Two of the four robots inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame on Oct. 23 ran embedded Linux. Aldebaran Robotics' humanoid, partially open source Nao robot, known for its use in RoboCup robot soccer competitions, won in the Education & Consumer category. And iRobot's PackBot remote sensing robot, which runs proprietary Linux, took the Industrial & Service award.
While it hasn't been a news item for a couple months, a group of developers are still hard at work to advance the LLVM/Clang compiler and the Linux kernel to a point where this alternative compiler to GCC can be used for building the Linux kernel.
Going back two years ago when a concerted effort began to build the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang compiler. At the time a number of patches were needed to both LLVM/Clang and the Linux kernel itself plus there were lots of broken parts. Patches are still needed, but more of the Linux kernel is properly working and it's an easier process than it once was.
With 2D color tiling enabled by default in the R600 Gallium3D Radeon open-source driver as of this week, here are new benchmarks showing off the OpenGL performance impact of the 1D and 2D tiling methods for this common open-source AMD Linux graphics driver.
With the recent release of Wayland 1.0, here's a visualization that looks back on the development of Wayland/Weston going back to 2008 when it was born as a small project by Kristian Høgsberg at Red Hat.
After being reminded about Gource from the libvirt 1.0 release article this week, I decided to apply Gource to the Wayland Git tree followed by the Weston reference compositor.
The visualization of Wayland's development begins in 2008 when Wayland was born as a small personal project of Kristian Høgsberg. At the time he was working at Red Hat and this was just a side-project, before being hired by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center to work on Wayland full-time where there is also numerous other developers now also dedicated to this X11-alternative.
Writing is one of the essential skills in modern society. Being able to communicate effectively is paramount both at work and at home. It makes your thinking visible to others, and is the main way in which work, learning, and intellect is judged by others.
The Wine development release 1.5.16 is now available.
Few days back we reported that Linux Game Publishing is planning to bring all games in their catalog to Ubuntu Software Center and Desura. Some of their games like Sacred Gold and Majesty have already been released in these distribution services.
Few days back we reported that Linux Game Publishing is planning to bring all games in their catalog to Ubuntu Software Center and Desura. Some of their games like Sacred Gold and Majesty have already been released in these distribution services.
Now RuneSoft, another company that specializes in porting games for Linux, is planning to bring their games to Desura. Alongside their own published games, they have also ported games like Software Tycoon and Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom for Linux Game Publishing.
He's unhappy with the second part–retorting that you can't attribute a trend toward extreme weather to climate change. But it's actually the first part that's most obviously problematic: Contrary to Kolbert, it's possible to attribute every weather-related event to climate change.
Just as another year is passing by and summer is on its way, KDE Brazil gathered and fled south, just like migratory birds. Dragons are like birds, you know? Konqi the KDE Dragon is a little bigger than a bird, but he still has wings. We all had a common destination in this trip, the beautiful Itaipu, the biggest water-powered power plant in the Americas. (It used to be the biggest in the world, but a bigger one was built in Asia last year.)
That's a question the GNOME project would do well to contemplate. The once mighty Linux desktop has stumbled and looks like it might be poised to come crashing down after the release of GNOME 3.
The Fedora Linux developers have decided to, yet again, delay the release of Fedora 18's Beta by another week. But, by taking a week out of the beta test period, they still plan to make a final release on 11 December. The decision to take a week out of the schedule has been made to avoid overrunning into the Christmas holiday period.
The statistics alone for the Norfolk Makerfaire are impressive alone. They had 46 tables on display (including Fedora), 1300-1400 attendees, and they issued one Band-Aid over the course of the day. When put in perspective that it was the first faire put on by members of 757 Labs, they are even more impressive.
Through improving the publicly available Ubuntu Linux documentation and reaching out to new developers -- along with existing Windows developers that may now be thinking of targeting Ubuntu as their next supported platform -- the Linux OS hopes to increase its developer and application count.
XZ compressed packages have been used for a while by various distributions, including the Gnome repositories, but Ubuntu's developers are still reticent about switching to another compression.
While the Western world flounders in its debt crises and stagnating growth, much of the developing world is telling a different story.
