Microsoft’s Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving’s door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft’s representative. And on top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises.
Ramji’s Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week’s LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco. (Disclosure: Network World’s parent company IDG sponsors LinuxWorld.)
In Portland, Ramji, who runs the Open Source Software Lab for Microsoft and is the company’s director of open source technology strategy, gave a 15-minute presentation highlighting Microsoft’s work with open source, the company’s first code submission ever to the PHP community and a $100,000 investment to become one of only three Platinum sponsors of the Apache Foundation (Yahoo and Google are the others).
You need to run a job at midnight when system usage is low, or you need to run jobs daily or weekly, but you would rather be sleeping, or enjoying life in some other way. Other good reasons for scheduling jobs include letting routine tasks happen automatically, or ensuring tasks are handled the same way every time. This tip helps you use the cron and at capabilities to schedule jobs periodically or at a single future time.
Linux® and UNIX® systems allow you to schedule jobs in the future, either just once, or on a recurring schedule. This article, excerpted from the developerWorks tutorial LPI exam 102 prep: Administrative tasks, shows you how to schedule jobs periodically, and how to run a job at some future time.
Many administrative tasks must be done frequently and regularly on a Linux system. These include rotating log files so filesystems do not become full, backing up data, and connecting to a time server to keep your system time synchronized. See the full tutorial mentioned above for more about these administrative tasks. In this tip, you learn about the scheduling facilities available in Linux using the cron and anacron facilities and the crontab and at commands. Even if your system sleeps or is turned off, anacron can help it catch up the next time it is awake.
Today, in a Washington Times op-ed, Bill O’Reilly complains that if President Bush’s tax cuts “on those making $250,000 or more” are repealed, “me and other rich folks” — who as “part of the 1 percent of Americans that paid an astounding 40 percent of all federal income tax in 2006″ — would have to finance “folks who dropped out of school, who are too lazy to hold a job, who smoke reefers 24/7“:
“That means people who drink gin all day will get some of my hard-earned money. Folks who dropped out of school, who are too lazy to hold a job, who smoke reefers 24/7 all will get some goodies in the mail from UncleBarack and Aunt Nancy, funded by me and other rich folks.”
O’Reilly’s characterization of the 99% of Americans who earn less than $250,000 a year notwithstanding, his argument that the richest Americans are overburdened by taxation is demonstratively false. According to Internal Revenue Service data, “the share of income reported by the very wealthy has risen faster than the group’s share of income taxes.”
Last week former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and said the White House distributed “talking points” to friendly Fox journalists.
McClellan’s confirmation of an operation inside the White House of providing comprehensive talking points to Fox News and other Conservative talk show personalities to manipulate the media and control the message regarding the Iraq War and the “war on terror” is a violation of anti-propaganda laws. By law the government sources must be disclosed by the reporting news outlets.
Yesterday a report prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office found that a few aides to Alberto Gonzales and White House officials were actively involved in hiring decisions for non political positions at the DOJ. Being a loyal Republican was the main criteria for being hired, not education or experience.
Since the highly partisan DOJ is the law enforcement branch of the federal government, it is not likely there will be an investigation into the illegal activity between Fox News and the White House.
It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn’t travel faster than light.
Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.
“We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory,” said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org
The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it’s known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.
The tricky part is that the ship wouldn’t actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.
After spending long hours, sometimes late into the night, making his case for impeachment before a nearly barren House chamber, Rep. Dennis Kucinich finally got more of an audience for his case against President Bush Friday.
Even though Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers insisted early on that the panel’s evaluation of Bush’s “imperial presidency” was decidedly not an impeachment hearing, the prospect was not far from many minds during the six hours of testimony.
Kucinich formally introduced his articles of impeachment into the record of the committees proceedings — although he did not utter the dreaded I-word, instead referring to the resolutions by their more legalistic titles “H. Res. 333, H. Res. 1258 and H. Res. 1345.”
