Canton Linux Enthusiasts

Vigile writes "With the release of AMD's latest budget graphics card, the Radeon HD 4770, the GPU giant is bringing a lot of technology to the table. The card sports the world's first 40nm GPU (beating out CPUs to a new process technology for the first time), GDDR5 memory, and 640 stream processors, all for under $100. What is even more interesting is that as PC gaming has evolved it appears that a $99 graphics card is all you really need to play the latest PC titles — as long as you are comfortable with a resolution of 1920x1200 or below. Since so few PC gamers have screens larger than that, could the world of high-end PC graphics simply go away?"

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LWN.net: "The solid-state device topic was the most active discussion of the morning. SSDs clearly stand to change the storage landscape, but it often seems that nobody has yet figured out just how things will change or what the kernel should do to make the best use of these devices. Some things are becoming clearer, though. The kernel will be well positioned to support the current generation SSDs. Supporting future products, though, is going to be a challenge."

Akido37 was one of many readers letting us know that US Sen. Arlen Specter has changed parties to become a Democrat. This gives the Democrats 59 seats in the Senate, and 60 if and when Al Franken gets seated from Minnesota. However, Specter said in his announcement that he will not be an automatic 60th vote for breaking Republican filibusters. While the senator's move seems to have surprised many Republicans, it is understandable to moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who said, "You haven't certainly heard warm encouraging words of how they [Republicans] view moderates. Either you are with us or against us." Specter noted that in his home state of Pennsylvania, 200,000 formerly Republican voters switched party allegiance last year.

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LinuxDevices: "Open Invention Network (OIN) announced that three of the eight patents cited in Microsoft's lawsuit against TomTom have been posted for prior art review by the Linux community. The evidence is being compiled to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that the patents are invalid."

Barence was one of several readers to send in word that the UK Home Office checked whether its interpretation of the law suited Phorm, before issuing advice on the legality of the controversial advertising service. The Home Office and Phorm entered a dialogue about the company's services back in August 2007, at Phorm's request. In an email sent to Phorm in January 2008, a Home Office official writes: 'I should be grateful if you would review the attached document, and let me know what you think.' After Phorm made deletions and amendments to the document, the Home Office sent another email to the company stating: 'If we agree this, and this becomes our position do you think your clients and their prospective partners will be comforted.' From the BBC: "Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat spokeswoman on Home Affairs, told BBC News: 'My jaw dropped when I saw the Freedom of Information exchanges. ... Anything the Home Office now says about Phorm is completely tainted.'"

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LinuxInsider: "As part of a zealous effort to combat terrorists and cybercriminals, the British government has considered maintaining a huge database housing every phone call, email and Web site visit its citizens made. A loud outcry ensued over privacy rights, and the government is now looking for an alternate approach."

ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."

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The residents of Tuscarora, Nevada are getting ready to fight the annual invasion of mormon crickets with the power of Rock-N-Roll. Trial and error has shown that the crickets don't think much of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. The residents circle the town with boomboxes at regular intervals to drive off the millions of crickets. "It is part of our arsenal. You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you." says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents. The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.

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LinuxDevices: "Developers at the University of San Diego say they will demonstrate massive power savings for desktop PCs from embedding an ARM- and Linux-based Gumstix CPU into a network interface. The "Somniloquy" can handle file-sharing and long downloads independently, and only wakes a host PC when necessary."

nandemoari alerts us to news over at DSLReports that Cablevision will be offering subscribers 101-Mbps download service, a new US record. That's fast enough to download an HD movie in less than 10 minutes. The package, known as "Ultra," will launch on May 11 and will cost $99.95 a month. Upload speed is 15 Mbps and there are no monthly limits. Cablevision is also doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi service, which is available free to subscribers using hotspots across the Northeast. "...the company will be launching a new 'Ultra' tier on May 11. The new tier features speeds of 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for $99.95 a month. That's an unprecedented amount of speed at an unprecedented price, suggesting that Cablevision just took the gloves off in their fight against Verizon FiOS. ... Cablevision spokesman Jim Maiella confirmed for me that the $99.95 price is unbundled, and the new tier does not come with any kind of a usage cap or overage fees."

