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ElectricSteve writes "It's been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke's geosync satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become commonplace, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us — until now. At $86,000, the Martin Aircraft jetpack costs about as much as a high-end car, achieves a 30-minute flight time, and is fueled by regular gasoline. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence." Here's a video of some indoor test flights. This isn't Buck Rogers's jetpack — it's about 5 by 5 feet and weighs more than the average human. You won't be able to commute with it (the FAA has not certified this class of device) so it's recreational only for now.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
gollum123 sends an excerpt from the NY Times on how Google has taken a lead in language translation, in one of the company's few unqualified successes as it attempts to broaden is offerings beyond search. "...Google's quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world's largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation. ...in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google's alley. ...Google's service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We finally have an unit policy in Ubuntu. I started to work on this issue over a year ago. The first step was to talk to other people (Ubuntu developers and upstream), but the opinions diverged. Neither a consensus was found, nor any result came out of it (except heated discussions). Upstream was not willing to change anything. It was time to contact the Technical Board to get a decision for Ubuntu.
Now we have the policy and we can start filing bug reports and fixing them without discussions about the reasonability of the patches. Let’s get Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) in shape!
I keep hearing how Mac like the new theme for Ubuntu 10.04 is. I prefer to view it as less Windows like than more Mac like 
.
I saw the Translations of package descriptions video from FOSDEM 2010. Every distribution has two translatable string for each package: a synopsis (summary, short description) and a long description. These descriptions differ from distribution to distribution. The descriptions should be shared between the distributions. This will enable us to share the translations of the descriptions.
My idea: Why not letting upstream provide the package description and the translation for it? They should have the knowledge to provide a good description and to update it if required. To encourage upstream to provide the description, we should create a freedesktop specification for it. Quick draft: The tarball should contain a file named package.info. The package.info file should contain three RFC-2822-like fields for each package: Package, Synopsis, and Description. Translation can be stored in package.info.<language> (for example package.info.de).
Example package.info:
Package: audacity
Synopsis: A fast, cross-platform audio editor
Description: Audacity is a multi-track audio editor for Linux/Unix,
MacOS and Windows. It is designed for easy recording, playing
and editing of digital audio. Audacity features digital effects and
spectrum analysis tools. Editing is very fast and provides unlimited
undo/redo.
.
Supported file formats include Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and AU.
What do you think about this idea?
blozza2070 notes the news that Jeff Jaffe has been appointed CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. Until January Jaffe was CTO at Novell and, while his name hasn't come up very often in this community, he is one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. A reading of Jaffe's blog while at Novell tends to paint him as a software patent supporter, Microsoft apologist, and no fan of the FSF. This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
…that this part of my desktop could feel so sleek:
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, we are ready for you. 
adeelarshad82 writes "After originally rejecting the story, online retailer NewEgg confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and apologized for the affair. NewEgg has also broken off its relationship with IPEX, the supplier of the phony lot. The retailer said that it has already contacted affected customers and would continue to reach out and replace the counterfeit parts. We discussed the fake Core i7s over the weekend."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Back in the days, we did not have capabilities to find and install debug packages with Dr. Konqi in KDE. But those times are over!
Debug packages are important, well, actually very important. When an application crashes it is in most cases possible to create a so called backtrace. A backtrace ideally provides the developer with the precise location in the source code where the crash happened. Fixing a crash without this kind of information is almost impossible, and the more information are available in the backtrace the better. Debug packages contribute to this in that their content are debug symbols, essentially those are the references that are used in the backtrace. Now, usually you do not need to have this information to use the software, which is the reason a lot of distributions strip the symbols into these seperated debug packages (one can save a big deal of disk space by removing them).
In case you did not yet hear of Dr. Konqi. It is a very useful tool that usually pops up when a KDE application crashes. It then tries to get all information necessary for you to create a perfectly useful bug report.
