Want to run Linux on the Google Computer Engine cloud? Starting immediately, Debian Linux is Google's Linux of choice.
NASA’s Linux-based “Robonaut 2ââ¬Â³ is undergoing extensive testing on the International Space Station (ISS), and will soon be put to work. The humanoid Robonaut 2 will soon receive a major upgrade that will provide legs and an expanded battery pack, enabling it to perform more duties, including space walks.
Start-up RangeNetworks is hoping that the combination of low cost and transparent software will allow it to break into the notoriously locked-down cellular network market.
Microsoft's kernel is falling behind Linux because of a cultural problem at the Volehill of Redmond, claims one of its developers.
The anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a response acknowledging the problem and explaining its cause.
Could Google's Chrome OS arrive on platforms that have hardly been discussed for it yet? According to rumblings from Google and some media reports, the answer is yes. Of course, there has been a lot of talk about possible mergers between Chrome OS and Android, and talk of Chrome OS tablets. But there are some facts about the guts of Chrome OS that could make it ideal for other applications.
This year's 2013 Enterprise End User Report show the world's largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux for the third consecutive year and management's perception remains increasingly positive.
According to a press statement from the Linux Foundation, "These advancements are resulting in more companies wanting to contribute to the advancement of Linux and understand how to benefit from collaborative development."
With this, it seems, Linux has conquered the final frontier, but that doesn't mean world domination is complete. So, our question is this: Where would you like to see Linux adopted next?
The Samsung ARM Chromebook is one of a few ARM devices that I prepare Bodhi Linux images for. As such I've owned the hardware for almost six months now and during this time I've used it a fair amount. The goal of this post is to provide a comprehensive review of the product to see if it is something that could be useful to you.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) opened a center today for computing systems in Beijing to help customers and outside software engineers develop business applications for the open-source Linux operating system.
Rackspace's first quarter growth wasn't up to expectations. The company could be facing an AWS squeeze with enterprises and developers.
Linus Torvalds released RC1 of the new kernel on the eve of Mother's Day, together with some advice on how to treat Mum/Mom right on the occasion.
“So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at least as far as counting commits go,” Torvalds wrote in the release announcement. “Which was unexpected, because while linux-next was fairly big, it wasn't exceptionally so.”
Along with Linux kernel 3.9.2, 3.0.78 LTS and 3.4.45 LTS comes the thirteenth and last maintenance release of Linux kernel 3.8, as announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on May 11, 2013.
Welcome to 30 Linux Kernel Developer Workspaces in 30 Weeks! This is the first in a 30-week series that takes a new approach to the original series, 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks. This time we take a look inside developers' workspaces to learn even more about what makes them tick and how to collaborate with some of the top talent in all of software. Each week will share a picture and/or a video of the workspaces that Linux kernel developers use to advance the greatest shared technology resource in history.
After being in development for more than one year, BCache was finally merged on Wednesday into the mainline Linux kernel code-base. BCache serves as an SSD caching framework for Linux by offering write-through and write-back caching through a newly-exposed block device.
A couple posts ago, I cooed with joy over discovering Seq24. And last post, I pointed out SFXR (now in twilight development status) for producing simple low-fi sound effects. Now here is an app which is pretty capable at most of what SFXR does, and works as a Seq24 plugin as well.
I’ve been very busy with life and work in general and I haven’t blogged for a few months now. I finally get the chance to talk about something I worked on in my spare time.
New Linux users often ask me "what is the best way to learn about Linux?" My advice always comes down to this: install and use Linux (any distribution will do but something stable works better), and play around with it. Inevitably, you will break something, and then instead of re-installing, force yourself to fix what you broke. That's my advice, because I've personally learned more about Linux by fixing my own problems than just about any other way. After years of doing this, you start to build confidence in your Linux troubleshooting skills, so that no matter what problem comes your way, you figure if you work at it long enough, you can solve it.
A story driven, action-stealth-puzzler where you create and control your own zombie army! I fell in love when the developers emailed it in. Linux and Mac releases from day 1 will be a stretch goal, so I dug to find out why!
A couple of months ago we talked about the possibility of a Linux version of Hairy Tales. What yesterday was pure speculation, today it has become a reality! Hairy Tales is now available for Linux at Desura, although currently only as a standalone download.
