Tony Atkinson’s technical expertise runs deep as a Linux systems administrator for a telecommunications company in Essex, England. He works with the Asterisk PBX (private branch exchange) and communications server and Nagios notification system, writing and maintaining bespoke PHP and shell scripts to control and coordinate phone and SMS services and other general operations in the U.K., U.S.A. and Australia.
The closure won't affect GPU and APU development, according to the source, but it's not yet known exactly who will pick up the slack from the former Dresden team -- though the research center in Austin Texas is reported to be a likely bet.
There's still AMD developers working on Linux support, just in different areas now and there aren't as many left but AMD isn't exiting the Linux market. Linux will continue to play an important role for AMD in the server space especially with their forthcoming ARM-based Opteron products. Android will also become more important to AMD with future product launches. Linux users should certainly hope though that AMD becomes more financially fit so that it will be able to regain some of their dedicated Linux staff in the future.
The involvement of one company in particular has caused a few raised eyebrows. Microsoft's appearance as a "gold sponsor" of the European meeting has led some to suggest that the Linux Foundation had sold out by allowing Microsoft to speak at one session. But Zemlin says that the speaking session did not come as part of the sponsorship deal:
"There ain't an event sponsorship that they can pay us that's big enough for us to compromise principles. Part of our organisation's strength is the legitimacy that we've earned over a decade servicing this community in a humble, helpful way. We're not going to give that for a two-bit events sponsorship."
Back in August a basic DRM driver for the NVIDIA Tegra 2 graphics core appeared but wasn't merged into the Linux kernel. The Tegra DRM driver still hasn't been merged to this day, but it might hit staging with the Linux 3.8 kernel.
While there's usually always something to talk about with each new kernel release for the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau DRM/KMS drivers, that isn't always the case for VMware's "vmwgfx" virtual GPU driver. This driver for exposing 3D acceleration to guest virtual machines on VMware's virtualization products does work quite well already, but the open-source developers have been recently working on a few improvements.
David Airlie has implemented another one of the OpenGL 4.x features into mainline Mesa. The new feature is currently fully supported for the Softpipe and tentatively for AMD R600g (targeting the Radeon HD 5000 series "Evergreen" GPUs) drivers.
The latest NVidia GeForce driver, released yesterday, gives Linux users ‘double the performance’ and ‘dramatically reduces game loading times’, according to the company’s press release.
Having been in development for almost a year, the GeForce R310 driver has been designed to ‘showcase the enormous potential of the world’s biggest open-source operating system’.
Wayland 1.0 was released last month but the code for it and Weston were still living on master. Following the release, 1.0 was still on master to get developers to focus on any bug-fixes before moving ahead with new features and improvements for the next major release. After a couple of weeks, it's now time to move the 1.0 code-bases of Wayland and Weston into a branch so that Git master can move ahead.
Now that Valve is out with its Steam for Linux beta test featuring 26 games, one has to wonder if the hardware available to Linux users is going to move into the gaming era as well. As many Linux users know, the state of Linux gaming has been pretty desolate for the past few years compared to other platforms.
The Necessitas port of Qt for Android has been contributed to the Qt Project. The announcement was made by Turunen Tuukka, Director of Qt Commercial R&D at Digia. The Qt 4.8 port, which was started in late 2010 and introduced in February 2011 by lead developer Bogdan Vatra, remains under the control of the Necessitas project at KDE, while the contributed code will provide the basis of a Qt 5 for Android port. Digia, which acquired the Qt technology in August and promised to add Android to the platforms that Qt works on, is planning to work with the Qt Project and aims to add Android to its list of Tier 1 fully supported platforms in 2013.
