DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural WorldWe probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it's so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found "survival of the fittest" acting in computer programming.
My photographer, Steve, squints through a computerized scope squatting atop a big hunting rifle. We're outdoors at a range just north of Austin, Texas, and the wind is blowing like crazy—enough so that we're having to dial in more and more wind adjustment on the rifle's computer. The spotter and I monitor Steve's sight through an iPad linked to the rifle via Wi-Fi, and we can see exactly what he's seeing through the scope. Steve lines up on his target downrange—a gently swinging metal plate with a fluorescent orange circle painted at its center—and depresses a button to illuminate it with the rifle's laser.
Katherine Noyes over on the Linux Advocates site has resurrected the GNU/Linux vs Linux naming debate, once again. To the uninitiated, the debate centers around if we should refer to the operating system as “GNU-slash-Linux” or simply as “Linux”, with the Free Software Foundation claiming that referring to the operating system merely as Linux gives undue credit to the kernel, without proper attribution to the GNU tools that make up the majority of the OS. Personally, I find the debate to be a waste of time. It is unlikely that anyone outside of a very small group of dedicated loyalists will care about the distinction. However, it does bring up a more interesting point, what about going a layer higher? What happens when distributions stop referring to themselves as Linux derivatives, come to market only under their name?
I have been using a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook since picking it up last year. The Samsung is a great laptop that happens to run Chrome OS, something that works very well for me. I like everything about the Samsung. Then Google sent me a Chromebook Pixel and spoiled me.
The Series 5 550 Chromebook works very well for me. It runs Chrome OS nicely and is a super work machine that meets my needs. There is not really anything I don't like about the Samsung, but it's no longer enough.
Earlier this morning I wrote about Chris Forbes committing texture storage multi-sample support to mainline Mesa and the Intel DRI driver. This OpenGL 4.x extension is now accompanied by a new "RFC" patch-set for providing Mesa support for another GL4 feature.
Chris Forbes' newly-published patches on Sunday morning are for ARB_texture_gather, a feature mandated by OpenGL 4.0 and previously not tackled within the Mesa/Gallium3D world.
Open-source Intel developers have advanced their OpenGL geometry shaders work for Mesa, namely for the Intel DRI driver, and call it "substantial progress and definitely a reason to celebrate." This important GL3 feature is nearing a working state but there's still some work ahead before it will be merged.
Beyond LLVM 3.3 having performance optimizations, one of many other features coming to this next compiler infrastructure update is greater support for Intel's AVX2 instruction set extensions.
AVX2 is the first major update to the Advanced Vector Extensions. AVX2 is also known as "Haswell New Instructions" and will be found in the Intel Haswell CPUs introduced in the coming months. AVX2 tacks in gather support, expands most integer AVX instructions to 256-bits, 3-operand FMA support, vector shifts, and other new functionality.
Support for the OpenGL ARB_texture_storage_multisample extension is now implemented within Mesa and is exposed by the Intel DRI driver.
For those wondering whether Intel "Ivy Bridge" hardware is still being made faster with each succeeding Linux kernel release, here are benchmarks from an Intel Ultrabook looking at the Ivy Bridge performance on recent kernel releases going up to the yet-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel.
A few days back I carried out a Linux kernel performance comparison from an ASUS Ultrabook with Intel Core i3 3217U "Ivy Bridge" processor with 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hitachi HDD, and 24GB SanDisk SSD. Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64 was in use while the Linux 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 (Git) mainline/vanilla kernels were tested.
The Wine development release 1.5.27 is now available.
All the talk nowadays if of "unification" or to paraphrase Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu the "availability of a single interface for all devices." And with all this talk I began to wonder why more gaming engine's aren't jumping on board.
The recent release of Unity3d 4 was all the rage because it meant that an incredibly popular engine was coming to Linux, and thus all unity3d games developed with the new engine could in fact run on Linux (granted a Linux version was released). In my personal opinion, Unity3d is great, but when compared to the more AAA engines like the Unreal, FrostBite and CDProjectRed's RED Engine just to name a few, Unity3d falls a bit flat in my eyes.
That's right, you heard it here first folks, Half-Life 4 has been added to the SteamDB! It includes hints of others things too.
