After nearly a whole months absence, the Ignition team return to bring you all the latest news including: the possibility of a PSP phone; Bioshock Infinite; Stephen Merchant’s appearance in Portal 2; the future of desktops and much more.
Duration: 120 mins
I have to admit, WikiLeaks has been in my mind a lot over the last few days. Not only because of the media coverage associated with it (of which I did a quick, non-serious, round up on my personal blog) but because I am still trying to figure out where it stands in our modern society. Some argue that it is the inevitable storm brought about by the web – thousands of people anonymously connected sharing information bringing greater transparency to government – and others have gone as far to say that the people behind the whistle-blowing website are quite simply terrorists disguised as journalists.
I recently stumbled on a very insightful article on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks-journalism/) in which several professional journalists from different backgrounds give their opinions on WikiLeaks and whether it is a necessary evil or simply evil. The range of journalists was quite diverse. One of the journalists, who previously wrote speeches for George W. Bush while he was in presidency, was unsurprisingly against the website and called it a, “threat to national security”, while the other journalists were content to write it off as an internet fad and it provided little more in the way of secrets than what they had access to already.
While the fact that WikiLeaks is a threat to security is still under scrutiny it is true that, to journalists, WikiLeaks provides little more than convenience. More negatively, WikiLeaks even hurts journalists as the site has removed all opportunity of an exclusive scoop on the information it divulges. This fact bluntly means than journalists will continue to track down leads themselves because recycling old news simply doesn’t sell newspapers.
However, I don’t think this means that WikiLeaks has no place in our modern word I think it just needs to be re-branded. WikiLeaks may not be serving the media industry as, “an important journalistic tool” as the website dubs it , but as an important tool for people who demand greater transparency from their governments. For the first point in time people have been offered a single location to see what the governments that represent them are doing and, for arguably the first time ever, the same governments are being held accountable for their actions. WikiLeaks is not a tool for the press, it is a tool for the people.
A very good example of this is the recent video they released that clearly shows US forces opening fire and killing civilians and Reuters reporters (if you’re interested, here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0. Please don’t watch this if you are in a good mood, it is distinctly upsetting to watch). Without this exposure, those reporters and civilians would have died in vain, buried more in secrecy than soil. WikiLeaks did an admirable job of exposing this monstrosity and it led into an investigation into the personal who committed it.
Despite the fact the families of the reporters finally know what happened to their loved ones, the media coverage was minimal and even negative of WikiLeaks actions. The fact of the matter remains, journalists see the unpleasant side to life that many feel obliged to cover up. To journalists, what is exposed on WikiLeaks isn’t surprising and it certainly isn’t newsworthy. To the people, WikiLeaks offers insight into governments and business that they would never normally have a look in edgeways with. They are not just given media speculation but cold hard facts to base their opinions on and this doesn’t change if the transparency is legitimate or leaked. This is why WikiLeaks is important regardless of where it stands on the moral scale. If people are not safe if the truth comes out then that begs the question what have they been involved with that puts them at risk? Maybe if we lived in a society where governments could expect almost total exposure of information there would be different decisions made about finance, law or even who we decide to go to war with.
Anyway, I apologise for the brief article. Consider it unsubstantial at worst and food for thought at best.
We’re all in the gutter…... but some are staring at the stars.
Please be patient if this doesn’t make sense. I’ve proof-read and proof-read and it still reads like a cat with learning difficulties has bashed the keyboard over and over.
Okay, so it has been a while since I last posted and I guess I owe everyone an explanation. That’s why I am dedicating the first part of this post to personal matters (*groan from the background*). The biggest thing that happened is that we, as collective A level students, received the results that told us if we are going to be functioning members of society or dole-seeking reprobates who collectively drain the very social culture we live in. Luckily the members of Game-Engine were not among the 200,000 people being turned away and we all got into our first choices.
I myself am heading to De Montfort to enrol on an IT course where I see the minimum amount of Windows possible (to which my dearest mother pointed out that the term, ‘seeing no windows’, was wholly appropriate for computer security – oh how refreshing her trust is). I have to say I am quite looking forward to it. I have been outgrowing the small town that I live in for quite some time and I am wholly for hitting the world renowned(!) comedy circuit in Leicester. However, I think it is a much safer bet to swat up on C than to put all my eggs in the comedy basket.
