Hi,

we'd need more customization options for the email notifier. I see on the documentation that TC 5.1 is going to leverage a different templating engine but no additional information is provided.

Our requirements are as following:

• edit the templates from the Web UI, since not every member of the team will have physical access to the TC server.
• reference system properties, environment variables and parameters from the notification template

Is anything of this planned already or should I create an issue on youtrack?

Flame is an art program created by Peter Blaskovic using Processing, a noob-friendly flavor of Java favored by artists and hobbyists -- a variant, Wiring, serves as a programming environment for Arduino microcontrollers.

Flame shows how far the language has grown. It basically lets you draw using your mouse pointer, and the lines you draw look awesomely like fire. [via Kottke]

• nvcc C compiler
• CUDA FFT and BLAS libraries for the GPU
• Profiler
• gdb debugger for the GPU (alpha available in March, 2008)
• CUDA runtime driver (now also available in the standard NVIDIA GPU driver)
• CUDA programming manual

• Parallel bitonic sort
• Matrix multiplication
• Matrix transpose
• Performance profiling using timers
• Parallel prefix sum (scan) of large arrays
• Image convolution
• 1D DWT using Haar wavelet
• Many more features

Release Highlights

• Support for the new Fermi architecture, with:
• • Native 64-bit GPU support
  • Multiple Copy Engine support
  • ECC reporting
  • Concurrent Kernel Execution
  • Fermi HW debugging support in cuda-gdb
  • Fermi HW profiling support for CUDA C and OpenCL in Visual Profiler
• C++ Class Inheritance and Template Inheritance support for increased programmer productivity
• A new unified interoperability API for Direct3D and OpenGL, with support for:
• • OpenGL texture interop
  • Direct3D 11 interop support
• CUDA Driver / Runtime Buffer Interoperability, which allows applications using the CUDA Driver API to also use libraries implemented using the CUDA C Runtime such as CUFFT and CUBLAS.
• CUBLAS now supports all BLAS1, 2, and 3 routines including those for single and double precision complex numbers
• Up to 100x performance improvement while debugging applications with cuda-gdb
• cuda-gdb hardware debugging support for applications that use the CUDA Driver API
• cuda-gdb support for JIT-compiled kernels
• New CUDA Memory Checker reports misalignment and out of bounds errors, available as a stand-alone utility and debugging mode within cuda-gdb
• CUDA Toolkit libraries are now versioned, enabling applications to require a specific version, support multiple versions explicitly, etc.
• CUDA C/C++ kernels are now compiled to standard ELF format
• Support for device emulation mode has been packaged in a separate version of the CUDA C Runtime (CUDART), and is deprecated in this release. Now that more sophisticated hardware debugging tools are available and more are on the way, NVIDIA will be focusing on supporting these tools instead of the legacy device emulation functionality.
• • On Windows, use the new Parallel Nsight development environment for Visual Studio, with integrated GPU debugging and profiling tools (was code-named "Nexus"). Please see www.nvidia.com/nsight for details.
  • On Linux, use cuda-gdb and cuda-memcheck, and check out the solutions from Allinea and TotalView that will be available soon.
• Support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195 production driver package:
• • Double Precision
  • Graphics Interoperability with OpenCL, Direc3D9, Direct3D10, and Direct3D11 for high performance visualization
  • o Query for Compute Capability, so you can target optimizations for GPU architectures (cl_nv_device_attribute_query)
  • Ability to control compiler optimization settings via support for pragma unroll in OpenCL kernels and an extension that allows programmers to set compiler flags. (cl_nv_compiler_options)
  • OpenCL Images support, for better/faster image filtering
  • 32-bit global and local atomics for fast, convenient data manipulation
  • Byte Addressable Stores, for faster video/image processing and compression algorithms
  • Support for the latest OpenCL spec revision 1.0.48 and latest official Khronos OpenCL headers as of 2010-02-17

Can a luxury resort ever be green? A new hotel on the Maldivian island of Hadahaa is a true eco-paradise

With great pride, our "butler" Atheef is describing the utter deliciousness, the supreme sweetness, the irresistible flavour and vast superiority of the Maldivian mango. When I offer the Indian mango in comparison, he snorts with derision: the Maldivian variety is clearly in a much higher league. It's also only available in this island paradise for two months of the year, and as Atheef speaks I have a flashback to childhood and the giddy excitement of strawberries coming into season – a delight wholly unknown to my own children, for whom such exotic delicacies are these days pedestrian staples thanks to the global food market.

The Maldives, however, is not the place to get radical about eating only local, or indeed seasonal, foodstuffs: these idyllic islands rely on imported produce, and working out how to feed themselves while striving to become the first carbon-neutral nation on earth is one of the many conundrums facing the inhabitants of this breathtaking collection of islands. There are 1,190 of them in all, scattered among some of the most pristine coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, and at two metres above sea level this vacation paradise is one of the most threatened nations on earth. The most pessimistic estimates suggest that they will be underwater by the beginning of the next century, a danger their energetic new president, Mohamed Nasheed, is striving to publicise to the international community – last October the entire cabinet donned scuba gear and met underwater.

As a result of the very real threat on their doorstep, words like "sustainability", whispered among a very few of the forward-thinking hotels a decade ago, are now littered generously throughout their brochures. The bonanza that took place in the 1980s and 90s, turning the area around the capital, Malé, into a resort metropolis with barely a care for preserving reefs or local livelihoods, has thankfully all but come to a halt.

If the Maldives are a dot on the world map, the island of Hadahaa is a mere grain in an enormous oceanic expanse, as far south as you can go without crossing the equator. It lies in the utterly unspoilt and second largest atoll in the world, Huvadhoo. Until recently the whole area was off limits to visitors, the result of a government policy that sought to protect its ecosystem but also discouraged mingling between tourists and the local population, which put many travellers off these islands because they felt them to be a cultural void.

Since 2007 a small clutch of hotels has been allowed to set up among the native islands under the strictest environmental supervision, bringing employment and visitors to a region previously ignored. The contrast between this gloriously underpopulated, development-free atoll and the frenzy of the resort scene around Malé is extraordinary.

The latest arrivals, such as the one I'm visiting, pay more than lip service to environmental concerns. At Alila Hadahaa, which opened in August, they have their own desalination plant to create drinking water, hold a Green Globe Certification for planning and construction, and use wood certified sustainable from Malaysia. Most commendable of all is the presence of so many local staff; Maldivians make up 65% of the workforce. For a people in search of a homeland – as their president has described them – they couldn't be doing a better job of the audition. Staff such as Atheef – in his roving role of villa butler – and Shamin (snorkeller, babysitter, football expert and purveyor of popcorn) are proud of their country, eager to help you to experience more of it and so good with the kids that I feel surplus to requirements.

For a resort so clearly not imagined with children in mind – from the lavish luxury of the super-chic rooms to the glass and stone-hewn bathrooms – they couldn't cater for them better. Chicken curry sans spices, jelly made to order, babysitting on request and everywhere waiters happy to build "volcano land" in the sand, dive masters who long to take them snorkelling. I virtually have to wrestle the staff to get the children back for a couple of hours a day.

Alila's new resort is certainly architecturally adventurous. The two-storey state-of-the-art restaurant with its Bauhaus severity is slightly wasted on an ageing barefoot boho like myself, but the luxury beach bungalows and water villas make it a positively elemental experience. Of course it's an irony that is hard for the arriving tourist to ignore that the popular wooden water bungalows strung out on stilts above the aquamarine shallows at most resorts could, in the course of our children's lifetime, be all that's left of this island nation.

FOR THOSE WHO stray as far south as Hadahaa, the reward is a pewter evening ocean with a hazy shadow of islands on the far horizon, bearing no sign of human habitation. Ears pump with the complete silence we so rarely get to hear. When I take my four-year-old son snorkelling 5ft off the beach and find a lionfish swaying in the swell, a couple of Moorish Idols guarding the reef and as many small yellowtails as I can count, Dan starts to choke on his snorkel in excitement. To say the ocean is still stocked biblically here would be to underestimate what lies below.