Serious Sam 3: BFE is a very serious first-person shooter, as the name suggests, and it has just received a major update that greatly improves its performance.
The Croteam studio has been hard at work and it is trying its best to make Serious Sam 3: BFE one of the best shooters for Linux.
The latest update for the game has been promoted from the Beta to stable. It’s probably one of the largest patches launched so far and the number of Linux related fixes and improvements is quite impressive.
They have also just launched their Mobile Bundles which are for Android only, so no Windows, Mac or Linux (I know, I know Android is part Linux that's an argument for another day) versions, which makes me wonder just how the Windows crowd feels since they have been left out this time, too.
March 2013 was another interesting month for Linux users. The Mir Display Server, ARM on Linux advancements, and Valve's continued Linux game play continued to excite readers.
This month on Phoronix at the time of publishing there were 242 original news articles and 11 multi-page featured articles. The number of news postings and articles is down from February when there was FOSDEM plus advertising campaigns on the site were more lucrative... Phoronix.com is almost entirely ad-driven so please view this site without AdBlock or other cruft. And/or please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing as well as viewing multi-page articles on a single-page.
Valve has added Half-Life 4 to Steam and it will be a title for Linux without mentioning OS X or Windows support.
As can be seen from SteamDB, Half-Life 4 was added today to Steam, well ahead of the Half-Life 3 debut. The Half-Life 4 entry also hints at binary support for the Steam Box, Valve's forthcoming console. The Half-Life 4 entry also notes use of "Source Engine 2" for the game.
For those that have followed Phoronix over the years know that I am a big supporter of the Unigine game/3D engine. The engine delivers absolutely beautiful graphics and there is first-rate Linux support. The developers at Unigine Corp are very Linux-friendly. Unfortunately, games and other software based upon Unigine aren't too quick to come to the Linux gaming scene.
Today marks one year since an important milestone in the public history of Valve's Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux.
After all the delays in our Mageia 3 planning, we’re very pleased to be able to announce the beta 4 release.
Despite the growth of Linux adoption in enterprise and business use, Red Hat, the large company that sells Linux operating-system software fell after reporting fiscal fourth-quarter sales that missed estimates as some customers stopped purchasing, due to the current global economic situation.
Fedora 19 will be one of the first desktop Linux distributions shipping with accelerated Radeon HD 7000 series graphics support.
It's been decided at the last minute that "smart scopes", a feature of the new Unity desktop, will not ship in Ubuntu 13.04.
Smart Scopes were supposed to be an intelligent server-side service for deciding if a search query should be pushed through a particular scope, among other benefits. Smart scopes were said to be self-learning and aimed to provide more relevant results for users of the Unity desktop.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has finally listened to critics and EFF and said that the much controversial online search feature of Dash will be disabled by default in Ubuntu 13.04, which will be released later this month. Canonical was working closely with EFF, FSF and the EU privacy advisors and found it in best interest of its users.
"Users are our #1 priority and not our business interests," said Shuttleworth in a statement, "the foundation of Ubuntu is people and if some decisions were made which put user's privacy at risk, that would be very un-Ubuntu. We never shied away from trying out new things and we never hesitated in changing a decision for a greater good."
Every day we walk past and interact with machines that run Linux, without ever noticing.
‘Zeitgeist‘ is a computer based user activity logging framework for the GNU/Linux operating system that keeps a track of your frequently opened files (text, audio, videos etc), visited web links, conversations that you had with others (through ‘Chat’ apps) etc.
The database is a semantic one and so it makes it easy to identify patters, thus improves the ability to predict user activities. And since this database can be accessed by other applications (if they support ‘Zeitgeist’), they can predict or guess the user’s needs more accurately and thus improving the user experience.
While the future is with Mir and Unity Next, work on the short-term includes more performance optimizations for the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager.
While Sam Spilsbury no longer works at Canonical and has some dissenting views over the future direction of Ubuntu Linux, he has dabbled with some performance optimizations recently for Compiz/Nux.
To protect the naked Raspberry Pi and cool it when overclocked, SweetBox is a great choice for you. SweetBox is a product by Graspinghand, a group of young designers from France. And the group is having a campaign on Kickstarter to raise fund for the project.
