Now that Windows 8 has made its long-awaited and widely trumpeted debut, there seems to be a fresh air of excitement and purpose here in the Linux blogosphere.
This, of course, is not to say that many of us here are particularly excited about Microsoft's new OS, per se. Quite the opposite, in fact: Many of us are excited about the opportunity Win 8 means for Linux.
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"This is the question that's often on my mind," Google+ blogger Linux Rants began.
"At this point, Linux is in an interesting position in that its interface (which before was considered 'foreign') may actually seem more familiar to the average computer user than the interface for Windows 8," Linux Rants explained.
At the same time, "our ever-present problem is still there, and that's the fact that Linux has a reputation for being hard to install and even harder to use," he added.
ThinkPenguin is an American company that sells Linux computers and related products and services and ships them Worldwide.
A couple of Months ago I found a CR-48 at ebay, just an hour away from the auction deadline. So I place my bid, not to exceed $140, and guest what! I won it. Thus I Finally got my own Chromebook. The first couple of days were rough. A previous owner had installed a new boot loader into the machine, so that you could run others Operating Systems from the usb port and even install them into the Chromebook if you wished.
We've already seen Ubuntu loaded up on Samsung's $249 ARM-powered Chromebook, but the Linux modding hasn't stopped there.
Linux is a common and familiar bare metal operating system used by many hosting providers on their server infrastructure today. Among them is hosting vendor Dreamhost, who could soon be moving from just using Linux to actively contributing code to Linux.
Apparently, problems caused by last week's Ext4 bug only occur when combining several critical mount and umount options; this renders the bug harmless for most Linux users – so far, it has only affected one user. Nevertheless, ext4 lead developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o plans to draw the necessary conclusions from the incident.
Steven Rostedt works for Red Hat and maintains the stable Linux kernel releases of the real-time patch. In this interview, part of our ongoing series on Linux kernel developers, Steven explains how his career took him from Lockheed Martin to tinkering with the Linux kernel, to landing his first kernel job at a startup. What would he do if he wasn't a kernel developer? Open a Starbucks franchise.
At least three Linux kernel developers are no longer employed by AMD.
Torvalds describes this third release candidate of the Linux 3.7 kernel as "Nothing particularly stands out here. Lots of small fixes, exemplified by the series of memory leak fixes in usb serial drivers. Just a lot of random stuff.. Most of it is drivers (all over: drm, wireless, staging, usb, sound), but there's a few filesystem updates (nfs, btrfs, ext4), arch updates (arm, x86 and m68k) and just random stuff."
Jon Masters examines the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community – and the release of the 3.6 kernel, hot off the press
Video game publisher and digital-distribution giant Valve continues to take it to Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system.
The Ubuntu Developers Summit now happening in Copenhagen this year has put forward some interesting facts about gaming on Ubuntu platform. Some of the Valve's employees were present during the summit and discussed the future of Steam on Ubuntu in particular, and Linux in general.
Eastern city of Ningbo halts work to expand petrochemical complex after week of protests over environmental impact
Ubuntu developers will be looking to stick to "stable" GNOME components and not closely track the unstable GNOME development releases within the Ubuntu 13.04 cycle. There's several reasons why Ubuntu will be distancing itself from the latest upstream GNOME packages.
Thanks to digiKam’s geocorrelation capabilities, you can geotag photos using a GPX file created with apps like Open GPS Tracker. But there is also another way to use your Android device for geotagging. The built-in camera app of most Android devices is capable of geotagging photos. This means that you can take a geotagged snap with the Android camera and then transfer geographical coordinates from it to other photos using digiKam. So next time, when you are done shooting with your main camera, remember to take a reference snapshot with your Android device (make sure that the geotagging option is enabled).
In the recent few days, I got several emails from readers asking me to rethink my position vis-a-vis Gnome 3 and retake the most recent 3.6 edition for a spin. My eyes would be opened, they said. How can I resist my readers?
All right. So I did that. I downloaded the official Gnome 3.6 ISO, which uses FC18 as its underlying system, and booted, to see what gives. Once again, I will address all those issues that bugged me, including aesthetics, ease of use, power off button, and all the rest. So let's see if a year and a half down the road, Gnome 3.6 can be a redeemer.