Visiting the local villages is also now actively encouraged, as we discover when we are taken on an afternoon trip to Gadhdhoo, where hand-weaving straw tablemats and fishing offer the only alternative employment to the hotel and tourist sector. Despite obvious poverty and very basic amenities, the village looks like it is auditioning for a Best Kept Town award: no rubbish, well-tended homes with immaculate front yards and trees adorned with colourful strips of the Maldivian flag.

Shamin explains that every evening at sunset the women and children take to street cleaning in order to keep their collective home in good order. If only a similar civic spirit could be nurtured in the UK. During our amble around town an elderly lady in a headscarf (since 9/11 the Maldivians, previously relaxed Muslims with a little bit of local magic thrown in, have increasingly been embracing a stricter Islamic code) stops me to enquire whether Molly and Dan are my only children. When I reply that they are, she looks at me pityingly before declaring that she has produced 14. Patting my meagre contribution to the population on their heads, she wanders off chuckling in amusement at my uselessness as a woman.

This is my fourth trip to the Maldives and the first where I get to meet local people in their own environment and also to eat their cuisine. Along with western delights that include breakfast croissants the finest Parisian pastry chef would be proud of, Alila Hadahaa boasts a local restaurant – sand-floored, trestle-tabled and musically themed – offering the spiciest of curries, the tastiest of pumpkins, the crunchiest papaya and chilli salads on poppadoms, and pancakes with caramel bananas or fresh coconut rice pudding to follow. Where other Maldivian resorts can seem hell bent on ignoring their surroundings, this one is utterly committed to celebrating them.

On our last night, as the great fiery disc of the sun begins its exhausted slide into the sea, we spot a pod of dolphins gliding in and out of water thick as oil, feeding on the plentifully stocked and carefully protected home reef. The children, who have been weaving coconut-frond tapestries with Shamin, run shrieking toward the ocean, dropping clothes along the powder-white sand as they race into the sea in pursuit of each other. The dolphins make a hasty exit to open water, but in their absence a familiar figure steps into the frame: Shamin, waist deep in the ocean, still in uniform shorts and polo shirt, initiating a game with the kids.

It's my abiding image of our brief sojourn on this entrancing island. Thanks not to the cutting-edge design of the resort nor the fantastic food but to the seductive charm of the local staff, the five nights here number among the best vacations of my life.

HOW TO GET THERE... Elegant Resorts (01244 897 515; elegantresorts.co.uk) is offering seven nights at Alila Villas Hadahaa for the price of five, from £2,280 per adult, £2,070 per child (based on four sharing), including breakfast, British Airways flights and all transfers.

Visit guardian.co.uk/travel for more advice and travel suggestions

CARBON NEUTRAL... BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FLIGHTS?

The Maldives is engaged in an ambitious plan to become the world's first carbon-neutral country. By 2020 all its power will come from the wind and the sun, plus a biomass plant burning coconut husks. But the Maldives' biggest industry is tourism, so what about all the carbon emitted by the flights? There is no magic solution, but the government's plans include offsetting the emissions of all flights. Several offsetting methods are being examined, including buying "European emissions permits" which reduce pollution from Europe's factories. Until the scheme is operational, tourists have to arrange their own offsets. Mariella Frostrup did so with Climate Care (jpmorgan climatecare.com).

• Maldives

A battle between Marxists, Maoists and government allies has brought a wave of kidnappings and murders to the Indian state

The site is a patch of arid wasteland, ringed by a half-built wall, just off the potholed road from the flyblown town of Midnapore in West Bengal. There is little to indicate it is the cause of a murderous gang fight pitting communists, Maoists and allies of India's ruling government against one another in a battle for cash, power and resources.

A £30m steel plant is due to be built here by Jindal, India's biggest privately owned producer. The aim is to bring jobs and prosperity to the impoverished town of Salboni, but the plant's arrival has brought a wave of kidnapping, murder, arson and intimidation.

There is little trace of a new "India shining" in West Midnapore district. Its 3.5 million people have some of the highest rates of illiteracy in the country. There are only 3,000 under-trained and under-equipped police officers here, who are largely occupied guarding camps or making desultory patrols in areas most affected by the local Maoist guerrillas. Senior police intelligence officers in Kolkata, the state capital, estimate that between 90% and 95% of the relief and development funds channelled to rural areas are stolen. In the towns, the proportion sinks to "only" two-thirds.

When Jindal Steel announced it was to build the plant, there was much excitement. The decision was partly a result of generous incentives offered by the government of West Bengal, dominated by the Communist party of India (Marxist) for 33 years, which hoped to bolster its wavering hold on power.

But politics has brought violence, too. The body of Shibshankar Das was found sprawled on the single road through the village of Chotokalsingbanga on 8 March, close to his mud-walled, single-room homestead. A note pinned to the body said "police informer". In fact Das, a 35-year-old labourer trying to support a family on 70 rupees (£1) a day, was almost certainly an innocent, killed as an example.

"He was not a political person. We were poor, but things were OK," said Das's brother, Kamal. Asalota, his widow, sobbed quietly. "He never harmed anyone. I have no income. I used to weave baskets and he took them to market, but now he has gone. How can I pay to send my children to school?" she asked.

On a rope bed outside the home, beside the family's one cow, Das's 13-year-old daughter studied the newspaper carrying the front-page picture of her father's corpse in stunned silence.

Das had found himself caught in the complex three-way battle begun by local politics and the coming of the steel plant. In West Midnapore, political office means power. Whoever controls the neighbourhood around the site will control not just the workforce but the unions, the contractors, the development deals and the businesses the plant will generate.

The Communists, who have been in power for so long and are now flagging badly, are battling it out with the All India Trinamool Congress, a new party that makes up for its lack of ideology with populism and opportunism. This contest will climax in state assembly elections next year, and in Salboni the war is already well under way. "Only 1% of the supposed informers killed really are informers," said Superintendent Manoj Verma, chief of the district police. The real reason for Das's death is to be found in a neighbouring house where the family of Jagneswar Mahato, a small-time businessman and the local Trinamool Congress leader, was also grieving. Mahato, 38, was abducted last month and has probably been killed. His wife squatted in the dust as his brother dully retold how Mahato was last seen, covered in blood, being dragged away by Communist party thugs.

The Trinamool Congress won the village of Chotokalsingbanga from the Communists at the last local elections, largely because of the corruption of Communist officials. A day after the Observer visited, two more villagers were abducted. The police have registered 70 kidnappings in the past year and more than 160 "informers" have been killed.

West Midnapore has long been a base for Maoist insurgents – described by the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as the greatest internal threat to India in 60 years. "By creating a violent environment [in Salboni] they will be able to extort money from construction contractors [on the steel plant] to start with and then everyone else who follows," said Verma.

Contacted by the Observer, the local group responsible for Das's murder said they were "simply following orders".

There is one name that the villagers, almost all illiterate, rarely speak aloud: the Harmath, as the armed Communist party militias are known. The people of Vursa village, like those of Chotokalsingbanga, voted out the Communists last year. The Harmath first visited in December. Driving between the huts and cattle pens, they burned rice stores and this year's seed stock, and torched homes, stole jewellery and clothes and abused women. "We are an opposition pocket in a Communist area. We are day labourers, poor people. We have no defence," said Butnath Ghosh, 70. Repeated raids eventually drove the villagers out. They returned only a few weeks ago. "Without working we cannot eat. We had to return. But we are frightened," Ghosh said.

Across the district the same tales of violence and intimidation linked to the Harmath are told. "We live under a reign of terror," said one salesman in the town of Chandrakona, which has also seen a series of kidnappings.

Dipak Sarkar, head of the West Midnapore Communist party, said the militias were "a people's defence force to save their own lives and property. We help people resist by organising people, giving them courage, mobilising them," said Sarkar at the party's district headquarters. "But any weapons they might have are their own."

He denied any corruption or that the Communists might gain at the expense of locals. "When the party is helped, the people are helped," Sarkar said. "And the party is the people."

• India

The favourite new drug of clubbers and schoolchildren hit the headlines last week when two young men died after taking it. Sold under a range of street names – meph, miaow miaow, MC, drone and bubbles – and easily available on the web, mephedrone is not illegal. But should it be? Here, four people from different sides of the debate – a user, a mother, a dealer and a doctor – have their say on 'the poor man's cocaine'

The first time I encountered mephedrone, meow meow, plant food or whatever you want to call it, was about a year ago at a friend's house in south London. We were back from a night out at the student union and all wanting to continue the party when my friend's flatmate, Brandon, got back from work and, with a sly smile, disappeared into his bedroom, to return with a huge box. He dumped the biggest pile of powder I had ever seen on the table. "This, my friends, is mephedrone," he said with relish. "And this is the future."

