ViewSonic and Userful, which makes cloud managed Linux desktop virtualization, has announced a partnership to deliver a low cost zero client solution that enables schools and businesses to deploy three to four times as many computer users for the same cost. The MultiClient solution turns one Linux computer into 20+ high performance independent computer stations (with monitors, mice and keyboards) using the ViewSonic VMA line of zero clients and Userful's MultiSeat software. It provides all the benefits of traditional thin client computing, but with higher performance, and lower costs.
Linaro is leading ARM Linux unification efforts, according to its CEO, and the organisation is looking to lead the ARMies of chip makers in other areas of Linux development as well by acting as a safe "demilitarised zone" for the many ARM vendors that make up its membership.
Cisco is now refreshing its Linux powered portfolio of network devices with new switches and wireless access points (APs). On the switch side is the new 500 series switching platform that will serve customers that don't need an IOS powered Catalyst switch.
In less than two weeks, the latest version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin, will be released. This new Ubuntu is looking good. How good? In a recent interview with Julie Bort, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said, “We expect to ship close to 20 million PCs in the next year.”
While the Chromebook hasn’t taken off in quite the way Google expected it to, OEMs are still working on them. Samsung demoed a Chromebook at this year’s IDF in Beijing that would have an “instant on” boot thanks to new Coreboot code, a Linux-based BIOS replacement that talks to the computers hardware. Why does Coreboot sound so familiar? Just last week there was news that Google added code to Coreboot for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processor support. Is that what was on display at IDF?
Another misconception that extends far beyond HPC clusters is the notion that openly available software is free and therefore adds no cost to a cluster. Although the initial acquisition cost of open software might be nonexistent, software support and integration most certainly have associated costs. This time and effort has to come from either the user or a vendor and does not vanish because the software was freely available. In the case of HPC clusters, these costs can be quite substantial and are often the responsibility of the customer. If the customer takes the “learn as you go” approach to managing an open software stack, additional time and cost should definitely be expected.
Even if you're not a NVIDIA graphics customer and not interested in the state of the Nouveau driver and its big advancements today, there still is some Mesa Gallium3D news of importance to share. AMD has merged their Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" Gallium3D driver to mainline.
The Kickstarter-backed Wasteland 2 game that's already had plans for a Linux client may be powered by the Unigine Engine.
Last month word came out that Wasteland 2 would have a Linux client as the sequel to Brian Fargo's original Wasteland game from two decades ago. Via the crowd-sourced funding on Kickstarter, Wasteland 2 has raised over 2.4 million US dollars to fund its development by Fargo's inXile Entertainment company.
The New York Times has included a mini-game in one of its articles, published yesterday. The article, enititled 'Just One More Game... Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyper Addictive 'Stupid Games', includes a mini-game just under the heading.
The article concerns the 'darker' nature of video games. The pointless addictive nature of what the writer calls "stupid games", which began with Nintendo, the Game Boy and Tetris, and currently, Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja.
Microsoft Office may be the dominant productivity suite in much of the computing world, but it's not for a lack of alternatives.
How about something different for a Friday? Dream Linux is a distribution which I was watching some time ago, but it seemed to stall at release 4 Beta 6. I was pleased to find recently that it is not dead or abandoned, as I had feared, but the developers had decided to go back and make a fresh start for Dream Linux 5. There is a Message to All on their web page which explains what they have done, and why. The Dream linux home page (note the .info domain) gives a lot more information, of course, and explains the two installation options, either a "Full Install" to a disk drive or partition, or a "Persistent Install" to an external flash storage device.
Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, said today that they'd like to get "the opinion and ideas of the community, as well as to feel how strong you are." He says that the desktop distribution has been their foundational product and that its community is a necessary element of that.
Coekaerts’ 17-year track record at Oracle suggests the technology giant is very serious about the Linux and virtualization markets. But how serious? With a little luck, The VAR Guy will track down Coekaerts during a trip to California next week.
Enterprises are increasingly buying into the Cloud, but they need help in transferring their cloudy workloads between different providers and internal clouds.