There is big of a problem, on the one hand you do not want to waste disk space and network traffic for these debug symbols, even though like 99% of the regular users will not need them, and on the other hand you have Dr. Konqi which is trying to obtain a high quality backtrace that enables developers to quickly process a bug report and fix a crash in their software.
Not KDE 4.4not GNOME 3.0 and not KDE SC 4.4but Dr. Konqi 2.1 comes to rescue and now allows distribution developers to create scripts that take care of the find an installing of debug packages, so that the debugging experience becomes a bit better. Well, obviously debugging is not much of a user experience eitherway 
but at least getting a backtrace is now more barable than it was before.
The system is quite simple. Dr. Konqi calls an executable, passing it all files for which no debug symbols were found for as arguments, then the executable tries to find and install the appropriate packages and returns back to Dr. Konqi. Straight forward really 
Since I am, amongst other things, Kubuntu developer and since this blog post is tagged ‘kubuntu’ of course I am only blogging about this because Kubuntu today got support for this fancy new feature . Should you encounter a crash in upcoming Kubuntu 10.04 Dr. Konqi will not only tell you how good the quality of the automatic generated backtrace is, but also show a button with which you can install missing debug symbols.
Additionally I might mention that Kubuntu has a new mantra of using C++ whenever possible (in opposite to the former one, which was to use Python whenever possible), hence the application standing behind this new features is written in C++ and got the fancy name kubuntu-debug-installer.
In case you care, the code is available on launchpad, and fairly simple. It really just creates a thread and uses dpkg -S to find the appropriate packages. In later versions it will also be able to use other means of looking up debug packages and be able to add a super secret Kubuntu repository for debug packages automatically, if necessary.
What I would like to see for future KDE releases is the possibility to directly tie a plugin into Dr. Konqi instead of having to create an independet application. But for now we’ll try to get kubuntu-debug-installer the ability to use different algorithms for finding the appropriate debug packages (also using different tools, since for example apt-file performs better than dpkg-query, but requires an up-to-date cache etc.) and of course support of a special Kubuntu repository that contains debug packages for all and every official Kubuntu package.
netbuzz writes "When the NASDAQ stock index hit its all-time high of 5,133 on March 10, 2000, it had more than doubled in a year and the dot-com bubble was already leaking in a big way. A week later the NASDAQ had fallen 9 percent. A year later it was below 2000. Gone were such poster children of the era as Pets.com, Kozmo, and — who could forget? — Whoopi Goldberg's Flooz. Here's a look back."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I’m re-blogging Evan Boldt’s message to the SU team:
_ _
SpreadUbuntu is participating in the new Ubuntu branding project. We want to start some discussion about the new layouts, design, and logo.
Please take a look at this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/Projects/SpreadUbuntu/Brand
Some things to discuss:
Please make some mock-ups of what you want to see happen, and add it to the wiki at the top in the appropriate section.
_ _
My addition:
Thanks in advance for your help!
If you just let things happen in a collaborative project with design/artwork needs, you will likely see a few people creating proposals that mostly cover the same ground. They all will base there work on their own assumptions regarding various aspects of the project. This might not even happen consciously, but be more about gut feeling.
The same applies to other collaborators providing feedback. Everyone has an opinion on matters of design. People talk a lot of what they like or don’t like, seldom giving reasons.
This way there is no shared idea of what should be achieved and how to judge proposals. No common ground for collaboration.
A collaborative project should have a documented mission statement/vision/set of goals. You need to define where you wan to end up, before you can take care of getting there. Otherwise you rely on chance alone. This is especially important for artwork, because it shouldn’t be about individual taste or the latest fashion, but rather be constructed to help further the goals of the project.
Even making some people unhappy is better than having no direction.
You should work from a mission statement, a project briefing, towards defining your audience, the desired tone and your message. This will be your measure to decide what is and isn’t appropriate regarding design and artwork.
Your audience, your users might be quite different from your collaborators.