Like many students, I've never been one to say no to a new experience. We all end up running into drugs at some point, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I've always enjoyed a spliff and, on occasion, a little more, so I assumed this was just another casual substance I would be bumping into.

Nicknamed by users as "poor man's cocaine", mephedrone has swept through our nation's youth like a strong dose of salts, permeating every aspect of the party and night club scene. In less than six months, it has come from obscurity; everyone knows someone who's on it. Paradoxically, it was given a chance to become popular because of an EU restriction that prevented the importation of two substances necessary to the production of MDMA (ecstasy to the layman) that made it impossible to make or purchase any MDMA in Britain from late 2008. Mephedrone filled the gap in the market, and at half the cost of MDMA; it was everywhere.

You can snort it, drop it in "bombs" (rolling papers filled with it), and I've even come across people who eat it. The effect is euphoric, in some ways similar to ecstasy but much shorter-lived; you need to take a lot more of it a lot more often. The first time I took it, I could feel my heart pounding; everything seemed as if it was about to explode into life and I was up till the early hours in a wild rampage of excitement. But there any comparison ends. With mephedrone, the romance period is very short: after taking it just a couple of times, your tolerance increases dramatically, to the point that you're doing three or four times more than you were in the beginning to get high. Your appetite for the stuff also increases.

Brandon was well ahead of the curve. He was importing it from China at about a £1 a gram and selling it to students at £15. By mid-October, when our student loans had still failed to appear and finance was getting tight, we hit on the idea of doing the same. We could simply make a trip down to a seedy office in Victoria where we could buy it in bulk at wholesale price and then sell it on to our friends at a profit. Doing this you could turn £100 into £400 in a weekend and have a bit left on the side for yourself.

It became a crash course in drug dealing for beginners, and we weren't the only ones at it. Hundreds of students had spotted the gap in the market. You couldn't set foot in a club or house-party without someone walking past offering you "drone".

Whether or not this was legal is a good question, because although mephedrone isn't covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act, it is illegal to sell it for human consumption. Companies get round this by putting stickers on their product saying just that. When selling it, we would always tell people that it was not to be used to get high – it was almost a running joke. A very dangerous joke indeed.

When on it, you get very edgy (hence the comparison to cocaine) and you constantly crave more. It is possibly the most addictive substance I have ever come across. What makes it far more dangerous is that it is the first of a new breed of designer drugs, made purely to evade the laws surrounding controlled substances.

No one has considered what this will do to people in the short or the long term, and no one cares. Mephedrone might be called "plant food", but it is a plant decomposer, so what it does to your insides I dread to think. I once accidentally left a spoon in a bag of the stuff and came back three days later to find it had stripped off the outer coating and my mephedrone scattered with tiny silver bits of spoon. We still snorted it.

My stance was changed dramatically by my experience of prolonged use. After three or so months of using it at least a couple of times a week, I found myself in the darkest depression. I stopped taking it and suddenly found myself looking round at my friends with their eyes rolling in their heads and realised how much rubbish we had all been talking to each other. Good, straight-edge kids who barely used to drink have become crazed drug fiends, sitting in their house snorting plant food five days a week.

One friend of mine took it once and now has to use an inhaler, because he has permanently damaged his lungs. Another has almost ceased to be a friend, and is now a socially apathetic zombie, chasing mephedrone around London with his girlfriend, no longer able to interact without it, constantly asking if he can borrow 20 quid.

We've always been happy to get wasted on a night out, but I've never seen anything creep into so many everyday lives like this. I am horrified by the effect this drug has had on the people around me, and would urge anyone thinking about taking some tonight to change their plans.

Jack Starks is a student in his early 20s who lives in south London

For all those parents who have read with sadness about the deaths of an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old in Scunthorpe, but allowed themselves to be even slightly reassured that their own teenagers can't have come across mephedrone because they are so much younger, not yet clubbing and living very different lives, think again.

I first heard about mephedrone six months ago, at first from another north London mother whose son had ordered this "plant food" off the internet and who had roused her suspicions when he couldn't explain why he had suddenly developed an interest in gardening.

Then from my own daughter, aged 14 at the time, whose friends had discovered this legal high. She described them as "talking rubbish as if it is the most interesting thing in the world, and that they dribble and lick their lips and gurn and grind their teeth".

She said that people shook, bit holes in their lips and cheeks, were unable to feel their legs, were frightened because their heart was beating too fast and that their skin looked grey.

This might seem like any teenage group that has discovered harder drugs. It is rather like a description of my own group of friends at that age. What is different is that, in those six months, those friends who thought they were just experimenting seemed to need to take greater amounts of mephedrone on more and more occasions. Mephedrone is often sold in five gram bags and, as it is so "more-ish", it seems to be easy – even common – for a user to go through a whole bag.

Surely that kind of ever-decreasing, short-lived high is what makes dealers extremely rich and leads to the kind of desperate endless addiction of the crack-user?

Should all of this mean that we should immediately ban it? Well, I have always had a liberal view about drugs, believing that the criminalisation of drugs just creates an underground. I look at how making ketamine (a horse tranquilliser) a class C drug didn't stop its use among the young.

On an intellectual level, I agree with Professor David Nutt's measured suggestion of creating a "holding" class of D drug category. Within this category, sales would be limited to over-18s; the product would be quality-controlled, at doses limited as far as possible to safe levels; and it would come with health education messages. I also agree with Nutt that what we should look into is why teenagers are so drawn to taking drugs and why binge-drinking is so prevalent in this age group.

On a much more visceral, instinctive level, this "let's wait and see how harmful this drug is" D category doesn't comfort me at all. For this younger age group, the legality of mephedrone is a real attraction. While they can get hold of "weed" to smoke (mostly through older siblings, and even parents), because they are not yet going to clubs but to each other's houses or private parties they are rarely able to get their hands on harder drugs.

They can buy mephedrone off the internet or from headshops (shops selling drug paraphernalia) or stalls. Teenagers of this age seem to think that its legality means that it is safer than other drugs, which might also contribute to the wild abandon with which it is taken.

Health warnings wouldn't do a thing (my daughter says that, perversely, the deaths in Scunthorpe have made her friends even more determined to take the drug) and surely an over-18s rule on the net would be just like those porn sites that ask you to click a button to say that you are over 18 and that's all the proof you need. Prosecution of those selling to under-18s would be almost impossible in cases of website dealing.

For this age group, making mephedrone a class B drug would at least put up some sort of substantial hurdle and make it much harder for them to get hold of.

Just making it so much more difficult to track down may cause enough of a pause for some sort of easing-off from the enthusiastic consumption of what seems to be a particularly addictive drug.

Oh, and while we are waiting for a decision on this, look out for a fishy smell in your teenager's sweat, nose bleeds, restlessness, headaches, insomnia and a traces of yellowy powder on the surfaces in their room.

Sophie Radice is a journalist and mother of two who first came across the drug last year

I have no background in narcotics. My worst offence is a puff on a joint in college, which I found unpleasant. I am at heart "anti" substance abuse, though I am in favour of free choice.

I own and run three normal, legitimate businesses, all of which, thanks to the recession, have had their troubles. Have you ever laid off a loyal member of staff? It's the worst feeling in the world. I was looking for a lifeline.

I first heard of mephedrone in September. A friend heard about a new chemical that was originally a kind of plant food. It was legal and its effects mimicked cocaine and MDMA. I started searching for information on Google and within an hour I knew this would be a winning business.

From the start, I wanted to run this completely legitimately. No shady cash deals, pay tax, give excellent service with a quality product at the right price. Was I comfortable with the concept? No. Did I want to lose my home to the bank? No. Decision made.

In the first weeks, I bought my stock inside the UK, but very quickly I began buying direct from a manufacturer in China. I registered a company and contacted a web designer.