Now, here's a clickbaitful topic. But it's the truth really. Some Linux distributions are designed with all the gusto of an armadillo suffering from liver cancer dancing on a highway full of speeding cars. Not exactly the most fortuitous effort.
Luckily, it is quite possible to enliven dead-looking distributions, shipping with rigor mortis by default, into practical and useful systems, with only some small proverbial pimping, the word I so love to use, including first and foremost the installation of one or two alternative desktop environments, called Cinnamon and MATE, followed by some extra makeup and polish. You may argue that bling bling beauty makes not, but then you can argue that having a nice face lends nothing to human aesthetics either. I win. You read.
In the hard time for the Mandriva as the company and as a distribution, which currently struggles with their internal structure and the definition of their future, some other teams continue development of their forks of Mandriva operating system.
Namely, these teams are Mageia, which currently works on Mageia 3, and ROSA, which prepares the Rosa Desktop 2012 release.
A lightweight distro running XBMC that is designed for temporary or permanent use – how does it fare?
Linux Lite is a Linux operating system based on the Ubuntu distribution, developed in New Zealand. Its main objective is to show people just how easy it can be to use a Linux based operating system, dispelling myths about how scary Linux operating systems are.
There have been a number of releases of Linux distributions in the past couple of weeks but no release gets me more excited than a new version of Puppy Linux.
The latest release of Puppy Linux is called "Precise Puppy" and can be downloaded from the Puppy homepage.
I downloaded a version at the weekend and using Unetbootin I installed it to a USB drive and this is my review of the latest version of Puppy Linux.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, including the KVM hypervisor, has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ – the highest level of assurance for an unmodified commercial operating system – for the Operating System Protection Profile (OSPP) including extended modules for Advanced Management, Advanced Audit, Labeled Security, and Virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on Dell, HP, IBM and SGI hardware.
At Red Hat we are involved with a lot of cool open source projects. One of these is the popular LibreOffice productivity Suite, where we are putting in a lot of effort to make sure Red Hat customers and the community in general have a dependable and feature rich Office Suite available.
A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown “encouraging” results.
Ubuntu is one of the most commonly used Linux-based desktop distributions. The Ubuntu distro and its various community projects are used the world over and a new release always turns heads. This past week I took the latest release from Canonical, Ubuntu 12.10, for a spin. The new release promised improved integration between the desktop and social media, the ability to treat web applications as local programs and search results in the Dash which would include products from Amazon. In short, it seems Ubuntu is looking to become more integrated with on-line services. While this may be convenient for some people, it has raised a number of privacy concerns in the community and, looking over Ubuntu's legal notice about privacy does not provide any reassurance. The notice informs us Canonical reserves the right to share our keystrokes, search terms and IP address with a number of third parties, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the BBC. This feature is enabled by default, but can be turned off through the distribution's settings panel.
There's a lot of action going on in the small tablet space with Apple recently announcing the iPad Mini and Google heavily pushing its Nexus 7 tablet devices. When most people think of open operating systems for these devices, they think of Android, but it's actually very easy to put Ubuntu on a Nexus 7 tablet. In fact, Canonical has posted complete, easy instructions for doing so.
As we've reported, Canonical is very interested in taking Ubuntu to tablets, TVs and other new devices. Some have even speculated that Canonical might consider becoming a player in the hardware business, as Google has. But it looks increasingly like Canonical will concentrate on how to take Ubuntu to devices made by others.
It would appear that the folks at Google – or at least one of their ranks – wants to prove the versatility of the hardware behind the newest Chromebook on the market with a port of Ubuntu as an operating system. We’ve reviewed the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook in full and can say with some confidence that it’d be amazing to have more options than just Chrome as an OS, especially given the undeniably low price point of the unit at $249 USD. The process has already begun with Google’s Olof Johansson, right on down on the case – with a dirty port going strong here right as the Chromebook is arriving in mailboxes!