It’s been a big year for Canonical and Ubuntu, with big releases and lots of controversy highlighting the last six or so months. The company is steaming ahead with its plans though, and has announced that they’re joining the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).
I’ve been reading the Microsoft Surface RT reviews, and while the Surface Pro x86 is really the one everyone should judge the line on, they are pretty much the same when it comes to the Windows RT software. If you don’t know the difference between Windows RT and full Windows 8 (which will be on the Pro) it’s basically this – Windows 8 runs millions of PC programs, Windows RT does not.
After releasing plans for the ARMv8 64-bit micro architecture a year ago, UK-based semiconductor developer ARM has now announced actual implementations: the Cortex-A57 and the Cortex-A53. Both implementations can be used on their own or work together according to the big.LITTLE processing concept to increase chip efficiency when processor loads are low. The new CPU cores will initially target highly integrated server SoCs and can be combined with CoreLink components; this allows multiple chips or CPU cores to be linked together tightly and coherently. Powerful and energy-efficient cluster interconnects are expected to be pivotal for the future success of certain microprocessors.
As the ARM architecture prepares for a future not only powering consumer devices but also driving a new generation of power-sipping high-density enterprise servers, Linaro, the not-for-profit group created to develop open source software for ARM, has announced the creation of an enterprise group to help drive forward collaboration in the new space.
If you’re looking for a creative use of a Raspberry Pi, or maybe just want to get your retro game on, this DIY coffee table arcade machine is perfect for you. You’ll need some supplies, but Instructables user grahamgelding will show you how it’s done.
A British project to design and sell a self-assembly arcade cabinet for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer has won backing on Kickstarter, just days after the site opened up to donations from the UK.
Dawati was an interesting desktop shell for the Tizen operating system that was pulled from the MeeGo project, but work on the project has more or less been halted for the past six months.
Tizen is still around with the Tizen 2.0 Alpha from September that's expected to be officially released in December, but the Dawati Shell hasn't seen real activity since April of this year.
While Apple is busy pushing a smaller tablet to take on Google and Amazon's 7-inch offerings, Google is thinking big.
The company has teamed up with Samsung for the new Nexus 10 tablet, a direct competitor to the full-size iPad.
Asus CFO told The Wall Street Journal late Tuesday that the Nexus 7, Google’s well-received, affordable 7-inch Android tablet was nearing 1 million in sales per month, having picked up the pace considerably over the last month in particular. Chang noted that unit sales rose from roughly 500,000 around the time of its introduction in June/July, and rose steadily after that. Tablet sales for Asus beat analyst expectations, likely as a result of the Google-branded Nexus device, which got an update earlier this week in terms of base storage specs at both price points.
Android 4.1 'Jelly Bean' finally has 3 percent usage share in its sights, but Android 4.0 'Ice Cream Sandwich' continues to gain ground faster, currently powering more than a quarter of Android devices.
Samsung's Galaxy S III is doing pretty well, the company has announced that it has sold 30 million units of the smartphone worldwide.
Over 300 Android enthusiasts got into a huddle this week, discussing, debating, writing code and sharing geek wisdom on Google’s Open Source mobile operating platform, Android.
Organised by HasGeek, the second edition of the two-day conference, Droidcon India, was held at the MLR Convention Centre, Whitefield. Participants included cross-platform mobile app developers, Android developers, enterprises developing products and services for the Android platform, and front-end designers and engineers.
This week, Google announced a new lineup of devices that would be running its Android OS, Jelly Bean version 4.2. Those new devices are a phone, the Nexus 4, and a 10-inch tablet, called the Nexus 10. I’ve had a chance to play with both devices, specifically the Nexus 10, and I was actually surprised with how the device has fit into my daily routine.
The problem is that people often take what writers say as fact without realizing that there is a lot of intentional disinformation being used to gain a certain objective. Sometimes the author is not spreading disinformation, but putting information in the wrong context to get the desired result. In the old days, news used to be disseminated by journalists who were trained to at least look objective. Now, any skillful writer has to power to inform or misinform people.
In a previous post I looked at how LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats, claiming to have far more users than it actually has. Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives were peddling anything other than the plain, honest truth. No one seemed to noticed that the claims did not pass the” sniff test”. No one investigated more deeply. Until now. I hope that after reading these posts that you, gentle reader, will exercise your brain the next time you read a press release or blog post from LibreOffice, and try harder to separate fact from fiction. It will not be easy.