This is where the problems started. Even before the press discovered mephedrone, it was not possible to find good professional help. Undaunted, I built my own website. No banks would touch the credit card side of the business. I fudged round this and I was up and running. I launched the website and within an hour had five sales. My first week I turned over £8,000; the second, £10,000.

Then, last November, mephedrone hit the headlines. Its use was blamed for the death of a 14-year-old girl, although this turned out not to be the case. I thought it was the end. How wrong I was. That week, sales doubled. When mephedrone is in the news, demand rockets. Last week came the death of two boys. (I cannot comment on this tragedy, except to say I do not believe mephedrone was the cause.) One of my websites, which usually gets around 1,200 hits a day, received more than 20,000. The media have made mephedrone what it is.

Before you leap to judgment, do you drink alcohol? It is deadly, with 8,000 deaths directly attributed to it in the UK in 2008. There is a huge trade in illegal drugs in the UK. But people do not have to be criminals. They don't have to buy bags of drain cleaner from dodgy blokes in pub car parks.

The process of importing has become difficult lately, as UK Customs has begun withholding shipments. I have had 40kg seized. No explanation has been given and Customs has made no contact. This is surely illegal.

Mephedrone looks likely to be banned. This is the most dangerous thing that can happen. It is essentially a very safe substance. There is no addiction and to date I know of no deaths directly attributed to it. There are suppliers online such as me who treat this as a genuine business and supply a quality product pure to the customer.

The day mephedrone is banned, I will shut up shop. The taxman will lose hundreds of thousands of pounds and the criminals will step in. Prohibition has always failed. And the genie is really out of the bottle this time. Millions have used mephedrone in the UK. If they are stopped from getting it legally, they will either buy illegally or, even worse, try something new.

No British government would have the courage to exercise the level of common sense needed to keep it legal, what with an election looming and swarms of horrified Daily Mail readers to impress. This government has already sacked the moderate, sensible and knowledgeable Dr David Nutt. Mephedrone will be banned – and be dammed.

Mark is a businessman and owner of several websites that sell mephedrone

I first heard about mephedrone last July. The young man sitting opposite me told me that it had just arrived on the nightclub scene. He had tried it at once. He was well-educated and from a prosperous and stable family (who knew nothing about his drug use). He was in my clinic to withdraw from another "legal high", GBL. After using GBL for a few months, he had been dismayed to discover that he had become dependent. His lament "I didn't know it was addictive" could have been uttered by most doctors and policy-makers.

We are all playing catch-up as new compounds are recognised, banned – and new drugs appear, the risks of which slowly become apparent. Legal highs are mostly compounds closely related to known (and banned) psychoactive drugs. Mephedrone is chemically very similar to ecstasy. The slight variation in structure makes it legal, but also means that mephedrone has different pharmacological effects and toxicity.

This makes difficulty for the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which advises the government on whether a drug should be banned, as it has little information to go on. It takes experience to find out about the harms of particular drugs. It was only in the late 1990s, after years in which cannabis was regarded as a fairly harmless drug, that studies demonstrated it caused the development of psychosis in some vulnerable adolescents. News that two people died after using mephedrone suggests it may be dangerous, but we don't know enough. Mephedrone can cause cardiovascular problems, but I suspect that the post-mortem findings will identify other contributing drugs.

GBL, which was classified in December 2009, is a case study in legal highs. Many users overdose inadvertently and a small proportion progress to dependence. On trying to stop, users can experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Throughout 2009, most GPs and drug services knew nothing of GBL, and were unable to offer treatment. It was to catch up with this need that a "party drugs" clinic was established in south London . Attendees have reported that, since being banned, GBL is still readily available for same-day delivery, from internet sites outside the UK.

Mephedrone and GBL both enhance confidence and sociability and reduce sexual inhibitions. However, it is easy to lose the plot. The first dose of mephedrone produces intense euphoria, but repeated dosing produces decreasing pleasure and increasing paranoia and irritability – yet some people keep chasing the initial high until exhausted. This binge pattern of use maximises risks and minimises benefits of drug use.

A pre-election environment is a bad time to initiate a discussion about drugs policy, as there is a risk that any debate will degenerate into which party is going to ban more drugs, more rapidly. "Legal highs" are an easy target for moral outrage, precisely because they are legal and something can be done about that. More difficult is trying to address Britain's prodigious demand for drugs, legal and illegal. A non-partisan debate about reducing the harm would be valuable.

Dr James Bell is an addictions consultant at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust

• Drugs
• Drugs policy

Letter accuses leading Catholics of 'grave errors', but campaigners say it is not enough

Pope Benedict XVI yesterday rebuked Irish bishops for the negligent way they have handled sexual abuse cases in the Catholic church and issued an unprecedented public apology to the victims of paeodophile priests.

"You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry," Benedict wrote in a pastoral letter released yesterday, which will be read at Catholic masses in Ireland. The letter also announced the setting up of a Vatican investigation team. "Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen," he added. He accused bishops in Ireland of "grave errors of judgment" in their handling of thousands of "sinful and criminal" cases of abuse spread over decades.

Split into sections, the letter addresses victims, Irish bishops, abusive priests and parents. "There has never been a letter like this," said the pope's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi.

The letter does not admit any responsibility on the part of the Vatican in relation to the scandals, nor does it specify punishments for Irish bishops who covered up for paedophile priests, moving them from parish to parish.

Following revelations that he swore abuse victims to secrecy in 1975, Cardinal Seán Brady, the head of the Irish Catholic church, has said he will seek guidance through prayer before deciding on his future. Benedict has yet to accept the resignations offered by three Irish bishops. Following the release of the letter, Brady said that all Irish Catholics should reflect upon it. "I welcome this letter," he said. "I am deeply grateful to the holy father for his profound kindness and concern."

It is evident from the pastoral letter that Benedict is deeply dismayed by what he refers to as "sinful and criminal acts and the way the church authorities in Ireland dealt with them".

Lombardi said yesterday there were no pointers to be found on Brady's future in the letter, which did not have an administrative or disciplinary function. "This is a pastoral letter... That is not touched on here," he said.

The letter comes as a new tide of sex abuse allegations threatens to engulf the Catholic church. Benedict himself has come under pressure over the explosion of abuse revelations in his home country, Germany, following a wave of cases in the US. Maeve Lewis, the Irish director for the campaign group against child abuse, One in Four, said she was "deeply disappointed" by the letter. "It falls short of what victims want, since it only tackles failures in the Irish church and not the failures that go right to the top of the Vatican, such as the 2001 ruling on secrecy," she said. "The church is still in denial."

Reports on abuse commissioned in Ireland have singled out a letter written by the current pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, in 2001 instructing bishops to report all abuse cases to his office at the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for confidential handling. Vatican officials have said the measure was designed to prevent cases being covered up at local level, but Irish bishops reportedly understood the letter to mean they should not report cases to the police. In yesterday's letter, Benedict urged Ireland's bishops to "continue to co-operate with civil authorities".

"That could be interpreted as an instruction on mandatory reporting of abuse to the police, and this is welcome, although it is not clearly stated," said Lewis. "But where the pope goes on to deal with the proper application of canon law in these cases, it suggests he has no idea that civil law supersedes canon law, that bishops should abide by civil law like any citizen."

The letter announces that a Vatican investigation, or apostolic visitation, will be carried out at a "certain diocese" in Ireland, as well as in seminaries and religious congregations. Such investigations are carried out when the Vatican believes a local church is unable to put its own house in order.

"A lot of people will be quaking in their boots in Ireland as they wait to see which diocese the pope means," said one church insider in Ireland.

But Benedict also sympathised with Irish bishops, telling them: "I recognise how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice."

Rather than blaming abuse on an oppressive, conservative environment within the Irish Catholic church, Benedict singles out the creeping influence of liberal, secular society for weakening resolve against it. "In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations," he writes.

Lewis added: "We are astounded that the pope links the problem to secularisation. It shows a misunderstanding of the dynamics of sexual violence and suggests there is little hope the church will ever know how to respond."