There’s also the aspect of breaking a big problem down into a set of smaller ones. This helps with covering every aspect and detail. As far as there is subjectivity, it’s much better to deal with it in small parts instead of at once, for the entire design.
bjb writes "While helping a somewhat computer illiterate person figure out a problem recently, they mentioned that PDF files had recently stopped working. Upon investigation I found something installed called 'PDF Suite.' Never having heard of it, I Googled it with 'malware' and other key words, but nothing turned up, though my suspicion remained (and was somewhat confirmed by WOT.) So my question is, where can you go to find out if something is legitimate? Because the person I'm helping is on a dial-up connection, downloading malware detection applications (and updates) is too heavy consider. And I don't maintain a USB stick with such apps, since I don't do this kind of thing very often. Where can you quickly find information?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Just a kind thank you note to the gThumb authors for completely breaking my workflow by re-inventing the paradigm used to save imported pictures. Until now, all my pictures landed in a predictable location, using a predictable filename pattern that was easily searchable. Not anymore. Now, files land into my home directory, according to some recursive folder pattern that further complicates searching for files and requires a few more clicks to accomplish. Dammit! Couldn't you at least make this configurable, so that those of us who prefer to retain the old paradigm can?!
Note: re-inventing an application's paradigms is always a very bad idea. If you're a software developer who is reading this, please keep it in mind and go scratch your itch to change the world somewhere else. Thank you.
Many thanks to Damon Lynch for pointing me to his own professional picture importer called Rapid. This is an extremely configurable importing tool and, lo and behold, Damon even offers builds for Ubuntu via his PPA!
Still, the consequence of this mess is that migrating to Rapid means that I'll be loosing gThumb's simple but extremely efficient editing tools. To me, one strength of gTthumb was this unique combination of picture importing with basic editing tools. Now, I'm forced to split these interconnected tasks, simply because someone chose to completely rethink gThumb's paradigms. I'm of course aware of Gimp's existence, but repeated attempts at mastering it made me conclude that it's entirely the wrong software for my needs and essentially overkill. By contrast, gThumb offers just enough tools to enable someone to crop images to useful sizes and to adjust color balances in easy steps; it does the job without hassle, which is not the case with Gimp.
Thinking out loud, it is precisely on days like these that the urge to create my own Linux distribution keeps on coming to mind. Retaining consistent paradigms in the desktop environment and applications that I use, not to mention maintaining the number of duplicate libraries to a bare minimal, has been a constant struggle and, noticing how some developers' urge to re-invent the wheel every other day, using whatever new programming language of the day, persistently takes precedence over keeping system resource consumption to a bare minimum and over preserving user sanity, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Free Software has veered way too far into the bazaar and urgently needs a copious amount of cathedral to make it usable for mere mortals again.
Some dpkg-based distribution where the only scripting language allowed is Bourne shell and the only programming languages C or C++ comes to mind. Of course, this would also require porting popular application from e.g. Java, Python, etc. which would be a colossal amount of work. Still, I think that the time has come for this to happen. As an added bonus, this would make applications usable again on embedded devices with spartan CPU, RAM and storage resources, so this project could generate huge benefits to the embedded Linux industry. Based on my experience at my previous jobs, I have a rather clear picture (pun intended) of what needs to be done and of who I would hire to make it happen. What I'm missing are investors. Who's with me?
CWmike writes "Today Cisco Systems introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. 'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' Cisco's John Chambers said while announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said. The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the 'killer app,' Chambers said. Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.) AT&T said it has been using the CRS-3 to test 100Gbit/sec. data links in tests on a commercial fiber route in Florida and Louisiana."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In the ongoing project of ubuntu server dailies we have added qemu-kvm to be built daily from the upstream git archive. You can find it here.
kkleiner writes "For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There's no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Brian Murray finds out what makes LP’s new patches view awesome.
