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Death Knell For Righthaven In 9th Circuit Decision

Slashdot -

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Ars Technica: "Righthaven, the Las Vegas operation that sought to turn newspaper article copyright lawsuits into a business model, can now slap a date on its death certificate: May 9, 2013. This morning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on the two Righthaven appeals that could have given the firm a final glimmer of hope — and the court told Righthaven to take a hike (PDF)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



New Zealand Government Announces That Software Will No Longer Be Patentable (Forbes)

LWN Headlines -

Forbes is reporting that the New Zealand government has banned patents on software. "In doing this, New Zealand is essentially taking the position that existing laws provides enough protection to software as it is; patents only serve to stifle innovation because of the ever-looming threat of being sued by so-called patent troll companies. [...] During its consideration of the bill, the committee received many submissions opposing the granting of patents for computer programs on the grounds it would stifle innovation and restrict competition. Internet New Zealand said [Commerce Minister Craig] Foss' decision to amend the Patents Bill drew to a close 'years of wrangling between software developers, ICT players and multinational heavyweights over the vexed issue of patentability of software'."

DoD Descends On DEFCAD

Slashdot -

First time accepted submitter He Who Has No Name writes "While the ATF appears to have no open objection to 3D printed firearms at this time, the Department of Defense apparently does. A short while ago, '#DEFCAD has gone dark at the request of the Department of Defense Trade Controls. Take it up with the Secretary of State' appeared on the group's site, and download links for files hosted there began to give users popups warning of the DoD takeover." Well, that didn't take long. Note: As of this writing, the site is returning an error, rather than the message above, but founder Cody Wilson has posted a similar message to twitter. At least the Commander in Chief is in town to deliver the message personally. Update: 05/09 21:17 GMT by T : Tweet aside, that should be Department of State, rather than Department of Defense, as many readers have pointed out. (Thanks!)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



PyPy 2.0 released

LWN Headlines -

The PyPy 2.0 release is available; PyPy is a performance-oriented reimplementation of the Python 2 interpreter. "This is a stable release that brings a swath of bugfixes, small performance improvements and compatibility fixes. PyPy 2.0 is a big step for us and we hope in the future we'll be able to provide stable releases more often." Headline features include stackless and greenlet support, a new interface to C modules, and more.

Real World Stats Show Chromebooks Are Struggling

Slashdot -

recoiledsnake writes "The first real world stats for Chromebooks show that they're struggling to have any traction in the marketplace. In its first week of monitoring worldwide usage of Google's Chrome OS, NetMarketShare reported that the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was roughly 2/100 of 1 percent, a figure too small to earn a place on its reports. The first Chromebooks went on sale in June 2011, nearly two years ago, with Acer reportedly selling fewer than 5000 units in the first six months and Samsung selling even fewer. In the past three years, Chromebook sales have been worse than even three months worth of WindowsRT sales. Perhaps users are heeding Stallman's warning on Chromebooks. We previously discussed reports of Chromebook topping Amazon sales, selling to 2000 schools and wondered whether QuickOffice on ChromeOS can topple Microsoft Office." I find ChromeOS good in some contexts (any place that a browser and a thin layer of Linux is all you need), but the limitations are frustrating — especially on hardware that can run a conventional Linux as well as Google's specialized one. We'll watch for developments in the Google hardware world at next week's I/O conference.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Drupal Commerce: Showcasing the latest Drupal Commerce sites

Drupal Planet -

DrupalCommerce.org exists to help people learn how to use and develop for Drupal Commerce. In addition to the traditional education tools we offer in our documentation, video library, and Commerce Q&A, we host a showcase of sites built using Drupal Commerce. It’s one thing to tell people how to use a tool to build something, but it’s quite another to show actually show them the end result.

And the results are stunning.

Since launching, we’ve received dozens of showcase requests from developers around the world. These sites have varied widely in design, feature set, market, and size, and each one provides an opportunity for new developers to learn something new.

Our DrupalCommerce.org handyman Josh Miller just finished a redesign of the showcase that will make it even easier for you to find reference sites built using Drupal Commerce and learn how they were built. Our showcase is now organized by a variety of categories based on the products sold and the tools used. You can quickly scan a list of beautiful sites for design and feature inspiration, and in our featured showcases you can find a write-up or case study describing the modules and processes used to develop the featured site.

We aim to give credit where credit is due, so while we would love for you to share your latest work with the community, we would also love to link to your company or personal website so new users know who to look to for advice and consulting when they need help. Our featured showcases in particular give you an opportunity to talk about the modules you used (or contributed!) to build a site and talk about how you solved the various configuration and deployment tasks involved in launching a high quality eCommerce project.

Use the showcase submission form to get your latest creation featured today!