The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the beta release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite. This means that the calligra/2.7 branch has been created and from now on Calligra 2.7 will only see bugfixes but no new features. The final release of 2.7 is planned in approximately a month from now..
Does this sound familiar to you? Does going to the canvas resize dialog break your workflow? Don't be frustrated anymore! Now you can just scroll down, click and... Presto! Add those happy feet to your drawing!
A few month have past, this my last WebMiner update. In the meantime I finished my Master Thesis, moved to a new location and started my new job. Perfect time to release a new version with the changes I have made since.
ROSA Desktop Fresh LXDE is the end-user edition of ROSA Desktop that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. This is not the same as the LXDE edition which was released in June 2012. That one is the enterprise edition, which ships with Debian-style stable Linux kernel and software, and uses the Marathon code name. (See ROSA 2012 LXDE review
A new test release of MEPIS 12, version 11.9.86, is available for testing. It may take up to 24 hours for the ISOs to appear at the mirrors.
After a month since our last release under the name “Cinnarch”, we’re glad to announce the new name of our project and our first release being out of beta. We’re stable enough to make this step.
We are happy to announce three new Manjaro Community Editions featuring Mate 1.6, Cinnamon 1.7, Gnome 3.8 and KDE 4.10.2. “Community Editions” of Manjaro Linux are released as bonus flavours in addition to those officially supported and maintained by the Manjaro Team, provided that the time and resources necessary are available to do so.
Today we are pleased to announce the release of OS4 Enterprise 4.1. With this release we bring many advancements to the worlds premier enterprise Linux platform. We learned a lot from our release of Enterprise 4.0 and this release is based on customer feedback. Starting with the user interface. Many of our Enterprise customers coming from Red Hat and Oracle Linux wanted a consistent user interface that they had become accustomed to with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux and we believe we have achieved that and with some of the flare that OS4 is famous for. They also wanted features on par with what they were accustomed to on their platforms and what we came up with was perhaps the most feature rich enterprise Linux product on the market today.
PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, free and open source NAC solution.
In just a month since the last release of Cinnarch, during which the developers decided to drop Cinnamon for GNOME, they have produced a new release that brings a distribution that is more desktop agnostic than ever before. Cinnarch development was halted after the developers were finding it harder to synchronise the Cinnamon development with the rolling nature of Arch Linux.
The third stable release of the Ceph distributed storage platform, named the "Cuttlefish" edition, has enhanced Red Hat support and improvements to make it easier to deploy. Ceph, which is developed by Inktank, offers a distributed system that can be presented to users as an object storage system, a block storage system, or as a POSIX compatible filesystem. Ceph 0.61 now has RHEL 6.0 tested packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux available from the Ceph site and in the EPEL (Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux) repository; the company says it is discussing with Red Hat the possibility of including Ceph in a future RHEL.
Having a virtual machine with Debian 6 on there, I was interested to hear that Debian 7.0 is out. In another VM, I decided to give it a go. Installing it on there using the Net Install CD image took a little while but proved fairly standard with my choice of the GUI-based option. GNOME was the desktop environment with which I went and all started up without any real fuss after the installation was complete; it even disconnnected the CD image from the VM before rebooting, a common failing in many Linux operating installations that lands into the installation cycle again unless you kill the virtual machine.
Now that Debian 7 "Wheezy" has been officially released and it's ready to be installed on your Linux-powered computers, the developers can concentrate their full resources on the next major release, Debian 8.
Warren Woodford announced this past weekend that development on SimplyMEPIS 12 has reached Beta quality and thus he has released a test image. This release brings some newer elements, but the announcement tells of the kibosh on two of them. With little else to go on, it was time for a boot.
The graphics of SimplyMEPIS 12 haven't changed since the alpha released last Fall. Some software version numbers have jumped, but some haven't. The Beta features Linux 3.8.2, Xorg X Server 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, and KDE 4.8.4. GRUB 2 is default, but UEFI and GPT drive support have been "deferred." Woodford said of that, "Unfortunately each hardware vendor is implementing the "standard" differently." The MEPIS tools look pretty much unchanged as well.
"I don't know what's wrong with Canonical," said blogger Robert Pogson. "They seem not to understand that GNU/Linux is a cooperative product of the world, and wasting resources to do things differently when existing software is working well is poisoning the well. FLOSS is the right way to do IT, whether as a developer, a distributor, OEM, retailer or user."
