The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the immediate release of the “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report,” which shares new and trending data that reveals Linux is the primary platform for the cloud and users consider the operating system more secure than alternative platforms. The findings also show a 14-point increase in Linux deployments over the last four years, while deployments on Windows have experienced a 9-point decline.
The Linux Foundation today released its 2014 end user trends report, providing visibility into how some of the world's largest IT organizations are thinking about and using Linux.
At the core of any organisation are important IT systems that are vital for continued successful operation. Mission-critical applications, such as ERP, CRM, business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytics, advance and support business in many fundamental ways. In the modern, global corporate landscape, it is almost certain that users will need to access these systems at any time of day, demanding around-the-clock, 24/7 availability. Any outage of mission-critical server infrastructure directly impacts revenue and profitability, so downtime must be avoided.
The Open Compute Platform launched its networking effort in 2013 in a bid to disrupt the business model of big networking vendors. One of those big vendors is Juniper Networks. Today, in a surprising move, Juniper announced that it is embracing the Open Compute Platform with its own open hardware switch, the OCX 1100.
The open-source Docker project is growing today with the announcement of new efforts that expand the deployment and usability options of the popular container application virtualization technology. Docker Inc., the lead commercial vendor behind the open-source Docker project, is also announcing a commercial enterprise product and partnerships to help further accelerate adoption.
Fedora 21 is due out in a few days and as such I've been busy extensively testing and benchmarking this first Fedora Linux update in a year. To not much surprise given the close package versions to Ubuntu 14.10, Fedora 21 isn't performing very differently from the Ubuntu Utopic Unicorn.
A large number of people are using Whatsapp on their phones, but a very good alternative for that app is Telegram. The main difference is that the Telegram devs have also released a desktop client for the Linux platform, that is also open source.
For years I avoided installing keyboard shortcut tools on my computers. I thought dog-gonnit, if something needed to be typed out, I'd type every letter myself. Recently I capitulated, however, and I must say, going back seems unlikely. If you've never tried a text-replacement app, I highly recommend doing so. The time it saves is incredible, and after I abandoned my grouchy old ways, I've grown to love it.
Beyond the reviews I also provide how-to guides including tutorials for creating live USB drives, testing virtual machines and installing the Linux distributions that I review.
Airline Tycoon Deluxe, an economic sim game that lets players take control of an airline, has been finally landed on Linux 16 yeaesrs after the original launch.
Always Sometimes Monsters is a highly rated, award winning, and great looking 2D game that looks like it really will be coming to Linux.
The crowd-funded point-and-click adventure from the designer of the classic 'Gabriel Knight' games, Jane Jensen, was funded on Kickstarter in 2012. In April the game was released for Windows and Mac, and now it looks like the long wait for a Linux version might soon come to an end.
According to the blog post Firaxis/2K are planning to release a patch for the Windows version. Aspyr intends to release the patch for Mac simultaneously, but unfortunately they have run into some problems with it. The post doesn't specify the nature of the problems, but it's bad news for Linux too, since they want to have the patch in before the full release for our platform.
I look forward to watching you all fail, horribly. Sadly it seems like it's not available on Linux yet.
Steam has hit over 800 Linux games recently, so if you head over to the SteamOS + Linux section and filter to "Games" the current count at time of writing is 820, that's a whopper of a number!
QLLauncher is a Quake Live launcher for Linux which comes with various tweaks that should improve the game's performance. Furthermore, the tool supports downloading and updating Quake Live along with other useful features.
Braveland Wizard, a turn-based strategy game developed and published by Tortuga Team, has been released on Steam for Linux and is now available with a 15% discount.
KGet is the download manager of KDE. As part of the current porting to the KF5 frameworks its functionality was taken under verification. In an online survey users were asked about their opinions, needs and requirements. The evaluation for the current program can be found in the posting on “What people think about KGet“. The analysis of requirements follows in this posting.
This week I finally moved kdecoration2 to the kde/workspace project structure and merged in the required backend code in kwin. This means the upcoming 5.2 release will ship with the new Breeze window decoration by default.
Several KDE users came by for a little chat or to see the new Plasma 5. But there were also many none-linux-users. They were interested and I think also a little bit impressed by our powerful software and community.