Since SpaceFM is entering the GTK3 realm (SpaceFM can now be built on anything from GTK 2.18 “I won’t give up my lenny!” thru GTK 3.6.x), I’m starting to hear more feedback about GTK3 and experiencing a few things for myself. While SpaceFM’s GTK3 port has been running very well with the few non-broken themes I could find, there are some intrinsic problems with any GTK3 app due to GTK’s poor maintenance, as well as a growing culture of enforced conformity from GNOME devs. Some of the things you’re about to read should make your hair curl and your blood boil.
The fallback mode, also known as the classic GNOME session, will no longer be included starting with GNOME 3.8, the next stable GNOME release.
I downloaded Luninux a couple of weeks ago at the same time that I downloaded Fuduntu. I wrote a review about Fuduntu last week and I was really impressed.
When I booted Luninux for the first time I noticed that this operating system is using the Gnome 3.4.1 shell which basically makes it look like Gnome 2 as well. At a first glance you could be confused into thinking that there isn’t much difference between Luninux and Fuduntu except that Luninux is based on Ubuntu and Fuduntu is based on Fedora.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, including the KVM hypervisor, has been awarded a major security certification used by IT in government, financial and other mission-critical verticals. By receiving the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, which is the highest level of assurance for an unmodified commercial operating system, Red Hat can assure public sector customers looking at cloud and virtualization will meet a range of important security assurance requirements.
Debian will no longer be defaulting to the Xfce desktop but they have returned to using the GNOME desktop as the default.
Back in August it was reported that Debian was defaulting to Xfce rather than GNOME with the Tasksel Git. The reason for changing the recommended desktop came down to Xfce being lighter than GNOME so that the Xfce desktop could fit entirely on the first Debian CD where as GNOME fails in this regard.
The next version of Ubuntu is ready for testing on 32 and 64-bit x86 systems, as well as PowerPC hardware
Recently I had a bit of a nightmarish experience that we might be able to transition into an opportunity. Let me share it with you.
For many years now I have been running my personal website at www.jonobacon.org. The site is nothing special, just my blog and some other content, and I have been running it on a dedicated host alongside some other sites (including Stuart Langridge’s homepage). Stuart and I shared the server and paid nearly $1400 a year for the hosting.
I realized this morning that this week marks two years since Mark Shuttleworth shared his plans for Ubuntu's Unity to run on Wayland. Even after two years, Ubuntu's engagement with Wayland hasn't advanced much and it's consummation of Wayland is still likely at a minimum another year out.
The plans back in November of 2010 were for Ubuntu's Unity desktop to eventually run on Wayland rather than the long-standing X.Org/X11 Server. Mark acknowledged back then that it would likely be a gradual transition and it still will be the case. Wayland 1.0 was recently released, but it's still not ready to take on the world with missing features, not all drivers/hardware being Wayland-compatible, and other shortcomings.
While trawling through the Internet today I came across the Linux Foundation's page, and my eyes were pulled to their top story. Now this is nothing new, I often find plenty of great articles and news to read there, but this was different. This was a post that was about Android.
Sony has revealed it's now at the helm of a project to bring pure Android 4.1 to the Xperia S and will bring Android 4.2 in the future
Yet another Sony smartphone has been leaked online, joining both the Odin and Yuga as something else for which to look forward.
With every new version of Android that comes out, Google has beefed up the mobile platform's security a bit. The latest release is no exception.
Android 4.2 Jelly Bean will include a built-in app scanner, according to Android vice president of engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer, who last week spoke with Computerworld's JR Raphael.
Mumbai based technology and electronic manufacturing company is all set to launch a Linux based tablet which can support 85 Global languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Urdu, Zulu and 23 Indian languages. The product is set for launch anytime post Diwali.
Analysts have been consistently reporting that tablet sales are eating into laptop sales. The regular reports of good tablet sales accompanied by lower laptop sales back up that trend. While prudent to take such reports with a grain of salt, my observations from the street indicate this is indeed happening, and at a very fast pace.
Mainstream desktop PCs is expected to account for 46.9% of the market each by the year-end, while the top-end PCs will account for only 6%
The demand for lower-end desktop PCs and notebook computers continue to dominate over high end models during this year, accounting largest chunk of PC shipment, according to IHS iSuppli.