A committee aide tells RAW STORY that members were cautioned to abide by the Rules of the House, which prohibit lawmakers from “impugning” the president’s character during official debate. Some apparently took this to mean they could not explicitly call for Bush’ impeachment.
On today’s Brian and the Judge radio show, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade twice confused Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Osama bin Laden — within five seconds.
Internet service provider Embarq eavesdropped on the web surfing habits of 26,000 customers in Kansas without notifying them personally, as part of its test of new, controversial advertising technology that profiles users, the company told federal lawmakers Wednesday.
Embarq, an offshoot from Sprint, tested the service in Gardner, Kansas, saying it was their smallest facility. The secret test ended earlier this year, though no dates were given for when it started or stopped. The letter also disclosed that 15 people from the region opted out, even though the company didn’t notify the affected subscribers that the technology was being tested — it just added a paragraph to its privacy policy.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain cashes his monthly Social Security checks despite calling the federal program “a disgrace,” the Associated Press reports.
“I’m receiving benefits,” McCain told campaign reporters, but added, “the system is broken.”
In 2007, he received benefits of $23,157 from Social Security, approximately $1,930 a month. The maximum monthly benefit under Social Security is $2,185. Social Security benefits are determined by age at retirement.
McCain, who is 71, has received benefits since he was 65.
Last week, McCain told observers at a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, Ohio, “Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers … and that’s a disgrace.”
B.J. Jarrett from the Social Security Administration said that individuals can refuse retirement benefits.
In 2006, McCain’s wife Cindy earned $6 million, and has a net worth of approximately $100 million.
In the context of digital security, a key is a piece of data which is used to encrypt or decrypt other pieces of data. The public and private key scheme is interesting because data encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with the associated private key. You may freely distribute a public key so that others can encrypt the messages they send you. One of the reasons that public/private key schemes have revolutionized digital security is because the sender and receiver don’t have to share a common password. Among other things, public/private key cryptography has made e-commerce and other secure transactions possible. In this article, we’ll create and use public and private keys to create a highly secure distributed backup solution.
Each machine involved in the backup process must be running the OpenSSH secure shell service (sshd) with port 22 accessible through any intermediate firewall. If you access remote servers, then there is a good chance you’re already using secure shell.
Our goal will be to provide machines with secure access without requiring the need to manually provide passwords. Some people think that the easiest way to do this is to set up password-less access: do not do this. It is not secure. Instead, the approach we’ll use in this article will take perhaps an hour of your time, set up a system which gives all the convenience of “passphraseless” accounts — but is recognized as being highly secure.
Of all the constitutionally threatening and extremist powers the Bush administration has asserted over the last seven years, the most radical — and the most dangerous — has been its claim that the President has the power to arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the U.S., and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charging them with any crime, based on his assertion that the imprisoned individual is an “enemy combatant.” Beginning with U.S. citizen Yasser Esam Hamdi (detained in Afghanistan), followed by U.S. citizen Jose Padilla (detained at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport), followed by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri (in the U.S. on a student visa and detained at his home in Peoria, Illinois), the Bush administration has not only claimed that power in theory but has aggressively exercised and defended it in practice.
The Bush administration’s strategy of imprisoning these “enemy combatants” in a South Carolina military brig has (by design) ensured that subsequent legal challenges are heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most right-wing judicial circuit in the country. In September, 2005, a three-judge panel from that circuit issued a ruling in the Jose Padilla case (.pdf) that actually upheld the President’s power to arrest and indefinitely detain even U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil without charging them with any crime — a decision which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review (because the Bush administration, after 3 1/2 years of lawless imprisonment, avoided that review by finally charging Padilla with a crime), thus leaving that Padilla decision as still-valid law in this country.
The series “Robocars” will be premiering tonight at 9pm (Central time) on the Discovery Science Channel. The show follows ten teams of top engineers from around the U.S. compete for a $2 million grand prize, struggling to build the first vehicle to drive itself through an urban environment and features Team CajunBot.