Within OpenShift Online, in the main menu, click on the Add application button, and search for ownCloud if you do not see it on the list. Choose the URL of your application, and then starting the application in the cloud usually took OpenShift about 30 seconds. Then, it is time to login to your app using the generated password. For safety, make sure that you change the password during your first login. Now, you are good to go, you have 1 GB of online storage for free!
Semplice Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian's Sid unstable branch that aims to provide a clean and simple user experience. A new version has just been released and it's quite different from any of the previous versions.
Arch users always say that the Wiki is the best feature of Arch, and you need it to keep everything running properly. I knew this when I started. What took me so long to figure out is that it’s import to not wait until something’s broken to use it.
Individuals who apply for an openSUSE Membership will be able to vote during elections and run for candidacy
As part of this initiative, Huawei and Red Hat aim to combine Huawei's world class domain expertise and extensive global experience with telecommunications companies and Red Hat's leading OpenStack and open source expertise to help CSPs embrace cloud computing with a carrier-grade OpenStack solution. Huawei and Red Hat plan to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Huawei’s FusionSphere Cloud OS at the management layer to offer a unified open, flexible, and production-ready cloud solution to support telecommunication carriers' NFV evolution. Working together, Huawei and Red Hat plan to align upstream contributions, engineering, product, and go-to-market efforts to drive the adoption of OpenStack for NFV implementations by CSPs.
Inspired by Intel's tick-tock model of processor development cycles in flipping between architecture and manufacturing advancements, Fedora Linux developers are currently considering a similar model in flipping between feature releases.
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller brought up for public discussion the idea of Fedora moving to a tick-tock release cadence. Under the proposal, it would allow alternating between a focus on release features and on release engineering / QA / tooling. The "tick" releases of Fedora would drive features and reduce release engineering changes while the "tock" would focus more on the engineering / tooling changes.
At the Fedora 21 Final Go/No-Go Meeting a few minutes ago, Fedora QA, Release Engineering, and Development agreed to Go with the Fedora 21 Final.
Debian’s suffering a civil war, and it’s all because of systemd. A Debian systemd maintainer and others have resigned, a splinter group threatened to fork Debian if the controversial init system was made mandatory, and a Debian Technical Comitttee vote chose systemd as Debian’s default init system.
The latest development is a vote that concluded “Support for other init systems is recommended, but not mandatory.” In other words, packages in Debian can force the use of systemd.
Now, the group that threatened the fork is making good on their threat.
This version of Elive includes a first selection of the packages that should be used in the next Stable version, we have not finished yet with the selection but there’s already a good amount of them included, there’s also nice tools created by elive that are meant to make your life much easier!, also, since the version of Reiser4 supports TRIM for SSD drives we updated the version of reiser4progs.
The Ubuntu Touch operating system is almost ready and soon we'll start seeing various devices running it. Until that happens, we only have some leaked images to talk about, like the one that landed today.
Last week we mentioned that the release of an Ubuntu Touch version of the Meizu MX4 is now tantalizingly close. We should be seeing the new OS on the already familiar handset some time, early next year.
Today we received an email with a new photo, showing the smartphone and what appears to be the Ubuntu Touch menu. It seems that everything is finally coming together and the agitating wait for OEMs to pick up Canonical's mobile OS might be nearing to a close.
The best thing about the Click packages is that they do not require dependencies, dependencies being a big issues on all the Linux systems. Also, it is easier for the developers to pack their apps as click packages, via the Ubuntu SDK, instead of using the DEB packaging format.
Another week, another Ubuntu Tablet news item... This time there's an unheard of company that's looking to deliver an Ubuntu Tablet inspired by Canonical's failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone.
Configurable Menu is one of the best applet’s I’ve found in Linux Mint Cinnamon. I’ve been using it for about three weeks on Linux Mint 17 installed on my laptop. And I’ve just installed it on a test installation of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon in VMware.
In this post, you’ll read why I like Configurable Menu so much and how you can install it on your Linux Mint 17/17.1 Cinnamon desktop.
So, why do I like Configurable Menu so much?
The answer, dear reader, lies in its name – configurable. Configurable Menu is very, very configurable. It can take on any form that you want – from a classic menu type to a fullscreen application launcher and any form in between.