Not bad! Karl Fogel is currently working on hiding the Fix Committed and Fix Released bugs by default so it’s more of a queue than a huge pile in your face. I am keen to get more feedback on +patches and how it affects your team so don’t be shy!
harrymcc writes "Windows has been so dominant for so long that it's easy to forget Windows 1.0 was vaporware, mocked both outside and inside of Microsoft — and that its immediate successors were considered stopgaps until OS/2 was everywhere. Tandy Trower, the product manager who finally got Windows 1.0 out the door a quarter century ago, has written a memoir of the experience. (He thought being assigned the much-maligned project was Microsoft's fiendish way of trying to get rid of him.) The story involves such still-significant figures as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, and Nathan Myhrvold; Trower left Microsoft only in November of 2009 after 28 years with the company."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Overview of theMarch 2010 MicrosoftPatchesand their status. ...(more)...
macslocum writes "Nat Torkington begins sketching out an open data process that borrows liberally from open source tools: 'Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners you've cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster (many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it's a great training ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn't bring the same opportunities to data projects. And a lot of data projects need these things. From talking to government folks and scientists, it's become obvious that serious problems exist in some datasets. Sometimes corners were cut in gathering the data, or there's a poor chain of provenance for the data so it's impossible to figure out what's trustworthy and what's not. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball, then immediately forks as all the users add their new records to their own copy and don't share the additions. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball but nobody has provided a way for users to collaborate even if they want to. So lately I've been asking myself: What if we applied the best thinking and practices from open source to open data? What if we ran an open data project like an open source project? What would this look like?'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UPDATE: Thanks Alberto Ruiz for pointing out that VirtualBox can use .vmdk files, so the VMware image can be used for that purpose.
Thanks to the incredible work of Zhang “Jesse” Sen and Vladimir Melo, a brand new release of the GNOME Developer Kit has been published! “What’s new”, you may ask? Everything, since all packages are built directly from git.gnome.org! 
But that alone is not what makes this release so cool, but the fact that the final image went through a dramatic “diet”, shedding a lot of its “weight” and going from a 1.4GB monster to less than 700MB of pure GNOME goodness!!!
 |
| From Screenshots |
Firefox was replaced by Epiphany and codecs and fancy-Nancy stuff was scrapped to make room for a lightweight release for developers and translators!
So go ahead and try the new images today:
Trailrunner7 writes "Security researchers have found that Vodafone, one of the world's larger wireless providers, is distributing some HTC phones with malware pre-installed on them. The phone, HTC's Magic, runs the Google Android mobile operating system, and is one of the more popular handsets right now. A researcher at Panda Software received one of the handsets recently, and upon attaching it to her PC, found that the phone was pre-loaded with the Mariposa bot client. Mariposa has been in the news of late thanks to some arrests connected to the operation of the botnet."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A new version of the Samurai WTF (Web Testing Framework) distribution, version 0.8, has been r ...(more)...
This weekend, I went with bokunenjin to the 100.tea.bowls exhibit hosted by The Art League which lives in Old Town Alexandria’s (VA) Torpedo Factory. The quality of tea bowl styles, purposes, and quality varied, but we were both impressed with some of the available pieces. Most of them were also very affordable! There were several I would have loved to purchase and bring home with me, but I settled on one particular piece. This bowl was done by artist Jennifer Dinkelmeyer.
Although the piece was unnamed, I will call it Koi Pond. The colors and bumps around the outside of the bowl remind me of koi gliding under the water and occasionally breaking the surface in search of food. The black base color of the outside and inside of the bowl reminds me of cold, dark, and muddy water. Perhaps this bowl could be a metaphor for that first walk after winter through the garden to see and feed the koi.