As we near the release of the biggest consumer-oriented commercial software to ever hit Linux, some negative realities from other platforms may make a nasty appearance in Ubuntu. Why? That’s easy; as Ubuntu gains traction with the desktop buying masses, there will be more and more individuals who are simply not educated enough to discern between quality software and not.
On October 28th, Canonical officially announced that their Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system is no longer supported.
If you’re watching our website regularly, than this should be no news for you, as we’ve announced the end of life for Ubuntu 11.04 two months ago.
“This note is just to confirm that the support period for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) formally ends on October 28, 2012 and Ubuntu Security Notices no longer includes information or updated packages for Ubuntu 11.04.” said Kate Stewart in the announcement.
At a talk given this morning at the Ubuntu Development Summit (UDS) which is currently taking place in Copenhagen, Drew Bliss from Valve Software has announced the beginning of Valve's beta test of its Steam client for Linux. As Canonical employees have reported on Google+, Valve has also given developers attending the summit access to the beta program. Other Linux users may fill out a hardware survey on the company's site to be considered for the program as well; a Steam account is required to fill out the survey.
For Ubuntu 12.10 Canonical decided to abandon the Unity 2D desktop and just only support the standard Unity desktop with Compiz. When there isn't a proper OpenGL/3D driver available, LLVMpipe is used for running the GL commands on the CPU. This move caused lots of upset Ubuntu Linux users and the developers are now looking at what to do for a desktop that doesn't require 3D support.
In the absence of Canonical changing the behaviour of Unity in these regards, the EFF suggests that concerned users try installing an alternative desktop such as GNOME 3, KDE or Cinnamon.
Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns.
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It's a major privacy problem if you can't find things on your own computer without broadcasting what you're looking for to the world. You could be searching for the latest version of your résumé at work because you're considering leaving your job; you could be searching for a domestic abuse hotline PDF you downloaded, or legal documents about filing for divorce; maybe you're looking for documents with file names that will gave away trade secrets or activism plans; or you could be searching for a file in your own local porn collection. There are many reasons why you wouldn't want any of these search queries to leave your computer.
The mascot logo for Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” is on show at UDS, which starts tomorrow in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Mark Shuttleworth delivered a keynote on the opening day of the UDS and ha announced future plans that he has with Ubuntu.
But the EFF’s statement brings a particularly loud and influential voice into the debate. Unlike individual Ubuntu users upset by the search functionality, the EFF is a venerated organization that generally commands a great deal of respect within the open source channel for its support of digital rights. It’s also an organization Canonical has helped support in the past through proceeds donated from games sold in the Ubuntu Software Center.
As part of the push to make Ubuntu a competitive gaming platform, developers at Canonical and within the Ubuntu community will be working to improve the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager performance for Ubuntu 13.04.
As I wrote over the weekend, Canonical is planning to eventually ship its own SDK (Software Development Kit) for Ubuntu Linux to ease software development on the open-source platform. The Ubuntu SDK won't happen for the Ubuntu 13.04 release, but work is being planned about what to include in this Ubuntu-specific SDK.
Among the items that were talked about on Monday during the Ubuntu 13.04 Developer Summit in Copenhagen were how the SDK is to be integrated with Ubuntu, language/tool-kit support, form-factor support, performance, availability of documentation, the stability/maturity/support-life of an Ubuntu SDK, application sandboxing, and abstraction of the actual implementation.
Ubuntu developers are hoping to redesign Wubi, the Ubuntu Windows Installer, for the Ubuntu 13.04 release in April.
Wubi allows for Ubuntu Linux to be installed on a Microsoft Windows host that you can then launch at boot-time but without having to re-partition the drive, etc. It's a nice concept, but the Ubuntu Wubi performance is slow for I/O access.
Discussions were held this morning in Copenhagen at the Ubuntu Developer Summit about improving audio and graphics support for Ubuntu Linux in order to propel the distribution as a first-rate gaming platform.
Ubuntu wants to be a great gaming platform and as part of that audio and graphics support are two of several areas that need to be improved.