Here is the schedule and episode descriptions:
July 14th 9-10pm - Episode 1 - follows Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team Jefferson, Team Gray and The Golem Group as they prepare for the Urban Challenge and pass through the DARPA site visits.
July 21st 9-10pm - Episode 2 - follows Highlander Racing, Team Oshkosh, Team Cajunbot, Team MIT, and Team Case as they prepare for the Urban Challenge and pass through the DARPA site visits. The show ends with DARPA announcing the teams who made it to the semi-finals.
July 28th 9-10pm - Episode 3 - covers the semi-finals. Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team Jefferson, Team Gray, The Golem Group, Team Oshkosh, Team Cajunbot, Team MIT and Team Case are all included. The show ends with DARPA announcing the teams who made it to the finals.
August 4th 9-10pm - Epiosde 4 - covers the finals. Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team MIT, and Team Oshkosh are all included.
August 11th 8-10pm - Episodes 5 and 6 - The first hour is a summary of the last four episodes and the second hour focuses on futuristic car technology and contains excerpt from the DARPA Urban Challenge.
Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.
Unlike most humans, however, individual animals generally cannot be classified as gay or straight: an animal that engages in a same-sex flirtation or partnership does not necessarily shun heterosexual encounters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homosexual tendencies that are a regular part of their society. That is, there are probably no strictly gay critters, just bisexual ones. “Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex,” says sociologist Eric Anderson of the University of Bath in England.
Nevertheless, the study of homosexual activity in diverse species may elucidate the evolutionary origins of such behavior. Researchers are now revealing, for example, that animals may engage in same-sex couplings to diffuse social tensions, to better protect their young or to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable—or simply because it is fun. These observations suggest to some that bisexuality is a natural state among animals, perhaps Homo sapiens included, despite the sexual-orientation boundaries most people take for granted. “[In humans] the categories of gay and straight are socially constructed,” Anderson says.
In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”
The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.
“It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”
President Bush’s signature had barely dried on the FISA Amendments Act, which the Senate approved Wednesday, when the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would mount a constitutional challenge to the new law, claiming that it violates the First and Fourth Amendments. The group also filed a motion with the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requesting that proceedings and rulings on the constitutionality of the FAA be made public.
On a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon, ACLU lawyers said they had filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of an array of plaintiffs. This included a panoply of human rights organizations, prominent defense attorneys, and journalists like Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein of The Nation.
One of the most difficult aspects of challenging secret surveillance law is proving standing to sue, as the National Security Agency does not make a habit of notifying targets that they are being wiretapped. The ACLU therefore hopes to demonstrate that its plaintiffs are harmed, and their First Amendment activities chilled, by the very existence of a law whose “effect and… main purpose,” in the words of attorney Jameel Jaffer, “is to give the government unfettered access to the international communications of US citizens and residents.”
Let’s say I received a subpoena from the Justice Department today telling me I had to testify about matters it considered vital to national security.
Let’s say I told them, “I could give a rat’s ass about your subpoena, blow me.”
What do you think would happen?
I would be in Guantanamo dining on that “cockmeat sandwich” that Harold and Kumar avoided.
So why is Karl Rove walking around free today? Because the Democrats talk a good game but when it comes to taking action, they fail time and time again.
It’s simple. Congress tells you that you have to testify? You testify. It’s the law. Period.
The following interview was banned in the United States:
The interview with Coleman should go down on record as definitive proof of Bush’s utter incompetence, a priceless picture of a madman who had no business occupying the highest office of the land.
The Senate passed a revamped version of FISA legislation on Wednesday. But that conclusion was never in doubt. The real intrigue surrounded which Democrats would buck the compromise, which included immunity for telecommunications companies, and what side Sen. Hillary Clinton would come down on.
