To OpenBenchmarking.org today I uploaded more results beyond all of the data offered in the comparison of my AMD FX-8350 Linux CPU review.
While in that review I compared the FX-8350 Eight-Core processor to several different Intel and AMD CPUs, these new results uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org are just some standalone numbers. However, there's more than 100 new Linux benchmark results from this Piledriver-based AMD processor.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated his USBView program, a user-space utility he started more than one decade ago for displaying USB device information under Linux.
USBView is a small program for showing the device tree of the USB bus and then displaying information about connected devices on the bus.
Lennart Poettering has announced the release of the latest version of the open source startup daemon systemd. With version 195, the tool, which is being used by Fedora, openSUSE and several other Linux distributions, has received what Poettering calls a "non-trivial amount of cool new features".
As a warning for those who are normally quick to upgrade to the latest stable vanilla kernel releases, a serious EXT4 data corruption bug worked its way into the stable Linux 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernel series.
Being discussed recently on the Linux kernel mailing list was an "apparent serious progressive ext4 data corruption bug in 3.6.3." Theodore Ts'o was able to successfully bisect the kernel and found the serious bug, which first appeared within the Linux 3.6.2 kernel and was since back-ported to older stable kernels.
Linux kernel developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o has released a series of patches for what he has called "a Lance Armstrong bug" in the kernel, meaning behaviour that does not trip up tests but also makes the kernel work differently than intended. A user had reported a problem that caused them to lose data; the kernel developers quickly narrowed this down to a fault in the ext4 implementation that was introduced with the release of Linux 3.6.2, just over a week ago. Apparently, the data corruption bug was hard to track down as it only manifests itself if a system is rebooted twice in a relatively short period of time.
With this week's unveiling of the FX-8350 eight-core processor being based on AMD's new Piledriver architecture, in this article are benchmarks when testing out the Piledriver "bdver2" optimizations within AMD's own Open64 compiler.
AMD Catalyst 12.10 for Linux was only officially released two days ago, but already there's a Catalyst 12.11 beta for Tux.
Maarten Lankhorst released a stable xf86-video-nouveau X.Org graphics driver update today for the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA support.
Many Phoronix readers have been writing in over the past day getting excited that it looks like Team Fortress 2 is coming to Linux.
Yes, the Team Fortress 2 Beta is coming to Linux. An update was pushed out on Monday with changes being made as the Linux client of the Valve game nears reality. There's some launcher changes and other alterations needed specifically for the Linux client.
If you love RPG (role-playing games) and you think there's no future for these games on Linux, this post is for you. I’ll show you five new RPG games developed from scratch that run on Penguin: Questverse, Hale, Dawn, Flare and Arakion.
Kevin Ottens recently blogged about the shiny new KDE Manifesto. He does a great job of explaining the motivations behind such a document. As he noted, I gave a keynote at Akademy six years ago on this very topic. Evidently it's something that has been on my mind for a while, and the reason has to do with sustainability of the KDE community.
By the time I wrote that keynote, KDE already had very clear social principles, agreements and mechanisms. They are reflected in the new Manifesto, so there is in one sense nothing really new there. What is new is that those principles are being stated openly and clearly. Not everyone felt they needed to be, and so I'd like to address the reasons why this is such an important step for KDE.
I first learned about Plasma Active on a KDE User Experience sprint in April 2011. Sebastian Kügler was talking about their new project called Plasma Active, which aimed to bring the KDE experience to devices other than desktops, laptops and netbooks. It would provide a framework for application creators to easily adapt their UIs to different from factors, pixel densities and input methods.
Gnome University is an effort from Christian Hergert to help people to learn C, involve with Gnome Programming and push the project further. I had referred how nice this project is, some time ago at its initial starting. So I will skip this.
Puppy Linux project founder and lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the first release of a new edition of his independent Linux distribution, code-named "Precise". Based on binary packages from Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" and built using the Woof build tool, Precise Puppy represents the latest version of the Ubuntu-based flavour of Puppy Linux 5.4 and includes access to Ubuntu's package repositories.
Ubuntu 12.10 reviews are reeling in as the upgrade for server and desktop variants are now available for the users. Canonical Ltd., which provides access to the Ubuntu releases announced the Ubuntu 12.10 upgrade in April 2012. The recent update of the open source operating system, Linux 12.10 was named as Quantal Quetzal.
Ubuntu 12.10 release marked the final update of the Linux software this year with the first installment coming in April 2012 which was named as Precise Pangolin. Ubuntu 12.10 server provides administrators with an enhanced platform for cloud deployment by integrating the Folsom feature with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC).