The bi-annual ikebana show was also colocated with the 100.tea.bowls exhibit. Some of the pieces were interesting in more ways than one. The ikebana (japanese flower arranging) on display were also a — sometimes violent — contrast to the chabana (flower arranging for tea) I’ve seen.
krebsonsecurity writes "Organized cyber-criminal gangs stole $25 million in the 3rd quarter alone last year, by pilfering the online bank accounts of small to midsized businesses, the FDIC reported last week. In contrast, traditional bank robbers hauled just $9.4 million in 1,184 bank robberies during that same period, according to an analysis of FBI bank crime statistics by krebsonsecurity.com. From that story: 'The federal government sure publishes a lot more information about physical bank robberies that it makes available about online stick-ups. Indeed, the FBI's bank crime stats are extraordinarily detailed. For example, they can tell you that in the 3rd quarter of last year, bank robbers were more likely to hold up their local branch between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on a Wednesday than at any other time or day of the week; they can tell you the number of tear gas and dye packs taken with the loot, the number of security cameras activated, the number of food stamps taken, even what percentage of suspected perpetrators had illegal drug habits at the time of the robberies. About the only thing the stats don't tell you is what brand of jeans the perpetrators were wearing and whether the getaway car had cool vanity plates. What do we get about e-crime statistics from the federal government? One guy from the FDIC giving a speech at the RSA conference."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Take a close look at this beautiful image by John Rogers of the Austin skyline ... Do you see some purple? Maybe some orange? How about a few clouds? Reminds me a bit of the new Ubuntu color scheme...
Well the Texas Linux Fest committee has accepted my proposal to demo the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud!
So if you're interested in seeing a demonstration of the 10.04 LTS Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud in action, join me in Austin, Texas on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at the first ever Texas Linux Fest.
In my presentation, I will use:
Bring a blank 1GB+ USB key and I'll even burn you a copy of the same ISO I use in my presentation.Cloud Computing is here, and Ubuntu is a phenomenal platform on which you can construct your private Cloud today. Since 2004, Ubuntu has revolutionized the Linux desktop. Attend this session and learn how Ubuntu is changing the landscape of the Linux server.
An anonymous reader writes "The European Parliament is preparing to take on ACTA. A joint resolution (DOC) has been tabled by the major EP parties that threatens to go to court unless things change. The EP is calling for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searches at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Whilst I was quite happily sleeping yesterday morning, the International Women’s Day competition winners were announced. The popular vote prize went to Elvira Martinez “tatica1″. The second prize went to Karen Y. Perez, and Jen Phillips got an honourable mention for her awesome analogy-style story.
You can read all the stories and see the record of votes on the Ubuntu Women wiki.
Thanks so much to everyone who entered and voted (and Jono for announcing). The competition was heaps of fun to organise and now we have lots of stories to show that we forge our own paths to Ubuntu just like the guys do!
I meant to blog about Harvest a long time earlier already. With the help of fantastic people like Paul Hummer, James Westby and Dave Walker, we got to the point were almost all of the ideas we wanted to have in the new design are implemented:
It’s going to be online soon, but there’s still a few things that would be nice to have resolved. If you know a bit about Django, Web UIs, python or want to dive right in, I’d appreciate your help with making Harvest rock.
nigham writes "The EFF is publicly disclosing a version of Apple's iPhone developer program license agreement. The highlights: you can't disclose the agreement itself (the EFF managed to get it via the Freedom of Information Act thanks to NASA's recent app), Apple reserves the right to kill your app at any time with no reason, and Apple's liability in any circumstance is limited to 50 bucks. There's also this gem: 'You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.' The entire agreement (PDF) is up at the EFF's site."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Panda Security has a post up on one of their employees buying a brand new Android phone from Vodafon ...(more)...
schwit1 sends this quote from the Wall Street Journal: "Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain. Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal US workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker. ... A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said. The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
chudnall notes a Technology Review story on a new gas engine injection system that promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that 'activates' it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It's always nice to see the amount of interest that just a simple table at say, Geekfest Montreal can generate. We gave out a couple of CDs, showed off 10.04, and generally got a very nice amount of support and interest for the Ubuntu-QC LoCo and our Global Jam event.
Simon Phipps tegnap blogjában arról írt, hogy utolsó napját töltötte a Sun-nál Oracle-nél. A Sun-nál majd' 10 évet lehúzó nyílt forrású szószóló számot vetett arról, hogy mivel elégedett és mivel nem. Azt még nem tudja mihez kezd a jövőben. A blogbejegyzés itt.