Canonical's Foundations Team are creating a new application packaging system to sit alongside the existing "apt and dpkg" system that Ubuntu currently uses. The plan was disclosed by Colin Watson, technical lead of the Foundations Team which is responsible for the core of the Ubuntu system, in a mailing list post.
Just a quick note to remind everyone that our next Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place this week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and is open and available to everyone to participate. This is the event where we get together to discuss, debate, and plan the next three months of work.
Ubuntu Developer Summit is a meeting where software developers gather to discuss the next Ubuntu version changes and features.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit (uds-1305) will start tomorrow, will last for 3 days and some major possible changes will be discussed, like "click packages", Chromium replacing Firefox as the default web browser, Unity 8 with Mir being available for testing on the desktop and more.
n the broadest sense Chrome OS is a consumer of Google Services. But it is not alone in this role. This topic has been broadly discussed in the context of Google services for Apple’s iOS and others. I am thinking of Google Maps and Google Now.
I’d like to give an update on upcoming plans for Ubuntu.com and to respond to recent concerns about the positioning of the community within the website.
The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided, at its most recent meeting, to finally abandon the Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas site. The site was created in 2008 to bring together the community and developers on a collaborative crowd-sourced platform where problems could be posed, ideas for solving the problems offered and users could vote on preferred solutions. If solutions were popular they could find themselves implemented by Canonical or Ubuntu teams.
As you might have seen in Jonathan’s blog post we discussed Mir in Kubuntu at the “Mataro Sessions II”. It’s a topic I would have preferred to not have to discuss at all. But the dynamics in the free software world force us to discuss it and obviously our downstream needs to know why we as an upstream do not consider Mir adoption as a valid option.
With its new Silvermont architecture, it looks like Intel has finally leaped forward in mobile. But whether it can ward off ARM'S upcoming 64-bit ARMv8 processors is another story.
In a 2010 post here on OStatic, I asked this question: "Is It Too Late for an Open Source Challenge to Android?" Now, of course, we know that there are several open source smartphone strategies in the works that will be coming to fruition this year. Mozilla is moving ever closer to delivering its first phones based on the Firefox OS platform, and urging developers to build apps. Meanwhile, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth maintains that Ubuntu phones will ship in the coming months, and early reviews of the Ubuntu Touch operating system are already arriving.
It looks like all the rumors are coming together, as benchmarks have been released for an upcoming 8-inch Samsung tablet thanks to the Dutch website TechTastic. Sources at the site say they have discovered the 8-inch tablet in the GLBenchmark database, carrying model number SM-T311 (which we presume is the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0.)
Spend five minutes browsing the tech press and there's a very good chance you'll come upon Kickstarter. Gone are the days when products had to be at least on the verge of release for them to get publicity; today, anyone with a cool idea can post it on Kickstarter—or one of its many clones--spread the word, and start raking in the cash they need to make it happen.
The CyanogenMod developers have published a blog post, indicating that the release of a final version of the Android 4.2 ("Jelly Bean") based CyanogenMod 10.1.0 is "quickly approaching the point where a 'final' build is due." For this reason, the developers have now released the first release candidate for the upcoming version of their Android-based, community-developed firmware for smartphones and tablets. The team is still in the process of building images for individual devices, but once that process is finished, 40 different devices should be supported.
First-quarter 2013 shipments of “smart mobile devices,” including notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, swelled by 37.4 percent year-on-year to 308.7 million units, reports mobile market analyst Canalys. From the operating system perspective, Android grabbed a healthy majority of units shipped, at 59.5 percent.
Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, whose absence have led Home to just 1 million downloads since launching a month ago.
If you're a Google Gamer – as in, Android gamer – then there's a bit of good news in store for you. A new leak in advance of next week's big Google I/O conference has revealed a host of gaming-friendly features set to arrive to the Android platform in the form of a new "Google Play Games" service.
Reuters reports news this week of Amazon.com launching an Android application store in China offering "paid" and free applications.
With this move Amazon effectively beats Google (whose store only offers free open source apps) in terms of the amount of digital content it offers to what is indisputably the world's largest mobile phone market.
Just like last year, ASUS is filling time before the Computex trade show by posting teaser trailers. Sporting a "We Transform" tag, its first one for 2013 features the spun metal casings, touchscreen laptops, convertibles, tablets and phones we've become accustomed to from the company. So what's next?
