Nice retrospective by computer world."After batting around some ideas for a new system, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix, which the pair would continue to develop over the next several years with the help of colleagues Doug McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday. Some of the principles of Multics were carried over into their new operating system, but the beauty of Unix then (if not now) lay in its less-is-more philosophy." Unix turns 4
Learn how to better integrate scripts with command-line tools. Examine using shell_exec(), exec(), passthru(), and system(); safely passing information to the command line; and safely retrieving information from it. See how to integrate closely with underlying shell commands and folding any return values into your interfaces and processes.
The battleground has shifted from the Operating System to the hypervisor, and Linux has a clear role to play. One of the most important modern innovations of Linux is its transformation into a hypervisor. Learn about KVM and Lguest and why the most important modern innovations of Linux is its transformation into a hypervisor
The ideas in this article may help you breathe life (and some additional security) into your old machines and make better use of Linux on aging hardware. A lack of physical memory can severely hamper Linux performance. Llearn how to accurately measure the amount of memory your Linux system uses. You also get practical advice on reducing your memory requirements using an Ubuntu system as an example.
This article compares and contrasts some of the innovations of the latest releases of AIX 6.1, Solaris 1, and HP-UX. Learn the differences on how to work with certain tasks, such as networking and performance tuning. Also, see at a high level some of the virtualization differences among these big three. You decide what you prefer best.
Some nice info in this."Most of the time, your screen's capabilities should be identified using something called EDID - Extended Display Identification Data. This is a chunk of information sent from your display to your graphics card, and normally contains information such as your screen's model and manufacturer, resolution timings and display size. X then uses this data to create appropriate resolutions and bit depths that make optimal use of your hardware." Modify xorg.conf for better per
As data centers grow in both size and complexity, the ability to manage the configuration of each and every server from a central location becomes increasingly important. Two popular Open Source configuration management solutions exist: cfengine and Puppet."Puppet is written in Ruby, is easily installed, and as we will see, can be setup and taken live in less than fifteen minutes!" Puppet + subversion in 15 minutes
Android, a complete operating environment based upon the Linux V2.6 kernel, promises to be a market-moving open source platform that will be useful well beyond cell phones. In this article, learn about the Android platform and how it can be used for mobile and nonmobile applications, then build your first Android application. This simple first app you build will get you started quickly, but beleive me, you'll want to do more after that.
Why is virtualization so important? The short answer is that virtualization enables businesses to lower their technology Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), while increasing their Return on Investment (ROI). What do the top UNIX vendors have to offer with respect to virtualization? Find out what virtualization is more scalable. Here's a look at HP's Virtual Server Environment (VSE), Sun's xVM, and IBM's PowerVM.
I want an ebook reader like device. But am way to cheap to get anything I have seen on the market. If the Kindle was $15 I think I would be carrying one around. Well if there was more of an electronic version discount for the books at least.""Effectively what [Pixel Qi is] doing is creating a hybrid display that combines the best of E Ink and regular LCDs," says Robert Barry, director of business development for Team Research, a company that makes an e-book reader called the Astak Mentor
"MySQL's clustering storage engine is a unique take on database clustering, unlike Oracle's or Microsoft SQL Servers solutions. As with those, it has its strengths and weaknesses, so you'll of course need to test, test, and test some more before you can decide if the technology is right for your application, and organization. New features that are in development include the ability to add nodes while the cluster is up and running, storing data and index information on disk, and much more.
Who needs GUIs?"Based on ncurses, MOC (music on console) is a popular, text-based audio player which can play various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, WMA and WAV. The release I'm going to talk about in this article is 2.5.-alpha3, as it comes with Debian Lenny." MOC: Text based audio player
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
An anonymous reader points to Digital Daily, writing "Looks like the fireworks have begun early in Mountain View. On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice officially notified Google that it is investigating its book deal for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act."
ericatcw writes "The inaugural NoSQL meet-up in San Francisco during last month's Yahoo! Apache Hadoop Summit had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of burdensome, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data, reports Computerworld."
Al writes "The AcceleGlove from AnthroTronix, is the first fully programmable glove that records hand and finger movements. Other gloves — like 5DT's Data Glove, which is used primarily in virtual reality — normally cost $1,000 to $5,000, but the AcceleGlove costs just $499. The AcceleGlove comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish. AnthroTronix initially developed the glove with the US Department of Defense for robotic control but it could also be used in video games, sports training, or physical rehabilitation."
