Archive for the ‘news & announcements’ Category
More than a hundred schools across Finland are using open source for all of their desktop PCs, according to Opinsys, an open source services provider.
The company assists ninety schools in 28 municipalities with the maintenance of PCs and laptops running Ubuntu Linux. Tens of other schools are managing similar PCs themselves, according to Mikko Soikkeli, the company’s sales director.
The costs per Linux PC or laptop, including maintenance, is about 282 Euro per year, according to a presentation last month by one of the schools using Ubuntu. “This infrastructure is easy to extend, it is secure, reliable and easy to use”, according to Allen Schneitz, a teacher at the Kasaviori School. “The system allows utilisation of second hand computers that are four to five years old.”
Italian public administrations considering to use open source can turn to a competence centre specialised in this type of software. The centre, which will be opened tomorrow, aims to foster the development and adoption of open source software.
“The Italian Competence Center is a no-profit no-loss consortium, operating on a national scale and addressed to meet the needs of basic software and applications for schools, universities, small municipalities, hospitals, small and medium enterprises in the adoption of open source software”, says an announcement published by Spago, a project developing open source software for business intelligence applications.
Italian children hospitals are saving money by using the ‘Smart Inclusion project’ using open source technology and offering access to for instance medical data and e-learning applications. According to a statement from the Ministry for Public Administration and Innovation, hospitals can save about 1000 Euro per PC and about 500 per thin client.
The project uses the Linux open source operating system.
Italy’s minister for Innovation, Renato Brunetta, inaugurated the Smart Inclusion project early last month at one of the units of the Meyer Hospital in the city of Florence. The system is also used by the Policlinico Sant’Orsola in Bologna, the Ospedale Bambino Gesù in Rome, and the Azienda Ospedaliera in Padua.
Two hundred Romanians have signed a petition urging Gabriel Sandu, the Minister for Communications and Information Society, to support open source software on e-government projects. They also ask him to use open standards and to make government data public electronically.
The petition was organised by APTI, a Romanian Association for Technology and Internet. It was organised on-line regarding the eRomânia project, a 500 million euro project proposal to make government services and information available electronically. The project has been discussed for the past few years, and minister Sandu is one of its supporters.
The Portuguese government agency for public procurement has published a list of open source applications it deems suitable for use by public administrations.
The selected open source applications are now part of the official software catalogue published by Portugal’s procurement authority, the Agência Nacional de Compras Públicas, ANCP. Included on ANCP’s list are the database management system MySQL, content management system Alfresco, email server Scalix and server and desktop operating systems Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux.
Twenty desktop PCs running the Ubuntu Linux distribution are used to manage the services at a shared office building in the Hague for all Dutch ministries, since the beginning of this month.
The shared office building, called Rijkskantoor Beatrixpark, facilitates ministries working together on temporary projects, and offers the ministries extra office space when needed.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum (MFIA) at Yale Law School filed a friend-of-the-court brief today urging the Illinois Court of Appeals to block the unmasking of an anonymous online critic of a local political candidate.
The critic, commenting on a story on the website of a suburban Chicago newspaper called the Daily Herald, engaged in a heated debate with other commenters. One turned out to be the son of the village trustee candidate in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, who was discussed in the article. The candidate, Lisa Stone, who eventually won her race, asked a state court to order the newspaper to release the critic’s name and address without appropriately showing that the statements directed towards her son were defamatory or otherwise illegal. Stone indicated that she may choose to subsequently file a lawsuit once she determines the critic’s identity through the pre-complaint procedure.
Household network communications is developing so quickly that it is necessary to adapt and change in order to take advantage of the new services and meet the broadband needs that they require. With this objective, a group of UC3M researchers have presented a new proposal for architecture for Residential Gateway or RGW, which is a device that connects a residential communications network with an access network from any server. This work, recently published in the journal, Computer Networks, is a pioneer in the field, according to the authors.
“Other research focuses on defining which functionalities a Residential Gateway should have, while ours is aimed at facilitating the way to implement them and making them more flexible,” asserted one of its authors, Jaime García Reinoso, Professor at the UC3M Department of Telematics Engineering.
The government of Galicia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants to boost the use of free and open source software by its public administrations and citizens. The regional ministry for Modernisation and Innovation aims to bring together its previous initiatives on open source, it explains in a statement published on 27 January.
Previous initiatives on free and open source software have not yet resulted in an increased uptake by public administrations, companies or citizens, writes the ministry. “These actions were isolated and lacked coordination and an overall strategy.”
At least three open source projects in the Czech Republic are working to allow platform independent access to the government’s electronic message service. The mandatory service, called ‘Datove schranky’ (Data boxes) is currently only accessible on computers running Microsoft’s proprietary operating system.
The open source development projects started following an appeal by a group of 25 Czech companies and individuals. The group called on the government to make Datove schranky accessible to all computers and devices. According to the AbcLinuxu (‘the ABC of Linux’) website, the group has now raised 85000 CZK (about 3200 Euros), which it wants to award to the first open source project that offers platform independent access.
The ministry of infrastructure and transport in Valencia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, last week began migration of three of its open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications and projects to the European Union’s Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).
The applications, gvSIG Carreteras, gvSIG Sandbox and gsSIG Mobile, are currently hosted on the gvSIG software development site of the ministry in Valencia or on a development website hosted by the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Chips that can simulate a supernova or predict a hurricane are yesterday’s goal, if Intel’s recently unveiled 48-core research chip is any indication. Today’s goal is squeezing all the simple but extensive work of a data center onto a single chip. Big IT firms have huge, sophisticated networks of servers, says Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer and director of Intel Labs. But ”they’re not computing the mass of a proton,” he says. ”They’re searching for the needle in a haystack.”
In response to the need for better, faster data mining, Intel Labs has developed what it’s calling a single-chip cloud computer. The 1.3-billion-transistor research chip, the company reported yesterday at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, consists of 48 Pentium-class IA-32 cores formed into a network of 24 tiles. Each tile has two cores plus one router to allow intercore communication. The keys to its efficiency at handling needle-in-a-haystack-type tasks are two new software-based techniques: one for rapidly transferring data between its many cores and the other for controlling the power those cores consume.
Another Big Win for EFF’s Patent Busting Project
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won reexamination of an illegitimate patent on voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) that could cripple the adoption of new VoIP technologies.
A company named Acceris Communications Technologies, now C2 Communications Technologies, was awarded the bogus patent for hardware, software, and processes for implementing VoIP using analog telephones as endpoints — covering many telephone calls made over the Internet. EFF and the law firm Fenwick & West LLP filed a reexamination request showing that both a prior patent and published reference materials described the underlying technology long before Acceris made its claim. Today the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted EFF’s reexamination request, ruling that there were substantial new questions of patentability. Continue reading.
Several public administrations in Spain are sponsoring the development of Zorb, an open source extension to Nagios, an open source network monitoring tool. Zorb allows users to fine-tune the processing of events generated from the monitored instances, hosts and services. Zorb has just been published on the OSOR Forge.
The development of Zorb is made possible with the help of Cenatic, the Spanish government’s resource centre on open source and open standards,the government of Tenerife and the public administration of the city of Benicasim.