A cryptic media invite to see the social network's "Home on Android" gets the rumor mill running anew about an upcoming Facebook phone.
Facebook is moving to take a more prominent place on smartphones.
The social network has been developing new software for mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system that displays content from users’ Facebook accounts on a smartphone’s home screen–the first screen visible when they turn on the device, people familiar with the situation said. Facebook will initially demonstrate the capability on smartphones from HTC, these people said, but has been working to reach similar arrangements with other device makers.
Don't want to give your money to Apple in exchange for an iPad or iPad mini? No problem! Here are my top 5 Android tablets for April 2013.
I have been a self-employed technical person for the past 38 years. I my living based solely on my output. Since 1998 a major secret weapon has been the use of SR. Certainly, you can get speech recognition from the Debian pool. While some good folks over in Japan have made some major advancements over the years, it is still a toy. This is inherent in the complexity of speech recognition software.
In 1998 IBM had a Linux version of SR known as ViaVoice. It worked about as well as any other SR offering of the day. IBM dropped the product. At a conference I asked an IBM executive, Why? The answer was: “We did not get enough gross revenue to cover the cost of the box manufacturing to put the CD in it.”
In my experience the Open Source community is its own worst enemy. Putting on the rose-colored glasses, and disappointing those who just want to ‘get something done’. Let’s look at a real world example.
The software firm has teamed up with Epic Games to bolster the browser's gaming capabilities and bring some of the latest titles to the platform.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given 3 million dollars to Texas-based software provider Continuum Analytics with a view to helping fund the improvement of the Python language's data processing and visualization power for big data tasks.
The DragonFlyBSD 3.4 release is anticipated for release in mid-April and one of the features to this next BSD operating system update is the formation of DPorts, a derivative of the FreeBSD ports collection.
DPorts is DragonFly's derivative of FreeBSD Ports and will ultimately replace pkgsrc and the other pkg_* tools on the operating system. These older tools also reached an end-of-life state on FreeBSD.
The Russian government in recent weeks has been making use of a new law that gives it the power to block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children.
That's perhaps why it wasn't all that surprising that Ford's EVP of Global Marketing, James Farley, didn't use his keynote address at the opening day of the New York International Auto Show to announce some line extension or new braking system, but rather to introduce a mobile app competition.
OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to "help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web." Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post's description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”
In a dramatic show of support for the open access movement, the editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week. In a letter to contributors, the board singled out a conflict with owners over the journal's licensing terms, which stripped authors of almost all claim to ownership of their work.
WebRTC is awesome, but it’s a bit unapproachable. Last week, my colleagues and I at &yet released a couple of tools we hope will help make it more tinkerable and pose a real risk of actually being useful.
To watch the accelerating fall from grace of the once venerable Washington Post is perhaps to view traditional journalism's quandary in a nutshell.
First, their ombudsman suggested it was unlikely that the Post would implement a paywall, for a variety of sound reasons.
Then the Post fired their ombudsman. Then they announced the availability of notorious "sponsored posts" throughout their pages.
And it's been ever more rapidly downhill for the Post from there, with their now giving credence to serial Google hater Robert Epstein's rambli
The basic design of modern word processors has its roots in the WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) revolution of the 1980s, which became possible with the introduction of the graphical user interface. Whereas people once had to use a text editor to enter markup by hand, and never really knew what their document was going to look like to readers until they printed it, WYSIWYG provided an accurate on-screen depiction of how the final print output would appear.
Somewhere Steve Jobs isn’t smiling. Computer pioneer Alan Kay, a former Apple Fellow back in the '80s, had some harsh things to say about the iPad and tablets in general tonight at a Silicon Valley event.
Under the Coalition's reforms, the NHS’s former strengths are being replaced by a fragmented service, bound not by what is best for the patient but by cost
As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression
A bill introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly will practically ground all future drone use in the state if it is not rewritten. The bill proposes to “regulate the use of drones to conduct searches” and is already being praised by the ACLU of North Carolina as an “opportunity to place strong safeguards and regulations on the use of drones . . . .” The bill, however, doesn’t regulate the use of drones so much as it buries their operation in ambiguities and contradictory constraints.
Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.
