Announcements
Articles of interest
A report from the Peru OLPC deployment
For those in a hurry, the Economist has a brief and mostly negative summary of a report on the benefits of the One Laptop Per Child program in Peru. "An evaluation of the laptop programme by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) found that the children receiving the computers did not show any improvement in maths or reading. Nor did it find evidence that access to a laptop increased motivation, or time devoted to homework or reading."
For those with more time, the
actual report is more nuanced. "Results indicate limited effects
on academic achievement but positive impacts on cognitive skills and
competences related to computer use. Cognitive abilities may arise through
using the programs included in the laptops, given that they are aimed at
improving thinking processes. However, to improve learning in Math and
Language, there is a need for high-quality instruction. From previous
studies, this does not seem the norm in public schools in Peru, where much
rote learning takes place
".
Linux for Your Electric Car: Techies Create Open Source EVs (txchnologist)
The Tumanako Project aims to provide open hardware and software to drive and recharge electric vehicles. Author Morgen E. Peck covers the project and talks with developer Philip Court. "The main offering of the Tumanako project is a drive package and inverter for a 200kW induction motor. This includes all of the software necessary to take a “go” command from a driver and the calculations for how much power to feed to the motor. Court says his code works but will not be fully open source — meaning there are still snippets of proprietary code — for another 6 months to a year."
AOL Unloads Patents to Microsoft (Wall Street Journal)
The Wall Street Journal is running a short article about a patent deal between AOL and Microsoft. "AOL Inc. agreed Monday to sell more than 800 patents and related products to Microsoft Corp. for $1.1 billion, as the struggling online company looks to raise fresh cash while fighting a boardroom showdown with an activist shareholder." (Thanks to Martin Jeppesen)
Update: this article has more information, including a list of some of the patents involved.
FSFE Newsletter - April 2012
The April edition of the Free Software Foundation Europe Newsletter looks at projects and initiatives, warns European Parliament staff not to accept gifts from Microsoft, welcomes Nikos Roussos from Greece as a member of the Fellowship, and covers several additional topics.
New Books
Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has released "Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby" by David Bryant Copeland.
Upcoming Events
Events: April 12, 2012 to June 11, 2012
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| April 10 April 12 |
Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 | Santa Clara, CA, United States |
| April 12 April 15 |
Linux Audio Conference 2012 | Stanford, CA, USA |
| April 12 April 19 |
SuperCollider Symposium | London, UK |
| April 12 April 13 |
European LLVM Conference | London, UK |
| April 13 | Drizzle Day | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| April 16 April 18 |
OpenStack "Folsom" Design Summit | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 17 April 19 |
Workshop on Real-time, Embedded and Enterprise-Scale Time-Critical Systems | Paris, France |
| April 19 April 20 |
OpenStack Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 21 | international Openmobility conference 2012 | Prague, Czech Republic |
| April 23 April 25 |
Luster User Group | Austin, Tx, USA |
| April 25 April 28 |
Evergreen International Conference 2012 | Indianapolis, Indiana |
| April 27 April 29 |
Penguicon | Dearborn, MI, USA |
| April 28 | Linuxdays Graz 2012 | Graz, Austria |
| April 28 April 29 |
LinuxFest Northwest 2012 | Bellingham, WA, USA |
| May 2 May 5 |
Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 | Vienna, Austria |
| May 3 May 5 |
Utah Open Source Conference | Orem, Utah, USA |
| May 7 May 11 |
Ubuntu Developer Summit - Q | Oakland, CA, USA |
| May 7 May 9 |
Tizen Developer Conference | San Francisco, CA , USA |
| May 8 May 11 |
samba eXPerience 2012 | Göttingen, Germany |
| May 11 May 13 |
Debian BSP in York | York, UK |
| May 11 May 12 |
Professional IT Community Conference 2012 | New Brunswick, NJ, USA |
| May 13 May 18 |
C++ Now! | Aspen, CO, USA |
| May 17 May 18 |
PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers | Ottawa, Canada |
| May 22 May 24 |
Military Open Source Software - Atlantic Coast | Charleston, SC, USA |
| May 23 May 26 |
LinuxTag | Berlin, Germany |
| May 23 May 25 |
Croatian Linux Users' Convention | Zagreb, Croatia |
| May 25 May 26 |
Flossie 2012 | London, UK |
| May 28 June 1 |
Linaro Connect Q2.12 | Gold Coast, Hong Kong |
| May 29 May 30 |
International conference NoSQL matters 2012 | Cologne, Germany |
| June 1 June 3 |
Wikipedia & MediaWiki hackathon & workshops | Berlin, Germany |
| June 6 June 8 |
LinuxCon Japan | Yokohama, Japan |
| June 6 June 10 |
Taiwan Mini DebConf 2012 | Hualien, Taiwan |
| June 7 June 10 |
Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe 2012 | Grodno, Belarus |
| June 8 June 10 |
SouthEast LinuxFest | Charlotte, NC, USA |
| June 9 June 10 |
GNOME.Asia | Hong Kong, China |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol