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10.07.12

Links 7/10/2012: Linux 3.7, GIMP 3 Discussed

Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source equals software freedom, not free software
  • An Open Source Dyslexic Font

    Programmers seem to be prone to dyslexia, or is it that dyslexics are prone to programming? Whatever the cause, an open source dyslexic font is welcome news.

    Yes reader, I am dyslexic and I am a programmer – and yes it makes things difficult, especially when I get an attack in the middle of a published article, and variable names are often more variable than they are supposed to be.

  • Graduate students in Finland solve real problems beyond the classroom

    The School of Business and Information Management at Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OUAS) created an open source project management software named OpixProject. The objective was not to create something that would compete with the current project management software, but to place students in realistic problem-solving environments in order to reduce the gap between the concepts covered in the classroom and real-world experiences.

  • Copenhagen Suborbitals Release Snowmix, an Open Source Video Mixer
  • Juju Has Charms Included

    So how many of you ever thought of installing/configuring an application like WordPress/Drupal and compact Big Data mammoth like Hadoop in less than few clicks?

    I am sure everyone of you. A system admin loves automating his work and getting his/her most of the deployments done with some magic scripts. We all are living in the cloud world, its not a buzzword anymore, people are leveraging on it. So I will ask again how will you automate/autoscale/load-balance your entire application ?

  • Open source release for Google reranking technology

    Google has released a general purpose framework for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), as open source. Reranking is a technique that is used when there is a model that can offer several scored hypothesised outputs; rerankers can reorder the ranked outputs based on information not available to the original model.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Is Back on Top of Chrome

        Looks like we weren’t the only Internet users that got fed up with Chrome’s constant crashes, as the latest numbers show its popularity has been waning a smidge. The chart above shows worldwide mobile browser market share over the last 12 months. Back in May Chrome’s adoption numbers just about matched Firefox’s. And, at the end of last year, after a year of huge growth, different numbers found the Google made browser surpassed Firefox as the number two most popular browser, just behind Internet Explorer. But since then—perhaps because of the constant flash crashes, or that hip Internet Explorer campaign—Firefox has regained the No. 2 spot, according to numbers from Net Marketshare. Another way to spin the numbers is that Firefox’s sped up six-week new release schedule attracted more users.

      • Mozilla Firefox OS Features And Expectations

        Mozilla, the organization behind one of the most popular browsers in the world, is busy developing a new mobile operating system of its own. Competing head-on with biggies like Android and iOS, the fledgling smartphone OS attempts to create its own niche by seamlessly blending the power of the web and the mobility of smartphones together. Codenamed Boot to Gecko (or B2G), the open-source project will include applications that will be written in HTML5. These apps can then use the device’s API to run natively with the help of JavaScript.

      • Firefox 19: new tab strip design incoming

        Australis is the name of the new default Firefox theme that Mozilla has been working on for quite some time. The decision was made to release the update gradually, with some updates already in the browser, while others still waiting to be delivered to it. One of the next Australis-related updates comes in Firefox 19. You may have already seen how the new tab bar will look like in mock-ups that Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander released a while ago.

      • Firefox quit warning message bug

  • SaaS

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Open-source development: The history of OpenOffice shows why licensing matters

      The course of open-source software does not always run smoothly, especially when the development of software becomes entangled with broader corporate strategies.

    • NetBeans 7.3′s HTML5 App Dev features go into beta

      Java developers are not left out though, with improvements such as a new-style breadcrumb navigation bar, new member and hierarchy views, updated hints and refactorings, filtering for “Find Usages” and an “effective” POM editor tab for pom.xml files. Java EE developers will find a JPQL testing tool and enhancements to the REST service development features. FXML and the SceneBuilder are better supported in 7.3 Beta’s JavaFX handling, which is also compatible with JDK 7u6 on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

  • CMS

    • Open Source CMS MODX Launches Cloud Service

      Today open source content management company MODX is launching a hosted cloud service to commercialize the product, much as Acquia and WordPress.com have done for Drupal and WordPress.

  • BSD

    • An Easy Way To Try Out FreeBSD 10

      If you have been wanting to try out the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT operating system that’s presently under development, there’s now an easier way.

      Rather than needing to install a current FreeBSD release and then upgrade to the “-CURRENT” packages from there, a FreeBSD developer has finally started offering snapshot images of the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT and 9-STABLE versions. Yes, finally ISO snapshots to make it easier to try out the current development state from a clean install.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation

        It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.

    • Open Hardware

      • The Open Hardware Summit: The Future of Manufacturing is Sharing
      • HexBright, the Programmable Open Source Flashlight
      • Arduino Uno open-source prototyping board comes to market

        A starter kit for the Arduino Uno open-source prototyping board which can be used by professional embedded system engineers and students is available from RS Components, writes Richard Wilson.

        The kit contains the components required to start programming with the Arduino Uno board along with a guidebook featuring 15 different projects. There is a definite mechatronics flavour to the kit which includes a motor, servomotor and driver.

      • Open Hardware Summit open to hybrid models

        If there was an overarching message from the speakers at last week’s Open Hardware Summit, particularly those in the first morning block, it’s that openness isn’t that critical. It sounds strange coming from a conference whose name starts with “open,” but speaker after speaker talked about hybrids and doing whatever worked, not just doing what was open.

        That’s not to say they don’t believe in the power of openness. The first words of Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s opening keynote were the very foundation of open source: “Everything I’ve learned as I built my own business is because people shared what they knew.”

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Superweeds, Superpests: The Legacy of Pesticides

      The rapid adoption of a single weed-killer for the vast majority of crops harvested in the United States has given rise to superweeds and greater pesticide use, a new study suggests. And while crops engineered to manufacture an insect-killing toxin have reduced the use of pesticides in those fields, the emergence of newly resistant insects now threatens to reverse that trend.

      Farmers spray the herbicide glyphosate, widely sold under the Monsanto brand Roundup, on fields planted with seeds that are genetically engineered to tolerate the chemical. Found in 1.37 billion acres of corn, soybeans, and cotton planted from 1996 through 2011, this “Roundup Ready” gene was supposed to reduce or eliminate the need to till fields or apply harsher chemicals, making weed control simple, flexible, cheap, and less environmentally taxing.

  • Finance

    • 2nd Circuit remakes MBS class action rules in Goldman ruling

      Now they tell us? More than four years after investors in mortgage-backed securities began filing class actions accusing MBS issuers of deceiving them in offering documents — and at least three years after federal judges began tossing class claims because name plaintiffs didn’t have the requisite standing — the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has redefined standing in MBS class actions. In a 38-page opinion that revives a class action against Goldman Sachs, the appeals court rejected what had been conventional wisdom, finding that a union healthcare fund represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd isn’t limited to claims based on specific offerings it invested in. Instead, wrote Judge Barrington Parker for a panel that also included judges Reena Raggi and Raymond Lohier, the union fund has standing to assert claims related to every certificate backed by mortgages originated by the same lenders that originated the loans backing the notes purchased by the fund.

    • The War Between Credit and Resources

      Such a policy, which received wider attention during Ben Bernanke’s Congressional questioning last year and was also highlighted this year in a paper delivered at the Jackson Hole conference (Woodford, opens to PDF), has not caught any visible traction with Washington policy makers possibly because it’s seen as either too radical, or simply too new.

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