These two guys shed about 42 pounds of fur per day (it seems), and I like robots and automation, so a few weeks ago, I bought a Roomba.
Really neat...at least in principle.
However, the stock Roomba is simply incompatible with my house. 100% of the daily runs concluded prematurely with the Roomba inevitably stuck under my couch.
That sucks. And not in the vacuum cleaner sort of way that it's supposed to suck. Throw the automation out of the window if you have to un-wedge the machine from beneath your furniture every time, and it doesn't make it back to the recharging station.
Time for a bit of ingenuity...
I had unused four adhesive rubber "feet" that came with a wireless router (or something). I stuck these to the top of the Roomba sensor, adding about 2cm of additional required clearance, and poof--a working robot again!
Five days running now, and not a single wedging ;-)
:-Dustin
A Panda Security blogjában lehet arról olvasni, hogy egy újabb vállalatot kaptak azon, hogy (feltehetően nem akarattal) malware-t terjesztett termékével az ügyfeleihez. A blog szerint az egyik kollégájuk egy Android-os Vodafone HTC Magic-et kapott. Amint a készüléket a számítógépéhez csatlakoztatta, a Panda antivírus azonnal jelzett: autorun.inf, autorun.exe. A közelebbi vizsgálat után kiderült, hogy a malware valójában a Mariposa botnet kliense. A részletek itt. A Mariposa botnet-tel kapcsolatban nemrégiben letartóztatásokat eszközölt a spanyol rendőrség.
Megjelent az OpenSolaris kernelből és az Ubuntu userland-ből álló Nexenta Core Platform 3.0-s verziójának első beta-ja. A változások (Alpha 5-höz képest) közt szerepel az OpenSolaris 133-as build-ről 134-esre váltás. Részletek a bejelentésben.
Tegnap Vajna Miklós bejelentette a Frugalware 1.2 (Locris) kiadását.A bejelentés itt olvasható. Néhány fontos tudnivaló a kiadásról:
Letöltés: i686, x86_64 és ppc architektúrára itt található a tükörszerverek listája.
A Valve bejelentette a Steam-et és a Source-ot Mac-re. A Steam a Valve játok/játszó szolgáltatása, a Source pedig a Valve játékmotorja. Természetesen játékok is érkeznek, többek között a Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-strike és a Half-Life széria. A stuff valószínűleg áprislisban érkezik, de az is lehet, hogy csak jövőre. További részletek itt és itt. Már csak az a kérdés, hogy miért kerestek fejleszőket Linux-ra.
Did you ever have to deal with source packages and found the variety of patch systems simply mind-boggling? I certainly have.
Enter: the unstoppable Michael Vogt.
If you are running lucid and don’t have ubuntu-dev-tools installed, install it now. Forget about all the crazy stuff and incantations you might need for random patch system X, Y or Z (it supports cdbs, dpatch and quilt at the moment), just type:
edit-patch <name-of-patch>
and it will do the rest for you, even remind you do make use of the patch tagging guidelines.
Michael simply rocks! Give him a hug and if you find bugs in edit-patch, file them.
b4dc0d3r writes "How do you make sense of the various model numbers or naming schemes for CPUs, graphics cards, and the related chipsets? All I want is something that will run Oblivion and output full 1080 video to a TV. Last time I built my own computer I just went to Pricewatch, made a few easy choices, and everything came to my door. Do I really have to research the differences among Core i5, Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4, Pentium D, Semperon, Athlon, Phenom...? And that's just the processor. Is there a reference somewhere? In short, how do you buy a computer these days?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We received several emails today about the US-CERTanalysis of Trojan horse software found in a ...(more)...
Lyricue is free and open-source application that is used to edit/display song lyrics and passages of text along with images and videos on a second screen/projector. It was designed for use at live events such as church services, concerts and seminars.