An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, 'A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, and issued a directed acquittal on the three misdemeanor charges.'" A similar story in the L.A. Times notes that "The decision by US District Judge George H. Wu will not become final until his written ruling is filed, probably next week." Update: 07/02 21:15 GMT by T : For those not following, Lori Drew's three convictions sprang from charges of online harassment of Megan Meier, a Missouri teenager whose suicide was linked to Drew's actions.
Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."
An anonymous reader writes "An HIV/AIDS vaccine developed in Ontario has applied for Phase 1 human trials. Safety and immunogenicity studies of the vaccine, dubbed SAV001-H, have already been completed on animals. Phase 1 human trials will check the safety of the vaccine on HIV positive volunteers. Phase 2 will then test immunogenicity."
snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."
motherpusbucket writes "The Telegraph reports that Japanese scientists hope to be breeding a so-called 'Super Tuna' within the next decade or so. They have about 60% of the genome mapped and expect to finish it in the next couple months. The new breed will grow faster, taste good, have resistance to disease and will totally kick your ass if you cross them."
Greg George writes "The FDA has determined that Tylenol enhancing pain killers are dangerous enough to potentially be pulled from the market. Drugs including Vicodin, Hydrocodone, Lortab, Maxidone, Norco, Zydone, Tylenol with codeine, Percocet, Endocet, and Darvocet may be permanently banned from the US market, even if the patient has a prescription from a doctor. The problem is the key ingredient — acetaminophen — can easily damage or destroy a patient's liver if more than 2000 mg are used per day. In many cases that means if you take a pain killer and then take two extra strength Tylenol, you may have gone over the maximum dosage per day."
todd10k writes "I've recently decided to go back to college. I have a lot of experience with games, having played them for most of my adult life, and have always toyed with the idea of making them one day. I've finally decided to give it my best. What I'd like to know is: what are the best languages to study? What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept? Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
suraj.sun writes to tell us that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of security company Kaspersky in the recent case questioning their classification of Zango software as malware. "The court ruled that Kaspersky Lab, which classified online media company Zango's software as malware and 'protected' users from it accordingly, could not be held liable for any actions it took to manufacture and distribute the technical means to restrict Zango software's access to others, as Kaspersky Lab deemed it 'objectionable material.' Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zango's programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Lab's security software from blocking Zango's potentially undesirable programs. In the precedent-setting ruling for the anti-malware industry, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that Kaspersky Lab is a provider of an 'interactive computer service' as defined in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . Part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states: 'No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of ... any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [objectionable] material.'"
The US Justice Department has confirmed its antitrust probe into Google's $125m book-scanning settlement with American authors and publishers, indicating that the ongoing investigation is an important one.…
As if high-profile investment scandals and the economic downturn weren't bad enough here on Earth, now folks have to deal with it outside our galaxy. Virtually, at least.…
Debian, the foundation of Ubuntu, has rejected claims that it's potentially holding Linux's future hostage to Microsoft by including an open-source implementation of .NET in its code.…
A federal judge on Thursday tentatively overturned convictions against a mother accused of using MySpace to bully a 13-year-old girl who went on to hang herself to death.…
An internal AT&T memo leaked to MacDailyNews crows that "iLaunch day 2009" - yes, you read that correctly, "iLaunch" - set multiple Big Phone sales records.…
Google App Engine - the development and hosting cloud that serves up third-party apps and websites - was on the fritz for a good six hours this morning.…
Though the Chinese government has delayed plans to require the shipment of the highly-controversial Green Dam filtering app with all new PCs, several big-name PC manufacturers are shipping the thing anyway.…
Social networking sites like MySpace are not liable if underage users are sexually assaulted by people they meet on the website, a California appeals court has ruled.…
The US Patent and Trademark office today released a flurry of 22 Apple patent applications, the most earth-shaking of which may rid the world of one of nightlife's most maddening menaces: off-key karaoke singers.…
Looking for leverage and a few extra euros and pounds in EMEA, Dell has rolled out a set of modular services to help companies manage their PCs and - eventually - their servers.…
Dave Philips
reviews the Linux version of Pianoteq (commercial software)
on Linux Journal.
"On the 15th of May 2009 the Modartt company announced the release of version 3.0.3 of their award-winning Pianoteq, a professional-quality digital keyboard instrument created by an audio synthesis method known as physical modeling. The program is vastly praised by its users, but in order to feel the love you've had to run a Windows machine or a Mac box. Until now, that is. The latest release introduces various new attractions, and the one that interests me the most is support for a native Linux version."