Anyway, sinking to the deeper levels of intimate personal secrets, I am going to be blunt about the reason I haven’t written anything: I just haven’t had the focus to do so. For the last few months I seem to have sunk into a kind of embittered state in which I seemed a lot happier feeling sorry for myself than actually doing anything productive – doing anything about my predicament included. Well, I have mustered up some emotional energy and I am now forcing myself to write about technology so people don’t get mad and beat me while yelling, “nobby-two-shoes”.
In some ways you can look upon my silence as a form of blessing. Putting it as bluntly as Wayne Rooney is sharp, what I would have written would have been crap.
Anyway, personal explanations over. Let’s talk about some tech news!
Playstation Phone on the way?They do not comment on rumour and speculation...But we do!
It's not going to look like this. But if it did. OH MAN!
According to Engadget sources, Sony Ericsson is currently in the late stage plans of producing a ‘Playstation Phone’, utilising the Android mobile operating system and will carry both the Xperia and Playstation branding. Whilst this is all rumour, Engadget seem to be pretty sure this is real and happening, saying:
“…but we can tell you now that this is not a random rumor — we have reason to believe that what we’ve heard and seen is real and coming to market.”
There are no definite details, other than one quote describing the device as being ‘Damn sexy’, but apparently it’s supposed to be like a combination of the Samsung Captivate and a PSP Go!, but instead of having the slider hold some sort of QWERTY keyboard, it will reveal game controls, with a D-Pad and some sort of Analog touchpad. So whilst at the moment it sounds like a phone that has the tools to play non-existent complex Android games, it’s the software side of things that is interesting.
According to the sources, the phone will be running Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) and it looks like that Sony Ericsson are working in partnership with Google to really kick up the Android gaming market. Google’s bank rolling of Zynga, the creators of Facebook favourite Farmville, shows they want to really make an impact on the growing mobile games market, and a venture like this could really be a way to start a fire under it.
For example, there may be a new section on the Android Marketplace for games, but another big thing is the type of games that will be playable. Even if we forget about the proposed control scheme, they are claiming that the games will be of around PSX to PSP graphical quality, and as someone who has recently been playing some PSX games, on a phone that could be alright. In terms of actual software titles, apparently those being showed off at the moment include some older PSX titles and some more recent games, including God of War and LittleBigPlanet.
Whilst there is no information as of yet that confirms this, it’s both plausible and likely that a device such as this could fit into the market, especially with Sony Ericsson not having actually released an Android phone yet, and with the PSP market kind of flagging, this could give it a new direction and possibly a positive one.
Why I always go back to UbuntuUbuntu is DistroWatch's #1 distribution and for good reason.
Quite recently, there has been a lot of bitchy back and forth comments between defenders of Canonical and what seems to be the rest of the free-software-overse into the upstream contributions of Canonical to the GNOME project. I don’t really think either party has a leg to stand on because they both see development ideals in completely different lights; Canonical focussing more on making downstream enhancements and the rest of the world more focussed on contributing back to parent projects.
So I thought it would be apt, no pun intended, among all the politics and ideals to post an article into the technical and preferential reasons into why I use Ubuntu over another distribution.
I think I am in a position to write this article because I am not – at the moment – a developer, I have been around pretty much every distribution and I know my way around Linux systems in general.
I don’t mean the rest of this to sound bitchy but, God forbid, if I do sound like I’m verging on the fish-net tights remember that this is just my opinion and a flame-war would bring A LOT of traffic to this site.
#2 at DistroWatch: Fedora
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Fedora. If Ubuntu didn’t exist I can quite comfortably see Fedora becoming my primary distribution. It is secure, it has a great community and it features cutting edge packages. It also benefits from Red Hat sponsorship which means it usually is first of the line with new technologies.
However, I do have a few gripes with Fedora that stop me from deploying it everywhere I go. Firstly, when compared to Ubuntu, Fedora crashed more times than Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang strafing through a Flak-88 deployment. I understand that not everyone has this problem, but it wasn’t just an X-server hang: the entire thing would just go unresponsive – not even a kernel panic message or anything!
Secondly, Fedora is great if you are only deploying it on the one computer you love and care for. The time it takes to configure Fedora into a usable state makes deploying it quickly completely unrealistic. Maintenance is also an issue – security is so tight on Fedora even getting WINE to work is a challenge without trawling through the SELinux configuration. Not a problem if you know how to deal with it and have time on your hands but for inexperienced or time constrained people it’s not amazing. To sum up, Fedora is less appropriate to put on your Gran’s desktop PC than the pics you sent to your girlfriend/pen-pal in Brussels last night.