• Pope Benedict XVI
• Ireland
• Catholicism

John Gilmore keynote – What do we do next, having produced a free software system for our computers? Perhaps we should aim at Windows? Wine + an extended ndiswrapper to run other hardware drivers + a better system administration interface/resources/manuals. However that means knowing a lot about windows internals – something that open source developers don’t seem to want to do. We shouldn’t just carry on tweaking – its not inspiring; whats our stretch goal? Discussion followed – reactos, continue integrating software and people with a goal of achieving really close integration: software as human rights issue! ‘Desktop paradigm needs to be replaced’ : need to move away from a document based desktop to a device based desktop. Concern about the goal of running binary drivers for hardware: encourages manufacturers to sell hardware w/out specs; we shouldn’t encourage the idea that that is ok. Lots of concern about cloning, lots of concern about what will bring more freedom to users, and what it will take to have a compelling vision to inspire 50000 free software hackers. Free software in cars – lots of safety issues in .e.g brake controllers, accelerators.

Eben Moglen – ‘We’re at the inflection point of free software’ – because any large scale global projects these days are not feasible without free software. Claims that doing something that scales from tiny to huge environment requires ‘us’ — A claim I would (sadly) dispute. Lots of incoming and remaining challenges. ‘Entirely clear that the patent systems relationship to technology is pathological and dangerous’ – that I agree with! Patent muggings are a problem – patent holders are unhappy with patents granted to other people . Patent pools are helping slowly as they grow. Companies which don’t care about the freedom aspect of GPLv3 are adopting it because of the patent protection aspects. Patent system is at the head of the list of causes-of-bad-things affecting free software. SFLC is building coalitions outside the core community to protect the interests of the free software community. We are starting to be taken for granted at the high end of mgmt in companies that build on free software. … We face a problem in the erosion of privacy. We need to build a stack, running on commodity hardware that runs federated services rather than folk needing centralised services.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya on GNOME Shell: Integrates old and new ideas in an overall comprehensive design. Marina ran through the various goals of the shell – growing with users, being delightful, starting simply so new users are not overwhelmed. The activities screen looks pretty nice The workspace rearrangement UI is really good. The notifications thing is interesting; you can respond to a chat message in-line in the notification.

Richard Stallman on Software as a Service – he presented verbally the case made in the paper. Some key quotes… “All your data on a server is equivalent to total spyware” – I think this is a worst-case analogy; it suggests that you can never trust another party: kindof a sad state of paranoia to assume that all network servers are always out to get you all the time. And I have to ask – should we get rid of Savannah then (because all the data is stored there) – the argument for why Savannah is not SaaS is not convincing: its just file storage, so what makes it different to e.g. Ubuntu One? “If there is a server and only a little bit of it is SaaS, perhaps just say don’t worry about it – because that little bit is often the hardest bit to replace.”  ”Lets write systems for collaborative word process that don’t involve a central server” — abiword w/the sharing plugin ? RMS seems to be claiming that someone else sysadmining a server for you is better than someone else sysadmining a time-shared server for you: I don’t actually see the difference, unless you’re also asserting that you’ll always have root over your’ own machine’. The argument seems very fuzzy and unclear to me as to why there is really a greater risk – in particular when there is a commercial relationship with the operator (as opposed to, say, an advertising supported relationship).

But its more than just a VCD waveform viewer in a fancy new wrapper. Scansion also adds the ability to view higher abstraction transaction modeling events, tracing transactions as they flow through a system. This makes it the ideal companion for modeling in SystemC and other environments that support higher level simulations.

Here are some highlighted features:

• Reads standard Value Change Dump (VCD) files for logic waveforms
• Reads open XML format for transaction traces
• Display of analog waveforms for viewing mixed-signal data
• Many more features

• Fixed several UI performance issues with larger trace files.
• Fixed issue where values were not being displayed in the trace list value column.

In the next few weeks, the ReadWriteWeb events guide will take you from New York City, to San Francisco, to Portland, Oregon. Along the way you'll find a conference on search engine strategies, a showcase for startups, an in-depth look at the freemium business model, and a day filled with of social media case studies.

How do you like your events calendar? As a world map? As an iCal (and Google Calendar-importable) file? You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

Sponsor

Search Engine Strategies New York Conference & Expo

Go beyond search at Search Engine Strategies New York. Learn the newest trends, strategic action plans, and technology that industry leaders are employing today. Our experts will trace the natural evolution of search exploring topics such as: digital asset optimization, mobile application development, transition from search to discovery and more.Book your pass today. Enter RWW15 to save 15% off the registration. Sessions include:

• Digital Asset Optimization
• Deep Dive Into Analytics
• Augmented Reality: It's a Brave New World
• Bringing SEO In-House: The Pros and Cons
• Advanced B2B Search Marketing
• Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

S.F. Beta 4.0

After a long winter's hiatus, S.F. Beta is back, for its forth year straight! Join hundreds of founders, investors, developers, and technologists for a lively evening of demos, drinks, conversation, and new connections. Early bird tickets are available, and they're going fast. Register now for discounted admission. As always, we feature startup demos all night. This time around, the theme is Search & Discovery. If you're building the next Google (or the next Google acquisition), we want you here! Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info.

Freemium Summit

The first Freemium Summit is a one day event focused on exploring what it takes to succeed under the freemium business model. Across all segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering models that combine a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most exciting areas of business model innovation impacting the world of media and the Freemium Summit will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners.

Confirmed Speakers: Toni Schneider, Automattic (WordPress); Matt Brezina, Xobni; Aaron Levie, Box.net; Phil Libin, Evernote; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Drew Houston, Dropbox; Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt; Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp; Lance Walley, Chargify; Isaac Hall, Recurly; and Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures.

Social Fresh Portland

The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day, you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford, Comcast, Nike and many more, as well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.

ConnectNow

TEDx CMU is an independently organized TEDx event that will be held on April 4th, 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University and will feature a full day of talks by prominent speakers as well as recorded videos from past TEDTalks. Confirmed speakers include Jonathan Fields (author, blogger and entrepreneur), Stacey Monk (founder of Epic Change, a startup nonprofit), Chase Jarvis (photographer, director and social artist) and Nathan Martin (CEO of Deeplocal, an innovation studio in Pittsburgh).

The theme of the event is "Fearless", and we are inviting speakers from cross-disciplinary backgrounds to talk about their experiences, and tell us a little about what inspires them to be fearless in the pursuit of goals. We hope to spark discussions and foster connections between participants, encouraging aspiring individuals to follow their dreams and make a difference. The event is free to attend, and the application deadline is March 21, 2010.

For more information about the event, visit tedxcmu.com or email info@tedxcmu.com. You can also find TEDx CMU on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

ConnectNow

ConnectNow brings together international specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is "social currency". For more info email info@connectnow.net.au.

PubCon South

PubCon, the premier search and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the future of the Web. PubCon South will include cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register here.

Under the Radar: Cloud

Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference, featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com.

FutureMidwest

FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference and TechNow.

Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here.

Social Fresh St. Louis

The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy, Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.

DrupalCon

DrupalCon is the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal experts.

Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and management.

Future of Money and Technology Summit

The Future of Money & Technology Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors, solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and many more.

Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration.

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference.

An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks.

• 
  
• Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform?
• 
  
• Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• 
  
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices.
• 
  
• Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
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• Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• 
  
• Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR.
• 
  
• Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.
• 
  

Click here to register now, or to become a sponsor, or to help shape the conference.

FinovateSpring

FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day.

Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available.

SF MusicTech Summit

The SF MusicTech Summit will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment. Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off.

25 – 27 May 2010: Denver, Colorado

Glue

Glue is the only conference devoted solely to exploring the problem-sets facing architects, developers and IT professionals in a "post-cloud" world. Glue focuses on the APIs and protocols (Twitter, Facebook, Websockets, PubSubHubBub, XMPP), formats and standards (RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5), platforms and providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus), Identity Protocols (OAuth/WRAP, SAML, OpenID, SPML) emerging NoSQL data models (Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, HBase), and other mechanisms that are building the post-cloud world.

ReadWriteCloud will be blogging live from Gluecon and CloudCamp, and ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams will be moderating the "Managing Complexity in the Cloud" session. Please join us May 25-27 in Denver, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb readers can receive 10% off of registration by using the code "RWW12".

Corporate Social Media Summit

The Corporate Social Media Summit is a two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring:

• Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully
• 20-plus corporate speakers (including PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson),
• Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social media in your business
• A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth, practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding corporate use of social media

Cloud Computing World Forum

The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include:

• Co-located with CloudCamp London
• Co-located with Green IT conference
• Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre
• Free-to-attend evening awards presentation
• Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices
• Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services
• Evening networking party for all attendees

FinovateFall

FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders(...)