According to IHS iSuppli Compute Platforms Topical Report, lower-end computers classified in either the "mainstream" category or the "value" the mainstream desktop PCs is expected to account for 46.9% of the market each by the year-end, while the top-end PCs will account for only 6%.
In notebook computer segment, the value notebook segment will account 46.8% of the market, mainstream laptops will account 44% and performance models will account just 9.2% of the market.
It likely won’t be as sleek or fast as a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10, but a new tablet running both Android and Linux is in the works for open source enthusiasts and lovers of low-budget devices.
Micro-blogging site Twitter experienced record traffic as the results of the 2012 US Presidential election were announced on Tuesday night, but the service never faltered despite the increased load – something Twitter engineers credit to the company's move from Ruby to Java for its backend software.
Open source software has been there for a long time. Its popularity is increasing each and every day and has reached such a level that it’s hard to find a domain which does not have an open source presence. Companies are reluctant to buy proprietary software due to the cost involved. In most cases, open source software seems to be a viable option.
Mark Shuttleworth opens LinuxCon Europe with a keynote on how the future of computing will be collaborative
Quick, how old is the Firefox browser? While some will argue with how exactly that question should be answered, Internet News has noted that version 1.0 arrived on November 9th, 2004, which means that today is Firefox's eighth birthday. In fact here's what was said about it back then. If you're struck by how really young Firefox is, you're not alone, and it just goes to show how much innovation can take place in less than a decade.
Holiday season is just around the corner, but this week it's festival season.
To be more accurate, it's time for the Mozilla Festival. A gathering of web-centric happy geeks that features peer learning time as well as hands on coding and tool experience sessions, plus a chance to hear from executive director of the Mozilla Foundation himself Mr Mark Surman.
For four years, the IRS has been poking around Mozilla's lucrative deal with Google. Today, the makers of the Firefox Web browser shared some good news: Mozilla has settled with the taxman.
Today, on the eve of the Mozilla Festival in London, Mozilla is proud to announce a new partnership aimed at spreading digital literacy in the UK.
Mozilla together with Nesta and Nominet Trust are creating a new fund and umbrella group focused on teaching digital making, web literacy and tech.
Writing in the Times Higher Education supplement, historian and former British Academy president Sir Keith Thomas said "the very purpose of the university" was being "grossly distorted by the attempt to create a market in higher education".
After the National Institutes of Health grew interested in bioinformatics, following breakthroughts in the 1990s, the National Centers for Biomedical Computing were created with the goal of advancing the field by a few leaps and bounds, because IT systems hadn’t quite caught up to molecular biology.
The nine centers were founded through the 2000s, and with the advent of new data processing and visualization tools, there's been "an explosion of knowledge" in biomedical research, said Brian Athey, from the University of Michigan Medical School’s National Center for Integrative Bio Informatics (NCIBI).
A legal opinion from FSFE suggests it doesn't, in Europe at least.
One of the tentative goals for the upcoming FreeBSD 10 release is for BSD’s base system to be totally free of code licensed under the GPL.
Beer is truly the most democratic, egalitarian, and open source of all beverages. It is for both common folk and connoisseurs. It is for the masses. And, from my experience as a homebrewer and beer geek, you will rarely find a beverage that can be so liberating (in more ways than one).
On September 10, 2012, the Italian data artist who is passionate about the open-source medium, posted on the website he created, Open Source Cure (artisopensource.net): "I have a brain cancer. Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors. Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life... I opened them... so that I could share them with everyone. Just today I have been able to share the data about my health condition with 3 doctors. 2 of them already replied."
It takes talent, luck and charisma to become a rock star (or money, connections and good looks, depending on how you look at it). It’s much harder to become a rock star of the open-source hardware movement. One way to do it is to create a compostable server chassis. No big deal, right?
