The biggest thing Intel brought to the CES table this year was undeniably its Sandy Bridge processor, but the electronics manufacturer also introduced a new way to play with Legos. Using an Intel Core i7 processor and Gentoo Linux, Intel programmers are bringing the digital world of toys into the physical one.
InfoWorld has put together a Linux IQ test to see just how learned you are vis-à-vis the free-and-open-source operating system that makes the world go ’round. (You do know that Android is based on Linux, right?) Let’s see how well you do!
The new system runs a Linux-based matching engine, understood to be developed around Red Hat software. In November the exchange hired 81 additional open source staff to cope with the changes to the system, which operates in a C++ environment. It replaces a Microsoft .Net system, built by Accenture.
For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel's new processors.
Now that the kernel mode-setting page-flipping for the ATI Radeon DRM kernel module has been merged into the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and the respective bits have been set in the xf86-video-ati DDX, we're in the process of running new open-source ATI graphics benchmarks under Linux. Our initial results (included in this article) show these latest improvements to cause some major performance boosts for the open-source ATI driver as it nears the level of performance of the proprietary Catalyst driver.
Brian Joseph, CEO at Zarafa, explains: "In 2010 we have experienced that many Scalix partners changed to Zarafa. And now we see many Scalix customers checking non-Linux-alternatives because they do not trust the Scalix roadmap promises anymore. We have decided to help these customers to continue to use Linux".
There are many good reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution - it enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable and stable income. That can be used to plan support for contributors and events that help speed up development of KDE software, enhance our promotion efforts and help grow our community. However, our contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds and their reasons for contributing are likely to be just as diverse. We caught up with our 125th supporting member, Paul Eggleton to ask him why he Joined the Game.
You'll find far less hand-holding on the Arch Forums than some of the other distro's forums, and for good reason. Arch has one of the most informative, user-friendly wiki's out there. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT ask a question in the forums or on IRC without searching the wiki and the forums first. If you can't find a solution by searching, include all appropriate log files and as much information as possible in your request. Look at some of the current posts marked "Solved" in the Arch Forums for examples.
This version fixes some booting issues and Save Session for CD/DVD. There were a few bugs fixed in the new direct ISO booting feature. Super Grub Disk(1/2) has been updated to .9799 and 1.98s1. Some other minor issues…
13 Jan 2011. New release, new bugs :-) I have discovered that the functionality implemented in pelican_config is not working on v2.3. For most people, this is no problem. For those of you who would like to user permanent storage, use the older method - there's a prompt at boot time. For pelican_config users, mount your $PELHOME by hand.
We are pleased to announce the Alpine 2.1.4 release.
Superb Mini Server version 1.5.5 released (Linux kernel 2.6.35.7)
Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL).
After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn't a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren't in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update.
Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users.
Android has surged past iOS in ad impressions on Millennial’s ad network for the first time, breaking a two-month tie that suggested a possible lull in the growth of Google’s mobile platform. Android now represents 46 percent of ad impressions in December, compared to 32 percent for iOS after the two OSes were tied at 38 percent in November. Millennial said Android has also widened its lead in ad revenue from applications with 55 percent compared to 39 percent for iOS.
Google will announce Android 2.4 "Ice Cream" in May, adding fuel to the theory that version 3.0 will fork Android, say reports. Meanwhile, Samsung is rumored to be prepping a "Vibrant 4G" phone for T-Mobile's HSPA+ network featuring 21Mbps downloads, Samsung and IBM are teaming up on mobile R&D, and the Google Goggles app gets a marketing-focused upgrade, says eWEEK.
The vast majority of the tablets, however, use the Linux-based Android. At BetaNews, Joe Wilcox quotes a Caris & Co estimate at the start of the show stating that some 69 tablets were expected to be shown or announced. CNET, meanwhile, says the number was more like 75.
At CES last week, MIPS Technologies, demonstrated a number of MIPS-based Android mobile devices, including two smartphones and several tablets. MIPS also announced that Chinese semiconductor firm Ingenic -- whose MIPS-based processors power Velocity's Cruz Android tablets, has licensed the MIPS32 architecture to develop one of the new Android smartphones -- while an Action Semiconductor MIPS SoC powers the other.
Samsung Electronics has shown off a Google TV-based Blu-ray player and companion box at CES, due to ship later this year. Meanwhile, Vizio unveiled two HDTVs running the Android- and Intel Atom-based Google TV stack, including a 56-inch model.