Few days ago we heard the rumor about a upcoming Sony flagship device which is known as "Xperia Honami". There was another rumored model "Xperia Togari" a 6.4" phablet to come out in the 2nd half of 2013. Sony also introduced a new Series of product lineup named "One Sony" where people can get the best out of Sony's latest technologies in a single product. The Xperia Honami is expected to follow up the One Sony line.
The HTC First, or “Facebook phone” as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.
WIRED: The Android handover from Andy Rubin to you seemed sudden and mysterious to us on the outside. Was it long in the works?
PICHAI: I got to know only towards the end of the process of Andy deciding to step back. It played out in a rapid time fashion over the couple weeks prior to the actual announcement. I am passionate about computing and so to me, it was very exciting to be in a position where I could make an impact on that scale.
Ouya has revealed it will delay the retail launch of its Android-based gaming console by three weeks until June 25th. In an interview with Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman, Polygon reports that the self-imposed delay is to ensure that the company has enough units to "satisfy all the early orders," and to make sure there's enough stock ahead of its public launch. According to Joystiq, Ouya has also listened to early feedback on its controller design, expanding the button holes to ensure that they no longer stick — something we noted in our review of the console.
As supporters of open source software, our knee-jerk reaction to the question of if open development always results in better quality code is often an unqualified, “yes, of course!”. However, it may do the community good to take an objective look at the state of some of our projects, and how it reflects on the open source movement as a whole. It has been my experience that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, proprietary software is fantastic, and it would do us all a bit of good to ask why.
The open-source RF design initiative, dubbed Myriad, has the support of US-based distributor Richardson RFPD.
Richardson RFPD will begin stocking and selling the Myriad-RF-1 board to customers around the world via its website immediately.
The actor model is a message-passing paradigm that resolves some of the major challenges of writing concurrent, scalable code for today's distributed systems. In this installment of Open source Java projects, Steven Haines introduces Akka, a JVM-based toolkit and runtime that implements the actor model. Get started with a simple program that demonstrates how an Akka message passing system is wired together, then build a more complex program that uses concurrent processes to compute prime numbers.
Details are emerging for some of the most important technology conferences of the next several months, which promise to feature lots of compelling speakers and content for open source fans. The Google I/O conference begins this week in Northern California, and is likely to bring with it lots of news related to Android and Google's phone and tablet strategies. Meanwhile, The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America, taking place September 16-18, 2013 at the Hyatt New Orleans in New Orleans, La.
Valve Software boss Gabe Newell and Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton have been announced as keynote speakers for the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon and Cloud Open North America conferences. The two events will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana from 16 to 18 September. Newell and Upton will be joining Jonathan Bryce of the OpenStack Foundation, HP Labs Director Martin Fink, and representatives from Intel and Wired Magazine on stage as keynote speakers. The popular Linux Kernel Panel, which features leading kernel developers and maintainers discussing the future of the open source operating system, will also be back.
While it hasn't generated a whole lot of buzz yet, Google has begun to take the wraps off of a strategy that will allow users of the Chrome browser to easily find and run "packaged apps" just like sophisticated web apps that users of Chrome OS are used to running. In an announcement on the Chromium Blog, Google officials unveiled a developer preview of Chrome packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher. Chrome packaged apps are now available in the Chrome Web Store for anyone on Chrome's developer channel on Windows or Chrome OS.
Mozilla's WebFWD programme is seeking applications for its fourth cycle of classes which are designed to teach new innovators to build healthy businesses by embracing the best of open source and startup principles. By getting entrepreneurs to create businesses what make the Web better and more open, Mozilla hopes to ensure that future businesses on the internet are more effective in enabling an open web.
As I noted yesterday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs (who will be leaving his CEO post this year) made very clear in comments at the All Things D: Dive Into Mobile conference that Mozilla has very ambitious plans for its new Firefox OS mobile operating system. Specifically, he sees it as an innovation-centric platform. As quoted by ABC News, Kovacs said, "We haven’t done a great job [on mobile browsing]. I’m expecting someone will do an Apple on the whole browsing experience."
The Firefox Australis theme that is going to be released later this year if things go as planned seems to split the community. Some users are looking forward to a modernized theme while others fear that it will change the browser that they are using in away that it is not as customizable and usable anymore.