The Free Software Foundation Europe presents
an interview with Smári McCarthy.
"Stian Rødven Eide: One of the most profiled projects you have been involved with is the Fab Lab, having headed the Icelandic branch for over a year now. While best known for its use of 3D printers, the Fab Lab is actually a much broader concept that goes far beyond technical innovation. Can you tell us a bit about your work there, and what you hope to achieve?
Smári McCarthy: There are two sides to the Fab Lab story. On the one hand, theres the research side, which is all about developing the universal constructors, figuring out the hard science of digital fabrication. In that realm I think our work is done when we can download chicken sandwiches off the Internet."
The July, 2009 edition of the
GNOME Journal
has been published. Contents include:
"a review of Project Hamster by Les Harris, an interview on working with
upstream with Laszlo Peter by Stormy Peters, using git for GNOME translators
by Og Maciel, an introduction to GNOME Zeitgeist by Natan Yellin, a look at
some of GNOME Do's advanced features by Jorge Castro, and lastly, the Behind
the Scenes feature continues with Owen Taylor by Paul Cutler."
iTWire reports
on a new Linux installation by a Glendale, California hospital.
"Adventist Medical Center (GAMC) has installed thin clients running Linux virtual desktops in 65 patient rooms in its new West Tower.
"Just as easily as the hospital provides patients with TVs in rooms, now we provide personal computing," said Roger Pruyne, senior programmer/analyst and project manager for the GAMC Patient Computing project.
The system combines NoMachine's NX remote access and virtualisation software, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and an IBM System x3650 server.
GAMC estimates that this approach saves 98 percent of the cost that would have been involved if conventional PCs had been selected."
Skip-free audio and video playback is a fundamental expectation for many -
if not most - Linux users. Given the importance of this feature and the
increase in hardware performance over the years, one would think
that the audio latency problem would have been solved some time ago. The
recent posting of (and mixed reception for) the "RealtimeKit" mechanism
shows that this issue remains open, though, and that we are still short of
a consensus on how it should be solved. Click below (subscribers only) for
LWN's report.
The long-awaited PostgreSQL 8.4 release is available. "This release contains an abundance of
enhancements to make administering, querying, and programming of
PostgreSQL databases easier than ever before. With 293 new or improved
features in version 8.4, there are even more reasons to choose
PostgreSQL for your next project." See the announcement (click
below) for a list
of the most interesting new features.
Version 1.0 of
the Open Database License is now official. This is the license that
the OpenStreetMap project proposes to move to; the current
plan envisions a vote being held almost right away, followed by a
2-3 month transition.
The first KDE 4.3.0 release candidate is out. "KDE 4.3 focuses on polishing and completing the user experience by providing a
modern and beautiful Free working environment. Compared to the Beta releases,
this release candidate now contains the new Air theme, which will be the
default for KDE 4.3.0. Air is a theme lighter than Oxygen, which is still
available as an option through the 'Desktop Settings' dialog." See
the full
announcement for a summary of features in KDE 4.3.
Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 3.5. "Firefox 3.5 has
been under development for the past year, contains many new exciting
features for users and web developers, and is our fastest Firefox release
ever."
NetworkWorld covers
a talk by Jim Zemlin. "The move by carriers to sell netbooks at a discount and seek revenue from later application downloads is an opportunity for Linux, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said at a Beijing forum. He urged Chinese and global companies to consider offering devices and download stores based on Linux."
SCO has been a busy bee, filing a motion to amend/correct its complaint against AutoZone and a motion to amend/correct the protective order in SCO v. IBM.
What it wants in the IBM motion is to get to use documents it got in discovery in that action in the bankruptcy, to demonstrate "the value of its claims". Heh heh. Not sure how well that will work out for SCO. I think we may safely expect an opposition from IBM.
And in AutoZone, it would like to "expand" its copyright claims to include OpenServer. Surprise. Surprise. That's all it reliably has left to use to be annoying, I think. It also wants to add a claim for breach of agreements. Presumably this is to try to avoid losing outright, now that Novell has been ruled the owner of the copyrights SCO initially sued about. So, even if Novell is upheld by the appeals court, SCO evidently wants to continue somehow, in some way, whatever works. SCO tells the court that the court can allow the amendment, if justice so requires. I am not sure justice is the foundation on which I'd build my house, if I were SCO. People might start to have deep thoughts.