Cairo-Dock in action Zoom Source: Cairo-Dock The developers of Cairo-Dock, a feature-rich and extensively configurable Mac OS X-style dock for Linux desktops, have released version 3.1 of their open source application switcher. Cairo-Dock 3.1 features integration improvements for Ubuntu's Unity desktop: for example, like the Unity launcher, icons in the dock can now display progress bars for actions that take time to complete. New indicators have been added, including for the Sync, Print and Messaging menus. The developers have also improved the configuration window and updated the Recent Event applets.
Puppy Linux project founder and lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the first release of a new edition of his independent Linux distribution, code-named "Precise". Based on binary packages from Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" and built using the Woof build tool, Precise Puppy represents the latest version of the Ubuntu-based flavour of Puppy Linux 5.4 and includes access to Ubuntu's package repositories.
on24Oct
Wind River has launched its Intelligent Network Platform, a software platform for the development of sophisticated network equipment that can accelerate and secure the flood of traffic for current and future networks.
Without a doubt, the Raspberry Pi has grabbed the most headlines as a tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, but it's actually only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new "Linux punk ethic." Several others, such as the Cotton Candy device, have warranted attention as well.
The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced the open sourcing of its VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM chips. The foundation has chose a more permissive 3-Clause BSD licence for the driver code. The source is available from the foundation's new userland repository on GitHub.
The popular budget-friendly Raspberry Pi ARM development board now has a fully open-source graphics stack -- the user-space graphics drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore included!
Since July of this year I had been exclusively hinting that a major open-source announcement was coming... In that article for the clued Phoronix readers it was made sort of apparent it was about ARM graphics drivers and the Raspberry Pi. Well, today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is finally able to announce they have a fully open-source graphics driver stack for their low-cost development board!
TINY COMPUTER MAKER the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the system-on-chip (SoC) used in the credit card sized computer now has open source drivers.
While the Raspberry Pi Foundation has promoted the Raspberry Pi computer as a device to teach programming, it has become a hit with hobbyists and developers due to its low cost and Linux support. Now the foundation has announced that all drivers for the Broadcom BCM2835 used in the device has been open sourced.
The foundation's announcement means that all the components of the BCM2835 SoC have open source drivers that are provided by Broadcom rather than reverse engineered like the open source Nouveau graphics driver that attempts to work around Nvidia's decision not to disclose specifications for its chips. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said that all of the Videocore driver code has been released under a three clause BSD license and is available from its userland repository.
First, I'm going to correct you. We actually have stopped referring to our conference as a developers' conference. We now call it the Open Solutions Conference, and the reason this matters is that we have seen over time that the nature of who attends our events has changed. It's not just developers. It's a conference where we tend to invite partners from our ecosystem. And by ecosystem, I mean everything from people that we buy services and products from like HTC or Samsung or Ericsson and Synniverse. They are part of our consortium, but we also have people like individual developers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. And we also have opened up and welcomed people from different industries that are not necessarily part of the wireless industry, such as banking and advertising.
Apple unveiled the long rumored iPad Mini in San Fransisco this afternoon, and it turns out to be a 7.9 inch device with internal similar to iPad 2. Apple is very much aware of the tough competition that iPad Mini will face in this segment from the highly successful Google Nexus 7. At the launch event, Apple’s Phil Schiller tried his best to defame the Nexus 7 when comparing it to the iPad Mini and how was the new Apple’s new device superior to the Nexus 7.
I have to say I was impressed. The new iPad with its extremely fast A6X chip looks great, pity it just instantly obsoleted every iPad 3 out there, but... oh wait. That''s the new iPad 4. That's not what Apple is running up against the Nexus 7. Instead, they're putting out the iPad Mini. Seriously? That's just sad.
True, Apple senior vice president for marketing Phil Schiller may say that the Nexus 7 is an example of how "Others have tried to make smaller tablets, but they've failed", but that's just showing that the Apple reality distortion field is still at work within Apple's halls. The truth, as everyone knows who've used the Nexus 7, is that it's a great tablet. Heck, without it and its relatives such as the Nook and Kindle, Apple never would have produced a 7" tablet.
Yet somehow, against this hostile background, FOSS feminism has managed to survive and expand. Today we see many obvious signs of the growing influence of FOSS feminism: greater reporting of incidents of sexism, networking and teaching opportunities for women, the availability of related resources, women speakers at conferences and the adoption of anti-harassment policies or codes of conduct.
The AITEC East Africa ICT Summit, officially opened by Hon. Samuel Poghisio, Minister for Information and Communication, is drafting a first ever map of ways in which Open Source Software (OSS), which is frequently free, can be used to drive regional economic development.
