Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP), which combines a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a 28nm FPGA. The Zynq-7000 EPP Linux Solution offers GNU toolchain, runtime libraries, and debuggers, plus options including a Virtual Platform hardware emulator based on Cadence VSP. • VeriFone Systems announced an Linux-based Point of Sale (POS) payment device that integrates a near field communication (NFC) contactless reader.

The H5000 runs Linux on an ARM11 processor, offers a 3.5-inch color touchscreen, and supports multiple payment types– including legacy magnetic stripe, EMV smartcards, and contactless cards — with a single hybrid card slot, says the company. • Phones • Android • Android served up more ad impressions overall in Q3 than rival iOS, at 56 percent, Millennial Media reported. For its part, ABI Media noted that in Q2, Android overtook iOS to become the market share leader in mobile application downloads.

The market shares of Android and iOS were 44 percent and 31 percent, respectively, ABI said. • The most important thing about Ice Cream Sandwich is that “there seems to be a change in the wind insofar as Android being a pure operating system is concerned,” said blogger Roberto Lim. “With Android 1.6 to 2.3, the ‘vanilla’ version was a pretty basic OS, which provided the minimum necessary smartphone functionality.” With ICS, “the vanilla Android install is not very much like ‘vanilla’ anymore, but more like a Banana Split.” • Sub-notebooks/Tablets • Leader International announced two Android tablets, both with full-sized USB ports and microSD slots.

The $179 Impression 7 (I7) runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz processor, and provides a seven-inch 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, while the $349 Impression 10 (I10) runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird, adding a 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 capacitive IPS touchscreen, an HDMI port, and a two-megapixel camera. • F4S: Greetings Richard. Please, give us a brief introduction about your company Eagle Genomics. Richard: Eagle Genomics is an outsourced bioinformatics services and software company specialising in genome content management and the provision of open-source solutions. Eagle consistently delivers quality and value-for-money for customers across the biotech sector, combining cloud and NGS expertise with a track record in building scalable, efficient genomics analysis workflows. • The digital age has added significantly to the tools available to scientific work, but has also introduced new challenges.

Glyn Moody describes the present situation, and suggests that we need true openness with respect to scientific software. • Google has announced the release of ScriptCover as an open source project. Available as an extension for the company’s Chrome web browser, ScriptCover is JavaScript coverage analysis tool that provides real-time, line-by-line code coverage statistics for web pages. ScriptCover displays results as the page continues to load and is automatically updated when the user interacts with the site. The reporting tool highlights each of the lines of code that have been executed for a more detailed analysis.

• There are numerous counterexamples to this; my analyst colleague from the 451 Group Rachel Chalmers cites Unix, others the underlying protocols of the internet and I myself would point to the more recent work that browser teams like Chrome and Mozilla are doing or the pre-Cambrian explosion currently occurring in the non-relational database market. But superficial questions like “can open source innovate” obscure real, fundamental changes in the way that software is being developed today. Changes that are important. • Events • • For those not able to attend this year’s LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Prague, Czech Republic, the Linux Foundation is offering live video streaming of all the keynote sessions. Free access to the live video streams of the first ever European LinuxCon event is available on the LinuxCon Europe 2011 site (registration required).

• With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members. Day one of the first-ever LinuxCon Europe was heavy on stellar content and great beer. The day started with a welcome from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, followed quickly by the exclusive Linux Kernel Panel featuring Linus Torvalds.

The rest of the day included individual sessions from “Why the Free Desktop Matters” to “File and Storage Systems: Making Complex Systems Easy to Use” and “Using Dynamic Analysis to Hunt Down Problems in Kernel Modules.” The technical content featured at Linux Foundation events is the result of detailed review by Amanda McPherson of hundreds of submissions as well as her discussions with community members about the most important topics to address that will help advance the platform. • People are invited to a Mooroopna LUV-in this weekend? But you can leave your kaftan and hippy beads at home.

Linux Users Victoria are holding a free information session for people eager to learn more about the original computer operating system similar to Windows and Android, but with one major exception? There is no cost. • • Web Browsers • In April of 2000, when the U.S. Department of Justice handed down its decision that Microsoft was an “abusive monopoly” and set about imposing restrictions on the company’s business practices, many people wondered two things: 1) why did the decision arrive after so many years?; and 2) what exactly would the DOJ place restrictions on?

Among the various restrictions that were imposed, one of the most influential was that Microsoft could not continue to tie its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as inextricably as it had, thereby creating an unfair distribution model for the browser, since other browser makers didn’t have a ubiquitous OS such as Windows to tie their browsers to. Now, more than 10 years later, the DOJ’s consent decree has lapsed, and there is a possibility that Microsoft could once again tie Internet Explorer to Windows in a number of questionable ways. • Chrome • Google Chrome and Chromium open-source web browsers version 15.0.874.106 has been released. Latest stable release of Chromium web browser brings many improvements, performance enhancements and fixed several security bugs. The new tab page has been redesigned to easily access your mostly visited websites, web store applications and customizable website speed dial. • Mozilla • • SaaS • Hadapt has closed a Series A funding round of $9.5 million for its Hadoop-based software that handles structured and unstructured data in a single system.

Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, which comes about seven months after Hadapt’s launch in March 2011. • • • Databases • Whether the acronym “NoSQL” stands for “not only SQL,” as some database architects content, or literally “no SQL,” up until this month, it has been taken to imply “no Oracle.” One of the many hallmarks of Oracle’s SQL RDBMS technology, historically, has been consistency — the notion that every client perceives the same view of the data at any one time. Maintaining consistency, among other factors, incurs latency issues as database sizes scale with social media into the stratosphere. • CMS • • • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC • GCC 4.6.2 was officially released today as the second point release in the GCC 4.6 series to address bugs and other outstanding issues.

GCC 4.6.1 was released in June and the original GCC 4.6.0 release happened this past March. • Licensing • • Programming • For myself, I can attest that there would be no O’Reilly Media without Ritchie’s work. It was Unix that created the fertile ground for our early publishing activities; it was Unix’s culture of collaborative development and architecture of participation that was the deepest tap root of what became the open source software movement, and not coincidentally, much of the architecture of the Internet as well • • Finance • Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has been trying to dismiss recent studies suggesting America’s tax system has disproportionately benefitted the super-wealthy.

But his claims about upward mobility have themselves been refuted. The Congressional Budget Office just released a study showing that between 1979 and 2007, income grew by 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households, whereas it grew just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent and just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent. The income gap grew under Republican presidents who promoted low taxes on the wealthy. • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying • As newsrooms across the country shave off staff due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, is rushing to fill the gap. The group has 43 state news websites, with writers in over 40 states. Its reporters have been given state house press credentials and its news articles are starting to appear in mainstream print newspapers in each state.

Who funds Franklin and what is its agenda?