I was intrigued. My first question to him was "How do I buy a computer with that already on it", that of course being Linux. Mark explained that it not only acted as a recovery CD but that it could be installed as a permanent operating system and showed me the icon on the desktop.
I asked him if I could play around with the disk for the evening and he of course said yes.
After faxing in my story, I logged out of work via computer and began exploring my new digital visitor. I would have occasional fits of "This can't be working." and "Can this be legal?" Of course now I know it is but from my narrow perspective, I'll ask you to understand my doubts.
I can't tell you exactly when I made the decision but somewhere between playing with LibreOffice and the webcam software, I found myself dropping and dragging important files from my Windows world onto a portable hard drive.
* 548,352 – the number of CPU cores in the K Computer in Japan, the world’s currently fastest supercomputer. It’s the result of having 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each. * 1,820,352 – the combined number of CPU cores in the top 10 supercomputers * 672 – The number of computer racks that make up the K Computer (one is seen on the image for this post). * 8.2 petaflops – The computing performance of the K Computer. It’s more powerful than the five next systems (i.e. position 2-6) combined. * 8,200,000,000,000,000 – 8.2 petaflops written out as floating point operations per second (8.2 quadrillion instructions per second). * 2.6 petaflops – The computing performance of the second-fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A in China.
We chat with Travis Tidwell about MediaFront, the open source media solution for streaming and playing video over the web.
Guest: Travis Tidwell
Bridge construction set (also referred as Pontifex II) is now available in available in Ubuntu Software Center under the purchase section. The game which tests your bridge constructions skills has received great reviews from critics and users and has won many awards.
It was big news in Canada when, in 2008, the country slipped from the top-ten list of the world’s most peaceful countries (all the way to eleventh). By this year, it was back in eighth, 74 places above the U.S. and, when liberals in the U.S. feel despairing, what dominates their fantasy life but “moving to Canada?”
And yet, today, you could make an argument that Canada has actually become one of the earth’s more irresponsible nations — namely, when it comes to the environment. Indeed, you could argue that the world would be better off if the government in Ottawa was replaced by, say, the one in Brasilia, which has made a far better show of attending to the planet’s welfare. It’s a tale of physics, chemistry, and most of all economics, and it all starts in the western province of Alberta.
One of the primary results of Platform 11 was gaining consensus on making KDE's development platform more modular, with each library (or technology within it) clearly defined in its purpose and how it can be deployed for use in a Qt or KDE application.
With so much controversy surrounding the recent release of GNOME 3 and Canonical’s Unity, there’s only one way to resolve things: a head-to-head battle royale. Gareth Halfacree investigates which next-generation desktop environment might suit you better to set the record straight once and for all…
GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell have their fans, who castigate Canonical’s Unity – and vice-versa. There are also those who decry both, claiming that a move to icon-based launchers represents a dumbing-down of the classic GNOME user interface. Worries over compatibility and extensibility cause further concerns, until nobody is quite sure what’s going on any more.
Almost as if Eugeni Dodonov read my post last night, he answered earlier this evening that the ISOs are now on the mirrors. I had found a copy a couple of hours before his post, so I was already burning. I had been looking forward to seeing the newer Mandriva, but in the end I'm afraid I was slightly disappointed.
[...]
All that looks stuff aside, I was really looking forward to seeing the new Mandriva Control Center that was alluded to in Dodonov's post last night. But it just looked like the same ole same ole to me. They could have and probably did do some work under the hood, but there was no changes to the appearance. And the issue of setting up graphical drivers mentioned in an earlier post still exists. I looked in the software manager and NVIDIA proprietary drivers were included, but the configuration just seemed broken. Everything else seemed to function correctly as far as I tested. The installer hasn't changed to the naked eye either except for the main image.
Here are my first impressions.
Am I happier now than I was before Mageia installation? Most likely yes. Mageia proved itself very stable and nicely composed system not only in Live run, but also in full install mode. Yes, I still have something to work on before I can make final decision to dump Kubuntu. But that hour is very close I believe. And even now I have system which works smoother and quicker then Kubuntu, does not have issues with desktop effects and shutdown. These two facts are more than enough.