PlaybackPro Collection (PlaybackPro/RecordPro) is a fully modern Macintosh application that takes complete advantage of recent advances in software stability and graphics capabilities. Using one output as the operator interface, it sends clean video to the secondary video output, utilizing the graphics card for hardware acceleration and complete control over size, aspect ratio and levels. By allowing much greater flexibility in both the field and studio, it is intended to replace hardware DDRs (digital disk recorders), DVD players and video tape machines.

While the digital revolution has changed the way video is edited, its effects haven't been truly felt in the live production industry, until now. We like to call it non-linear playback. PlaybackPro leads the way with a simple but powerful interface that allows flexibility and control over the playback of video content. PlaybackPro is completely non-destructive to original video files, allowing the same file to be referenced multiple times with separate in and out points, geometry and levels. All effects are rendered on-the-fly.

Features Include:

• Easy to understand Preview and Program paradigm.
• Clip ordering and play-listing, printable to paper and PDF.
• Resolution agnostic playback of virtually any file type by adding easy to find Quicktime Components.
• Automatically adjusts to the output resolution and aspect ratio. Content can be in any ratio (4:3, 16:9, etc) and has infinite adjustability through sizing, stretching, and cropping.
• Plugs right into todayÕs high-resolution switchers via DVI or VGA.
• PlaybackPro can utilize files placed on a high speed RAID array or media network. With enough disk bandwidth, PlaybackPro is capable of resolutions well beyond HD.
• PlaybackPro uses a document based architecture, which allows multiple shows to be created and switched between.
• Video of any type can be captured using the included RecordPro application in conjunction with any Quicktime-compatible capture device.
• DVD video can easily be extracted with 3rd party software, allowing much higher quality than when recording into another device (and finally fixes all the issues with DVD playback in a professional environment).
• Online back-ups are created easily utilizing the file system and networking capabilities of the operating system for ease of use and no generational loss.
• Ideal for use in ultra-widesceen applications.
• Complete control over each clipÕs levels, including black-level, gain, saturation, gamma, and volume.
• Clean clip aborting, by fading out audio and video.
• Full start and end point controls, with easy fade-in and fade-out settings.
• Clear time-elapsed and time-remaining counters for accurate countdowns.
• Selectable slate frames for visual reference.
• Convenient ÔGoto 10Õ and ÔGoto 30Õ buttons for use during rehearsal Ôcue-to-cueÕ rundowns.
• Created specifically for live environments by video professionals.

In the world of technology, drama is a valuable commodity. Disruptive change may happen in the minutiae of software code or the gradual execution of a business plan, but we see its effects in the dramatic narratives of companies rising and falling, or getting locked in combat with each other. Which is why the rivalry between Google and Apple is such a compelling story.

It’s so tempting to get drawn into the ego battles between Steve Jobs and the Google triumvirate while placing bets on who will win that it’s easy to forget a deeper truth about this rivalry: Google and Apple need each other.

They both have a deep desire to stake out claims on the mobile web, but the mobile web is in a nascent stage. In order to develop, it needs to have both rigid structure and a sometimes reckless creativity. Structure is necessary to provide a strong foundation and a set of standards everyone can understand. And creativity is essential to bringing the innovative potential of the mobile web into full bloom.

This dichotomy was present when the Internet began to develop in the early 90s. Many people who came online then did so through America Online’s walled gardens, a safe little enclave where consumers and content providers alike could create the rules of a new medium. Then the web itself took off and sites like Yahoo and GeoCities offered a much more creative environment to explore what else could be done.

Now it’s happening again, only with Apple and Google. Apple’s stern and unforgiving approach to the iPhone offers the structure this new medium needs to succeed. Cupertino’s control-freak tendencies stretch from enforcing adherence to ever-changing app guidelines to banishing plastic screen protectors from its retail stores.

Google’s approach is nearly the opposite, much more open and free-wheeling. Its Android OS, based on the Linux kernel, has so many versions available the company is struggling to consolidate them. The Android Market is such an unregulated affair that it’s hard for anyone to count the number of apps on sale.

Google’s culture has built into it a tolerance for the failures that come with creative experiments. Its 70-20-10 rule seems rooted on that spirit of tolerance — how many companies require employees to spend time on something that may never fly? — and Google has floated so many failed ideas it’s hard to keep track of them all. Apple, by contrast, starts with an instinctive idea of how consumers will experience its products and fits everything, even the ecosystem of apps that extends beyond its corporate walls, into making it work.

It’s in the tension between these two companies and their respective cultures that the mobile web is being forged. But as America Online found out, the walls eventually come down as consumers grow more comfortable with the new medium and desert the walled garden. That would suggest the balance will tip in favor of Google.

But I would be surprised if Apple isn’t anticipating this evolution. Right now, iPhone owners are experiencing the mobile web through the 150,000 or so apps it offers through the App Store. But Apple has also backed HTML5, which allows a smartphone browser to have rich app-like features without requiring any new software to be downloaded. Just as people stopped downloading AOL’s software and switched to browsers, we may well abandon most of the apps on our phones today.

Both companies will continue to play a major role on the mobile web, but I doubt either will ever gain the upper hand. This dramatic tension between Apple and Google may be around for a long time. So executives at both might as well get used to it.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

With The iPad, Apple Takes Google To the Mat

The Itawamba School District filed a brief containing several new revelations on Friday. The brief says prom was called off to settle the "very explosive and disruptive" issue of the district's ban on same-sex dating, the Clarion Ledger reports.

So the school actually has an official ban on same-sex dating?

The paper continues: 

"The filing by school board attorney Benjamin Griffith states that Itawamba Agricultural High School senior Constance McMillen 'wishes to make the defendant district the site for a national constitutional argument over gay and lesbian rights.' ... Griffith said the student's rights were not violated. 'This is not an issue where anyone has been denied an education or suffered a constitutional deprivation,' he wrote in the filing. 'Rather, this is a social event that, in light of rapidly escalating circumstances, was disruptive to the school environment because people are on all sides of the issue.' An affidavit filed Friday by attorney James Keith says school board members have been been under 'tremendous pressure' as a result of the controversy."

According to information in the newly filed briefs, parents have organized a private prom — and Constance isn't invited to that prom either:

"The school board's response states that parents have organized a private prom at a furniture mart in nearby Tupleo (sic). Now that the school district has withdrawn from the event, any constitutional claims are irrelevant, Griffith wrote.  [ACLU attorney Christine] Sun said she had only heard rumors of the private dance until she read it in the brief. 'Constance has not been invited, so it is clear to me that what is happening is that the school has encouraged a private prom that is not open to all the students,' she said. 'That's what Constance is fighting for — a prom where everyone can go.'"

Watch this battle unfold. The virtualization wars are just getting started.

On one side we have Microsoft, which announced changes in its licensing structures this week. The change reflects an understanding that the customer wants full access to its virtualization platform and not be charged a tax for that right to access it on a PC, no matter if it is at work or in their home.

And in true fashion, Microsoft is on the attack, Citrix at its side, in a full on fight with VMware for the virtualization market.

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On the VMware side, we see a company ready to move into Microsoft's customer base by offering more than virtualization as witnessed with its recent acquisition of Zimbra. VMWare is gearing up to tap into the Microsoft Exchange market by combining its virtualization technology with the Zimbra email platform.

Historically, Microsoft has charged for separate licenses to access Windows operating systems in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. Until now, there would be separate licensing fees for people to access their virtual desktops from secondary devices like home personal computers.

The licensing issue in all of this gets complicated pretty fast. According to Simon Bramfitt:

VMWare, in smart retort, praises Microsoft for the move and bowing to "intense customer pressure."

Raj Mallempati, director, product marketing, calls it an opening for VMWare View. You know it's competitive when you see this kind of rhetoric:

By loosening up the restrictive desktop virtualization license policy (VECD), Microsoft has finally bowed to intensive customer pressure. This validates the acceleration in demand in the desktop virtualization industry that VMware helped start and continues to lead. Microsoft's move here is extremely positive for the industry.

But what is Citrix part in all of this?

At the beginning of the year, VMWare offered the opportunity to exchange Citrix XenApp licenses for VMWare View. In response, Microsoft and Citrix announced a partnership this week aimed right at VMWare with some pretty attractive licensing deals.

The promotion intends to undercut VMWare by reaching into its customer base with offers to trade in as many as 500 licenses in exchange for a Microsoft integration offered with Citrix.

To kick it off, the two companies plan a 100-city tour.

But what this really represents is Microsoft providing some flexibility in its virtualization licensing agreements. That move alone will help open up the market.

And VMWare? The company has 80 percent of the virtualization market. Any move on its customer base should be expected. VMware's vision for Zimbra is another matter. That's a battle it is taking right back to Microsoft - square on its home turf.

The MTK MTK6516 phone might resemble some of the good stuff that HTC has come up with in recent times, but this model goes one up since it has dual core functionality, working in a Windows Mobile environment. As mentioned, the main draw would be its dual core 460MHz ARM9 main processor which will be used to handle system tasks, while a 280MHz ARM7 Modem processor will take care of the telephony module segment, featuring a 3.2" display, Windows Mobile 6.5, 256MB RAM, 256MB ROM, a 3.2-megapixel camera and 1.3-megapixel secondary camera for video calling purposes, and Wi-Fi connectivity. No idea on about pricing, but it ought to be released soon.

Permalink: MTK MTK6516 phone gets dual core from Ubergizmo | RSS Sponsor: Win a Fellowes Microshred Paper Shredder!

Casio has been in the timepiece business for quite a fair number of years already, and most of us would have fond memories of a digital watch from Casio, although these days it seems to be imported from China instead of its spiritual home, Japan. Ah well, their range of G-Shock watches are also a cause to celebrate, since those are some tough devices which can withstand the rigors of an active lifestyle. This time round, Casio America takes the next step forward in the world of watches with its latest addition to the Pathfinder collection, otherwise known as the PAG110C-3. This new Pathfinder will definitely appeal to those who constantly brave the great outdoors, but it also has a conscience since it is eco-conscious with features such as solar technology and recycled packaging.

After all, having your watch die out on you while you’re in the lush forest in the middle of nowhere can be quite a frightening thought. So why not throw in some solar panels to make sure the watch has enough juice to keep going? We wonder whether they will come up with a hybrid mechanism that relies not only on kinetic energy to keep the timepiece ticking, but a solar panel as well for another alternative source of renewable energy. The PRG110C-3 will incorporate Casio’s Tough Solar Technology which increases battery life via the regeneration of electrical power from sunlight. This will help decrease battery consumption associated with traditional watches, which in turn assists in cutting down over three billion batteries thrown away each year by Americans – at least that is what the Environmental Protection Agency say. Basically, you wil decrease the presence of heavy metals in landfills which cause toxic contamination to the environment if you pick up this digital watch.

Despite being eco-conscious, this Pathfinder timepiece retains its core features, with the PAG110C-3 boasting advanced outdoor capabilities such as a digital compass, altimeter, barometer and thermometer, where all of it are more than capable of meeting the needs of the serious outdoorsman. You will also be able to enjoy five daily alarms, a stopwatch and world time in 30 cities. Is it raining, or do you have to forge rivers? Fret not – the watch is water resistant up to 100 meters and low temperature resistant as well. Each Casio PAG110C-3 will retail for $250 as an exclusive item on Amazon.com.

Press Release
Tech Cult – We cover the latest tech news, but always with a funny twist.
[ Casio unveils Pathfinder PAG110C-3 timepiece copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Tracker est un moteur de recherche local pour votre ordinateur. Il permet d’effectuer des recherches de fichiers, mais aussi dans les fichiers eux même ou encore dans votre courrier électronique.

Ce projet est assez vieux, on parlait de sont inclusion dans le projet Gnome il y à quelques années déjà. Mais à cause de mauvaises performances et d’un développement lent il n’a jamais vraiment pu s’imposer sur le bureau Gnome.

Aujourd’hui c’est d’ailleurs un véritable manque, car aucun réel moteur de recherche n’est implémenté dans Gnome, alors que ce genre de fonctionnalités est maintenant standards ( que ce soit sous KDE, sous Windows Seven ou OSX ).

L’année 2009 à marqué toutefois un réveil du projet, on est ainsi passé de la version 0.5 à 0.7 en un peu plus d’un an et les premiers développements de la nouvelle version 0.8 devraient arriver en 2010.

3 Générations de moteurs de recherches

Pour mieux comprendre la suite de l’article, on va s’arrêter un peu sur les différents types de moteurs de recherches disponibles. Techniquement on peu diviser ces moteurs en 3 générations :

- La première génération ( qui correspond au petit moteur de recherche de fichiers de Gnome ), est un moteur de recherche simple, qui va aller chercher un fichier selon son nom, son type ou sa date de modification. Vous tapez «Â lenomdemonfichier », Et il s’en va le chercher sur votre ordinateur. Dans le meilleur des cas, il est doté d’un cache pour offrir un temps de réponse plus rapide.

Le gros inconvénient de cette première génération, c’est qu’elle est extrêmement limitée. Vous ne pouvez chercher que par le nom du fichier ou son extension. Et si vous ne vous rappelez pas du nom du fichier ou que vous tapez un nom légèrement erroné, vous n’aurez surement aucun résultat pertinent.

De fait ces moteurs de recherches sont peu utilisés. Et on préférera souvent avoir une bonne organisation de l’arborescence des répertoires pour éviter de perdre nos fichiers.

- La seconde génération de moteur de recherche s’est donc attachée à proposer un résultat de recherche un peu plus efficace. Ici il est question de reprendre les fonctionnalités du moteur de 1ere génération, mais en plus de lui permettre d’aller chercher le contenu des informations de chaque fichier ( lorsque c’est pertinent ). Le gros avantage c’est que la recherche devient un peu plus précise. Vous pouvez par exemple facilement retrouver un document texte sur un thème précis, en tapant un mot contenu dans ce document.

Tracker dans sa version stable 0.6.X fait parti des moteurs de seconde génération. Mais la encore la recherche reste peu utile, car le moteur de recherche ne pourra parcourir que le contenu de fichiers lisibles ( documents textes principalement ). Si vous souhaitez chercher d’autres types de documents, comme des images ou des vidéos, vous vous retrouvez donc avec le même problème que le moteur de première génération.

- C’est ici qu’intervient le moteur de recherche de 3éme génération, qui s’appuie sur le bureau sémantique. Le bureau sémantique consiste à construire un réseau d’informations sur l’ensemble des éléments du bureau; que ce soit les médias, les documents, les applications ou tout autre élément pertinent composant l’ordinateur ou son réseau. Pour chaque élément on va garder en base de donnée des informations pertinentes sur son contenu ( par exemple pour une photo l’auteur de la photo, la date de prise, le lieu, la définition... ). Il sera en plus possible d’associer des tags pour chaque élément ( exemple : photos de vacances ), permettant ainsi de regrouper les fichiers sans prendre en compte l’arborescence.

Enfin, pour rendre le système encore plus intelligent,le système créé des liens entre les différents éléments du bureau. Par exemple votre ami «Â Paul » vous envoie les photos de vacances que vous avez passés ensemble. Vous les stockez dans un répertoire. Puis quelques jours plus tard vous souhaitez les voir de nouveau. Il vous suffit de chercher «Â Paul » dans le moteur pour retrouver les fichiers qu’il vous a envoyé. Vous ajoutez le tag «Â Photo de vacances » et elles se retrouveront dans votre gestionnaire de photos dans la bonne catégorie ( si ce dernier supporte Tracker) .

Tracker 0.7 : le renouveau... expérimental.

Pendant l’année 2009, l’équipe de Tracker à décidé, de refondre totalement le projet. L’objectif est de créer un moteur interne performant, standardisé et facile d’utilisation.

Pour ce faire le projet c’est logiquement orienté vers des standards reconnus.

En premier SPARQL, qui est le langage utilisé pour effectuer des requêtes a la base de donnée de Tracker. SPARQL est un standard défini par la W3C, une des briques du futur web sémantique. Il est officiellement devenu une recommandation en janvier 2008 et permet d’effectuer des requêtes intelligentes en relation avec des documents,images, etc.