Maia is a colony management simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux from indie developer Simon Roth. Launched on Kickstarter the day the service became open to projects based in the UK – October 31st – the game has already received €£26,721 over 1,500 pledges at the time of writing. With a goal of €£100,042 to be pledged by November 28th, that means the game is already 27% funded.
DragonFlyBSD 3.2 brings kernel scheduler improvements, updates to the GCC compiler, and a port of the FreeBSD USB stack. It's the kernel work though that's interesting since in multi-threaded benchmarks it has been shown to do much better than DragonFlyBSD 3.0 and to compete with Scientific Linux 6.2.
I have recently been working on RaspberryPi GNU sipwitch servers. I actually have two things in mind for this. The first is a simple and complete stand-alone secure free software voip “switch” anyone could deploy and use, much like a FreedomBox for VoIP, as a kind of wallwort with ethernet you can plug into any router. A low cost and general purpose secure VoIP server does I think have appeal, and producing complete pre-configured and assembled servers would certainly be more interesting than selling project t-shirts. The second idea is a sipwitch VoIP public wifi access point to enable anonymous secure calling, like pictured here.
Marcin Jakubowski dreams of living off the grid. Over the past few years, he's been working on a set of 50 machines he believes necessary to found and sustain an independent, modern community. He wants to "take everything that civilization has learned to date" and use it create a blueprint for a "Global Village Construction Set" that others can use to follow in his footsteps. His Factor e Farm has already developed and built a tractor, brick press, table saw, and bread oven, as well as many other machines. The farm hopes to have the complete set of 50 ready in 2015.
ESL, the Embedded Systems Language, is a new programming language intended for embedded/small systems and its compiler was implemented atop the LLVM infrastructure.
While figuring out what niche operating systems to benchmark on Phoronix next, I realized the AuroraUX operating system project quietly disappeared.
About a week before election day, a young girl, maybe 10 years old, confronted Colorado House candidate Sal Pace in a pew at his Pueblo church. "She said, 'Is it true that you want to cut my grandmother's Medicare?'" Pace remembers.
Back in 2000, Republican election officials in Florida led by then-Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris kicked nearly 60,000 mostly African American voters off the rolls just ahead of the election.
They said that these people – who comprised 3% of the entire African American electorate in Florida – had been convicted of felonies and were thus ineligible to vote.
Earlier this week, ThinkProgress released internal documents from the Romney campaign detailing how it is training poll watchers to mislead voters in Wisconsin. Now, according to new documents, Wisconsin may not be the only state where Romney’s campaign is equipping volunteers with deceptive information.
With Election Day on the horizon, most voters have settled on their choice for the oval office. But let's not forget about the all the other choices on the ballot, many of which will have a great affect on the lives and livelihoods of Americans -- Congressional and State representatives, local officials, and referenda.
The just-launched Windows 8 has been nothing short of polarizing, in both the online community and users at large. But we can all agree it's new, and a little bit confusing. Google wants to help — help you get your old Google back, anyway.
After using a Surface tablet, it became crystal clear that the Surface is really an Office appliance, not a tablet à la the iPad. But it's not a very good Office appliance. One reason is that the hardware doesn't work well for Office, even with the bundled keyboard cover, because the Office apps are nearly unusable with the touchscreen and just so-so with the keyboard's trackpad. You'll want a laptop's superior input hardware if you do a lot of Office work. Even then, you'll suffer from the poor Windows touch environment, where text selection is difficult, gestures are limited, and the heavy reliance on menus is interruptive.
Over the last decade, judges have repeatedly told torture victims that they don’t have the right to a day in court when they seek compensation. Even when victims have substantial publicly available evidence to support their claims, our government and its private contractors have remained above the law.
Under most circumstances, these plaintiffs would have their day in court. Our constitutional and civil rights demand that. But when it comes to national security, the Bush and Obama administrations asked courts to toss these cases, even before plaintiffs have a chance to share their side of the story, invoking the state secrets privilege and other procedural hurdles.
