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20th Dec 2007
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News Alert


Linux and Open Source News for 19th December 2007

Linux Downloads

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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: blackPanther Size: 685.40 MB Status: 1 seeders and 21 leechers Added: 2007-12-19 10:03:42


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: blackPanther Size: 181.65 MB Status: 3 seeders and 9 leechers Added: 2007-12-19 09:57:15


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: UHU-Linux Size: 3.30 GB Status: no seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-12-19 09:31:40


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Damn Small Size: 42.55 MB Status: 1 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-12-19 07:28:03


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: PCLinuxOS Size: 666.11 MB Status: 237 seeders and 166 leechers Added: 2007-12-19 06:34:45


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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ubuntu Size: 2.02 GB Status: 20 seeders and 40 leechers Added: 2007-12-19 00:19:01


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Source: netbsd

Geert Hendrickx announced the availability of the official release of NetBSD 4.0: "Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI .



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Source: Linux Today

DevX: "While no devices available on the market run it, Google has offered 10 million dollars in prize money to the developers who create the most compelling applications "


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Source: Linux Today

Developer.com: "I'm a programmer, not a database administrator; I prefer to live in a world of code rather than table schemas and confusing SQL queries "


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Source: Linux Today

Packt: "In addition to being a fantastic release, Fedora's user and development community and a clear headed approach makes Fedora 8 much more than a Linux distribution "


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Source: Linux Today

FLOSS Ruminations: "This falls in line with the view that an open model is more efficient, but how exactly is it more efficient, and how does one maximize that efficiency? Does Open Source development lead to the creation of a perfect market ?"


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Source: Linux Today

Shared Software, Shared Processes: "What will 2008 bring? Many of the answers are unknown, but here's something I'm fairly certain of "


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Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "Interestingly, our European and North American customers view licensing very, very differently "


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Source: Linux Today

Wired: "There's a movement afoot in the web development community that says it's time to move beyond standards and take the web to a new levels "


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Source: Linux Today

InformationWeek: "To a list that includes CIO and CTO you can now add, thanks to a legal settlement, 'OSCO'. And here's why your company might soon need to hire one "


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Source: Linux Today

The Open Road: "It's one thing to lose a sales team. It's quite another--and much more dire--to lose one's development team, and especially in an open-source company "


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Source: Linux Today

Fanatic Attack: "Microsoft has set up a situation where many of the shortcomings and thousands of comments which need to be resolved at the BRN will not be addressed "


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Source: Linux Today

Datamation: "Because KDE and GNOME users are so furiously loyal to their preferred desktop environment, I had to take into account that no matter how I stated my case, someone was going to come away feeling let down "


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Source: Linux Today

Fortune: "If you thought open-source software was a threat to big-company profits, think again "


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Source: Linux Today

451 CAOS Theory: "2008 could be a very good year for the likes of Compiere and Openbravo if 451 CAOS Theory's blog stats for this year are anything to go by "


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Source: Linux Today

Lucas Nussbaum's Blog: "Debian could use more manpower, but is it actually easy for new contributors who would like to help to do useful things, and get the impression that they actually improved Debian ?"


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Source: Linux Today

Linux Journal: "Choice is an important element of free software, so it's perhaps no surprise that even at the level of the desktop environment there is more than one offering "


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Source: Linux Today

Computerworld: "Dell's efforts to reinvent itself this year through a dramatic break from its direct-sales model, expanded services and new enterprise offerings have shown positive early results "


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Source: Linux Today

Mozilla Developer Center: "Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3 "


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Source: Linux Today

Beskerming.com: "While the modification was minor, a simple change to a PHP global variable, it led to the case where the compromised versions of SquirrelMail would allow arbitrary remote code execution "


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Source: Linux Today

icculus.org: "The GNU/Linux server for Unreal Tournament 3 is now available "


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Source: Linux Today

ONLamp: "Perl 1 was released to the public by Larry Wall 20 years ago today. To celebrate, Perl5Porters have released Perl5.10, the latest stable version of Perl 5. Happy Birthday Perl !"


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Source: Linux Today

Mad Penguin: "Along with the obvious bug fixes and a few usability improvements, the KDE team has really outdone itself. The inclusion of Plasma looks promising "


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Source: Linux Today

InfoWorld: "The Mandriva system can access Windows volumes, and the free space on the flash drive can be read from Windows "


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Source: Linux Today

TechieMoe: "It is with much disappointment that I find this latest release of Puppy no more useful than Damn Small Linux when it comes to practical, offline concerns "



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Source: Slashdot: Linux

sjvn writes "The official word will be out any minute now, but in the meantime DesktopLinux has learned that Dell will be releasing Ubuntu 7.10 on a laptop and desktop with immediate availability. And, as an extra added bonus, they're tossing in legal DVD-playback capability. In a word: Neat."Read more of this story at Slashdot.



previous    Open Source, Open Standards    next


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Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Managing a Linux system can be as easy as connecting to a remote system and run some of the system tool available with most Linux distributions. It gets difficult when you have to manage multiple remote systems, and many Linux admins do work in environments with hundreds or even thousands of systems.



previous    The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs    next


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Source: ONLamp.com

The
Peer to Patent project
(which I’ve
reported on before)
just pointed me to a particularly broad patent that could encumber
user interfaces on the web and desktops for years to come.