Earlier this week I shared some updated benchmarks of the latest development code for LLVM/Clang 3.2 on an Intel Core i7 processor. Now from this same setup to complement the LLVM 3.1/3.2 benchmarks are results of the GCC 4.7.2 compiler, the latest GCC 4.8 development snapshot, and benchmarks of GCC when using LLVM's DragonEgg 3.1/3.2-SVN optimizer plug-in.
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has gained a new video player, with a little help from Kaltura. The open-source information site (and its related sites) are now using Kaltura's open-source HTML5 video player. The Wikimedia Foundation made the switch so it could better stream educational videos to multiple languages and devices.
It was quite expected from the beginning that the Redmond giant Microsoft is not going to earn huge profits from Bing. Unveiled in 2009, Bing is Microsoft's online search engine, which was launched to compete with the search leader Google.
The cover surrounding the touch panel of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, appears to be far from durable, as users are reporting that within mere days of receiving their version, it began to split and come away from the frame.
The problem is being experienced by multiple users, each of them reporting the same thing: where the keyboard magnetically attaches to the main body of the device, the cover seam begins to split. On top of this, many have also reported that the Windows 8 logo hasn’t been etched or embossed into the frame and has already begun to wear.
Under fire from its customers in the higher education market, Apple has proposed creating a new industry standard that would fix problems with its Bonjour zero configuration networking technology that is causing scalability and security problems on campus networks.
Despite the fact that I've been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we're not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen (thankfully), but rather ads that can be found inside of some Modern UI apps that Windows ships with. That includes Finance, Weather, Travel, News and so forth. Is it a problem? Let's tackle this from a couple of different angles.
Like a lot of people, I listened to Rush Limbaugh the day after the election. Pure Schadenfreude, I admit it; I just wanted to hear the reaction. I searched the right-wing media landscape far and wide and tried to find even a hint of self-examination, self-criticism, and I didn't find much. Then again, they didn't lose the presidential vote by much, so they didn't take the election result as a total repudiation of their belief system, as they probably shouldn't have, anyway.
Every ten years, the average IQ goes up by about 3 points. Psychologist James Flynn has spent decades documenting this odd fact, which was eventually dubbed the Flynn Effect. The question is, does the Flynn Effect mean we're getting smarter? Not according to Flynn, who argues that the effect simply reveals that IQ measures teachable skills rather than innate ones. As education changed over time, kids got better at standardized tests like the IQ test. And so their score
Update (9/11/2012): The error has now been corrected by the developers. The code now uses OPENSSL_cleanse() function rather than the eliminatable memset(), though the developers are looking for faster alternatives. Since the -O2 flag was used in the Tor project's configuration files, it is possible that the issue exists in Tor binaries for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in binaries earlier than version 2.2.39-5.
We've linked to the blog, PhotographyIsNotACrime.com (PINAC), a few times in the past (it recently moved locations). Its author, Carlos Miller, not only covered a number of cases involving photographers being arrested or harassed for photographing buildings, police or something else, but was a defendant in just such a case himself. Miller was arrested back in January while videotaping police at an "Occupy Miami" event. Not only was he arrested, but his camera was confiscated and the police deleted footage from the camera -- including footage of the encounter that led to his arrest. The police claimed that Miller had disobeyed an order by the police to "clear the area." However, the videotaped footage -- which Miller was able to recover despite the deletion -- showed a different story. It showed a clearly-aware-of-his-rights Miller making the case that he was doing nothing wrong. Furthermore, other journalists were allowed to stay in the area, and one of those journalists, Miami Herald reporter Glenn Garvin, testified at the trial about how he was allowed to stay. In fact, he went to the officer who arrested Miller and asked her if he needed to move, and she told him he was "under no threat of getting arrested."
In another blow to human rights, freedom, the law, and morality, the 7th Circuit Court has exonerated Donald Rumsfeld from prosecution for allegations of being a primary architect of U.S. torture policy.