More bills to go over with a fine-toothed comb, and SCO has filed an third amended Schedule F for SCO Operations. That's the list of unsecured creditors. Here's the previous version, if you'd like to compare, and I hope you do, and the original [PDF].
We have now finished the exhibits to SCO's latest proposed APA, and I want to say thank you to everyone who pitched in. What a job that was!
This is very odd. Remember at the last bankruptcy hearing on June 15 SCO represented that there were several different possible purchasers SCO was considering? Both SCO CEO Darl McBride and Frank Caplan, a lawyer for Berger Singerman, testified about that. Caplan mentioned at least four deals. But Berger Singerman has just filed its Interim Application for Compensation [PDF], plus the usual attachments for the month of May, and all I can find is reference to one real deal in the making. McBride did say that the York discussions were in February through April, but where are the rest? And we get a real insight into the legal preparations for the hearing. I find it fascinating, and I'll try to explain to you why.
tridge has done it again, offering a patch to Linux's VFAT filesystem that
retains support for long names, while carefully avoiding
ever having both a long and a short name for the same
file. As before, media containing the old long/short-name
combination VFAT format are still supported. His comment on LKML:
Date Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:19:33 +1000
Subject [PATCH] Added CONFIG_VFAT_FS_ DUALNAMES option
From tridge@samba ...
This is a new patch for VFAT long filename support, replacing the one
that I posted last month. It retains a lot more functionality then the
previous patch.
A FAQ will be posted immediately after this patch to answer the
questions that were raised from the previous discussion.
Cheers, Tridge
And here is the FAQ. Note particularly what can and can't be safely discussed regarding patents on LKML. Here's
the prior patch, for completeness.
I think it would be worthwhile to do text versions of all the exhibits [PDF], the ones that are not sealed, which SCO attached to its new proposed sales plan just filed with the bankruptcy court.
Details can matter. Let me give you an example. Remember when SCO's Darl McBride told the court in the SCO v. Novell trial in Utah that the only way to get Unix System V was to buy UnixWare, that he suspected that anything of value in the former was in UnixWare? Look at the products they are selling, though, or proposing to sell, as listed on Exhibit B, under the subheading 'Operating System Products'. Does that list seem to you to match SCO's story?
Here's what I see: more UNIX System V operating systems products than UnixWare products. Didn't SCO tell the court that the UNIX System V products had no monetary value to shake a stick at, that they were just thrown in for free when people bought UnixWare? Yet, here they are selling them, as far as I can tell.
I'll keep adding Exhibits as I can get them hand-typed. Exhibit C is hard, hard, hard, so if anyone can help out, it'd be a real boon. It's like the early days of Groklaw, when we had to hand type everything.
Here's the original Red Hat Complaint [PDF], filed back in early August of 2003, as text.
I'll call that the Neolithic Period of SCO'S litigation wars against Linux, and back then, we at Groklaw had to have a volunteer go and pick up the complaint from the US District Court in Wilmington, Delaware in person, because the courts then were not yet digitized, then scan the pages in as PDFs, then another volunteer, IIRC, then had to make all the pages into one PDF, and then for unknown reasons I never did a text version. Exhaustion probably.
Also back then, it was Groklaw's prehistoric period too, and I had no idea Groklaw would end up the public's permanent record of the SCO v. Linux lawsuits. Anyway, we just realized we needed to do it, and thanks to four more volunteers -- both new ones and some from the original group, still here, still helping out -- here is the text version at last. I hope you enjoy it, because a lot of volunteers make up the warp and weft of this text version.
It's very timely, because this is the complaint that SCO has asked the bankruptcy court to rule is disallowed and Red Hat has responded vigorously. I expect a real battle on this one, as Red Hat's legal team are some serious dudes, so I have restored the Red Hat Timeline link to our main menu, so you can find it easily as we go forward.
Since the SEC version is HTML, one wonders why SCO filed a scanned PDF instead of a digital copy with the bankruptcy court. They just represented to the court that they file a digital copy whenever possible.
You will want to have on hand the exhibits [PDF] which were attached to this proposed APA, to fully comprehend the deal. Of course, some of the exhibits are sealed, so you can't fully understand it, but you can get enough to grasp what it is SCO is trying to achieve. (More or less what the last such proposed plan tried to achieve, I'd posit, namely SCO gets to escape all consequences, while the litigation goes on and on.)