The idea in this patent, submitted by Yahoo!, is a clever little idea:
if someone is starting to drag an icon or mail message somewhere, why
not bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak? If she is dragging a
photo, for instance, the browser or operating system can guess that
she wants to open it with PhotoShop or the Gimp, and present that
choice right next to the icon for the photo.




Yes, an idea worth experimenting with, and one that (as the patent
application amply emphasizes) could turn up soon in desktop window
managers, in applications such as mail programs, in Ajax-enabled web
pages, on mobile devices, and all sorts of places. And Yahoo! wants a
cut for supposedly thinking it up.



Discussed by a lawyer in
his blog
and presented
in full
on the Peer to Patent site, this application seems to be a tough one
to crack, despite its simplicity. Only two comments are posted, and no
actual instances of prior art (although one comment tentatively
suggests on instance). If no prior art is found in 35 days, the
comment period closes on Peer to Patent and little stands in the way
of granting the patent.



I have nothing against acknowledging the brilliance of the interface
designers at Yahoo!. If GUI users overcome their initial surprise at
having targets pop up at them, smart drag-and-drop may prove to be a
convenience. Amusingly, the author of the patent application presents
it as much more–a radical improvement to user interaction. But this
has no impact on the granting of the patent. A novel idea can get a
patent no matter how small an increment over current practice it
represents.



What’s more disturbing to me is the cavalier way in which a Yahoo!
designer has picked off the easiest layer of a complex design and
tries to set up a toll gate to profit from it. (More likely,
exercising the patent on such a small advance would just hold back its
adoption, so I imagine Yahoo! is just trying to beef up its
cross-licensing patent portfolio.) A consideration of the work that
would go into implementing smart drag-and-drop quickly reveals that it
would require serious research into user interaction and extensive
changes to many parts of an application or desktop to deal with design
issues such as:





How does the system choose the targets to present to the user for each
type of icon or other user interface element?



How should the system subdivide its elements so that relevant targets
are grouped with elements that can be dragged?



Once heuristics for these choices are developed, what data structures
store these targets, how are targets linked to the objects being
dragged, and how can an association be made quickly so as to present
targets almost instantly to preserve a comfortable user experience?



What hooks does the desktop have to present to applications so they
can create seamless experiences such as the hypothetic mail program
suggested in the patent application? How do applications need to be
redesigned in order to categorize user interface elements that are
presented to the desktop for this service?



Needless to say, the patent application offers no help in any of these
areas. When you read proposals, beware of “could be’s,” with which
this application is larded. Yes, all of these things “could be” done.
If smart drag-and-drop prove attractive, developers of operating
systems, desktop, browsers, and applications will solve the
problems. But they may have to license the right to do so from Yahoo!.



If you’re a web developer or other person with experience in graphical
interfaces, maybe you can prevent this. Check out the claims and see
what prior art you can find.


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Source: ONLamp.com

Another article of the series “Yet Another Perl 6 Operator”
The design of Perl 6 includes some unification mechanisms to bring some extra power to syntax and developers. One of such artefacts is the notion of meta-operators. With them, it is possible to construct augmented operators from existing ones.

The first of such meta-operators we’re going to look at is the quite simple '!' negation prefix.

When applied to infix operators which produce a Bool result, they build a boolean-wise negated version.

== (numeric equality) / !== (numeric inequality)
eq (string equality) / !eq (string inequality)
~~ (smart match) / !~~ (smart "mismatch")


A few of these have traditional shortcuts: like '!=' as a synonym of '!==' and 'ne' which is the same as '!eq'. But from the point of view of homogeneity, the negated operators are more easily decipherable.

With negated relational operators, many expressions and algorithms will get a more natural code, without compromising their meaning and readability.

$x !eqv $y versus ! ( $x eqv $y )


The precedence of any negated operator is the same as the base operator. To avoid visual confusion with the '!!' operator, it is forbidden to modify any operator already beginning with '!'.

Note. This article is an expansion of section “Negated relational operators” of Synopsis 03 .



Next article is due tomorrow (Dec 20, 2007).


LINKS

Synopsis S03, the official source

The introduction of this series

Official Perl 6 Documentation

Perl 6 in your browser



Updated: Thu Dec 20 23:55:01 2007


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