Debian + Openbox = CrunchBang Linux (Video)

Slashdot -

"CrunchBang Linux is a Debian based distro with the Openbox window manager on top of it. So it is Debian under the hood with Openbox on the surface," says distro supporter Larry Cafiero. A glance through the #! (CrunchBang) forums showed an exceptionally fast response rate to problems posted there, so even if you haven't heard of #! (it's not in the DistroWatch Top 10), it has a strong and dedicated user community -- which is one of the major keys to success for any open source project. In order to learn more about #! Linux (and to share what he learned), Timothy Lord pointed his camcorder at Larry during LinuxFest Northwest and made this video record of their conversation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Open Source Training: A Beginners Guide to Drupal Overrides

Drupal Planet -

The problem with many software applications is you can't make them your own. With Drupal, however, you have the option to override how Drupal does things. From altering a form to customizes the way your pages are displayed, Drupal provides options.

The concept of overriding something in Drupal can be made reality in several ways: Drupal's APIs, theme overrides, as well as overriding default configurations in modules. Whatever it is you need to do, the number one rule you should endeavor to follow is: don't hack the core (or a contributed module). Don't open the code files in Drupal and change them to meet your needs. There are better ways.

In this tutorial, we will focus on overriding themes.

How Netflix Eats the Internet

Slashdot -

pacopico writes "Every night, Netflix accounts for about one-third of the downstream Internet traffic in North America, dwarfing all of its major rivals combined. Bloomberg Businessweek has a story detailing the computer science behind the streaming site. It digs into Netflix's heavy use of AWS and its open-source tools like Chaos Kong and Asgard, which the Obama administration apparently used during the campaign. Story seems to suggest that the TV networks will have an awful time mimicking what Netflix has done."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Bluespark Labs: Rooms 1.0 Released and Roadmap

Drupal Planet -

After almost 22 months since our initial commit on the Rooms project we are happy to announce a 1.0 release! We are really proud of this release as it brings together a rich set of features built on a flexible core that can grow and improve over time.

Our central objective with Rooms is to provide the absolutely best tool for creating booking experiences on hotel websites through an open-source solution. We want to free up accommodation owners to actually own and define that experience for their users and do that in a way that is unique to them.

There are three key ingredients that come together to achieve this.
Drupal - undoubtedly one of the strongest CMS’s out there it allows us to construct truly elegant websites.
Commerce - a powerful Drupal-based open-source commerce solutions that enables us to offer flexible and sophisticated checkout experiences for our users.
Rooms - it tightly integrates with Commerce adding the booking and room management layer dealing with a range of situations and features.

Put these three things together and you get Drupal Rooms. What, we believe, currently represents one of the most flexible open-source booking solutions out there. Check out our screencast for an overview of what is possible.

Rooms 1.0 Demo - Hotel Booking Management.

Rooms 1.0, however, is just the first step for us.

Roadmap

Now that we have a stable core to built on top we are going to focus on two key areas.

Developing Rooms 1.x

Usability Enhancements
Expect a constant stream of usability enhancements on the Rooms 1.0 branch. We want to not only have the most powerful booking solution but also the easiest to use. We already have great ideas about wizards to enable you to setup your Rooms-based hotel.

More use cases
It sometimes feels that there are as many feature requirements as there are hotels out there. Inspired by the Commerce ecosystem expect to see features added to the core but also add-on modules that will enable you to do more. We have a couple in the making that we can’t wait to share with everyone.

Rooms 2.x

At the same time we will be working on a 2.x branch of Rooms. The focus here will be on growing Rooms in two directions.

Multiple Hotels and Hotel Owners
We want a module that will allow you to build in Drupal a site that can host multiple hotels with multiple hotel owners managing them.

Beyond Room Bookings
While Rooms right now is focused on just hotel nightly bookings we believe we can expand the core engine to handle both more fine-grained bookings (e.g. hours-based) as we well as larger bookings (e.g. minimum of a week).

The Rooms Sites are Coming!

Last but certainly not least we have a host of Drupal Rooms sites in the works. We will be sharing those (and the code so you can get a head-start with your own sites) before Drupalcon Portland - yes, I know in just a few days!

Drop us a line if you want to discuss any of the above. We are looking forward to helping people build their hotel sites and the comments, feature requests and bug reports that we have been getting so far were instrumental to making Rooms a great booking solution.

Tags: Drupal RoomsDrupal Planet

Raspberry Pi operating systems: 5 reviewed and rated (Techradar)

LWN Headlines -

Those looking for alternative distributions (or even operating systems) for their Raspberry Pi may want to take a peek at Techradar's review of five choices for the diminutive ARM-based computer. The article looks at Raspbian, Risc OS, Plan 9, Android, and Arch; it evaluates and rates each one on a variety of criteria: The areas we're looking at are installation, default software, media playback (out-of-the-box), looks and usability, the community behind the OS and their respective attitudes toward software freedom. Basically, the very stuff that makes a Linux user decide on what system to use.

We also want to gauge this from the point of view of someone who's not as familiar with Linux as others are, so they can jump into the project without too much hassle, and not end up leaving it feeling disheartened.