The new version of Ubuntu Linux slated for release in October introduces a feature that some users claim is at worst a violation of privacy or, at best, generally annoying. Ubuntu 12.10 introduces search results from Amazon into the Dash. That means you could be searching for a file or application on your computer and get shopping results under a "more suggestions" section after your general results.
A widget mechanism with a formal Unity widget API will be delivered for Ubuntu 13.04. There's still lots of decisions to be made, such as whether these widgets will be constructed in HTML5/JavaScript or Qt, but more details should be forthcoming in the near future. Unfortunately the slides for this Unity widget support aren't currently available on the Internet but should surface shortly.
With Ubuntu trying to improve their OpenGL driver support state to push the Linux OS as a platform for gaming, Valve going to be promoting the closed-source NVIDIA and AMD drivers on Linux, and various other challenges still turning up for those trying to use the different Linux OpenGL drivers, here are some new benchmarks comparing the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver against the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver.
Hardened sysadmins and operators often spurn graphical user interfaces (GUIs) as being slow, cumbersome, unscriptable and inflexible. GUIs are for wimps, right?
A new flavor of Ubuntu has been developed, and this one now runs on ARM Chromebooks. The release is still in alpha stages, meaning you can expect a few glitches and have some experimental features. You can run the OS in your Chromebook, but its still not recommended for daily work.
The Raspberry Pi mini computer that’s become popular with the maker community but was originally conceived as a device to help kids learn how to code has had the lightweight TinyBASIC programming language ported to it.
One Christmas in the mid 1980s when I was 10 or 11 years old my parent's bought me the best gift I have ever received.
My parents know nothing about computing or technology so they would never have come up with the gift if they hadn't asked "What would you like for Christmas this year?"
A new update of SD card image is available for Raspberry Pi that supports partitioning of memory between CPU and GPU. This means if you need more of RAM, you can do that by editing a single configuration file. Also, if you need some graphical memory for running some games, you can just go and increase the memory.
Use Python to make your first game on Raspberry Pi in our easy to follow step by step tutorial
Wireless communication chipset solutions provider HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd., and Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced that HiSilicon has joined Linaro as a core member.
HiSilicon will appoint a representative to the board of Linaro and work with other members to develop the future of Linux on ARM. The company will contribute resources to work together with the engineers from other Linaro members. In addition to joining the board of Linaro, HiSilicon will join the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), which directs the shared Linaro engineering team of over 100 engineers.
The latest version of the Enyo JavaScript framework now comes with LESS-based theming support and globalisation/localisation support. The update comes after the HP-sponsored development team recently added four new team members and are looking to expand. The Enyo project is part of the software foundation of WebOS and open WebOS, but since then, Enyo 2 has become a general purpose JavaScript framework for all browsers.
The solution to this issue? I've been told I need to compile a custom kernel module to add ext4 support. If I am going to spend that much effort getting Android to work I would rather devote that effort towards getting Debian to boot on the MK802 instead. So much for Android being easy.
We were looking forward to the big Google Android event which was scheduled for October 29th. Unfortunately, the event was called off and many devices which were rumored to be released at the event remained unannounced. However, Office Depot could no longer keep its patience and unveiled the 32GB Nexus 7 at its stores.
Lately we've seen an explosion of low-cost media players designed to access the web and run Android apps on TV with plain old Android. In part one last week we explored the diversification of products beyond the Google TV platform toward pure Android. In part two we explore each category of Android TV in depth and assess their roles in the TV ecosystem and potential for success.
Android TV options can be broken down into the following categories, including products based on the Google TV platform: low-end, sub-$100 media players; HDMI sticks; high-end, Google TV-based devices; cable-ready Over-The-Top, Set-Top-Boxes; and smartphones and tablets.
When Google announced its new Nexus tablet and smartphone line, the search giant also announced, almost in passing, that there's a new version of Android on its way: Android 4.2.
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1) Multi-user support
On Android 4.2-powered tablets, but not on smartphones, you'll be able to have multiple users. Each user will get his or her own setup. That means, for example, you can have your own home-screen, background, widgets, apps and games, while your spouse or office partner can have their own unique tablet experience. You can set this up so a new user must login to the tablet or they'll be able to simply hit a button and away they'll go with their own tablet take.