The upcoming Firefox OS will appear on higher-end smartphones, and not just entry-level handsets, with Sony expected to release a premium device running the operating system, a Mozilla executive said.
"Sony is known for quality and user experience. So they are targeting for very very high (end). We are in joint discussions on the kind of device and what's the product," said Li Gong, Mozilla's senior vice president for mobile devices.
There are a lot of different programming languages in use today. When it comes to the cloud, thanks in part to the strong position of OpenStack, the open source Python language has emerged as being one of the most important. OpenStack is written in Python and is in used by many leading IT vendors including IBM, HP, Dell and Cisco.
Today, open source cloud platforms are winning the IaaS battle, open source storage and file systems are expanding their footprint, and open source databases are replacing closed source rivals. Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems explains why nearly everything is being snatched by open source software
The fourth generation of OpenNebula is the result of seven years of continuous innovation in close collaboration with its users
The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the fourth major release of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source enterprise-grade solution to build and manage virtualized data centers and enterprise clouds. OpenNebula 4.0 (codename Eagle) brings valuable contributions from many of its thousands of users that include leading research and supercomputing centers like FermiLab, NASA, ESA and SARA; and industry leaders like Blackberry, China Mobile, Dell, Cisco, Akamai and Telefonica O2.
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.3, the third maintenance release of the current 4.0 series. The new version brings a number of bug fixes to the open source office suite and the binaries for Mac OS X are now signed by the Foundation and will pass the operating system's Gatekeeper security system without user intervention.
Many, if not most businesses use open source software tools and products every day. Some of these tools and products are constructed by their own IT developers while others are purchased from third parties, including a wide range of professionals who construct and sell software after having incorporated open source software. Most of today's IT professionals are aware of the fact that the use of open source software requires compliance with specific open source license terms, but new challenges have emerged as a result of the development of new versions of the General Public Licenses (GPL) and the combination of GPLs.
‘Big data’ startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies “turn multistructured data into business gold.”
What is it that means one open source project takes off, while another doesn't? There are a lot of ways to analyse this question depending on the example at hand, but a more general study of the "remixability" of online content has found a surprising correlation -- there's a trade-off between originality and the chance it will inspire new versions.
Researchers Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT and Andrés Monroy-Hernández from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University wanted to look at a particular dilemma -- despite "proponents of remix culture often speaking of remixing in terms of rich ecosystems where creative works are novel and highly generative", actual examples of it happening "can be difficult to find", Monroy-Hernández writes on Hill's blog.
Used by Facebook and Yahoo, the Apache Giraph project for distributed graph processing has released version 1.0. This is the first new version since the project left incubation and became a top-level project in May 2012, though for some reason it has yet to make it to the Apache index of top level projects.
The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has announced that it will make its new map editor, which it had originally unveiled in February, available to all its contributors today. Development on the new iD editor was partly funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation and unlike the software it replaces, the new editor does not require Flash to run. The tool is written completely in HTML5 and uses the D3 visualisation library.
The National Security Agency has started developing a cloud computing platform intended to help secure the government’s network infrastructure, FedScoop reported Friday.
David Stegon writes NSA has reached out to the country’s open source community by allowing developers to collaborate in shoring up the cloud infrastructure’s code for the cloud infrastructure.
The Maryland state government quietly announced its brand-new online open source data trove last Wednesday.
US president Barack Obama is aiming to breathe new life into US information portal data.gov. Over the last two years, the portal appears to have faltered somewhat. Under an executive order issued by the White House on Thursday, data in new government and public sector IT systems will have to be stored in "open and machine readable" formats. The requirements also apply to data processing facilities which undergo modernisation or renovation, which will also be required to make information available via the US government's open data portal.
International communal house-building network WikiHouse has come to Christchurch, and could be the solution for homeowners in need of an idea or wanting to kickstart their rebuild themselves.
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has finally agreed to open today the source code of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines, which it will use for the May 13 elections, for review by political parties and other groups.
Pittsburgh-based entrepreneur Chad Whitacre is approaching his online cash gift-giving startup with an earnest interpretation of being transparent.
Next Tuesday's Securities and Exchange Commission Credit Ratings Roundtable will include open source ratings advocate, Marc Joffe. A former Senior Director at Moody's Analytics, Joffe has been using open source technologies to evaluate sovereign and municipal bond issuers since last year. Recently, Joffe's group, Public Sector Credit Solutions, developed a credit scoring model for California cities at the request of a unit of the State Treasurer's Office.