Are you interested in software usability and open source? If so, my friend Jim would like your help. He is doing a study of usability in Open Source software. I’ll post his entire request below along with a link to his blog. Also, he’ll probably be doing some other interent based interolocution about this; I’ll pass on to you whatever he passes on to me.
The OpenNebula Project has released version 3.8 of its open source cloud computing toolkit. OpenNebula 3.8, nicknamed "Twin Jet" after the M2-9 planetary nebula, offers better integration with KVM and VMware hypervisors, a new virtual routing appliance and a better Amazon EC2 interface than the previous version. The OpenNebula toolkit, which is used by organisations such as the European Space Agency, Fermilab, CERN and China Mobile, provides management for virtual infrastructure in data centres.
The networking giant isn't just contributing financially but is also building its own OpenStack cloud platform edition as well as being actively involved in code development. OpenStack is a multi-stakeholder effort to build a cloud platform and initially started out with the Nova compute and Swift storage components. Thanks in part to Cisco's efforts, OpenStack recently included the new Quantum networking project as part of the core OpenStack release.
The promotion of Apache OpenOffice to top-level project status within the Apache Software Foundation is good news for the open source office suite project, but it also means that it's time to put up or shut up for OpenOffice innovation.
Much has been said about the "innovation gap" that exists between OpenOffice and the two-year old forked offshoot LibreOffice. To be honest, much of what's said is coming out of the stewards of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation. And while they're not wrong - to date, only one big release of OpenOffice, v 3.4, has come out since the code was donated to the ASF by Oracle - it's not been entirely fair to the OpenOffice team to smack them around about it.
The Veterans Affairs Department is preparing a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA electronic health record version that is being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.
The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).
Antenna, the platform used to develop the app, was also created in iQ Labs. This open-source platform helps event organisers to manage, publish and mobilise event content, providing a CakePHP-based development framework to quickly create event publications.
Since 2010 I’ve been representing FSFE in France. This involves getting involved in events and conferences, and occasionally acting as an interface between various organisations and FSFE — some very local, and some national. There is a very strong and organised Free Software community in France — for instance with the yearly conference RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) — so one of my ongoing jobs is to show a face for FSFE, make a personal connection and explain what we do and why we exist. Then on further levels, it sometimes gets into collaboration on campaigns or issues. For instance, one of my main area of activities in Free Software is legal and public affairs. At the moment I’m mainly working on setting up our Free Your Android campaign in France, with phone liberation workshops. I really believe in this project: I think mobile devices are becoming more and more important, and having control over them, and more importantly over the services that we run them with, is becoming more important too.
Entando, Jaspersoft, Infobright, Green Vulcano and Red Hat have announced a joint product offering for public sector organisations called OpenITGov.
OpenITGov is intended to provide public sector organisations with a 'one-stop-shop' for all the open source software and support needed to build IT systems to be able to offer online services to citizens.
So if you live in Salt Lake City and want to maybe see the show for free, go get your tickets now. And then tell everyone you know to get tickets too, and maybe you’ll get to see the show for free. Or not! Could be a disaster! Exciting! Honestly I have no idea if this is going to work, but as you know, I am a scientist. I like to watch what happens.
The GitLab development team has released version 3.0 of its open source repository management software for the Git version control system. Used for self-hosted repositories, GitLab is based on Ruby on Rails and Gitolite, and is described as a "fast, secure and stable solution" by its developers. It includes the same features as those offered by the GitHub project hosting service, which also appears to be the inspiration for GitLab's user interface.
A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of oil appeared on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. BP was all, “Hm? What’s this about oil?” Then the government said, yeah, it’s from the Deepwater Horizon spill. And BP was all, “Hm? Oh, that? Yeah, I guess.” And the government suggested that maybe BP try and figure out what’s happening? Maybe make sure the broken well isn’t leaking again? And BP sighed heavily and whined about how none of its friends had to do chores and how it had all this homework and blah blah blah so the Coast Guard decided to just check for itself. BP, pleased, put its headphones back on and mumbled under its breath about what dicks these government dudes are.
It's Food Day, so let's put Paul Ryan's soup kitchen stunt aside for the moment and take a serious look at what a Romney/Ryan budget might mean for the future of eating. Today, the number of Americans receiving food stamps has reached nearly 15 percent of the population, and 17 million American households experience hunger. Despite such indications of growing domestic food insecurity, Paul Ryan has proposed a $133 billion cut to nutrition assistance, an evisceration that would add 10 million more Americans to the 50 million who already are missing meals.
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney wants to have his cake and eat it too. “Governments do not create jobs,” a stern Romney told CNN’s Candy Crowley twice during the second debate. Here in Wisconsin, however, he is running ads promising to “crack down on China” and create 12 million new jobs.
