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Links 25/5/2011: KDE 4.7 Beta, China Gets Debian Mirror



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



  • Server

    • Platform Gets Graphic with HPC Cluster Manager
      Not everybody who needs to build a cluster wants to be a Linux expert. And that is why Platform Computing has slapped an all-encompassing Web-based graphical user interface onto the 3 release of its Platform HPC cluster management tool.




  • Applications

    • Syncany: A Great Dropbox Alternative Which Supports Multiple Storage Types
      Syncany is a brand new open-source file sync software (similar to Dropbox, or Sparkleshare). "Oh no, not another Dropbox alternative" you might say. Well Syncany is different and has the chance to become better than other such applications. Read on!


    • 13 Reasons to choose GIMP over Photoshop!
      Photoshop is one of the most popular image editing proprietary software, with extensive capabilities and a rather un-affordable price! It will be interesting for you to note that most of the Photoshop copies running on thousands of computers are illegal, that seems to be obvious as even professionals cannot afford to buy such an expensive piece of software. On the other hand, GIMP, photo manipulation software is a free counterpart that is fairly popular in the Linux circle. GIMP is preinstalled on some Linux

      distributions or it can be installed with great ease. In this post we will draw a comparison between the two softwares! The debate is old yet it interests many. In this post we will compare the two softwares, according to current standards.


    • Proprietary



      • 10 Commercial Apps for Linux That I Never Knew Existed
        One thing that keeps Linux in the back foot is the lack of good quality applications that can compete with the best out there. The advent of paid softwares section in Ubuntu Software Center is a start, things like that can kick start application development for Linux in a big way. But things were not as bad I thought it would be. On further browsing, I found out that there are indeed a good number of paid applications for Linux, some of them were a total surprise for me. Here are some of those paid applications for Linux which I found interesting.




    • Instructionals/Technical



    • Games

      • The State of Gaming on Linux
        We recently covered the best paid games that are out there for Linux. We know that the list was too small and disappointing for any Linux fan. The size of the list can only be attributed to the lack of any major progress in this area for years. To be honest, most of the games that are available for Linux are graphically poor with loose plots and terrible AI levels. However, before you start bashing Linux developers for that, let's take a look at why gaming sucks so badly on Linux.






  • Desktop Environments

    • A bit about Fluxbox


    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Ships First 4.7 Beta
        KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.






  • Distributions



  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • Apache Libcloud is now a top level project
    The Apache Libcloud project has left the Apache Incubator where projects mature and has become a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation. Libcloud is a Python implementation of a common vendor-independent API for cloud services which supports multiple backends to work with cloud provider specific APIs. The project hopes to allow developers to write cloud applications for a single API without the need to write vendor-specific code. The current Python implementation has back-end driver support for over twenty cloud platforms including Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, Rackspace, GoGrid, IBM Cloud and Linode.


  • Apache Libcloud Graduates


  • Web Browsers

    • Deconstructing browser trends
      All right, the big moment has come. In the past dozen weeks and a similar number of Internet-related articles, I have alluded, hinted and clear-stabbed at various trends and hypes that seem to be gripping the modern browsers. In my Taming Firefox 4 article, we had a brief if heated piece on Tabs on Top thingie. Firefox came into spotlight again with Aurora, a dev-build, and so did Internet Explorer, with its version 10 preview.


    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 5 for Android adds CSS animation, support for Do Not Track browsing
        The Firefox team is moving as quick as a...well, you get the idea. Nearly two months after releasing its latest browser to the masses, the folks at Mozilla have unleashed Firefox 5 for Android as a beta for willing souls who happen upon it in the Market. The latest rendition will hook you up with support for CSS animations,






  • Public Services/Government

    • Romania to recommend open source "wherever appropriate"
      Romania's minister for Communication and Information Society, Valerian Vreme, said at a conference in Bucharest that the country's public authorities should "use free and open source systems, such as Linux, when a mature evaluation shows it is the proper solution". According to a report at OSOR.EU, Vreme said he would not support a law which required institutions to use open source, as the job of the ministry was to present the pros and cons of a product and its alternatives.