Google Inc. (GOOG) said there are about 700,000 applications available for downloading onto mobile devices that run the Android operating system, challenging Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s lead in the race for software tools.
Though there was no Google show on Monday, its Nexus 10 tablet would have been the star -- and it may even outshine the iPad. It has higher resolution than the iPad with Retina display, and unlike the iPad, it has a 16:10 aspect ratio that nicely accommodates the wide-screen format. It will offer movie buffs a superior viewing experience. Plus, it sells for a full $100 less than a comparable iPad.
Two new Android devices, the Nexus 4 handset and Nexus 10 tablet will go on sale on 13 November, Google has announced.
Only after a year of Steve Jobs' death Apple has started to look mediocre when compared with competitors. This year did not see a new category of devices from Apple, all the company is trying to do is catching up with Android. iPhone 5 was an effort to catch up with bigger screens of Android (the reception was negative), and now the iPad Mini is nothing but 'blatant copy'* of 7” Android tablets such as Galaxy Tab 7, Amazon Kindle Fire HD or the best selling Nexus 7.
Lack of competition in the desktop segment, Microsoft being an old dinosaur held the world hostage to old obsolete technologies, as it was repulsive to any innovation in the desktop. You can't pick a single revolutionary innovation in the desktop computing in the last 2 decades. I consider Windows XP - Windows 8 era to be dark ages for innovation in the desktop PC segment.
One of the worst hurricane in the US history, Sandy, washed Google's much expected event yesterday. But the resilient company anyway made the announcement of its much awaited Nexus series of products.
Yesterday Google captured all three form factors with its latest Nexus family of devices Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. Nexus 4 is already been praised as one of the best looking and the most powerful smartphone. Nexus 4 coverage has overshadowed the less talked about Nexus 10 tablet. So, how does this tablet stacks up against it's competitors namely the iPad and Microsoft Surface?
Taiwanese PC and tablet maker Asus has reported healthy third quarter results, spurred on by strong sales of the firm's tablets and notebook computers.
Como “todos” sabéis, “Skype” fue adquirido por Microsoft, y en su momento les prometí una alternativa libre. Pues bien, esa alternativa se llama “Jitsi”, antes conocido como “SIP Communicator”.
Back in January of 2011, the Eclipse Foundation announced the development of Orion, a browser/cloud based IDE. At the time, Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation told me that Orion is more than just Eclipse in a browser. It's a view that he re-iterated today with the official launch of Orion 1.0
In my early-October discussion of tech simplification at my former primary home, I'd mentioned that I was able to dispense with my powerline networking setup. But when I re-visited the CA residence a couple of weekends ago, I realized I'd forgotten about one particular node; my Power Mac G4 Cube upstairs. Instead of resurrecting a powerline spur, which would have necessitated a re-expansion beyond my solitary eight-port switch at the router, I instead decided to connect the G4 Cube to the LAN via an Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi bridge.
The list of accepted "dev rooms" for the FOSDEM 2013 conference have been announced.
In the most basic sense, programming code allocates specific locations in a program (or memory) that can be used for specific tasks. When code (malicious or otherwise) escapes those locations, trouble isn't usually far behind.
Open source companies have managed to get on board the UK Government's G-Cloud supplier framework, which enables public sector bodies to access and buy services from a range of listed suppliers. The idea of the G-Cloud is to make it less complex for public sector organisations to purchase by allowing companies to sign up and be validated with the CloudStore.
According to figures revealed by the Cabinet Office, 75% of suppliers named in both the first and second round of G-cloud framework are SMEs.
Since taking office in 2010, the coalition government has adopted a new public sector ICT strategy focused on sharing services and improving efficiency by reducing duplication of efforts and creating new ways for government departments to procure IT products and services.
OpenOffice's graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365's debut nears. Plans for "Cloud Apache OpenOffice" will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks
The PackageKit/Session Installer integration is implemented in UNO, that allow extensions and macro creators to trigger the installation of software from trusted archives in general — quite a nifty feature in itself. As we have this now in place, in the future we can also use it to complete the LibreOffice install by adding missing packages for certain actions that are not available in the default Ubuntu installation (which leaves out some parts of LibreOffice).