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ZDNet: "In a recent blog post, the Cyber Secure Institute claims that based on their previous studies into the average cost of such malware attacks, the economic loss due to the Conficker worm could be as high as $9.1 billion."

Computerworld UK: "The US Defence Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development -- an about-face for such a historically top-down organisation."

Miracle Jones writes "In an interview with Professor (and former Microsoft employee) James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School, who is both setting up an online clearinghouse to discuss the Google book settlement and drafting an amicus brief to inform the court about the antitrust factors surrounding "orphan books," he revealed that Google will be able to moderate the content of its book scans in the same way that they moderate their YouTube videos, leaving out works that Google deems "inappropriate" from the 7 million library books it has scanned. The Fiction Circus has called for a two-year long rights auction that will ensure that these "inappropriate" titles do not get left behind in the digital era, and that other people who are willing to host and display these books will be able to do so. There is only one week left for authors and publishers to "opt out" of the settlement class and retain their rights or raise objections, and Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has been stopped from jumping on board Google's settlement as a party defendant and receiving the same legal protections that Google will get. A group of authors, including Philip K. Dick's estate, has tried to delay the settlement for four more months until they get their minds around the issue." In related news, Google is seeking a 60-day extension to the period in which it's attempting to contact authors to inform them of their right to opt-out of the terms of the settlement.

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Datamation: "Ever since last summer, when Mark Shuttleworth called on Ubuntu to surpass Mac OS X in desktop design within two years, Ubuntu mailing lists and blogs have become one of the main places to go for detailed discussions about GNU/Linux usability. However, the discussions can become convoluted and acrimonious, as developers argue the logic of design principles"

yahyamf writes "I have a lot of free educational content in the form of audio lectures and text, which I'd like to translate into as many languages as possible. I would also want to transcribe the audio and create audiobooks from the text. There are already several volunteers willing to contribute, but I need some web based software to manage all the work. Facebook is already doing something like this, but it is only for their content. I've also looked at Damned Lies, which is part of the Gnome project, but it doesn't seem to handle audio. Are there any other open source translation projects out there that I can customize and build upon?"

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DeviceGuru: "The Linux version of Boxee's eponymously-named multimedia platform has finally been updated to include several new features introduced into the OS X and Windows versions over the past few months. Key additions include an "App Box" and restored support for Hulu."

marpot writes "Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation."

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Datamation: "It is HP's first-ever Linux pre-install on a standard business laptop, the company said. The PC maker does offer some netbooks with Linux."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against Apple to defend the First Amendment rights of BluWiki, a noncommercial, public Internet 'wiki' site operated by OdioWorks. Last year, BluWiki users began a discussion about making some Apple iPods and iPhones interoperate with software other than Apple's iTunes. Apple lawyers demanded removal of the content (pdf) sending a letter to OdioWorks, alleging that the discussions constituted copyright infringement and a violation of the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing copy protection measures. Fearing legal action by Apple, OdioWorks took down the discussions from the BluWiki site but has now filed a lawsuit to vindicate its right to restore those discussions (pdf) and seeking a declaratory judgment that the discussions do not violate any of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and do not infringe any copyrights owned by Apple. 'I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously,' said Sam Odio, owner of OdioWorks. 'Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.'" Random BedHead Ed adds ZDNet quotes EFF's Fred von Lohmann, who says that this is an issue of censorship. 'Wikis and other community sites are home to many vibrant discussions among hobbyists and tinkerers. It's legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it's legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it's legal for a public wiki to host those discussions.'"

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WorksWithU: "Less than one week after Canonical debuted Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix edition, System76 is playing an encure by launching an Ubuntu 9.04 netbook. The move had been rumored for several weeks. And it's certainly the first of many Ubuntu netbooks that will hit the market. Here’s a bit more about System76's new device."