Episode 008
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Total Running Time 53:36
Intro:
Mat Enders and Tony Bemus
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner
Over 1000 downloads!
Kernel News: Mat
Time: 0:39
The current development kernel is 3.2-rc4, As usual there is a new RC out this week. There is a large btrfs update, with the rest being mostly driver fixes, and a few ubifs updates.
Stable updates: Kernels 2.6.32.49, 3.0.11, and 3.1.3 updates were released on November 28; there where a load of fixes and some USB driver breakage in the 3.X series, hence the release of 3.0.12 and 3.1.4 less than 24hrs later with a single patch that reverted the USB system to what it was.
Kernel Quote Of The Week
“This doesn’t look tons smaller than -rc2 or -rc3, but it really is. Yes, there are some ARM updates and fixups to the new Exonys DRI code, and a questionably late ocfs2 update, but if you ignore those three areas (and most people can happily ignore them), things really are calming down pretty nicely.There are some small sound updates, and btrfs is still getting fixups (but nowhere near -rc2 levels), but other than that it was almost eerily quiet.
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe Davem and GregKH are holding back – they’ve been suspiciously quiet, and I think I can hear some evil chuckling going on there. But maybe it’s just time for my meds.”
–Linus Torvalds
Distro News: Tony
Time: 4:30
- 11-27 – CrunchBang Linux 10 R20111125 –
“The main thing to have been removed/retired is the Xfce edition. I love Xfce and I thought about this long and hard, but I really want to concentrate on making CrunchBang give the best possible out-of-the-box Openbox experience possible. Besides, there are plenty of brilliant Xfce-based distributions available, and if you know what you are doing, installing Xfce under Debian is really not too difficult. GDM is the other big loser, being replaced by SLiM. Plymouth, the graphical boot loader, has also gone from the default install.”
- 11-28 – VectorLinux 7.0 – The main desktop is Xfce 4.8 with a custom theme and artwork. Fluxbox is installed as a secondary desktop option.
- 11-29 – Clonezilla Live 1.2.11-23 –
“This release of Clonezilla Live (1.2.11-23) includes major enhancements and bug fixes: the underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded, this release is based on the Debian ‘Sid’ repository as of 2011-11-28; Linux kernel was updated to version 3.1.1; Partclone was updated to version 0.2.38, gDisk to 0.8.1; a new mode ‘1-2-mdisks’ (one image to be restored to multiple disks) was added in Clonezilla main menu, this is useful for creating massive USB Flash drives; this release supports VMFS5 imaging and cloning; the option to fsck the source partition will be shown in beginner mode; GRUB 2 for EFI booting was improved, now it is able to boot a Mac OS X machine from a USB Flash drive with the MBR partition table….”
Distro of the Week: Tony
Time 9:11
- Fedora – 1588
- Debian – 1595
- Vector- 1836
- Ubuntu – 2583
- Mint – 6246
Tech News:
Time: 9:45
Electronic Frontier Foundation Announced
The creation of the Global Chokepoints Project
The purpose of the project is to track how copyright enforcment around the world hinders freedom of speech and causes censorship. It is a collaborative effort between the EFF and more than a dozen organizations around the world. The method they are going to use to acomplish this is to document and monitor proposed and actual laws that will turn Internet Intermediaries, these consist of ISP’s and onlinesharing sites, into copyright police. These laws would be harmful to internet users privacy rights, freedom of expression, and due process. They would also endanger the future of a free and open internet. Global Chokepoints will provide empiracal information to activists and policy makers. Also to coordinate international opposition to misguided copyright laws and transnational agreements like the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
They will analyze trends in four types of copyright censorship:
- three-strikes policies and laws that require Internet intermediaries to terminate their users’
Internet access on repeat allegations of copyright infringement - requirements for Internet intermediaries to filter all Internet communications for potentially
copyright-infringing material - ISP obligations to block access to websites that allegedly infringe or facilitate copyright
infringement - efforts to force intermediaries to disclose the identities of their customers to IP rights-holders upon allegations of copyright infringement
The sites also contains links to digital rights orginizations, Law school clinics, Technology industry groups, and consumer groups that oppose overbroad copyright policing.