Verizon Wireless capped off a week of Android-based smartphone introductions with two new 4G LTE-ready, 4.3-inch models: HTC's ThunderBolt and LG's Revolution. The phones will compete on Verizon with Motorola's similarly 4.3-inch Droid Bionic, announced earlier this week, which ups the ante with a dual-core, Nvidia Tegra-2 processor.
Around mid-2010, Jonnalagadda started HasGeek, a firm that works for the open source community, and helps support it. He explains: “We have a lot of good software developers in India. They may contribute to open source. But very few Indian projects are able to make it big and retain the lead.”
One almost starts to question whether open source has been so heavily influenced by its commercial cousins that the true open source maverick will be left struggling to find a voice. So is there still a place for the OSS 'garage band' software start up?
Yes - of course there is. But how can we be sure?
The Brisbane river was expected to peak today, and the post notes: “We should know the full extent of the floods around this time and will continually keep people updated via the web and social networking sites.”
A decision on whether to go ahead with the 12th Australian national Linux conference, which is scheduled to be held in Brisbane from January 24 to 29, will be made on Monday, January 17.
We've made the point many times that one open source browsers--with Firefox and Chrome leading the way--are setting the pace in browser innovation, but as open source browsers run neck-and-neck, and still compete with Internet Explorer, are we in danger of seeing fragmented standards? On The Chromium Blog this week, Google officials wrote that they are putting more muscle behind the VP8 open source video codec, and that future versions of Chrome will support the WebM Project and Ogg Theora codecs. The upshot: Google is moving steadily away from supporting H.264 video, and that may eventually have a big impact on web publishers and device manufacturers.
We built RedMonk Analytics to track developer behaviors, and what it is telling us at present is that Firefox and IE both are losing share amongst developer populations to Chrome. Chrome is highly performant, but also benefiting from significant marketing investment (e.g. billboards, site sponsorships) and related product development (e.g. Chrome Web Store). The conclusion from this data is that Chrome will eclipse Firefox from a marketshare standpoint (speaking specifically of developers, not the wider market where Firefox is sustainably ahead), likely within a quarter.
But having tested the 4.0 version of Firefox for several weeks, it’s clear that Mozilla’s browser is responding to the evolutionary threat. Firefox 4.0 is faster and less stale from a user interface perspective, but more importantly differentiated via features like Panorama.
The 4.0 release is unlikely to be sufficient in preventing Chrome from assuming the top spot among developer browser usage, but it is likely to arrest the free fall. Expect Chrome and Firefox to be heavily competitive in 2011.
1. Virtual appliances become a stepping stone to the cloud: Software vendors eager to offer on-demand application services find a simple solution that doesn't require the time and expense of re-architecting applications. Enter virtual appliances, which are already being used by software vendors like VMware, IBM and SAP. The need for simpler deployment and the demand for cloud-based options are driving major ISV interest in virtual appliances, which are optimized, pre-configured virtual workloads. In 2011, 25 major ISVs will use virtual appliances as a fast and painless way to meet the demand for cloud-based application delivery (SaaS), and Linux will be a key enabler of this approach.
Oracle has ended MySQL support for several operating systems that either reached the end-of-life or were not in popular demand.
A company, EHR Live, has updated the interface to provide a more visually appealing interface that makes OpenEMR marketable in today's marketplace.
PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-op are the named investors in this round. PHP Fog is the brainchild of veteran developer Lucas Carlson, who was the lead engineer for music-on-demand service Mog and wrote Ruby Cookbook for O’Reilly Media. A PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance.
Because Joomla is offered under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0, it requires no hardware investments and no initial spending on software. Ozimek said it also will work with a wide variety of SQL and even noSQL databases, including mySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, so "it can be the glue for Web services."
Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin has paved the way for organizations all over the world by initiating a cost cut. Putin has ordered his federal decision makers to phase out proprietary software-Windows-and adopt free solutions-Linux-by 2015.
But he was not prepared for the storm that erupted once this news was posted on Slashdot, referencing a post by an open source developer, Philip Paradis. A respondent to the post on Paradis' blog pointed out some lines of code which were believed to be from the original mtr and which, could, therefore mean that Manac was violating the GPL.
This is a 66% growth in HTML5 video user support since December of 2009. With the expected release of Internet Explorer 9 in the near future, 2011 could see a major increase in websites adopting HTML5 video as their primary playback method.
Of browsers that support HTML5 video, Mozilla’s Firefox is the clear leader, with Google’s Chrome in second place. Much of the growth in HTML5 video support can be attributed to Chrome’s success in stealing market share from Internet Explore over the last year.
Government lawyers had argued there was no discrimination because those same services are provided in other formats, such as on the phone, in person or by mail.