Red Hat's Jakub Jelinek issued a new 4.8.0 status report where he mentions "I'd like to close the stage 1 phase of GCC 4.8 development on Monday, November 5th. If you have still patches for new features you'd like to see in GCC 4.8, please post them for review soon. Patches posted before the freeze, but reviewed shortly after the freeze, may still go in, further changes should be just bugfixes and documentation fixes."
PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, free and open source network access control (NAC) system.
The latest major update to Clementine, version 1.1, expands the open source media player's streaming support and adds long-awaited podcast functionality. Clementine is a cross-platform program that, its developers say, is designed to be both fast and easy-to-use, and was inspired by version 1.4 of Amarok (the current release is Amarok 2.6). It supports playback of local music libraries and streaming of online radio stations, and can be used to transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC and AAC files.
Sourcefabric has released a new version of its open source radio automation software that brings with it several new features. Airtime 2.2 includes improvements to the rebroadcasting features of the application as well as new "Smart Blocks" that allow users to automatically assemble randomised playlists according to a set of parameters.
The Bootstrap developers have announced the release of version 2.2.0 of their open source web front-end toolkit. This new major update is the project's first release since leaving Twitter, which made the framework available as open source in August of last year, and brings with it dozens of fixes as well as new templates and a new media component.
To help reduce the government's debt, Portugal's public administrations should switch to free and open source software, pleads the country's Association for Free Software, Ansol. In a manifest published earlier this month, the group exposes recent violations of European public procurement rules, accusing public authorities of what it calls 'an unacceptable waste of public money'.
While the U.S. government has historically leaned towards the use open source software, lately there have been a few signs to remind us the government can still very much be a proprietary software consumer. Is the love affair with open source cooling in the halls of government?
Smaller governments, typically those in rural towns, don’t have the IT capacity to foster serious innovation in citizen participation like governments in larger cities do. Two groups decided it was time to give back and have come together to share their technical knowledge and expertise: OpenColorado and Colorado Code for Communities will combine community, platform, and digital literacy to create a hosted service platform that includes open data with different web and mobile applications.
FEMA could get crushed by sequester: If the sequester takes effect in January, the White House estimates that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would lose about $878 million, according to The Washington Post. Most of that budget goes to programs that provide disaster relief, such as the response happening now to the devastation of megastorm Sandy.
One of the premises of this blog is that the success and methodology of open source are not one-offs, but part of a larger move towards open, collaborative activity. Thus, by observing what open source does well - and not so well - lessons can be learned that can be applied in quite different fields.
With the cost of college textbooks as high as they are, students are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. The edtech world is finally starting to take notice: companies and edtech leaders are working to create resources for open-source textbooks. Online Colleges has created an infographic on the numbers behind the shift toward open-source textbooks, and some of the statistics will surprise you.
Computer scientists from the University of Bonn have developed a new robot whose source code and design plan is publicly accessible. It is intended to facilitate the entry into research on humanoids, in particular, the TeenSize Class of the RoboCup. The scientists recently introduced the new robot at the IROS Conference (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Portugal.
This month from CPUs based upon AMD's new Piledriver micro-architecture I have delivered results of compiler tuning on AMD's Open64 compiler as well as GCC bdver2 tuning. That initial testing from an AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core processor didn't show any big boost out of the "bdver2" target with the new BMI/TBM/F16C/FMA3 instruction set extensions. Testing in this article from the AMD FX-8350 are GCC compiler benchmarks of the 4.6.3, 4.7.2, and 4.8.0 development snapshots to look for performance improvements on this new high-end AMD processor when using the very latest GCC compiler code.
It was early in the proceedings here on Monday night when I was struck with a horrible vision. It may have been right about that moment in the final presidential debate when Willard Romney — who, for most of the past two years, has been the most bellicose Mormon since they disbanded the Nauvoo Legion — looked deeply into the camera's eye and, inches from actual sincerity, said, "We can't kill our way out of this mess." Or, perhaps, it was when, in a discussion of his newfound dedication to comprehensive solutions to complex problems, he announced his devotion to "a peaceful planet," or when he cited a group of Arab scholars in support of loosening the grip of theocratic tyranny in the Middle East.