(...)
Read the rest of Lyricue - The GNU Lyric disply system (244 words)
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UDAV is a cross-platform program for data array visualization based on the MathGL library. It supports a wide spectrum of graphics, simple script language, and visual data handling and editing. It has a windowed interface for data viewing, changing, and plotting. It can execute MGL scripts, set up and rotate graphics, export to bitmap or vector (EPS or SVG) files, draw TeX-like formulas, and so on.
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A Palm az ezen a héten megrendezésre kerülő Game Developer Conference-en adja ki a Plug-in Development Kit-jét, ami lehetővé teszi C/C++ alapú programok fejlesztését/portolását a webOS alapú (pl. Palm Pre) készülékeire.
Ezzel a lépéssel a platform egyik nagyon komoly hátrányát csökkenti a cég a konkurens Android és iPhone platformokkal szemben. A cég képviselője külön kiemelte, hogy a a PDK támogatni fogja az OpenGL ES 1.1 és 2.0 szabványokat is, ami jelentős mértékben növelheti a készülékre fejlesztett játék- és grafika intenzív alkalmazások számát.
Jeff Bush, a Palm játékokért és grafikáért felelős igazgatója előadást tart az új lehetőségekről a GDC 2010-en.
Részletek itt.
For those unfamiliar with the title of this blog post, let me introduce you to one of the most important tags in Launchpad: regression-potential.
What bugs tagged as regression-potential mean? Basically, they mean that a regression has been found in the development release of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx, at the moment of writing).
Why are they so important? Because it means that a regression has been found but, good news, we still can do something about it.
These bugs are specially important in the kernel. Nobody likes to see hardware, working in previous versions of Ubuntu, failing once upgraded to the new one.
Jeremy Foshee, a QA member of the Kernel team, is trying to avoid as many regressions in the kernel as possible. As announced in several mailing lists, he is going to be organizing a weekly bug day of kernel bugs marked as regression-potential from today and until the release of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). If you want to help avoiding regressions in Lucid, every Tuesday, you can check the Kernel Bug Day page, which includes a list of bugs that need some love. If you have doubts on how to help, please, join the kernel team on #ubuntu-kernel at freenode IRC, and feel free to ask any question.
The more people helping triaging regression-potential bugs, the fewer regression-release bugs Lucid will have.
Február közepén jelentették be, hogy a Nokia és az Intel egyesíti erőit és egybegyúrják az Intel Moblin-t és a Nokia Maemo-t. Az eredmény egy MeeGo névre hallgató platform. A bejelentés óta az egyik leggyakrabban ismételt kérdés: mikor lesz forráskód?
Valtteri Halla, a Nokia egyik veteránja egy blogbejegyzésben igyekezett információkat adni. Valtteri 1997 óta dolgozik a finn vállalatnál, ahol saját bevallása szerint idejének több mint 75%-át azzal töltötte, hogy a nyílt forrást és a Linux-ot becsempéssze a céghez. Valtteri az egyik tagja a jelenleg összesen két fős MeeGo technikai vezetőségének (Technical Steering Group of MeeGo).
A blogbejegyzéséből megtudhatjuk, hogy a Nokia és az Intel a március hó végét jelölte ki határidőként saját magának arra, hogy megnyissa a MeeGo repóját. Ez a nap afféle "Day One" lehet a MeeGo életében, amely azt jelzi, hogy a Maemo és a Moblin valóban egyesültek.
A blogbejegyzés itt olvasható.