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to finance his campaign than Goldman Sachs. This election, none has done more to help defeat him.
While the European Commission sets out an action plan for online gambling, La Quadrature du Net warns about the risk of Internet content censorship, and urges Member States's governments to refuse the instrumentalisation of child protection for unacceptable measures.
Calls for evidence-based policy-making in the copyright domain are increasing on both sides of the Atlantic. How do we best regulate the fair remuneration of artists? How do we enforce it? Evidence based on sound methodologies and research is slowly but surely appearing. Now the highly respected Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam joins the league of evidence-givers with a new report, Filesharing 2۩12, Downloading in The Netherlands, about how blocking websites is not a worthwhile remedy (The report is in Dutch, but the executive summary is translated. It was an initiative by the IViR itself and was partly financed by the Ministry of Culture, Education and Research, some ISP's, Dutch society for professionals in the book industry and done in collaboration with several other institutes. Small disclaimer: I did my masters at this institute).
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The episode left Hicks scrambling to figure out how he'd get home from Hawaii without being able to fly. Then he was abruptly removed from the list on Thursday with no explanation.
Back in August, Mike wrote about some questionable sharing of license plate information between the US Border Patrol and various insurance companies. While the stated aim of tracking stolen vehicles might seem to make this sharing justified, the fact that this is going on with no oversight or accountability is cause for alarm.
Later this month, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could define the government’s ability to monitor innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. The lawsuit, Amnesty International v. Clapper, argues that the Constitution bars the National Security Agency from listening to or reading Americans’ international conversations and emails without court oversight, even if Congress blesses the NSA’s actions.
Unfortunately, the government has tried to block the courts from ever reaching that constitutional issue, arguing that unless the plaintiffs can prove they will be monitored (which is impossible, since the list of who is monitored is classified), they cannot sue. Now that threshold question has reached the Supreme Court. Based on our combined six-plus decades of experience working at the NSA, we are sure there is only one just outcome: The justices should let this case proceed, giving the courts the opportunity to determine whether the executive and legislative branches have gone too far.
Part of the Defense Department, the NSA was created to listen to and analyze foreign communications to protect our nation from threats outside our borders. Today, it is bigger than the CIA and FBI combined. For decades, those of us inside the NSA prided ourselves on our respect for the Constitution. Our touchstone was the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and its guarantee that warrants could be issued only with probable cause and against specific targets. Whenever we suspected that an American abroad or someone inside the United States might be involved in terrorism or espionage, we carefully gathered the evidence and presented it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret to protect classified information. Only if that court gave us permission would we monitor an American’s communications.
Recently, Tim noted that, for some strange reason, politicians don't like having the same level of surveillance applied to them as they wish to inflict on the public. Here's a nice case from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, found via Evgeny Morozov, where politicians aren't being given any choice:
Earlier this week, we talked about how publishing giant Random House had very explicitly stated that when libraries buy their ebooks, the libraries "own" those ebooks, rather than license them. They left no doubt about it. Skip Dye, Random House's VP of library & academic marketing and sales was explict: "when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them... this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license."
Thousands of students participated in a march in San José on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, protesting for their right to photocopy textbooks for educational purposes. The unrest was caused by President Chinchilla vetoing Bill 17342 (known as the ‘Photocopying Law’) which seeks to amend Law No 8039 on Procedures for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, on the grounds that it removes protection of the work and intellectual property in the artistic, literary and technological areas.
Universities are and have always been vast copy machines. Evolved from medieval monasteries and their vast libraries and scriptoria, universities have always had as central functions of their mission the copying, transforming, and preserving works of art, thought, and science and making them available to their patrons.
In 2011 and 2012, European citizens took to the streets to protest against secret negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that threatened their fundamental freedoms. This led to a massive rejection of the agreement in the European Parliament in last July. The message was clear: no repressive measures without a democratic debate by our elected representatives.
Nevertheless, the European Comission and the Member States are still trying to force the adoption of repressive measures that undermine fundamental freedoms, under the cover of trade agreements kept secret. The Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), the India-EU, Thailand-EU, Moldavia-EU Free Trade Agreements, etc.: all these agreements might include dispositions harmful for Internet users's rights, access to essential drugs or the use of free software.
We're rapidly approaching the time in which perpetual copyright hits its existing statutory limits -- so I've fully been expecting an increase in arguments for why copyright needs to be extended again. Of course, the actual economic evidence doesn't support this at all. Instead, the evidence suggests there's tremendous value in a broader public domain. So how will maximalists argue for copyright extension? If a recent paper from economist Stan Liebowitz is any indication, it will be through strawmen and the argument that we should ignore the economics. Seriously.