The site launch includes an in-depth analysis fo ten regions: Chile, Columbia, The EU, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain,South Korea, The UK, and The USA. The USA is on the list for some proposed legislation, Stop Internet Piracy Act in the House of Representatives and PROTECT-IP in the Senate. Lets all right our representitives and senators and get these stopped.
Linux Server Revenues Increase, However Unix Still has a Bigger Share
Ever since the inception of comercial Linux, it has aquired a large portion of its market share from Unix, however there is still a lot of market share left. According to IDC’s Q3 2011 Server stats, Linux server revenues were $2.3 billion. That is an increase of 12.3 percent year-over-yeear. Linux has 18.6 percent of overall server revenues. On the other hand, Unix server sales were $2.6 in the same time frame, having a much slower growth rate at only 1.6 percnet year-over-year. Even so Unix server revenues have 20.1 percent of overall server revenues. This difference in revenue can largly be explained by by the fact that Unix server hardware costs more than the typical x86 hardware that Linux runs on. With the inroads that Linux has made however and if the trend continues Linux will surpass Unix sooner rather than later. Demand for Microsoft Windows servers also improved as revenue increased 5.3 percent. Quarterly revenue of $6.3 billion for Windows servers represented 49.7 percent of overall market share.
World wide server market revenues increased 4.2% year over year to $12.7bn, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. Asia/Pacific and Japan exhibited strong revenue growth while demand in EMEA, North America, and Latin America was flat to slightly down year over year. IDC believes that continued weakening economic conditions around the world will further moderate demand for new servers in 2012.
IBM and HP jointly held the No. 1 position in the worldwide server market with 29.8 percent each third quarter 2011, a statistical tie. IBM experienced 3.5 percent year-over-year growth in factory revenue with particular strength in Power Systems demand. HP lost 2.5 points of share in 3Q11 as factory revenue declined 3.8 percent year over year largely because of weakening demand for Itanium-based Integrity systems.
Dell maintained third place with 15.1 percent market share in the third quarter. Dell gained 1.2 points of share year to year, driven in large part by an improved product configurations. Oracle maintained the No. 4 position in the worldwide server market, with a year-over-year revenue decline of 3.2 percent, and now holds 6 percent market share. Fujitsu, which rounded out the top 5 vendors, experienced a 0.4 percent decrease in factory revenue, holding 4.8 percent of the market.
Chrome Beats Firefox worldwide in November
Google Chrome surpassed Mozilla Firefox Globally for in November 2011. StatCounter Global Stats says, Google Chrome has 25.69% of the worldwide-browser-market in comparisson to Firefox which has 25.23%. It is interesting that in November 2009 Google Chrome only had 4.66% of the market share. Internet Explorer by far has the largest market share with 40.63%, this can largely be attributed to the fact that it comeswith and is the default browser on MicroSoft Windows operating systems. The report also shows that in Europe Chrome at 24.82% really beats Firefox at 20.56%. However, It is a different story in the US where Firefox has a solid second place with 20.09% down from 26.75%, Behind Internet Explorer. Chrome holds 3rd place with 17.3% up from 10.89%. “Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads our stats show that people are actually using it to access the web also” says Aodhan Cullen CEO of StatCounter. Regardless of which browser is winning the race for more market share it is very apparent the broser race is heating up.
Curator Library First of Four Netflix’s Open Source Projects
Netflix announces the Curator library, designed to work with Apache ZooKeeper making it simpler, and gives us a look at coming open source projects. They announced four projects, and a portal on GitHub for them.
Even though ZooKeeper has its own client, Netflix claims “using the client is non-trivial and error prone.” ZooKeeper, originaly developed by Yahoo, is a “coordination service” for distributed applications. Basicly ZooKeeper is software to coordinate distributed processes, this task was usually accomplished with in-house onetime solutions that reeally did not work that well. ZooKeeper is intended as a solution that can be re-used to manage many different distributed applications. However using ZooKeeper can be more complicated and error-prone than some companies find acceptable.