A distribution that uses the word “ultimate” in its title always seems a little bit much, but the fact is that Mint Ultimate 17.1 is actually quite close to filling that bill. It's a new spin of Linux Mint and many users will find it quite interesting.
Anyone in the market for a mini PC that is capable of running either Android or Ubuntu might be interested in the newly unveiled CompuLab Utilite2 which is powered by a Snapdragon processor and supports Android 4.4.3 operating system.
At Indiegogo there’s a Linux-based automated beer brewing machine called the Brewie, with 20-liter capacity, plus touchscreen, RFID, and mobile app access.
Recently we had the release of the Tizen 2.3 SDK, and now we have a maintenence release of Tizen 2.3 Rev1 SDK which is available to available via the SDK download page.
Here is a video of a Seasoned photojournalist, in this case Dan Kitwood, who has taken the Tizen based Samsung NX1 Smart Camera into the elements with him to put it to the test.
Imagination’s Linux/Android “Creator CI20ââ¬Â³ hacker SBC, featuring a dual MIPS core Ingenic JZ4780 SoC, 4GB flash, WiFi, and BT 4.0, is now selling for $65.
Imagination Technologies today launched Creator CI20, a new development board that unites a dual-core 1.2 GHz MIPS32 CPU and a full suite of connectivity options (Fast Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0) into an Internet of Things platform that runs a variety of Linux distributions or Android 4.4 KitKat and retails for $65.
After a less-than-smooth rollout three weeks after it began to roll out Android Lollipop to users, Google has begun the process of getting Lollipop 5.0.1 out the door.
The big advantage with the paper display is the increased battery life—up to five days when using it as an e-reader and up to two days when using the paper display as a smartphone, Yota promises. The problem for the company is that features for extending battery life have become much more common, which makes it less of a differentiator compared to a year ago.
In the Linuxphere today Adam Williamson announced Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 4. Lifehacker is running an interview with Kali developer Mati Aharoni and the Linux Foundation released a study on Linux usage trends. Patrick Masson discusses "openwashing" and Linux gaming reaches new milestones. In software news Opera 26 was released, Eric Geier presents firewall options, and The Register features 10 "freeware apps" for Linux.
The Node.js server-side Javascript runtime is today’s hot thing. You might say it’s the Ruby on Rails of the ’10s. Where developers used to code in Perl and PHP, then Ruby/Rails, today’s startup-fueled web-development world is all about Javascript on the server, and Node is the grease that makes it all go.
We’re still suspicious of their motives and know they would destroy us tomorrow if they could — but that doesn’t worry us, because they can’t. They have too much on their plate as they fight for survival. But even if they didn’t we still wouldn’t be afraid — not of them, nor of Oracle or anyone else who’d like nothing better than to squish us under their thumbs. We’ve won. As Dwight Merriman, co-founder of DoubleClick – a closed company if ever there was one — told me recently when I asked him about open source in the enterprise, “I think it’s mainstream.” He should know; he’s on our side now.
These days the future of FOSS is pretty secure; we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. We even seem to be slowly gaining the upper hand on the patent front, with many recent court rulings taking the wind out of the trolls’ sails, if you’ll excuse the cliche.
The newest Chrome Beta channel release includes several new developer features to help you make richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
Chrome has transformed itself from a mere browser to a full-fledged operating system. It now has apps, extensions, themes, and a complete ecosystem built around it. Developed by Google, this browser, which is based on an open-source project, has become one of the most popular products made by the search giant. In fact, combined with Android, Chrome has the potential to become a formidable force that might be able to completely unshackle users from the clutches of Microsoft.
The scale of the problem became apparent in an open source project where I volunteer, the Apache OpenOffice community. For several months, the user support mailing list has been bothered with apparently random questions -- some very angry -- from people seeking support for an iPad app. The community has been confused by these questions, since they have nothing to do with any work at Apache; Apache OpenOffice doesn't even have an iOS version.
Google Code-in is an initiative for 13-17 year olds to get involved in open source software projects.
Back in 2012 OpenBSD got forked as Bitrig and as of this week the initial release is finally available.
Bitrig launched to focus on supporting modern architectures, a focus on LLVM/Clang rather than GCC, and other modern development focuses compared to OpenBSD carrying a lot of legacy support.