Hugh Pickens writes "Network World summarizes an RSA Conference panel discussion in which former NSA technical director Brian Snow said that cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for 20 years, but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt. 'I do believe NSA is still ahead, but not by much — a handful of years,' says Snow. 'I think we've got the edge still.' Snow added that that in the 1980s there was a huge gap between what the NSA could do and what commercial encryption technology was capable of. 'Now we are very close together and moving very slowly forward in a mature field.' The NSA has one key advantage (besides their deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes): 'We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research,' he said. Snow's claim of NSA superiority seemed to rankle some members on the panel. Adi Shamir, the "S" in the RSA encryption algorithm, said that when the titles of papers in NSA technical journals were declassified up to 1983, none of them included public key encryption; 'That demonstrates that NSA was behind,' said Shamir. Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linus bejelentette a 2.6.34-es kernel első kiadásra jelölt verzióját. A vártnál egy kicsivel előbb került sor az -rc1 kiadására. Ahogy Linus ígérte, aki a két hetes beolvasztási időszak utolsó napjára hagyta a pull request-et, az most így járt, várhat a 2.6.35 beolvasztási időszakáig.
A változtatások körülbelül fele a drivers/ könyvtár alatt található. Ehhez jön még 5% a sound/ alatt, amelynek saját könyvtára van. További 10%-ot találni a firmware/ alatt, szóval a változások kétharmada tekinthető eszközmeghajtó-programokkal kapcsolatosnak.
A maradék fele architektúra frissítés, a többi pedig a "maradék". Összességében 850 fejlesztő működött közre, 6 500+ fájl változott, 400 000 sornyi kód adódott hozzá és körülbelül 175 000 sor került eltávolításra.
A bejelentés elolvasható itt.
Well this will be a short and sweet one, I have generated a simple wallpaper for Lucid for my laptop. (1920x1200), thought I would share it with all of you. Hope you everyone likes it.
I’ve finally soldered on the LEDs for the Cylon DorkShield I designed and got built in a recent DorkBotPDX PCB run. I’m having trouble with the programmer, but I got the shield mostly working:
Which is more powerful?
Say we have a software project in the FOSS community and say it needs to have 5 developers work on it, spending a total of 90 developer days between them in order to get it to a usable state. That’s a fairly large amount of work and most people will dismiss the project, as it’s not in a usable state.
This is the FOSS bootstrapping problem. If you can’t find a way to boot your project, then you’ll be toiling on it for years. Slowly becoming more behind with the technology. Most programmers don’t want to do that.
To solve this you can inject money into the problem. Get a decent amount of investment at the start a simply pay programmers to make the thing work. This is a good way to do it as I like it when programmers get paid.
Otherwise your going to have to drum up some community support and it’s going to need an awful lot of faith in the leader, the project idea and the prospects of it succeeding. Telling a bunch of people that it will succeed with their help is rather hard if you need a bunch of people to all believe it in order for it not to be a lie.
But, isn’t money just faith too? sure your not investing your time any more, but your investing your money and in some quarts that may be worse. Does this mean that we should be able to start interesting projects or does this mean that we have to gradually, very slowly work our way up to the goal with small pieces, evolve them forward with what we have to prove their worth first?
Your thoughts?
tugfoigel writes "Anyone who currently owns an iPhone and was hoping they would be able to use it as a mobile Web access point for a Wi-Fi iPad just got some bad news. Reportedly, Steve Jobs has said this will not happen. Swedish blog Slashat.se claims they e-mailed Jobs directly to ask him whether or not you'd be able to tether your iPad and iPhone and received a terse 'No' in reply. According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
geek4 sends in an analysis indicating that Microsoft may have the most to lose if hedge-fund operator Elliot buys Novell. (The eWeekEurope piece is based on a longer and geekier writeup by Andy Updegrove on how the mechanics of unsolicited tender offers can play out in the tech world.) To avoid meltdown or asset-stripping, Novell can try and find a preferred bidder — a company with some interest in running Novell as a business, and preferrably a tech company. Or another company may make a move independently. But who might that be? A couple of analysts have suggested IBM, Oracle, or SAP. These all have problems... Microsoft is in a similar category, with one added problem. ... Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution. If Novell falls to bits, then Microsoft's efforts to gain open source cred pretty much disappear with it. It's something that would have been impossible to imagine a few years back, but if we're looking for someone to prop Novell up, Microsoft would now be a prime candidate."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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