In the Israel of 2011, it's no longer legitimate to belong to the left. It's illegitimate to campaign for human rights or to oppose the occupation or to investigate war crimes. Such actions earn Israelis a mark of shame. A land-stealing settler is a Zionist; a warmongering right-winger is a patriot; an inciting rabbi is a spiritual leader; a racist who expels foreigners is a loyal citizen. Only the leftist is a traitor.
During the Bush administration's "war on terror", it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held "the worst of the worst" terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
At least 11 people have died in new clashes with security forces in Tunisia after four weeks of unrest, it was reported today. The interior ministry said eight people were killed over the weekend in the western towns of Thala and Kasserine. Rioting against joblessness and other social ills has scarred many cities in the country since 17 December, when a 26-year-old graduate set himself on fire when police confiscated his fruits and vegetables for selling without a permit.Mobs have since attacked public buildings and the local office of the party of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
When Alina happened upon a group of men—too many to count—raping a girl in the squalid Port-au-Prince camp where she and other quake victims lived, she couldn't just stand there. Maybe it was because she has three daughters of her own; maybe it was some altruistic instinct. And the 58-year-old was successful, in a way, in that when she tried to intervene, the men decided to rape her instead, hitting her ribs with a gun, threatening to shoot her, firing shots in the air to keep other people from getting ideas of making trouble as they kept her on the ground and forced themselves inside her until she felt something tear, as they saw that she was bleeding and decided to go on, and on, and on. When it was over, Alina lay on the ground hemorrhaging and aching, alone. The men were gone, but no one dared to help her for fear of being killed.
The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker's online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks.
Revelations that the U.S. Justice Department obtained a court order to examine data held by Twitter Inc. on Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who sits on the country's Foreign Affairs Committee, immediately caused consternation in the tiny North Atlantic nation.
He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in North Yorkshire.
He had come alone on 12 August 2003, in the middle of a heatwave, for a gathering of environmental activists known as Earth First.
A police officer who for seven years lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations, has quit the Met, telling his friends that what he did was wrong.
PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, infiltrated dozens of protest groups including anti-racist campaigners and anarchists, a Guardian investigation reveals.
Six environmental activists who faced charges of trying to take over a power station called today for an inquiry into the role of an undercover police officer, who is accused of helping to plan and pay for the invasion.
The trial of the six, who denied conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, collapsed today, after details began to emerge about the role played by PC Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer.
On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid at Iona school in Nottingham, which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today.
Along with many others, I was sickened when I discovered that the man I knew as a fellow activist, Mark Kennedy, was in fact an undercover police officer who had been spying on us since 2003. Yet my feelings were nothing compared with those who were close to him. The betrayal and loss they are feeling is a real grief – the equivalent of someone you love dying. I went through this myself a few years ago when one of my best friends, Martin Hogbin, was exposed as a BAE spy. I denied the facts for a long time simply because the truth was too difficult. I still miss my friend, miss the good times, miss him seeing my son grow up; I don't think this feeling will ever go away.
The huge quantities of methane gas that bubbled out of BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico were eaten up almost entirely by undersea microbes by the end of August, a new study reports today.
Other scientists cautioned that much oil remained on the ocean floor, where it has penetrated deep into the sediment, as well as in fragile marshlands. Oil is still turning up in tar balls on beaches and in fishermen's nets.
The commission also concludes that the government's efforts to prevent disasters like this were inadequate. "As this narrative suggests, the Macondo blowout was the product of several individual missteps and oversights by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, which government regulators lacked the authority, the necessary resources, and the technical expertise to prevent," it states.
Glaciers in the European Alps could shrink by 75% by the end of the century, according to new research into the expected impact of global warming.
The study, published in the journal Nature: Geoscience, concludes that, globally, mountain glaciers and ice caps are projected to lose 15-27% of their volume by 2100, although the extent of the damage varies widely. The analysis suggests glaciers in the Alps and New Zealand will shrink by more than 70% but shrinkage is predicted to reach about 10% in Greenland and high-mountain Asia.
By the time he left office, President George W. Bush wasn't exactly known as a friend of endangered wildlife. Over eight years, his administration protected 62 species of domestic animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act. By contrast, Bill Clinton had declared 522 species endangered during his two terms. (See chart below.) On average, Bush added eight new species to the list annually, the slowest pace of any president since Richard Nixon signed the ESA into law in 1973.
The CRTC last week quietly proposed a significant change to the rules on false or misleading news broadcasts on radio or television. The law currently provides that a broadcast licensee "shall not broadcast any false or misleading news." The CRTC is proposing to amend the law with respect to television and radio by lowering the standard to "any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public." In other words, it would perfectly permissible for a broadcaster to air false or misleading news, provided that it not endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.