Late this afternoon, Clinton voted against the bill, putting her at odds with the party’s presumptive nominee, Barack Obama. In a statement put out by her Internet guru, Peter Daou, the New York Democrat struck a similar chord as her Illinois counterpart, describing the compromise as legislation that will “strengthen oversight of the administration’s surveillance activities over previous drafts.” She also, like Obama, pinpointed shortcomings in oversight, immunity, and other aspects of the compromise. But, in the end, she, unlike Obama, was persuaded to vote no.
I’m sure y’all remember the expensive ice cream buckets on top of several DARPA Urban Challenge vehicles…
Radiohead, never ones to shy away from trying new things, has shot its new video for “House of Cards” without using cameras at all. Whaa? Yes, they’ve used two fancy new technologies called Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar.
If you’re running linux on a macbook and you have fuzzy or static like sound especially out of the left channel, whether on speakers or headphones, then this tip from the Ubuntu forums will most likely help. The following was done on my Ubuntu machine, but mostly can be applied with little effort on another distribution like Fedora:
intel-mac-v1 : Intel Mac Type 1
intel-mac-v2 : Intel Mac Type 2
intel-mac-v3 : Intel Mac Type 3
intel-mac-v4 : Intel Mac Type 4
intel-mac-v5 : Intel Mac Type 5
macmini : Intel Mac Mini (equivalent with type 3)
macbook : Intel Mac Book (eq. type 5)
macbook-pro-v1 : Intel Mac Book Pro 1st generation (eq. type 3)
macbook-pro : Intel Mac Book Pro 2nd generation (eq. type 3)
imac-intel : Intel iMac (eq. type 2)
imac-intel-20 : Intel iMac (newer version) (eq. type 3)
You’ll also need to update your initramfs:
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
Reboot and see if the sound works. Typically the sound will stop working altogether or work perfectly. If it doesn’t work, try changing the model. I have a 2nd or 3rd generation macbook (I can’t remember which), but I needed to use the model=intel-mac-v3 for it to work. Check out the help article for more information.
What an interesting week: I came back from vacation to find the two presumptive presidential nominees running away from their bases. Suddenly John McCain is evading, not embracing, the media, limiting access and getting testy with the very people whose formerly friendly coverage made him a popular “maverick.” Meanwhile, Barack Obama is complaining that his “friends on the left” just don’t understand him — he’s not moving to the center, he is “no doubt” a progressive, just one who now supports the scandalous FISA “compromise” and Antonin Scalia’s views on gun rights and the death penalty, no longer plans to accept public campaign funding, and wants to make sure women aren’t feigning mental distress to get a “partial-birth” abortion (the right’s despicable term of choice; the correct phrase is either late-term or third-trimester abortion).
I actually have some sympathy for Obama. He was never the great progressive savior that his fans either thought he was, or peddled to their readers. While Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas and Tom Hayden were hyping him as the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, Obama was getting away with backing a healthcare bill less progressive than Clinton’s, adopting GOP talking points on the Social Security “crisis” and double-talking on NAFTA. So why shouldn’t he think his “friends on the left” will put up with his abandoning other progressive causes?
I’ve admired Obama, but I never confused him with a genuine progressive leader. Today I don’t admire him at all. His collapse on FISA is unforgivable. The only thing Obama has going for him this week is that McCain is matching him misstep for misstep. While we’re railing about Obama’s craven vote on FISA — rightfully; Glenn Greenwald is a hero for his work on this topic — McCain was outdoing Dick Cheney with neocon crazy talk, warning that Iran’s test of nine old missiles we already knew they had increases the chances of a “second Holocaust.” Every time I wonder whether I can ultimately vote for Obama in November, given all of his political cave-ins, McCain does something new to make sure I have to.
…
“This Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. Our Constitution works, and so does the FISA court.”
As the Senate voted to endorse a Bush-administration backed plan to expand its surveillance authority and grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that facilitated warrantless wiretapping, the American Civil Liberties Union unveiled plans to challenge the new law in court.