Brennan had masterminded the program, from creating the bureaucratic processes determining which agency did what, right down to naming names for the kill list. In his new job, Brennan would have enormous sway over the CIA's future activities, including lethal drone strikes.
[...]
But if the drone debate is any guide, the public part counts. A lot.
WikiLeaks has announced a press conference scheduled for April 8, generating speculation about a possible release of a new stash of classified material or a project somehow connected to Assange’s political party in Australia.
THE bare-knuckle infighting within Zanu PF has reached new heights, with WikiLeaks being resuscitated as party members try to discredit each other ahead of the party's primary elections expected next month.
It is now official. WikiLeaks announced on Twitter on Saturday that Julian Assange's new Australian political party is open for membership.
Digital Journal reported back in January 2013 that Assange is planning to run for the Australian Senate in September this year and that he was founding the new WikiLeaks party. However, in order to officially register with the Australian Electoral Commission, the WikiLeaks Party must enlist 500 members.
The Ecuadorian government has held talks with the British Labour party to try to strike a deal to send Assange to Sweden to end the political impasse, which has seen the Australian whistleblower holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy since claiming asylum in June last year.
LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London since last June, is unlikely to be able to leave Britain before 2015 and his hosts are now hoping for a future Labour government to help break the impasse, a media report said.
Information warfare is the 21st Century equivalent of class warfare, with people like Aaron Swartz (threatened with decades of imprisonment, then bullied by prosecutors into taking his own life), Barrett Brown (imprisoned, awaiting trial and threatened with life imprisonment), Jeremy Hammond (same), Julian Assange (under investigation by Grand Jury) and Bradley Manning (facing life sentence in upcoming trial) as its most notable victims whom the US Government has decided to make an example of so as to deter others from following suit.
Chinese authorities have a new mystery to ponder after 1,000 duck carcases were found floating down the Nanhe river in the country's Sichuan province on Tuesday.
The nation’s largest banks have devised a novel way to protect their interests and save themselves from hundreds of billions of dollars in legal exposure. They’re taking a judge to court.
Lawyers for 17 banks submitted an unusual filing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this week (just listing all the corporate lawyers involved takes up the first four pages). The banks – including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – stand accused of ripping off the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie and Freddie’s conservator, alleges that these banks improperly sold $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities without disclosing the shoddy underwriting of the underlying loans. FHFA argues the banks knew the loans in the securities were bad, yet sold them to Fannie and Freddie anyway, leading to massive losses and the need for a government bailout. So FHFA wants the banks to buy back the securities they improperly sold under false pretenses.
A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.
First, its clear that profits as a percentage of total US GDP have recovered from the crash of 2008. Unemployment may still be over 50% higher than it was in 2007, and real wages may be below what they were then, and the benefits and security of jobs may have fallen, but profits have come back. And with them the stock markets. Hence also the upbeat talk about “recovery” yet again.
Yesterday, news broke that the Expensify service has enabled bitcoin payments. With the rapidly expanding number of businesses accepting bitcoin as payment method, one could think that this was merely another player in the pool of bitcoin’s expanding economy (which just broke the one-billion-USD barrier, by the way). But Expensify is something much more than that.
A previous article called them the new normal. Bad ideas spread fast. Canada endorses Cypriot harshness. Its "Jobs Growth and Long-Term Prosperity: Economic Action Plan 2013" says so.
The Lords often make very helpful contributions to legislative debates, but this really isn't one of them. There are huge amounts of regulation constraining Internet providers, from eCommerce to copyright, that cover the necessary ground already.
In fact, last summer U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest granted a permanent injunction, ruling detention provisions written into the NDAA overbroad and unconstitutional.
The issue came to light yesterday when Minnesotans United for All Families, which is pushing to legalize same-sex marriage, criticized the group for linking same-sex marriage efforts to propaganda in Nazi Germany. The initial language was posted on the website Pastors for Marriage, which is working with Minnesota for Marriage to ban same-sex marriage. The website (which has been changed since the controversy surfaced on Thursday) included a message from Minnesota for Marriage Chair John Helmberger (who is also CEO of the Minnesota Family Council).
Two former CIA employees whose suburban Kansas City home was unsuccessfully searched for marijuana claim they were illegally targeted, possibly because they had purchased indoor growing supplies to raise vegetables.