Apple's CEO Tim Cook took a dig at Microsoft's soon-to-be released Surface tablet during Apple's earnings call on Thursday, referring to it as a "fairly compromised, confusing product".
"I haven't personally played with a Surface yet," Tim Cook said in response to a question about the Surface and the competitive landscape in the tablet market overall.
"What we're reading about it is that it's a fairly compromised, confusing product."
iFixit determines Microsoft's tablet is pretty tough to repair, coming in only slightly easier than the iPad.
52 percent of respondents had not heard of Windows 8 and that 61 percent had "little or no interest"
In studies conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, a software consultancy, experienced Windows users had trouble finding applications on the Desktop interface.
We've raised questions in the past about the relevance of "Klout" scores. If you don't know, Klout is one of a few companies that try to measure "influence" online by looking at your social media activity. The whole process seems kind of silly, but for whatever reason, once you put a number on things, people take it seriously, no matter how bogus the number might be. Lots of companies now use Klout scores to determine who they should give special perks to, leading to plenty of people just trying to game their scores. However, should Klout scores count towards your grade as a student? Adam Singer sent over examples of two separate journalism professors who think so.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten a lot of abuse for his campaign to ban the sale of sugary drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. There are lots of reasons for this, but among the economically literate his proposal is widely viewed as gratuitously inefficient. Simply taxing sugary sodas would be a lot more sensible, so why not do that instead?
Well, that was a waste of $30-some dollars...
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is to release its first ARM-based chip in 2014.
In tonight's 'Conversations with Great Minds,' Thom talks with Frederick Kaufman, author and Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine. Tonight’s 'Big Picture Rumble' panel discusses Romney campaign Co-Chair John Sununu’s racist comments on Colin Powell, how simply living near foreclosed homes has cost families trillions and whether Hurricane Sandy will prevent the oligarchs from stealing the election.
As the head of Greece’s largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.
Over the next couple of minutes the man is also pepper-sprayed and beaten with a truncheon by the female officer, all while posing no threat to the officers’ well-being whatsoever.
After a good two minutes of sadistic thrashing, the officers are joined by a squadron of their peers, and successfully put him in handcuffs and under arrest.
A source confirmed with CrownHeights.info that the man had full permission to be there, and had been living there for a month without any trouble. It is unknown who called the police or why.
Has there ever been a more crazed, cruel, anti-people, corporate-indentured, militaristic and monetized Republican Party in its 154-year history? An about-to-be-released list of some of the actual brutish votes by the House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor, will soon be available to you from the House Democratic Caucus.
Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov created one of the only websites in the world to successfully replicate WikiLeaks’ model of anonymously leaked bombshell documents. Now their project may face a similar fate to WikiLeaks’: Crippling attacks by the financial institutions of the country they’ve embarrassed.
Biggest increase in coal usage for 50 years could throw the UK's green ambitions off course
Two aging oil and natural gas pipelines running under the sparkling waters of the Straits of Mackinac in northern Michigan are time bombs that could devastate the upper Great Lakes if they rupture, according to a report issued today by the National Wildlife Federation.
The pipelines are owned by Enbridge Inc. and carry an estimated 20 million gallons of oil and natural gas every day under the pristine water from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario. The company announced in May that it plans to increase the volume of oil it pumps through the lines, a proposal the federation says could strain the 59-year-old pipes to the breaking point.
No Dash For Gas protesters scale cooling towers in protest at UK government's energy plans
Senator Bernie Sanders called out a group of the top US CEOs Thursday in a new report revealing top corporate tax dodgers in the US and urged those dodgers to 'look in the mirror' for the causes of America's ballooning deficit. The report followed a joint statement issued Thursday morning by the top 80 US CEOs, pleading to Congress for a deficit reduction plan that would include cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and a decrease in taxes "for the top 2%."