Canonical – which manages the Ubuntu Linux distribution – has run into this issue itself, as Ubuntu is a giant on public clouds. After solving the issues for its own internal use, it is now releasing for beta testing a cloud proxy product, dubbed AWSOME (“Any Web Service Over Me”) that will make cloud workloads more portable, by providing APIs for OpenStack, that are also common to Amazon’s EC2 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) public clouds.
It’s a pretty nice dream. On your morning commute, you send a text message to the office espresso machine with your order for a double Americano and the warm mug is waiting when you get in.
For Seattle-based cloud texting company Zipwhip, the dream is reality. Its engineers custom-built an espresso machine that takes orders via SMS using their own cloud messaging application. (Watch the video, it’s pretty sweet.)
As Linux users look forward to the release later in April 2012 of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Canonical’s decision to cease sponsoring Kubuntu as an official Ubuntu variant has passed largely under the radar — a sign, perhaps, that Kubuntu’s user base is small. But as the first member of the Ubuntu family to lose official endorsement, where is Kubuntu headed? And more importantly, what does its departure mean for the Ubuntu brand as a whole? Read on for some analysis.
Full disclosure: I’m writing this post from a Kubuntu system. Well, actually, it’s not pure Kubuntu, but it’s close enough — It’s an Ubuntu computer with the kubuntu-desktop package installed. I use the KDE desktop environment almost exclusively these days, because it just works in a universe where so many other Linux interfaces — namely Unity and GNOME Shell — still have a bit of maturing to do, to put it simply.
LINUX VENDOR Canonical will release an application programmable interface (API) to bridge the gap between Openstack based clouds and those that run on Amazon Web Services.
Easter Weekend brought good news for Linux users. The much anticipated (by me, at least) release of Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 4 arrived on Friday. After just a few days of testing and working with it, and installing it on just a couple of my netbooks, I would say that it is every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. The Update Pack Announcement gives a lot of good information about installation, so be sure to read it. In a nutshell the options are:
The images show that the device can support multiple home screens, an Android-style notifications bar and pinch-to-zoom, but this could either be evidence of the S40 re-skin (codenamed "Sonic") or, fancifully, the first appearance of Espoo's Linux-based Meltemi OS for low-end phones.
Following Google's strong earnings report this week, CEO Larry Page has provided one of the clearest glimpses yet of what his company's Android tablet strategy will look like. Previously, TIME reported that Google may be focused on a co-branded 7-inch tablet in the $200 to $250 range, possibly based on the Asus MeMo 370T, for the July time frame. The Register has also noted that an Asus-based 7-inch tablet in that price range is likely from Google.
Syllable, an attempt to write a desktop-focused operating system from scratch using best practices, has notched up a new milestone, with its developers releasing 0.6.7 today.
Audacity, the venerable and much loved open source audio editor, has a 2.0 release today in versions for OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux.
UPS supplier Eaton has released a new open-source software development kit aimed at providing better accessibility and flexibility to users of its power management products.
RELATED: Cisco, EMC, VMware unite behind big data, cloud training initiative
Hervé Tardy, the company's vice president and general manager of distributed power quality, says the ability to substantially modify the management software based on the specific needs of each client is a powerful upside to the firm's technology.
After more than two years on the back burner, Firefox has finally introduced click-to-play (or “opt-in activation” in Mozilla terms) for all plug-ins, including Flash, Java, and Silverlight. Plug-ins are the single biggest cause of browser slow-downs and security vulnerabilities — and Chrome has had a similar feature for more than a year — so really, it’s about time Mozilla added this to Firefox.
Mozilla engineers are in the process of improving the security and speed of Firefox by implementing a permission switch for browser plug-ins.
In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.
"Open source is certainly at the foundation in terms of building out cloud technologies," says Byran Che, senior director of product management at Red Hat and responsible for its cloud operations offerings, management software and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, (Red Hat's Messaging, Real-time and Grid platform). "If you take a look at market share in the server space, as you look at traditional data centers, about 70 percent are running on the Windows platform and about 30 percent are running Linux. As you take a look at what operating systems people are choosing to build applications on in the cloud, the ratio flips completely."