Since the last GNU GS release Artifex Software have moved from GPL to the GNU Affero GPL V3 the gpl-ghostscript package (at version 9.07), and GNU-GS moved to this license too with this release.
FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video and it was just upgraded to a new major version, 2.5. It comes with a lot of new features and it's pretty interesting.
The current Zeitgeist of the broader Open Source and Free Software community incubated his disturbing mindset. Our community suffers now from regular and active cooption by for-profit interests. The Trade Association Executive's fundraising claim — which probably even bears true in their subset of the community — shows the primary mechanism of cooption: encourage funding only from a few, big sources so they can slowly but surely dictate project policy.
The TIM Review is an open access journal with an upcoming Open Source Strategy issue they want you to contribute to. Mekki MacAulay is the guest editor for the issue, and in this interview find out more about the journal, this issue, and how you can share your expertise on the subject.
CIOs are under pressure from their line-of-business colleagues who are reportedly exerting greater influence over IT purchasing decisions, according to a newly released global study.
The shift away from CIOs has caused them to change their priorities for their businesses as they turn to new measures to regain control of ICT spending.
In May 2014 at the all-girls Emma Willard School in upstate New York, nearly a third of the school's 300+ students were preparing for their final Advanced Placement (AP) exams. But exactly three were studying for the AP Computer Science exam—and they weren't doing so on campus. The school (full disclosure: my alma mater) completely eliminated its computer science program in 2009.
Everyone is bad at passwords; that's nothing new. But if you're working at a high-profile studio like Sony, perhaps you should choose a better password than "s0ny123" or "password."
On Wednesday, Google announced that many of its “Captchas”—the squiggled text tests designed to weed out automated spambots—will be reduced to nothing more than a single checkbox next to the statement “I’m not a robot.” No more typing in distorted words or numbers; Google says it can, in many cases, tell the difference between a person or an automated program simply by tracking clues that don’t involve any user interaction. The giveaways that separate man and machine can be as subtle as how he or she (or it) moves a mouse in the moments before that single click.
When completing an online form, proving that you’re not a robot can be very annoying. Sometimes even frustrating, especially if the website uses reCAPTCHA or a similar implementation of a system that asks you to decipher some cryptic text.
I don’t use reCAPTCHA on this website, but I do encounter it on other websites. So it was heart-warming to learn that Google has released a new implementation of reCAPTCHA called No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA that doesn’t come with reCAPTCHA’s annoying aspects.
The official announcement has it that “a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.”
What’s not to like about that? But is it as simple as that? And how does the system know that the entity completing a form is a human and not an automated script? The simplest way to find out is to try and complete an online form protected from bots by No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.
After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.
The problem is not a lack of places to plug in: There are at least 20,000 stations in the US, and that number is quickly growing. But they’re no help unless they’re both easy to find and available. In my case, they were neither.
With more money available the prices of houses at the lower end will increase - a bribe to current homeowners with houses valued between €£125k and €£750k - exactly those swing voters predominantly located in marginal constituencies.
Chicago City Council Voted To Increase Minimum Wage To $13 Per Hour In 2019. On December 2, Chicago's 50-member city council "overwhelmingly" approved a plan to increase the city's minimum wage to $13 per hour by 2019 with only five alderman opposing the measure. Chicago will raise its minimum wage to $10 next year, and increase the minimum wage "by steps of 50 cents and $1" until the $13 dollar an hour mark is reached in 2019. Approximately 400,000 workers in the city will be affected by the increase. [Associated Press, 12/2/14]
I love teaching. It is what I was born to do. I’m a thirtysomething further education teacher with a first class degree, a PGCE, qualified teacher status and two subject specialisms, who has repeatedly been rated outstanding in my teaching.
I’m also a parent of a 15-year-old child with an autistic spectrum disorder and straight after I have written this piece, I will be leaving teaching.
I’m not unusual. I’ve been on zero-hours contracts for some time and it has finally got to me. I’m tired of thinking I’ve secured a future for me and my child, tired of thinking I won’t have to worry about whether we both eat or whether we have heating, tired of worrying how we will cope if my child loses their school coat. As I explained yesterday on 5Live, I’ve decided to leave teaching for a supermarket job that will give me the security of knowing how much I’ll have available to pay my bills each month.