THE evidence suggests that innocent bystanders are killed and injured often in US drone attacks – not occasionally.
The evidence is contained in a report compiled by Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity, Reprieve.
Seven U.S. Navy SEALs have been reprimanded for giving up classified information connected to their tradecraft so a video game could seem more realistic, according to a navy official.
U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady of Alexandria, Virginia, noted the investigation in a legal flap surrounding three WikiLeaks associates who lost their bid to protect their Twitter records from U.S. investigators. The three had asked the court to unseal documents in their case. In May, O’Grady ordered the documents remain under seal for six months. On Wednesday he renewed that order, based on a government filing.
Climate change is likely to be more severe than some models have implied, according to a new study which ratchets up the possible temperature rises and subsequent climatic impacts.
America's intelligence community was ordered to track poachers in Africa and Asia on Thursday as part of a new global drive against the illegal trade in elephant tusks and rhino horn.
U.S. regulators on Thursday accused a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc trader of defrauding the Wall Street bank of $118 million in a scheme of fabricated trades and fake entries.
Internal memos from large companies leak all the time. It happens. Companies don't like it, but most learn to deal with it. Sometimes, they go a bit nuts. For example, you may remember the spying scandal at HP, in which the board tried to stop leaks by spying on phone records and other info, including trying to spy on various journalists. Apparently some companies just go a bit nutty when they think they have someone to track down, where execs suddenly think they can act like they're in some sort of spy movie. Apparently this is now happening at Cisco as well. A few weeks ago, Network World reported on Cal State's decision to use Alcatel-Lucent instead of Cisco, claiming that it saved the university $100 million. As is fairly typical at companies when such bad news is in the press, an internal memo was sent around on how to respond to questions about this story. And... as is fairly typical at such companies, the internal memo leaked to bloggers who posted it. The memo itself is fairly tame and about what you'd expect given the situation.
The European Union has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. But it is today’s Greek anti-fascist movement that deserves an award for doing what European states have so far failed to do — confronting the rise of violent neo-Nazi movements on the continent.
Although fascism is not new in Greece, it has seen a resurgence in the Golden Dawn party, which won 18 parliamentary seats in the last election. Some polls indicate that approximately half of Greek police support Golden Dawn and that the party enjoys legitimacy in wide social circles. Police sometimes even refer crime victims to Golden Dawn for follow-up on law enforcement and citizen protection.
In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.
I would not necessarily compare the deterrent effects of punishments for a capital crime, which is often a crime of passion, with financial fraud. And beyond some point no matter how severe the punishment may become, the deterrence is not commensurately increased.
The problem is that there is little or no personal penalty these days for even the most egregious forms of financial misbehaviour and fraud. There is a fellowship of mutual corruption at the heart of the money system.
And as some have warned for years, political capture and moral hazard have broken the Anglo-American financial system with profound implications for the real economy. What I find appalling is when so called progressive economists dismiss this important principle for the sake of their models and expediency.
The Australian government has now, after years of testing and preparing, formally abandoned a plan to filter its domestic Internet. Officials now say that it will use Interpol’s "worst of" child abuse site list as a way to shield Ozzies from truly awful content.
All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China on Friday night and into Saturday, the company confirmed. The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way.
On Wednesday, AT&T announced a plan to invest $14 billion in expanding its wireless and U-Verse service around the country. At the same time, the company submitted a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking for an end to the "conventional public-utility-style regulation."
With most voter ID laws blocked before the 2012 elections and local election officials and civic groups prepared for True the Vote's intimidation tactics, some of the worst fears about voter disenfranchisement were averted in Tuesday's vote. But partisan voting laws and continued confusion over election administration led to long lines -- prompting President Obama to note "by the way, we have to fix that," in his acceptance speech.
How can a virtually unknown Indian boost his Twitter following a hundred-fold overnight?