After learning that the journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested this morning, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its appeal to the Greek authorities to respect all of his rights
The former head of the FDIC warns that the financial system remains far from stable – and that regulations like the Volcker Rule may be too complex to be effective. These five steps, she suggests, could lead to more sensible reforms.
Earlier this year internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a major hub of climate change denial and right-wing extremism, were publicly leaked. The documents exposed the Heartland Institute's funders and strategies for attacking climate science, and led to a mass exodus of Heartland's corporate funders.
One Wisconsin Now and theGrio have uncovered that the Milwaukee-based Einhorn Family Foundation is the "private family foundation" that funded controversial billboards in Milwaukee which warned: "VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY! 3 1/2 years and a $10,000 fine." The billboards were denounced as voter suppression by Mike Wilder, director of the African-American Round Table, and other community groups. The billboards were put up in largely African-American and Latino communities in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Columbus by media behemoth Clear Channel, but the client remained anonymous.
When Phyllis Cleveland first saw the billboard on East 35th Street warning of prison time and a $10,000 fine for voter fraud, the city councilwoman concluded it had one purpose: to intimidate the constituents of her predominantly low-income ward in Cleveland, Ohio.
Earlier this year, we wrote about how a minority owner of the Miami Heat, Ranaan Katz, was so upset about an "unflattering photo" that a blogger/critic had posted of him, that he apparently bought the copyright on the photo and sued the blogger, claiming copyright infringement.
2012 has been yet another year filled with meritless lawsuits filed solely to chill First Amendment free speech rights -- so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP). As websites relying on user-generated content continue to increase in popularity, we also see a rise in SLAPPs targeting online speech, from the everyday blogger to the one-time online reviewer. Some of the most talked about SLAPPs this year include:
Tension rises between Greek government and media after TV presenters are suspended over criticism of public order minister
The long-awaited inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics of the British press” being run by Lord Leveson is nearing completion, and rumblings of a proposal to regulate the press are beginning to surface.
Let us be clear – a free press is a fundamental part of a democratic society. From bloggers to broadsheets, the idea that the state should be able to decide who gets to publish is entirely at odds with the essential role the press plays in holding the state and authority to account.
In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.
The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.
Reacting to the All Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group's report, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:
"We welcome the group's desire for evidence based policy but think this sits ill with its' call to move the Intellectual Property Office to the Department of Culture Media and Sport, which has had a dire record of inventing policy initiatives without a shred of evidence.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news about food lately, you’ve probably read about the now infamous “Seralini study,” in which University of Caen (France) molecular biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini demonstrated major health issues associated with eating Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) corn and the herbicide used in conjunction with it, RoundUp.
Over the past year or so, there has been a slow and steady effort to generate support for a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. The Obama administration is now behind this, and there is no reason to think a President Romney would change gears. Thus, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election, this trade initiative is likely to go forward.
A couple years ago, we wrote about Hebrew University suing GM for using an image of Albert Einstein in an ad without first getting permission (i.e., paying up). Einstein left his assets to Hebrew University (of which he was a founder and a big supporter), and Hebrew University has taken that to an extreme, more or less arguing near complete ownership over Einstein's likeness, and has been ridiculously aggressive in trying to enforce those rights -- to the point of tricking print shops into printing Einstein images, only to threaten them with lawsuits. All this despite the concept of publicity rights barely even existing in Einstein's time, and no indication that he cared one way or the other about such things.
As promptly reported yesterday by the IPKat, the Orphan Works Directive has just been published in Official Journal of the European Union, thus becoming Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works. This Kat agrees with Jeremy that there’s plenty of material for preliminary references to the Court of Justice of the European Union, as the various provisions in the Directive look, to say the least, open to various interpretations.
But the more urgent motivator for lawmakers was the bruising battle early this year over SOPA—a bill aimed at reducing online copyright infringement that would have dramatically increased civil and criminal penalties associated with even minor violations of the law.
What looked like a slam dunk for the entertainment industry, which authored the bill, instead sparked a revolt among Internet users that culminated in a day of website blackouts. Millions of average citizens called and wrote to Congress to complain, bitterly, about lawmakers’ casual and admittedly inexpert tinkering with the one growing sector we have left.