Range Networks is releasing a standards-based hardware-software cell network that is open source from end to end using equipment and software made in the United States.
A municipal credit research group has published credit scores for 260 California cities calculated with an open source credit model. The group, Public Sector Credit Solutions (PSCS), developed the model with a grant from the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission (CDIAC) – a unit of the State Treasurer's Office (STO). The PSCS research, which has recently been submitted for peer review, does not represent the opinion of CDIAC or STO, nor do the credit scores reflect the views of CDIAC, STO or any other public agency.
Facing a possible sentence of 30 years if convicted, the 26-year-old hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last year. His family blamed the university and U.S. prosecutors for his death and sought to have the documents released without omissions.
...law has been twisted by U.S. prosecutors to bully and intimidate security researchers, journalists, and activists...
Over the past several years, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts, and the California-based Willow Garage made some of the biggest contributions of all. It produced a widely used robotics operating system and was the impetus for the formation of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).
Server vendors have started shipping servers designed by the chipmaker AMD based on open-source specifications of the Open Compute Project, an open-source hardware-design community Facebook launched about two years ago.
One of the commonly asked questions I hear is "I want to get into programming, which language should I learn?" It's closely followed by "I write in X but I want to do something else... what language should I be looking at?" There used to be some nicely canned answers to these questions over which the merits and demerits could be discussed over coffee or beer but the culture and practice of open source has changed that. Now, I can only give one answer... "all of them".
The developers of PyPy, an alternative Python 2.x implementation with a just-in-time compiler that's "almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7", have announced the release of PyPy 2.0. According to the developers' benchmarking site PyPy 2.0 is around 5.71 times faster than CPython 2.7.3.
It wasn't until the middle of 2012 that IBM viewed LLVM as being "critical" to support but since then they have decided to fully support LLVM across all IBM server platforms. Last week in Paris at the European LLVM Meeting, one of their developers talked about the tipping point in supporting LLVM on IBM hardware and their current development status.
Google has said this week that it is finishing defining the open-source VP9 video codec standard, with a final date of June 17th.
Your idea that all interfaces should be simple, to-the-point, and touchable is the way to go. To heck with convention! We are all sick of the desktop and the whole idea of a desktop. It's not a desktop anyway—it's a screen and there are better things to put on it than folders and icons. These are dumb and they assume we all work in offices. Or worse, it assumes we work at all.
Just look at the old-fashioned interface. Those faux shadows and cutesy icons symbolize what exactly? This is not the interface for today's modern user. We need representation. Something that reflects the "now." A symbol of the public—today's public. Like some bland, square, one-dimensional tiles. Dumbed-down to an extreme. Dopey even. Tiles say it all. And you can poke at them and move them around.
Microsoft, you nailed it!
The Pakistani politician poised to become the country's next prime minister said Monday that Islamabad has "good relations" with the United States, but called the CIA's drone campaign in the country's tribal region a challenge to national sovereignty.
Nawaz Sharif spoke to reporters from his family's estate outside the eastern city of Lahore on Monday, two days after his Pakistan Muslim League-N party won a resounding victory in national elections.
On the agenda were "kill lists" — names of individuals whose perceived threat to America's security made them targets for assassination by unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The kill lists, scrutinised personally by Obama at the weekly meetings, were soon expanded to become what US journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars, calls a form of "pre-crime" justice where individuals are considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of suspected terrorists.
Throughout history, some forms of war and weaponry have been viewed with greater horror than others. Even ancient civilisations tried to codify the rules of war – jus in bello. Homer's Greeks disapproved of archery; real men fought hand-to-hand, not at a distance. Shakespeare's Henry V roared with anger when, at Agincourt, the French cavalry killed his camp followers. At the beginning of the last century, dum-dum bullets, a British invention, were outlawed following an appeal by Germany. Revulsion against the widespread use of gas in the first world war led in the 1920s to an international convention prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons – not that the ban stopped the British using chemicals in Iraq, or the Italians in Ethiopia in the 1930s. A landmine convention was agreed in 1997, though not signed by the US, China or Russia. Today, China, India, and perhaps surprisingly North Korea are among nuclearââ¬âarmed states that have pledged no first use, though Nato, Israel and the US have not.