Over the last two weeks there has been a whole lot of news about 'open' clouds. From my perspective though there is now one clear winner – OpenStack.
As opposed to say Eucalyptus or CloudStack, OpenStack has one key item that those other two 'open' cloud efforts do not – THE SUPPORT OF EVERY MAJOR LINUX DISTRIBUTION.
Oracle announced Thursday that it has launched MySQL Connect, a user-focused event to be held Sept. 29 and 30 in San Francisco, the weekend before Oracle OpenWorld.
Oracle's proclamation comes just before the Percona Live MySQL Conference kicks off next Tuesday in Santa Clara, California. It's run by MySQL software vendor Percona.
With the surging popularity of Joomla, it's no surprise hackers are drawn to it as well. Don't panic, however. There are a number of things you can do to strengthen your security and turn your Joomla website into a fortress. Read along as we show you how to guard against the most common exploits and hacks that this open source CMS faces.
More than five weeks ago, when some of my cancer markers were elevated, I began the process of bartering with the insurance company, doing the tests they said would be covered, and then coming all the way back to the start to finally getting the tests my doctors originally ordered. My full diagnosis and treatment considerations have been pending ever since, and that has given me time to think and to remember. Waiting, worrying, and wondering.
It’s not that I believe every cancer is a death sentence. I certainly know that isn’t the case. I am a uterine cancer survivor. My mom is a two time breast cancer survivor. But I am 57 years old now -- old enough to be an expensive liability in our society, especially if I get sick and need care, but too young to be covered by Medicare. If I face a serious illness like cancer again that costs me an awful lot in out-of-pocket expenses not covered by insurance and lost time from making the money we need for survival, I will doom my husband to struggles he doesn’t need and that are not his fault. Bad enough that one of us should be sick, there is certainly no need for me to take him down with the ship.
The global economic crisis has triggered a series of unprecedented social and political upheavals that have left many governments on the brink of bankruptcy. The high volume of debts have engulfed even the most well-managed economies, triggering a chain reaction in which cuts to public sector spending have become inevitable.
A high profile casualty of these consequences was Iceland, where a collapse in the banking system led to long-running financial and diplomatic crisis. Significantly, it has recently been announced that Iceland is set to swap its high-cost public sector proprietary software solutions in favour of open source alternatives. Strategists behind the move cited cost savings as a prime reason for the shift in solution and, to their credit, this is a perfectly logical reason for engaging with open source alternatives.
The new Open Government Plan, “Flagship Initiative,” is the creation of an “accessible, participatory and transparent web environment,” a goal reflected in the new site. Users are welcomed to a colorful, easy-to-read and easy-to-browse database of NASA projects and information — and they’re encouraged to comment on everything.
NASA chose its website as flagship for a revamp of its open government plan rolled out yesterday, and — as if to show the agency meant business — did so with a brand-new, brightly colored buzzword-catcher of a website.
Call it crowdsourcing for cures. Fed up with outdated models for finding new treatments that have missed the mark, drugmakers and other public health stakeholders have ignited open source efforts that involve networks of companies and scientists joining forces to discover drugs. And one of the pioneering efforts of this ilk in India is moving ahead with a mid-stage trial for a drug against tuberculosis.
India's Open Source Drug Discovery unit, which uses an online infrastructure to connect more than 5,500 scientists and others, revealed late last month with the Global Alliance on TB that the anti-tuberculosis molecule will be investigated in a Phase IIb trial in India, Forbes reported. And the open source group has two more TB molecules in advanced preclinical testing that could eventually enter trials and combat the infectious disease, which kills about 400,000 people annually in India.