La seconde technologie qui fait son entrée dans Tracker s’appel NEPOMUK pour «Â Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge » ou en français : Environnement réseau pour une gestion ontologique personnalisée de la connaissance unifiée.
C’est ni plus ni moins que le standard défini par un projet Européen pour le bureau sémantique que l’on à vu plus haut.

C’est donc avec la version 0.7.X que ces fonctionnalités ont commencés à faire leurs apparitions. De sorte qu’aujourd’hui Tracker propose un moteur de recherche sémantique «Â simple ». Il manque encore en effet un certain nombre d’éléments comme les liens entre élément, ou plus simplement une meilleure intégration.

Enfin un dernier élément à prendre en compte dans Tracker, s’appel le «Â mineur ». Ce sont des modules qui viennent s’ajouter au moteur principal et qui vont avoir pour rôle d’aller chercher les informations sur des éléments spécifiques. Pour l’instant Tracker dispose de 3 type de «Â mineur » :
- Mineur de fichier, qui va aller chercher la liste des fichiers présents dans votre répertoire personnel et va en extraire le contenu.
- Mineur d’applications, qui récupère le nom et les descriptions des applications présentes sur votre ordinateur
- Le mineur de courrier électronique qui va aller chercher les courrier électronique et leur contenu dans Evolution.

Tracker 0.8 : première version stable

Avec la version 0.8, qui sera la prochaine version stable du moteur et qui devrait officiellement arriver mi 2010, on devrait voir arriver de nouvelles fonctionnalités, notamment de nouveaux mineurs :
- Le mineur rss : qui, comme son nom l’indique, permettra d’aller chercher dans le contenu Rss
- Le mineur internet : qui permettra de garder les informations sur les pages visités et de les retrouver facilement
- D’autres mineurs liéés aux services en lignes (Réseaux sociaux, documents en ligne, etc...)

Enfin le système devrait être encore optimisé vers une meilleure prise en compte des standards de bureau sémantique. Cette version est d’autant plus importante qu’elle pourrait être incluse dans Gnome comme projet officiel. La version 0.7 n’a été accepté qu’a titre de dépendance externe dans gnome 2.30. En cause, l’absence d’une version stable moderne, et le manque de maturité du projet.

Enfin l’équipe de Tracker travail en étroite collaboration avec l’équipe de Zeitgeist. Ce dernier projet permet de garder une trace des actions effectués par l’utilisateur dans le temps, sur les fichiers ou les applications.

Quelques liens :

- Site du projet
- Site du projet sur Gnome
- Blog d’un des développeurs

Billet original de Lemarinel.Votez pour cet article sur le Planet Libre.

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2. Codenamed "Lucid Lynx", 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop and Netbook Editions continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a streamlined, smoother boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install-time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.04 family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Desktop features
————————

Social from the start: We now feature built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook, and other social networks with the MeMenu in the panel.

New Design: Cleaner and faster boot, new notification area, new themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Choose any folder in your home directory to sync, choose from millions of songs for purchase in the Ubuntu One Music store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1 for details.

Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud installer has been vastly improved in order to support alternative installation topologies. UEC components are now automatically discovered and registered, even with complex topologies. Finally, UEC is now powered by Eucalyptus 1.6.2 codebase.

UEC and EC2: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS continues the tradition of official Ubuntu Server image releases for UEC and for Amazon’s EC2, giving you everything you need for rapid deployment of Ubuntu instances in a cloud computing environment. UEC images, and information on running Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2, are available at:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/beta1

Stability and security: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS brings many improvements over Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to keep your servers safe and secure for the next five years, including AppArmor profiles for many key services, kernel hardening, and an easy-to-configure firewall.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-
Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment.

It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu features
————————

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS will be the first LTS to feature KDE 4 Platform and Applications. KDE 4 has come a long way since its early releases and is now suitable for the high demands of LTS users. Being an LTS we have focused on bug fixing and stability for this release, but we did find time to add features such as touchpad configuration, Firefox KDE integration, Kubuntu notification improvements, and cross-desktop systray menu standardisation. Kubuntu features the Plasma Desktop while Kubuntu Netbook Remix comes out of preview status with the Plasma Netbook workspace.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Beta1/Kubuntu for more details.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu in Lucid features a more complete live environment containing more software from universe and all existing language packs as well as our usual educational software in their current version. For Lucid the text installer has been removed and so is LTSP for the time being. We expect to have LTSP back on the DVD for the next beta. The DVD is then much smaller than it used to be but will still provide a complete education environment based on Ubuntu Lucid.

Also included on the Edubuntu DVD is a small repository containing the required packages to transform the regular Edubuntu desktop into a LTSP server or install the Netbook edition interface.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

Mythbuntu 10.04 introduces MythTV 0.23. This new version is significantly faster and should feel more responsive and stable than older versions. It also integrates better into the OS with better support for things like ConsoleKit and Upstart.

Please see http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23 for more details about changes introduced in 0.23.

See http://mythbuntu.org/10.04/beta for information about the Mythbuntu beta release.

Other
——-

* On the Desktop: GNOME 2.30, KDE SC 4.4, XFCE 4.6.1, OpenOffice.org 3.2.0, X.Org server 1.7.5

* On the Server: Apache 2.2, PostgreSQL 8.4, PHP 5.3.1, LTSP 5.2

* "Under the hood": GCC 4.4.3, eglibc 2.11, Linux 2.6.32.9, Python 2.6.5

The full release notes can be found at
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta1

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1
———————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 from Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 here (choose the mirror closest to you):

Africa:

* http://ubuntu.saix.net/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (South Africa)

Asia:

* http://mirror.rootguide.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (China)
* http://ubuntutym2.u-toyama.ac.jp/ubuntu/10.04 (Japan)
* http://mirror.khlug.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Korea, Republic of)
* http://ubuntu.qualitynet.net/releases/10.04 (Kuwait)
* http://ftp.mtu.ru/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.04 (Russian Federation)
* http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Taiwan)
* http://ftp.linux.org.tr/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Turkey)

Europe:

* http://ubuntu.linuxbe.com/10.04 (Belgium)
* http://ubuntu.ipacct.com/releases/10.04 (Bulgaria)
* http://hr.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Croatia)
* http://releases.ubuntu.mirror.dkm.cz/releases/10.04 (Czech Republic)
* http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (Denmark)
* http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Estonia)
* http://ubuntu.trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/releases/10.04 (Finland)
* http://ftp.oleane.net/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (France)
* http://ubuntu.mirror.tudos.de/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Germany)
* http://speglar.simnet.is/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Iceland)
* http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Ireland)
* http://releases.ubuntu.fastbull.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Italy)
* http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04 (Netherlands)
* http://no.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Norway)
* http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/ubuntu/10.04 (Portugal)
* http://rs.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Serbia)
* http://ubuntu.cica.es/releases/10.04 (Spain)
* http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Sweden)

North America:

* http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Canada)
* http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirror.yellowfiber.net/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)

South America:

* http://ubuntu-cd.innova-red.net/10.04 (Argentina)
* http://mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/mirror/ubuntu/10.04 (Brazil)
* http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/10.04 (Brazil)

Rest of the world:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Great Britain)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is expected to be released in April 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on FreeNode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

[Discuss Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-announce mailing list by Steve Langasek on Fri Mar 19 16:32:05 GMT 2010

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are  a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.

The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.

We started with some project updates:

• SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
• Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
  • short term: merging and collaboration:
    • merge behaviour
    • conflict behaviour
    • develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
    • looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
  • long term
    • continuing optimisation of network and local perf
    • meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
    • work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
    • easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
  • now and forever
    • keep fostering community growth
    • we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

• accessibility since 1st boot
• reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
• nonfree firmware issue

–lunch–

John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.

Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.

Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.

Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/.  24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!

GNU advisory board discussion…   too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

Microsoft’s experimental Office Labs group says it’s testing a new microblogging service called OfficeTalk—which “applies the base capabilities of microblogging to a business environment, enabling employees to post their thoughts, activities, and potentially valuable information to anyone who might be interested.” It’s an experiment but the Office Labs group does say that OfficeTalk has been one of its most popular internal tests to date and it’s therefore inviting interested outside firms to try it out.