Over the past couple of weeks there has been a marked increase in the number of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against Tor users of web based Bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain.info. One user reported 63 bitcoin stolen, and there were many other examples as the thefts continued despite warnings to users. The attacks were so successful that Blockchain resorted to blocking all traffic to the wallet service from Tor exit nodes.
Following recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica, there’s been new interest in the government’s use of a relatively obscure law, the All Writs Act. According to these reports, the government has invoked the All Writs Act in order to compel the assistance of smartphone manufacturers in unlocking devices pursuant to a search warrant. The reports are based on orders from federal magistrate judges in Oakland and New York City issued to Apple and another unnamed manufacturer (possibly also Apple) respectively, requiring them to bypass the lock screen on seized phones and enable law enforcement access.
You may recall, back in June, that there was a key House vote that took NSA supporters by surprise. An amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill pushed by a bi-partisan team of Thomas Massie, Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren passed overwhelmingly, with a plan to slam the door shut on questionable NSA "backdoor searches" (as described in detail earlier). The House voted 293 to 123, making it a pretty clear and overwhelming statement that Congress did not, in fact, support such practices by the NSA.
But I was surprised today when I tried to use it from Tor Browser and it failed to generate a short URL. Instead, I got this message: “Your computer is blacklisted; cannot make ur1s!”
The class, taught by PR agent Rick Rosenthal, focused on such topics as "Managing the Media When Things Get Ugly (Think Ferguson)." A flyer promoting the class promised, "In addition to the Ferguson case study, this fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!"
Sound boring? Not at all! "The training is also highly entertaining," the flyer emphasized. "You will learn a lot, and you'll have fun doing it!"
Why are people falsely convicted? The reasons include mistaken witness identification, false confession, official misconduct, perjury, false accusation, and false or misleading forensic evidence. As Lavender reports, “The factors involved in a wrongful conviction vary depending on the crime.” In child sexual abuse cases, for instance, over 80% of exonerations involve perjury or false accusation. By contrast, in sexual assault cases, a majority of exonerations hinge on mistaken witness identification.
Seven contractors were rounded up for swiping electronic items, jewelry and other items from checked baggage at Kennedy Airport’s Terminals 4 and 7 between 2012 and June of this year, officials said. The thieves would then sell the items they stole.
It's debatable whether or not you'd refer to Garner as resisting; he's certainly loudly protesting that he'd done nothing wrong, and he does not appear eager to put his hands behind his back to be handcuffed. But that "resistance" lasted a few seconds before he was choked.
The Glomar Response dates back to the 1970s, and allows agencies to respond that they can “neither confirm or deny” as a response to requests for information made under the federal Freedom of Information Act, when responding might compromise national security or privacy. As CJ Ciaramella writes, “The Glomar doctrine gives agencies the obvious power to hide the existence of records, but it also allows agencies to short-circuit the appeal process, since requestors can’t file an appeal for records they don’t know exist.” In Abdur-Rashid’s case, the NYPD argued that responding to his request would disclose, in Campbell’s words, “sensitive information about the department’s investigative techniques.”
If there are two ways in which the Internet is similar in the United States and Canada, it’s that it’s slow and expensive in both places relative to many developed countries. The big difference, however, is that Canada is looking into doing something about it.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the northern equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—is in its second week of hearings on how to ensure that Internet subscribers get access to the newest and fastest services at the best prices possible.
One reason for this hiatus is that there has been a change at the top. Karel De Gucht has relinquished his post, which has been taken by the Swede Cecilia Malmström. She is adopting a very different style, not least in terms of her attitude to the public. Faced by the growing scepticism about TTIP's benefits, and anger over its complete lack of any meaningful transparency, Malmström has taken a conciliatory approach, promising more openness, some of which has now been announced.
But Malmström is still trotting out the same old misinformation about TTIP. In a recent opinion piece she published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the paragraph about ISDS is particularly pernicious. Malmström says that European member states have signed a total of 1400 agreements that include ISDS; this is presumably to "prove" that ISDS is completely normal and totally harmless. Neither is true.
As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister's former IP advisor, as "facilitators" web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame.
The Paris Court has ordered French ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. The legal action, brought by anti-piracy group SCPP, resulted in an injunction ordering local service providers to "implement all necessary measures" to render not only the site inaccessible, but also its proxies.