Final Thoughts: The K Desktop Environment has all the features required to make an excellent desktop operating system, but one half of the problem lies in the default configuration shipped from the “factory.” The other half (of the problem) lies with distro developers who do not bother to tie the loose ends together. As much as I appreciate the time and effort involved in packaging a distribution, the community would be better off if more is done to ensure a more robust out of the box user-friendliness. Every feature that could work out of the box, should. The pieces are in place, they just need to be tweaked a little bit.
The 43-year-old executive, who in December 2007 took over the reins of what is now the biggest open source vendor in the industry, said what defines a 21st Century company is one with a significant number of workers who are "socially connected" through sites such Facebook and Twitter, and is governed by "meritocracy, not hierarchy".
By virtue of being in the open source space, Red Hat has many young employees who are generally early adopters of technology and this is a demographic that he has helped lead by influence and example.
Chronic Logic’s award winning game, Bridge Construction Set, is officially for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center. In Bridge Construction Set you build a bridge that hopefully does not break, however having a train plunge into the depths below may be fun for some!
Paolo is one of the amazing people out in local Ubuntu communities spreading the word, organizing events, and helping to nurture stronger teams. When you tune into Paolo's presentation at Ubuntu Community Week, please be sure to ask him to sign your card. (And don't worry, the bullets he's referring to are those that appear in nearly every presentation you've ever yawned through.)
We are one week away from Alpha 2, so right now you can see lots of developers trying to get as many things into Ubuntu Oneiric as possible: AirPrint, theme changes and loads of other stuff. After this milestone we will have only 4 weeks left until Feature Freeze at which stage most of the features should have have landed. As always: the status overview should give you a very detailed look on how each feature is progressing.
"The Ubuntu apologists are making all sorts of noise about how Canonical is targeting a new market (tablets and similar screen resolution devices), but we've seen this show too many times before," explained Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. "Red Hat didn't get to be profitable (something that still eludes Canonical) by dumping their target customers every year to chase new opportunities."
Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.
Previous versions of this distro made use of Mozilla Prism for running web applications directly on the desktop, but Peppermint has now switched over to Chromium. This means that Chromium is the web browser and also powers the rendering of web applications thanks to the ICE SSB (single site browser), a framework developed by members of the Peppermint OS team.
Licensing WebOS could be a double-edged sword for HP though. When you look at the tablet and phone market, as of this moment, Apple and Google are clearly dominating. When it comes to the tablet, the iPad continues to blow away the field. HP gets it turn at bat on Friday when the HP Touchpad hits stores.
What is the real value that Open Source has brought to the economy? This is not a peregrine question. Since most of the current evaluation methods are based on assessing “sales”, that is direct monetization of OSS, we are currently missing from this view the large, mostly under-reported and underestimated aspect of open source use that is not “sold”, but for example is directly introduced through an internal work force, or in services, or embedded inside an infrastructure. Summary: OSS provide cost reduction and increases in efficiency of at least 116B€, 31% of the software and services market.
Analytics company Ravel has announced it is releasing GoldenOrb, its massive-scale graph analysis software, as open source. GoldenOrb is based on the ideas behind Google's Pregel architecture which is in turn inspired by the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model developed in the 1980s.
After dealing with Firefox 3.6.17's abrupt end of life in favor of 4.0, and then 4.0's deprecation in favor of 5.0 (and yes, I had to change repositories every time because Linux in general and Debian in particular doesn't force new software on users), now I learn that Thunderbird is jumping from 3.1 to 5.0.
I use the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive for all my Mozilla software needs (Firefox/Iceweasel and Thunderbird/Icedove). Now I'll be dipping into my sources.list files to up the Icedove repo from 3.1 to 5.0 once the Debian Mozilla Team offers the new version (they generally need a little time to package it up).
Mozilla has released version 5 of Thunderbird, the popular open source e-mail client. The update includes some new features, updated components under the hood, and a number of performance and stability improvements.
Mozilla spun off Thunderbird in 2007, creating a separate organization called Mozilla Messaging. The split was reversed several months ago when Mozilla announced that it would reabsorb the messaging group and integrate it into Mozilla Labs.
The Thunderbird development model underwent some significant changes alongside the organizational restructuring. Its versioning and development cycle have seemingly been harmonized with that of Firefox. The Thunderbird version number was bumped up directly from 3.x to 5—skipping version 4 entirely. This change allows Thunderbird's version number to match Firefox and reflect the version number of the underlying Gecko rendering engine that is shared between both applications.