“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a statement provided to RAW STORY as the Senate was voting. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”
Like many Christians, he said grace before dinner and read the Bible before bed. Four years ago when he was deployed to Iraq, he packed his Bible so he would feel closer to God.
He served two tours of duty in Iraq and has a near perfect record. But somewhere between the tours, something changed. Hall, now 23, said he no longer believes in God, fate, luck or anything supernatural.
Hall said he met some atheists who suggested he read the Bible again. After doing so, he said he had so many unanswered questions that he decided to become an atheist.
His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.
In March, Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. In the suit, Hall claims his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggests that the United States military has become a Christian organization.
“I think it’s utterly and totally wrong. Unconstitutional,” Hall said.
Hall said there is a pattern of discrimination against non-Christians in the military.
Well of course my answer is “Yes”, but from the article:
We are less than a decade removed from impeaching a president and nearly relieving him of office because of a lie in a civil deposition about blowjobs. Yet when congressman Dennis Kucinich recently attempted to impeach Bush over torture, extraordinary rendition and other grotesque constitutional abuses, Kucinich’s embarrassed fellow Democrats couldn’t kill the measure quickly enough.
Why? Top Democrats are so complicit in what has happened since 9/11 that my guess is they dare not travel down that road. From voting in favor of the war in Iraq to holding the telecommunications companies guiltless for their role in spying on Americans (Barack Obama infuriated much of his progressive base by voting for immunity), the Democrats have often acted more as enablers than as a true opposition party. From their point of view, no doubt it’s best to move on.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is sticking to his drive to impeach President Bush.
Few in the House of Representatives have any intention of doing anything with the last 35 articles of impeachment Kucinich set before them last month, so the former presidential candidate appears to be lightening the load. Kucinich sent a letter to colleagues Tuesday asking them to support a single article of impeachment, to be introduced Thursday, which accuses President Bush of leading the country to war based on lies.
“There can be no greater offense of a Commander in Chief than to misrepresent a cause of war and to send our brave men and women into harm’s way based on those misrepresentations,” Kucinich wrote in the “Dear Colleague” letter.
You’re right in the middle of an important procedure when your computer freezes and crashes, erasing your data and costing you hours of extra work. For the thousandth time, you wish you had an easy-to-use alternative to your current operating system. Look no further than Ubuntu Linux, a community-developed, Linux-based operating system designed to give new life to your old PC or Mac.
Ubuntu Linux offers all the power of Linux in a package that’s simple to use and easy to learn, even for users who’ve never used Linux before. The OpenOffice complete office productivity suite includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software to provide you with all the key desktop applications you need for success, while still allowing you to open, edit and share files with users of Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, KOffice or StarOffice. Surf the Web with ease using Mozilla FireFox, which features tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and more. Easily instant message people on your AIM, MSN, Napster and Yahoo buddy lists from a single window with Gaim instant messaging. Manage e-mail, photos, music and more easily, and keep your computer safe with powerful firewall and antivirus programs. With Ubuntu Linux, your computer operates smoothly and efficiently, saving you time and preserving your peace of mind.
Features
OpenOffice productivity suite provides easy-to-use word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications
Open, edit and share files originating in Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, KOffice or StarOffice
Streamline multiple instant messaging programs into a single window incorporating icons, translations and emoticons
Manage your time and contacts with Evolution’s integrated e-mail and calendar
Upload and edit photos from your hard drive, camera or MP3 player in 16 different file types, including JPEG, GIF, TIFF and RAW
Store, search and browse your music library and listen to Internet radio with Rhythmbox media player
Browse the Internet safely and conveniently using Mozilla FireFox
Update the program easily, from quick security fixes to complete upgrades, with just a few clicks
Compatible with Intel®-based Macs and PCs
I guess people are finally catching on that Linux is awesome and Windows sucks.