    • Eve Online source code posted online, DMCA takedown quickly follows
      GitHub, for those that don’t know, is an online repository for source code and software projects. It supports both open and closed source projects, and gives developers a central location to both share and store their projects.

      For the most part the projects listed on GitHub are legitimate, and in the case of the open source repositories, viewing and downloading is encouraged. But sometimes code that shouldn’t be available is posted there, and the owner wants it taken down quickly.

      [...]

      They describe it as the “decompiled source code” of the game and that it represents “infringing material”.


    • European states 'illegally specifying' brands in IT tenders
      One in eight government IT tenders in the European Union illegally specifies a brand, according to a new report from Openforum Europe (OFE).

      OFE's annual assessment of procurement in E.U. member states has found that 13 percent of a sample of tenders for IT products published in the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union made reference to specific trademarks or brand names. This is usually illegal under E.U. procurement rules as it is anti-competitive.




  • Licensing



  • Programming

    • GNU-based IDE
      Mentor Graphics has developed Embedded Sourcery CodeBench, a next-generation integrated development environment (IDE) based on the open source GNU toolchain. The technology provides embedded developers with a powerful and easy-to-use tool suite for developing and optimising systems based on a broad range of devices from the most advanced microprocessors to microcontrollers. Sourcery CodeBench incorporates technologies which Mentor acquired from Code Sourcery in November last year. The tool introduces new support for the NetLogic Microsystems XLP multicore processor, Freescale Kinetis and Xilinx Zynq. The Sourcery CodeBench product is integrated with the Mentor Embedded Sourcery Probes and third-party probes.






Leftovers



  • Science





  • Finance

    • Goldman CEO Blankfein's Fate in Hands of DOJ
      Wall Street executives and senior people inside Goldman Sachs (GS) say Lloyd Blankfein may want to hang on as CEO of the big Wall Street firm, but the final decision will not be his to make. Rather, his fate rests in the hands of the U.S. Justice Department, which is probing statements he made before a Senate committee investigating Goldman’s role in the 2008 financial crisis, FOX Business has learned.

      If a probe by the DOJ into Goldman’s conduct ahead of the financial crisis is expedited and the focus turns to Blankfein’s actions, the thinking goes, Goldman’s board of directors will likely offer Blankfein up as a sacrifice in exchange for leniency.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Move Over Machiavelli: Wisconsin GOP Kills Public Financing to Pay for Voter Suppression
      You are a new Governor pursuing a radical, budget-slashing agenda. In your spare time, you work to pass the most restrictive Voter ID law in the nation, which turns out to be quite costly. What to do? Here is an idea. To pay for your voter suppression efforts, why not rob public financing for elections, a system designed to encourage a diversity of candidates and a flourishing of democracy?




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • Access Copyright Stops Pay-Per-Use Digital Licensing
        Earlier this year, Access Copyright won a Copyright Board decision that granted a new interim tariff for post-secondary education institutions. This is the first of three posts that examine the aftermath of that decision, the current economics behind Access Copyright, and the challenges the copyright collective faces over the long haul. The interim licence, which effectively sought to maintain the status quo as the copyright collective and educational institutions sort through the Access Copyright demand for a massive increase in its current tariff structure, provided the collective with a potential continued revenue stream and delayed what appeared to be a near-universal decision among Canadian universities to drop the Access Copyright licence altogether.


      • Pirate Party Germany server raid - Personal statement by Loz Kaye
        I would like to add my condemnation to that of Sebastian Nerz and Rick Falkvinge, amongst others on yesterday's police raid of German Pirate Party IT Assets.

        A French investigation into an attack on the IT infrastructure of the energy group EDF resulted in German authorities disconnecting and then confiscating the German Pirate Party's servers. This had the effect of partially crippling the party two days ahead of state elections in Bremen.


      • Pirate Party Germany Server Raid - Open Letter
        As you will be well aware, German police officers seized a number of servers belonging to the Piratenpartei (The German Pirate Party), provided by AixIT in Offenbach. Some of these servers constituted the information technology and communications infrastructure of the party, a legal and officially recognised political party in Germany apparently at the behest of French investigators.










Clip of the Day



Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli - Minor Swing



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Credit: TinyOgg

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