VoltDB, a leading provider of high-velocity data management systems, today announced the release of VoltDB Integration for Hadoop. The new product functionality, available in VoltDB Enterprise Edition, allows organizations to selectively stream high velocity data from a VoltDB cluster into Hadoop’s native HDFS file system by leveraging Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which has SQL-to-Hadoop integration technology, Apache Sqoop, built in.
Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL). Not only can BIRT provide native access to Hadoop as a data source for analysis, dashboards, reporting and custom BI and information applications, it can be used to build data sets or data visualizations that seamlessly combine Hadoop data with other data sources including SQL databases, XML data, document archives and flat files.
As the originator of the Hadoop technology, Yahoo’s official entry into this space should play a big role in shaping how the market of Hadoop-based products evolves.
Yahoo’s Hortonworks (as in the Dr. Suess book “Horton Hears a Who,” a reference to the elephant logo that Apache Hadoop bears) will be comprised of a small team of Yahoo’s Hadoop engineers and will focus on developing a production-ready product based on the Apache Hadoop project, the set of open source tools designed for processing huge amounts of unstructured data in parallel. It’s a natural step for Yahoo, which uses Hadoop heavily within its own web operations, and which has contributed approximately 70 percent of the code to Apache Hadoop since the project’s inception.
Zenoss, Inc., a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures, today announced the availability of Zenoss Service Dynamics. The new offering includes the market’s first service impact management solution that both unifies and automates impact and root cause analysis for IT services that span private and public IT infrastructures.
What I was keen to do there was not so much the usual “look at all the fun things you can do to money from giving stuff away”, since that by now is well-explored territory (one, moreover, that is visited briefly in the earlier slides of the set below). Instead, I'll focus on the other ways in which openness of a general kind can provide benefits to businesses that embrace it.
The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of Indigo, the 2011 annual release train. This is the eighth successive year in which the Eclipse community has shipped a coordinated release on schedule. Indigo is available for immediate download from www.eclipse.org/downloads.
Microsoft Office patch today. "Office File Validation Add-in" http://bit.ly/kFXlEA Interesting, uses a "binary schema"
The hacker group Anonymous has taken down a US tourism website in Orlando, Florida as a protest against the arrests of people handing out food to the city's homeless.
If you haven't seen the new fundraising video from WikiLeaks, which plays off an old Mastercard commercial, don't miss it. It's smartly done, and doubly effective given that Mastercard is one of the companies that are refusing to process donations to the whistleblowing site. With more than 100,000 views on Vimeo since being posted a few days ago, you have to give Julian Assange credit for knowing how to make a viral video.
Speech is never a punishment, and it strikes me as especially dangerous for supporters of free speech to suggest otherwise. If libertarians call it a “punishment” when the government subsidizes your opponent’s political campaign, it’s hard to object when more censorious types call it a “punishment” when a third party runs a nasty campaign ad against a politician. The solution to speech is more speech. I don’t love the Arizona campaign finance system, but I think it’s hard to argue that it runs afoul of the First Amendment.
Google launched its social networking platform last night. The initial response and reviews are positive. Google+ has exceeded all expectations by bringing all needed features under one roof. The integration with different Google properties and services is amazing.
Having spent one day with Google+, I can say that finally we have a strong Facebook competitor. It also puts both the companies and products under a direct comparison when it comes to data ownership.
Three Canadian companies have been ordered to pay roughly $2.5- million for selling knock-off Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags in what a Federal Court judge described as an “egregious” case of trademark infringement.
BT has warned the High Court that if an injunction to block access to the Newzbin2 website were to be granted, it would be the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ opening the floodgates to content owners desperate to prevent sites pointing to pirated content. BT told the court that it could face up to 400 applications for injunctions in the next year if the Motion Picture Association (MPA) prevail in an action against the UK telecoms giant.
Essentially the Council Decision would endorse it permissable that the Commission and the member states together circumvent parliament prerogatives under the Treaties (and Treaty conditions) via an Agreement with third nations using the trade funnel. Outrageous and inacceptable.
David Hammerstein reports that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been determined to be a "mixed agreement." This means that the agreement must be approved by both the EU and by the 27 member states. That suggests a long process to obtain individual parliamentary approval throughout the EU (the EU Council is moving quickly on the issue, however).
History of the Commodore Amiga Part 1