Curator consists of a replacement client for ZooKeeper, and a framework to make using ZooKeeper easier. Curator includes many utilities and extensions. It adds a “pluggable retry mechanism” so when something throws an error, there’s a set of policies to be used when attempting a retry of an operation. There is also connection state monitoring and instance management. Curator is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and available right now.
Curator is the first of four projects that Netflixs’ Jordan Zimmerman announced. The other three are tools for working with Cassandra, Apache’s database. Astyanax (an Apache Cassandra client), Priam (a Cassandra configuration and token management and backup/recovery co-process) and CassJMeter (Cassandra tests as a JMeter plugin).
A large part of the announcement is a asking for developers who also might want to work on open source projects for Netflix. What I want to know is if Netflix is so Open Source friendly where the hell is my Linux client for Netflix.
The Koha the Saga Continues
Last week the Koha community made a plea for help, as reported here. The situation has moved quite far since then. That initial plea for help was answered in a big way. Donations came in from all over the world, to aid in the fight against LibLime’s application for trademark in New Zealand. They have collected around $12,000 in donations from mostly individuals in $20 and $50 amounts. Many attorneys have also contacted the project with offers of pro-bono asistance.
In a statment from the community they say, “We believe we are well placed now to mount a strong legal challenge and we think we have enough in donations to cover filing fees, document costs and other disbursements.”
This may nolonger be neccassary however in light of this statement from PTFS/LibLime:
“When PTFS/LibLime purchased LibLime in March, 2010, one of the assets acquired was the trademark on the term Koha as it applies to ILS software in the United States. PTFS/LibLime has held that trademark in trust, purposefully choosing not to enforce it in order to insure that no individual, organization, or company would be prohibited from promoting their services around Koha in the United States.
Another one of the assets acquired in the purchase of LibLime was an application for the trademark of the term Koha as it applies to ILS software in New Zealand. That application has now been accepted. PTFS/LibLime will hold that trademark in trust as well, and will not enforce it in order to insure that no individual, organization, or company will be prohibited from promoting their services around Koha in New Zealand.
PTFS/LibLime is prepared to transfer the trademark to a non-profit Koha Foundation with the provision that the Foundation hold the trademark in trust and not enforce it against any individual, organization, or company who chooses to promote services around Koha in New Zealand. PTFS/LibLime encourages a direct dialog with Koha stakeholders to determine an equitable solution for the disposition of the trademark that serves the best interests of the libraries who use Koha.”
In response the Koha community had this to say:
“PTFS have issued a press release saying they are willing to hand the NZ Koha trademark over to a non-profit representing the Koha community. That organisation is the Horowhenua Library Trust, elected by the Koha global community, and we would be delighted to accept that offer and add the NZ Koha trademark to the store of other Koha community property we currently hold in trust ie domain names and trademarks.”
O folks even though this appears over we should all keep our eye on it just incase the PTFS/LibLime offer was not sincere.
Hack turns your LCD into a privacy monitor you can only see with magic glasses
I ran across this article and It reminded me of those paranoid people that get the film that stops people from seeing your screen from the side. This is different and I can see a good use. This only allows you with the custom glasses to see the screen, even if someone is looking over your shoulders. This would be good for using your computer in public area. Especially if you are watching material that is not age appropriate for the kids around you.
Open Source Tools for Worship
I don’t go to Church as much as I should, but each time I see that they are trying to integrate technology. This made me think, why don’t more churches use technology more. I think it’s because they don’t have a large budget and after buying a projector and a PA they are out of money. I would like to call to all the Techies out there to get involved and setup a Linux computer and show them how to use the tools in this article. I think the OpenLP Worship Presentation Software (http://openlp.org/) is an exciting software!
The Advantages of Using Linux
This article (Posted by Rodebian) is a response to the “Disadvantages of Using Linux” Article by Lisa Hann. I think Rodebian has done a good job of acknowledging Lisa’s points without being defensive.
Google Maps indoor public buildings
In the Demo and Videos it shows how you can find things in an airport like a coffee shop, bathrooms, and your gate.
Feedback:
Time: 47:57
Thanks to ThatDude for pointing out a link problem I created.
Outtro Music:
Time: 49:39
Jamendo.com
Go by Josh Woodward
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