Vupen occupies a gray area of computer security research, selling vulnerabilities to vetted parties in governments and companies but not sharing the details with affected software vendors. The company advocates that its information helps organisations defend themselves from hackers, and in some cases, play offense as well.
A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and "documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps."
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered.
Yesterday, EFF, on behalf of its client Kyle Goodwin, filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload's service and denied third parties like Mr. Goodwin access to their property. The government also filed a brief of its own, calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require third parties—often individuals or small companies—to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings, just to get their own property back.
I don’t normally focus on civil liberties here, but today’s news about John Kiriakou’s guilty plea really strikes a nerve. During the last decade, CIA operatives allegedly tortured accused terrorists in an effort to extract information to them in violation of US and international law. Kiriakou, appalled by his colleagues’ behavior, leaked the name of one of the participants to a reporter. The Obama administration brought charges against Kiriakou for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Kiriakou’s guilty plea makes this the first successful prosecution under the act in the last quarter-century.
The Portland Police Bureau said the event, which grew to several hundred demonstrators...
eam GhostShell, the hacker group responsible for the recent leak of some 120,000+ records raided from top universities around the world, has done it again.
"GhostShell is declaring war on Russia's cyberspace, in 'Project BlackStar'. The project is aimed at the Russian Government. We'll start off with a nice greeting of 2.5 million accounts/records leaked, from governmental, educational, academical, political, law enforcement, telecom, research institutes, medical facilities, large corporations (both national and international branches) in such fields as energy, petroleum, banks, dealerships and many more," the wrote in the statement accompanying the leak.
There’s been a noticeable shift in the way that prominent figures talk about how to deal with climate change. Many advocates have shifted from a more accommodating “let’s all join together and develop clean energy” message to directly targeting the fossil fuel industry as a villain. This effort, embodied in 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour, has become a central piece of messaging in the environmental community.
Goldman Sachs has been getting a string of bad publicity recently, with former Goldman board member Rajat Gupta being sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. And in March, London executive Greg Smith resigned in an op-ed in The New York Times, where he accused the company of corruption.
Smith, who started as an intern at the firm in 2000, worked him way up to a position as a vice president before ending his 12-year career in spectacular fashion. His subsequent tell-all book, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story” comes out this week. Greg Smith comes to “Starting Point” with more on his story.
The city of Allentown, Penn. is making steps towards the privatization of its public water and sewage systems.
But the hurricane has also revealed divisions in the city that existed long before Sandy touched ground: between rich and poor, and between the workers who make the city run and the wealthy who reap the benefits.
Apple is the poster-child for the claim that, despite its present troubles, America is destined to prosper in this de-regulated global economy.
Because of technological advances, we must spell out what used to be taken for granted.
The Kuwaiti authorities must drop charges against Musallam al-Barrak, who faces prosecution purely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression with remarks he made that have been deemed to undermine the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah, Amnesty International said.
A Bangkok court acquitted the netizen Surapak Phuchaisaeng two days ago of charges of insulting the king (lèse-majesté), for which he had been remanded in custody since September last year.
Reporters Without Borders is satisfied with the outcome of this case. “This case, involving a year in custody, underlines the failings of the Thai judicial system, particularly concerning allegations of lèse-majesté,” the press freedom organization said.
When the Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to vindicate the rights of Megaupload users who used the locker site for non-infringing purposes, they put forward Kyle Goodwin. The Ohio videographer used Megaupload as a backup service, but he lost commercially valuable footage thanks to the unlucky combination of the government's January raid and a personal hard drive crash. Since May, he has been seeking the return of his files.
Not only did publishers not get the injunctive relief they sought in a closely watched case over e-reserves, last week they paid the tab. In a final order in the Georgia State E-reserves case, Cambridge University Press vs. Patton, Judge Orinda Evans directed the publisher plaintiffs to pay the defendants nearly $3 million in legal fees and costs, including $2,861,348.71 in attorneys’ fees and $85,746.39 in other court costs. And, last week, on October 26, records show that the publishers deposited more than $3.2 million into the Commercial Registry of the Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The money, however, isn’t gone yet—publishers have appealed the case, and the money will stay in escrow under a stay order until the appeal is settled.