Here are the exhibits, or some of them, attached to SCO's Motion regarding its proposed sale to unXis, with some of them not only sealed but not even listed or designated:
06/23/2009 - 818 - Certificate of Service Regarding Debtors' Motion for Authority to Sell Property Outside the Ordinary Course of Business Free and Clear of Interests and for Approval of Assumption and Assignment of Executory Contracts and Unexpired Leases in Conjunction With Sale (related document(s) 815 ) Filed by The SCO Group, Inc.. (Billion, Mark) (Entered: 06/23/2009)
06/23/2009 - 819 - Exhibit /Exhibits to Purchase and Sale Agreement Regarding Debtors' Motion for Authority to Sell Property Outside the Ordinary Course of Business Free and Clear of Interests and for Approval of Assumption and Assignment of Executory Contracts and Unexpired Leases in Conjunction with Sale (related document(s) 815 ) Filed by The SCO Group, Inc.. (Makowski, Kathleen) (Entered: 06/23/2009)
06/23/2009 - 816 - Response / Red Hat, Inc.'s Preliminary Response to Debtor SCO Group, Inc.'s Objection to Claim of Red Hat, Inc. Filed by Red Hat, Inc.. (Millar, James) (Entered: 06/23/2009)
06/23/2009 - 817 - Certificate of Service (related document(s) 816 ) Filed by Red Hat, Inc.. (Millar, James) (Entered: 06/23/2009)
Red Hat is letting the court know that it cares about its litigation, it intends to vigorously pursue it as soon as the bankruptcy stay is lifted, and its claim should not be thrown off a cliff without giving Red Hat notice and an opportunity to be heard.
SCO has filed its proposed plan. I have only quickly skimmed it, but what I see immediately is that it wishes to sue Linux users, and it lists a Java patent, and I'm guessing there may just be a connection someday. Who knows? SCO loves to sue, I've decided.
It wants to sell some of the Mobility business, retaining part of it, along with selling the Unix business and "many of [SCO's] subsidiaries" to an entity called UnXis. I've never heard of it either. Think there might be trademark issues? Try going to Google and search for "unXis Delaware" and you get a list of UNIX jobs and such. The APA is signed by Steven Norris. If you go to Delaware Division of Corporations, you'll find there is a UNXIS, Inc. incorporated this month, on the 12th. You'll find the part about suing other Linux users on page 3 of the Motion, paragraph 5.
SCO will retain the litigations, and I gather the plan is to make them as close to counterclaim-proof as one can be. We'll read the details together. If they provide them. I note the opening words say that the APA is attached as Exhibit A, "without voluminous schedules and exhibits". I don't know about IBM, Novell, and the US Trustee's Office, but I would prefer to read those voluminous schedules and exhibits, myself. They say it'll be posted someday on their website.
[Update 2: SCO has posted a FAQ on their website, that makes me wonder if this is really a sale or just a renaming. Let me show you some key paragraphs.
The bankruptcy court in Florida has granted [PDF] Apple's motion to lift the automatic stay, to allow the Apple v. Psystar case to continue to resolution in California:
The automatic stay imposed by 11 U.S.C. §362 (a) is lifted to allow the Infringement Action to proceed for all purposes through final judgment; provided that Apple must seek further relief from this Court before executing any money judgment obtained in the Infringement Action against the Debtor's estate.
Psystar had filed an opposition [PDF] to Apple's motion to lift the stay. Attached as Exhibit C [PDF] was an affidavit from Psystar's President, setting forth Psystar's position. To no avail, alas.
So, it's off to the races. I'm sure Psystar just can't wait to make its EULA arguments. Of course, as is typical in bankruptcy cases, even if Apple wins, no money can be handed over without the bankruptcy court OKing it first. But that isn't, I suspect, Apple's primary goal anyway. They want the copyright infringement, as they see it, to stop.
SCO has filed a Notification of Late Filing with the SEC. They're tied up in bankruptcy court, it appears, so they can only give a ballpark idea of how things are going in the revenue department. Think South. I know. Their prince will come, if they can just drag this out long enough for the appeals court to act in their favor, which intriguingly all the SCO shills seem to think is as fixed in the sky as the Big Dipper.
I was goofing off, looking up some information on Wikipedia on King Lear, and here's what struck me. If the current US Copyright Law had been in effect over Shakespeare, I think he could have been sued by many authors for copyright infringement for writing that masterpiece.