#3 at DistroWatch: Linux Mint
Linux Mint is an interesting distribution to write about since it it based on Ubuntu with a strong emphasis on working out of the box. In all fairness, it accomplishes this quite well in the way in which codecs and flash are installed by default.
Apart from this, Mint holds no other merit over Ubuntu. In fact, all that downloading Linux Mint does is save you typing ‘sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras’. Many selling points of Linux mint, such as the theme and the software manager, also fall short of Ubuntu’s native offerings. The default theme isn’t spectacular and having the menu at the bottom left makes the desktop less functional by requiring more clicks for most common tasks.
Really, Mint shows promise and will always have a few dedicated ‘ease-of-use’ followers. However, I fully expect Mint to go down several places in the rankings once elementary OS is released – as will Ubuntu, actually.
#4 at DistroWatch: openSUSE
openSUSE seems to be a great distribution if you like looking through YaST and tinkering with random features you will never need. Don’t get me wrong, YaST is awesome but the distribution itself… not so much.
I can see openSUSE would be great for admins who just want a solid and stable OS to deploy but it seems like some of the developers took that notion a little bit too literally. Quite frankly, you are more likely to find a bleeding-edge on a rock. It’s not even easy to enable more up-to-date repositories either. I heard a great story that only the recent versions of openSUSE had included upstart as opposed to sysv-init, a technology that has been around for quite a few years and has proven itself to shave a lot off boot-time.
Also there is always a undertone of evil to openSUSE. I don’t know if it is the strong links with Microsoft or the fact they are Mono evangelists but using it just feels wrong.
Two things are surprising: 1) I’m not dead and 2) The same people who make vehicles that kill have just open sourced a social networking platform – yes the irony wasn’t lost on me either.
It’s called Eureka Streams and I can’t wait to have a play with it. From the video, it looks a lot like Facebook melted into LinkedIn. Anyway, I haven’t got too long so I wont keep you waiting. Here’s the video and link.
On this week’s Ignition we discuss Starcraft II’s release; Apple’s latest product announcements; India’s $35 tablet computer; the saga of the Daily Star and ‘Grand Theft Auto: Rothbury’; Firefox 4 and the upcoming gaming releases.
Duration: 100 mins
The new buzz word these days in the computing industry is virtualization. The technology hasn’t been around very long and already it has become such a massive part of today’s society the world simply could not cope without the scalability and control it offers.
So what is virtualization? Virtualization is the process of running another instance of an operating system over another operating system; for example, running Windows XP nested within Mac OS X. There are two types of virtualization used today: hypervisors or operating-system (OS) virtualization.
Hypervisors are the most common and instantly come to mind when thinking of virtualization. Put simply, hypervisors are host operating systems running guest operating systems. They work by offering the guest its own pool of resources – such as processor time or space in RAM.
Hypervisors are the most common because they are the most dynamic and scalable. It is often commonplace to have a very small host operating system running just the hypervisor which runs many guests that serve a different purpose. For example, you can have a dedicated web server and a dedicated e-mail server running on the same hardware.
OS virtualization involves running a separate, sand-boxed, instance of the operating system within the operating system. It runs the same kernel and shares the same hardware. They are a lot less resource intensive and offer security in the form of isolation. OS virtualized environments are often found within internet facing servers where an attack will not compromise the rest of the system.
For the home, virtualization can serve many purposes. The average user may have little need for it, but a more advanced user may appreciate being able to run another operating system without having to resort to partitioning and duel-booting. The virtualized environment is also portable, which is another problem with a conventional installation.
Virtualization has really taken off with Windows to Linux converts who want to use Linux but still need a Windows environment for some tasks they can’t do natively. It also serves a relatively useful purpose for people needing quick and easy, “disposable”, test servers.
Virtualization really comes into its own in enterprise deployments. Being able to run multiple servers on the same hardware is extremely tempting because it drives down costs and increases the scalability of the existing infrastructure – administrators can dynamically allocate more resources to an existing machine when needs be.
Another reason virtualization is popular in enterprise is that it makes deployments and restoration incredibly easy. Since all machines can be transported and copied, if a existing machine runs into a problem it can be straight replaced quickly and easily with a new image.
There are many names in virtualization at the moment. The hypervisor market can be split into two: kernel based hypervisors and user-land hypervisors.
Kernel based hypervisors are run in kernel space and are usually much more efficient because they have almost direct access to the system’s resources. They are generally found in enterprise deployments because they are more complex to maintain and only large scale deployments care about efficiency to this degree.