When Vote Counting Goes Bad

Slashdot -

ZipK writes "Television singing competition The Voice disclosed on Wednesday 'inconsistencies' with the tallying of on-line and SMS-based voting. Although host Carson Daly claimed the show wanted to be 'completely upfront,' the explanation from their third-party vote counter, Telescope, was anything but transparent. In particular, Telescope claims that disregarding all on-line and SMS-based voting for the two nights in question left no impact on the final results, but they haven't provided any detail of the 'inconsistency' or their ability to predict a complete lack of impact. Sure, it's only The Voice; but tomorrow it could be American Idol, and by next month, America's Got Talent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Ask Slashdot: Becoming a Programmer At 40?

Slashdot -

New submitter fjsalcedo writes "I've read many times, here at Slashdot and elsewhere, that programming, especially learning how to program professionally, is a matter for young people. That programmers after 35 or so begin to decline and even lose their jobs, or at least part of their wages. Well, my story is quite the contrary. I've never made it after undergraduate level in Computer Science because I had to begin working. I've always worked 24x4 in IT environments, but all that stopped abruptly one and a half years ago when I was diagnosed with a form of epilepsy and my neurologist forbade me from working shifts and, above all, nights. Fortunately enough, my company didn't fire me; instead they gave me the opportunity to learn and work as a web programmer. Since then, in les than a year, I've had to learn Java, Javascript, JSTL, EL, JSP, regular expressions, Spring, Hibernate, SQL, etc. And, you know what? I did. I'm not an expert, of course, but I'm really interested in continuing to learn. Is my new-born career a dead end, or do I have a chance of becoming good at programming?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW

Slashdot -

vinces99 writes "Redshirting isn't just for athletes anymore. The University of Washington and Washington State University are collaborating on an 'academic redshirt' program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor's program. The first year will help those incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Drupal Association News: Take Our Quick Survey on Webinar Topics

Drupal Planet -

Last month, the Drupal Association launched a webinar series with the goal of providing more educational opportunities for the community. Our first webinar was on Spark and it was a great success with 500+ registrants. We are excited to do more!

But, as we mentioned in a previous blog post, before we move forward we want to hear from you. What topics do YOU want to learn about?

Personal blog tags: webinars

EchoDitto Tech Blog: Speed up PHP on NFS with turbo_realpath on CentOS

Drupal Planet -

If you run a website based on PHP, and have your source files on a network file system like NFS, OCFS2, or GlusterFS, and combine it with PHP's open_basedir protection, you'll quickly notice that the performance will degrade substantially.

Normally, PHP can cache various path locations it learns after processing include_once and require_once calls via the realpath_cache. There's a bug in PHP that effectively disables the realpath_cache entirely when combined with open_basedir. Popular PHP applications with Drupal and WordPress make heavy use of these functions to include other files, so you would very quickly notice the drop in performance in this scenario. If you want to isolate your websites from each other (or from the rest of the operating system), how can you retain any shred of performance?

This is where Artur Graniszewski's turbo_realpath extension really comes in handy. I won't retype his installation instructions, so follow the previous link to get it installed manually.

If you're running CentOS 5 or CentOS 6, check out yum.echoditto.com and you'll find source and compiled RPMs that will install alongside the RedHat/CentOS-supplied PHP packages. The RPM will create a basic configuration file at /etc/php.d/turbo_realpath.ini. Essentially, it enables the PHP module but defaults all settings off, so you will need to read the comments (taken from Artur's most recent post on turbo_realpath) to determine how you want to use it.

Configuration

We frequently use turbo_realpath on a per-VirtualHost basis with Apache 2.2 and mod_php. If you use PHP-FPM, you can apply similar settings in your FPM pool configuration files. If you install our RPM and don't edit /etc/php.d/turbo_realpath.ini, add something similar to the following to each VirtualHost:

<IfModule php5_module> php_admin_value realpath_cache_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/domain.com:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php:/usr/lib64/php:/usr/lib/php:/tmp:/var/tmp" </IfModule>

This is effectively the same using open_basedir; any directories referenced in realpath_cache_basedir will be the only ones the website is allowed to access, and they will be cached as determined by the realpath_cache_size and realpath_cache_ttl. If you look in php.ini, you may notice the default values for these are:

; Determines the size of the realpath cache to be used by PHP. This value should ; http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.realpath-cache-size ;realpath_cache_size = 16k   ; Duration of time, in seconds for which to cache realpath information for a given ; http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.realpath-cache-ttl ;realpath_cache_ttl = 120

You may want to increase these if you're finding your website is still not loading quickly. On our systems, we have bumped the realpath_cache_size and realpath_cache_ttl settings up to 1m and 300, respectively.

Speed and Security!

With turbo_realpath enabled, realpath_cache_basedir set to appropriate open_basedir-like values, and realpath_cache_size and realpath_cache_ttl increased from defaults, we're able to have isolated PHP sites and have better performance by caching the locations of included/required files effectively. Hopefully, our RPMs will help you on your system for a quick installation of the excellent turbo_realpath module!

References

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