The deadline for interventions into the forthcoming CRTC hearing on the Bell - CTV merger passed earlier this week with hundreds of submissions from across the country. Many cultural groups focused solely on the proposed benefits package associated with the transaction (e.g. Directors Guild of Canada, Alberta Motion Pictures Industry Association, the Documentary Organization of Canada) but there are many others rallying to support the deal.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has a lot on his plate: He’s mayor of America’s largest city, owner of one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing news organizations and patron of a $1.75 billion charitable foundation. Critics have repeatedly accused him of blurring the lines between those roles. Is he doing it again with Bloomberg View, his new opinion operation?
David Shipley and Jamie Rubin, the co-executive editors of the new service, will technically be employees of Bloomberg LP, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be necessarily be working in the financial-news-and-data giant’s offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. At least part of the time, they’ll be based in the Upper East Side offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, located on Madison Avenue and 78th Street
New legislation currently under consideration by the Hungarian Parliament is the latest government initiative that poses a threat to press freedom, according to Freedom House. Among other things, the measure would impose fines on private media organizations for “unbalanced” news coverage.
Amid the mock-gothic gilt and stained glass of Hungary's elaborate parliament on the banks of the Danube, Viktor Orbán oozed charm, humour, and resolve. "I won. We won," he bragged. "We democrats won our battle."
But a lack of evil and stupidity does not eliminate short-sightedness, foolishness, and priorities run dangerously amok.
The path to Internet-enabled perdition, like the spiritual path to another well-known rhetorical locale very much to be avoided, can be paved with seemingly good intentions nonetheless.
If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan's religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.
Perhaps it is not the American Muslim community that harbors growing numbers of people threatening the core principles of our country. Perhaps such threats can more readily be found in certain dark corners of the hearing rooms of the House of Representatives. If we take constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties (that is the Bill of Rights) to be among the core pillars of the American way of life, then how should we judge Peter King's intent and actions? Are they radical or not? And if they are, then we should all join with those American Muslims who are raising their voices against King and his machinations.
Yesterday I tweeted a request for folks to help me compile a list of all the things that are geoblocked in Canada. within minutes, #BlockedUpNorth became a Trending Topic- one of the top ten Twitter conversation topics in Canada. I was genuinely shocked by how aware Canadians are about geoblocking- and how angry!
A US professor of computer science is prodding electronics giant Sony with the stupid stick by hosting a copy of the PS3's private key on his univeristy's web servers.
Professor David S Touretzky, who specialises in robotics and has been known to try to replicate the spacial awareness of rats in his spare time, has poked his head above the parapet as Sony's lumbering legal team grinds into action in an attempt to stop people spilling its secrets.
Later this year, the court will hear at least one case that examines the scope of the Copyright Act’s fair dealing provision. At issue is whether "research" within fair dealing can be extended to song previews that are made available on sites like iTunes where a consumer can freely listen to roughly 30 seconds of a song.
The Copyright Board of Canada ruled in 2007 that a broad and liberal interpretation of fair dealing meant that it could be included since the preview was effectively consumer research on whether to purchase the song. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the Copyright Board's interpretation last May, opening the door to many other consumer research possibilities under the current fair dealing provision.
Back in August we debunked the administration's Korea FTA stats, but the Obama administration has continued to tout these bogus figures. Regarding the alleged $11 billion rise in exports, the crux of the issue is that the factsheet is quoting the wrong section of the USITC report (the administration is citing Table 2.2 on page 2-8 of the report). The USITC study predicts that U.S. exports will increase by only about $4.8-5.3 billion, as Table 2.3 on page 2-14 of the report indicates. In addition, the study predicts that U.S. imports will increase by $5.1-5.7 billion due to the Korea FTA. This large increase in imports completely wipes out the benefits of the increase in exports and turns the predicted effect into a net negative.
The $10-11 billion figure that the administration is citing is merely the change in the U.S. bilateral exports to Korea itself, which tells only part of the story. As the USITC study acknowledges, bilateral tariff reductions induce significant "trade diversion" effects, which means that implementation of the Korea FTA will “rob” from the volume of U.S. exports that currently go to third countries and shift those exports to Korea, leading to little net increase in U.S. exports. The diversion occurs because many exporters of U.S. goods will stop exporting their goods to other countries like Germany and instead start exporting to Korea, just because the tariff that they face for exporting to Korea is lower than the tariff that they face when trying to export elsewhere. The shift in the destination of exports alone does not increase U.S. economic output or employment. Only net export gains matter for American workers.
Wikipedia