Zero is the Apple of electric motorcycles. The Santa Cruz, Calif.,-based company’s bikes coast out of the factory in gleaming perfection with control software that has been optimized for safety and performance. And, as with iPhones, the source code remains a company secret. Gearheads who like to know every detail of how their machines work or want to modify them either have to jailbreak their devices or start from scratch. They can turn to outside sources but, again, the only option is to buy a motor controller kit from a company that has made all of the configuration decisions in advance.
“People who are into electric vehicles like to be able to tweak them to make them faster and to be able to fix them themselves,” says Philip Court, the director of Greenstage, an electric racecar developer in New Zealand.
Crowdsourcing can boast of many success stories today, but in 2008, when the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) launched such an effort for drug discovery, there weren’t many. Four years on, its Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) network is emerging as a cyber platform to garner resources for developing drugs that pharmaceutical companies don’t find attractive enough.
A typical evil genius will attempt to conquer the world and keep his or her plans secret. As any reader of The H knows, that's no way to build a culture of innovation within the evil genius community. The H was pleased, therefore, to talk to Simon Monk who has been using open source technology, like the Arduino, as the basis for a series of Evil Genius books for aspirant evil geniuses and other people who want to get building open source based gadgetry.
PHP as an open source language has gained more popularity from PHP developers and PHP programmers because of its more interactive approach than HTML. Not only it is very fast, secure, economical, and efficiently manages the data but PHP codes can also be incorporated very easily. Moreover, another reason behind its popularity is that a web developer can download it free of cost and customize it according to the project requirements. Several business owners and big corporate are attracted towards PHP custom web application development due to its easy availability and flexible terms and conditions.
We've certainly talked quite a bit about the institutional-level corruption of the way Congress and lobbying works, but a recent This American Life episode, done in partnership with the Planet Money team takes a much deeper dive into how lobbying works. You absolutely should listen to it. It's really fascinating, even for folks who follow a lot of this stuff. There is also a full transcript, but hearing the whole thing is quite fascinating. Among the elements that are most interesting are the details of just how much time and effort goes into politicians raising money, and how the various fundraisers work.
Open Source Initiative cofounder Bruce Perens said that, thanks to Apple, Unix is more popular than ever. “We now have more Unix systems than we've ever had before. They are in our phones and our access points. I think if you actually set out to count, you could make a graph and show that Unix—if you define Unix as something that serves a POSIX I/O—that Unix is at its peak today,” he said.
“What's the difference? We don't care about the stuff the user doesn't see. The user doesn't see Unix. This is something I often have a hard time explaining to companies.”
And while one of the world's largest companies—Apple—is based entirely on Unix kernels, that doesn't mean Unix is on the cusp of a massive comeback. In fact, it would seem that the formal Unix market has essentially stood still in recent years.
A critical security flaw has been identified in a component of the latest version of Backtrack, a popular version of Linux that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The flaw is in WICD, an open source utility that can be used to manage networks in Linux operating systems.
With the most recent release of international oil production data, EIA Washington has revised figures back to 1985. This is one of the most comprehensive revisions I have seen in several years. Generally, the totals were revised slightly lower, and this was especially true for the past decade. Data for the full year of 2011 has now completed. | see: Global Average Annual Crude Oil Production mbpd 2001 – 2011.
Reno is suing Goldman Sachs, alleging fraud against one of Wall Street’s largest investment firms.
CHICK-FIL-A sells an average of nine sandwiches per second at its roughly 1,600 restaurants. Bo Muller-Moore paints T-shirts in the garage next to his house in Montpelier, Vermont. In 2011 Chick-fil-A’s sales were more than $4 billion; Mr Muller-Moore (pictured) estimates that his were $40,000.
[...]
They warned Mr Muller-Moore that they had successfully pressured other miscreants into dropping some 30 slogans, from “Eat More Dog” to “Eat More Music”. Their letter also alleged that Mr Muller-Moore’s “misappropriation of Chick-fil-A’s EAT MOR CHIKIN intellectual property…is likely to cause confusion.”
Comments
mcinsand
2012-04-17 18:09:36
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2012-04-17 20:51:34
mcinsand
2012-04-17 21:04:38
Regards, mc
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2012-04-17 22:04:10