Ravi Srinivasan did it by becoming the first person in India to be arrested for a tweet. The 46-year-old runs a packaging business in the southern Indian city of Pondicherry.
Mr. Hansen, 65, joined the group in 1973 and became senior staff counsel 20 years later, a role that allowed him to pick and choose issues to litigate around the country, from gene-patenting to Internet censorship to failing schools. Friday is Mr. Hansen’s last day.
This week, I’m just back from Azerbaijan – so human rights issues are very much on my mind.
The European Union is not just a common market; and not just a guardian of peace. It’s a place of fundamental rights. Rights that we treasure, protect and assure for our citizens. And nor is the Internet just a set of technologies, or just a space for business opportunities. It is the new frontier of freedom. And people like the inspiring young Malala Yousafzai are a reminder of that.
The need to bring all stakeholders together to discuss the future of copyright appears to have gotten a push from this year’s UN-led Internet Governance Forum.
Trevor Clarke, assistant director general for the Culture and Creative Industries Sector of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said during a workshop on “Rethinking Copyright” today that the multi-stakeholder environment is “the best and and most appropriate” when it comes to the debate on copyright in the digital age. WIPO is preparing for such multi-stakeholder discussions, Clarke told Intellectual Property Watch.
You may recall that back when AT&T was trying to buy T-Mobile, a big part of the argument was a spectrum crunch around its wireless efforts. The company insisted -- strenuously -- that it would not be able to expand 4G LTE services to more than 80% of the population unless it had T-Mobile. That argument ran into some trouble when a lawyer accidentally posted some documents to the FCC which admitted that the company could fairly easily expand its coverage to 97% of the population of the US without T-Mobile (and, in fact, that it would cost about 10% of what buying T-Mobile would cost). Suddenly, the argument that it absolutely needed T-Mobile rang hollow -- even as the company continued to insist exactly that. Still, the FCC suddenly was skeptical and AT&T, seeing the writing on the wall, gave up on the merger.
A teenaged hacker known as Cosmo the God, who was involved in a number of big site takedowns earlier this year, and who is considered a "social engineering mastermind" has been sentenced to probation. The terms include a ban on internet access until his 21st birthday, six years from now, according to a Wired article by Mat Honan. For many years, we've questioned whether or not it's reasonable (or even practical) to ban people from the internet for computer related crimes. It seems not only stupid and counterproductive, but just plain bizarre. The internet is so integrated into our lives these days that taking the internet out of your life is a lot more complicated than some might imagine.
The threat posed to Germany's underground club scene by all-around IP thug GEMA is no longer just a threat. Back in July, GEMA decided to "streamline" its convoluted fee structure. Naturally, it decided to smooth things over in a upward motion, raising the fees charged to these clubs by up to 1,400%. This sparked protests against GEMA's tactics and a petition with 60,000 signatures was brought to the Deutsches Bundestag (Germany's parliament). Unfortunately, the Deutsches Bundestag punted, suggesting those unhappy with the new fee structure negotiate directly with GEMA. [However you spell "LOL" in German goes here.]
The copyright infringement lawsuit concerned the online publication of lyrics to works by Van Morrison, Ray Charles and others.
For many years now, we've covered how music publishers have gone after all sorts of sites that post song lyrics, arguing infringement. As we've noted time and time again, this whole thing seems short sighted in the extreme. Lyrics sites don't take away from interest in a song, they only increase it. And, yes, publishers have different interests than the musicians or labels, but it still seems counterproductive to sue and take down sites that were increasing interest in the actual music, as lyrics sites do. Unfortunately, lots of lyrics sites have been forced offline because the rates the publishers want are insane. A few years ago, a bunch of publishers went after Brad Greenspan's LiveUniverse for its lyrics offerings. Greenspan -- who was associated with MySpace in the early days as its parent company Intermix's CEO -- has, well, a colorful history. He's spent many years stamping his feet about how Rupert Murdoch should have paid more for MySpace back in the day.