A new and popular kernel based hypervisor is KVM, or kernel-based virtual machine. KVM is included in the default Linux kernel since 2.6.20 and has been run natively on FreeBSD. KVM is currently coming into its own as it is replacing Xen as the hypervisor of choice on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the most popular commercial Linux distribution) and its clones/derivatives CentOS and Fedora.
Proprietary rival to KVM is the ESX* range of operating systems offered by VMware. VMware has gotten popular after offering commercial support to its products and for, essentially, being the first kid on the block. It offers easy to use GUI tools for remote administration. The ESXi server is free, as in beer, to use and deploy.
More popular virtualization solutions are user-space programs. These run guest operating systems in the same way the computer runs any other program. This incurs a performance hit but it is easy to deploy and has found favour among home users.
VMware offer full virtualization solutions in the form of Workstation, for Linux and Windows, and Fusion, for Mac OS X. VMware also offer a piece of software called Player which can play, but not create, virtual machines for free.
More popular is Oracle’s VirtualBox which is an open-source virtualization solution and is the user-space hypervisor of choice for most Linux users.
Finally on our methods of virtualization, OS virtualization is used mainly in production environments were parts of the system need to be isolated to protect the rest of the system. Many UNIX like systems have chroot which allows a user to work in a new root file system and run programs from there.
Chroot does have its disadvantages and the FreeBSD project built upon them with jails. Jails are completely isolated systems that are usually dedicated to one purpose. To my knowledge, Jails is currently only on BSD systems.
OpenVZ is a project that aims to bring the same sort of OS virtualization as jails to Linux. It is highly popular among people wanting to set up virtual private servers (VPS) and if you’ve ever used a Linux VPS solution you have probably been working in an environment created in OpenVZ.
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Apple opens source for… wait… MacPaint?!Apple donates the source code to MacPaint to the Computer History Museum.
Many people remember MacPaint fondly as the first proper image editing software.
Apple has donated the source code for MacPaint, an early image editing application, to the Computer History Museum. However, don’t get excited open-source buffs, it is under a non-commercial, non-free, license and is practically only to be looked at. The source code is written in pascal and 68000 assembly.
The program was written by Bill Atkinson and was designed to run on the first Mac computer. It only takes up 128k of memory which is a little bit less than 1gb minimum Adobe Photoshop uses today.
Head on over to http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/ to grab the source and take in a little bit of computing history.
You’ve seen it on OS X – AppImages to appear in Linux.The elementary project brings single-file executables to Linux.
AppImages: A single icon that contains everything an application needs to run.
Anyone who has used Mac OS X before knows how the Jobsian operating system handles executables: a single icon that contains everything the application needs to run. This differs from the Windows model of having a directory in a private system folder and symbolic links to the actual executable and the Linux/BSD model of having libraries and executables separated into different system folder – usually /usr/bin/, if you are curious. It makes application portability easy and you can run and manage the program for practically any location the user has executable rights on the hard-drive.
Well, the elementary project (who are aiming to make a contender to Mac OS X, in terms of usability, with Linux) are working on a project to bring these AppImages, as they are called, to Linux. The project is a surprisingly quite far along and the elementary project even provides a wizard for creating AppImages. A website with pre-compiled AppImages for general use is also online and offers quite a range of software. Disappointingly though it currently only supports 32-bit platforms which means 64-bit users are missing out.
Their wiki page has links and concepts and is well worth a visit: http://www.elementary-project.com/wiki/index.php?title=AppImages
Anyway, I fired up KVM, installed Ubuntu 10.04 i386 and decided to see if the applications are really just one click go. Because I think screen-shots say more than words, I present you with the following:
Okay, maybe having standard executable icons isn’t pretty, but it works! An entire application packed up in a little file. It works by mounting a FUSE filesystem with all the program needs to operate and the program itself temporarily while it runs. The applications are run natively and can even access current configuration settings on the system.
However, it’s not all fun and games. A big draw to Linux is the use of centralised repositories for updates and downloads; by using AppImages we would have to download the applications separately and each AppImage would have to update itself – increasing file size. I think it is safe to conclude AppImages would be nice on desktops where it would simplify application management but maybe not so beneficial on server distributions which are managed by people knowing what they are doing and want the benefit of repository updates.
If you want to try AppImages out on 32 bit Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint or openSUSE then head on over to http://www.portableimagesapps.org/ where there is a huge repository of AppImages ready download. Just make sure to make the files you downloaded executable (Right Click>Preferences>Permissions>Check ‘Make Executable’).