Even ex-Obama administration officials are expressing qualms about targeted killings.
The Peshawar high court has delivered a damning verdict on the strikes. Pakistan must now move towards protecting the security of its citizens
Palestinians say Israel uses drones to fire missiles, but Israel has never offered a confirmation.
The strikes, Khan told the Star’s Michelle Shephard, are only “creating anti-Americanism. It is helping the militants to recruit people. Collateral damage means anyone losing a family (member) goes and joins the militants.”
An alleged CIA agent has been briefly detained in Moscow for allegedly trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer, Russian media report.
The CIA secretly smuggled millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai over more than a decade, The New York Times revealed. Karzai confirmed the report.
After catching up on coverage of the Benghazi attack over the weekend, there's something that has me very confused: why are so many journalists ignoring the fact that the Americans there were mostly CIA? Here's how The New York Times began a Benghazi story published online Sunday: "A House committee chairman vowed Sunday to seek additional testimony on the Obama administration's handling of last year's deadly attack on the American diplomatic post in Libya."
In the first major Pakistani court ruling on the legality of the CIA’s drone campaign in the country, a Peshawar High Court judge said this morning that strikes are ‘criminal offences’. Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan ordered Pakistan’s government to ‘use force if need be’ to end drone attacks in the country’s tribal regions.
America’s long-running courtship of Afghanistan’s mercurial Hamid Karzai got even wackier last week.
Now, things that used to be top secret — like CIA bags of cash delivered to a government famously rife with corruption — have been featured on screens everywhere. And Washington policy is looking like a comic parody of the way the world really works.
Scene One: Afghanistan’s president convenes a Saturday news conference and publicly confirms the CIA’s longtime practice of bringing him bags of money. It had been a top secret until The New York Times disclosed it April 28. Karzai explains how and why he has been spending the CIA’s millions, which is as he sees fit, accountable to no one.
The U.S. government has a hard enough time parrying foreign threats like terrorist groups and hostile nations but it’s the unfettered distribution of information in the form of software that could pose the greatest threat of all.
WikiLeaks reveal that Indira Gandhi Government had charged two Americans under Official Secret Act. The cable says: ” Two Americans await trial in India on charges of spying and are expected to go on trial here within two months in the first case in India of Westerners. Anthony Fletcher and Richard Harcos were arrested on April 26, 1973 in Calcutta. they have been charged under the Indian Official Secret Act.” The cable also reveals that on February 19, the Home Ministry in New Delhi had issued official sanction permitting the Government of West Bengal to try Anthony Fletcher and Richard Harcos under the Official Secret Act. The trial which will be held in Calcutta has not been scheduled. The West Bengal Government has set another hearing in the case for February 27. At a preliminary hearing in Calcutta on February 13, the possibility of bail was discussed, and the decision on bail may be issued on February 27. I have instructed the Consul General in Calcutta to keep you and the Deraprtment of State informed on the progress of this case. I assume your Office will inform Mrs. Fletcher of the forgoing and I am writing separately to her in response to her letter to me of February 12.”
Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks can again accept credit card donations today after Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. (MA) and Visa Europe Ltd., began processing payments after losing a court case.
Valitor was ordered by Iceland’s Supreme Court on April 24 to begin processing WikiLeaks payments within 15 days or face daily fines amounting to 800,000 kronur ($6,800), according to the ruling. The company was sued by WikiLeaks’s payment services provider, Reykjavik, Iceland-based DataCell, which has also lodged complaints against Visa and MasterCard with the European Commission.
President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday pledged to pursue a broad trade agreement between the U.S. and European Union, amid growing domestic unrest with the Obama administration's plans to include new political powers for corporations in the deal.
Negotiations have not formally begun, but a series of meetings between U.S. and EU officials have established some ground rules and the preliminary scope of the talks. Since tariffs are already low or nonexistent, the agreement will focus on regulatory issues. That emphasis has concerned food safety advocates, environmental activists and public health experts, who fear a deal may roll back important standards.
A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.
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"It's a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill,'' Awe said. "It's like being punched in the stomach, it's just so horrendous.''
A cache of data amounting to a whopping 400 gigabytes of information leaked by bank insiders has triggered an offshore tax evasion investigation across the United States, the UK and Australia.
The National Security Agency ( NSA) has released a guide to 'help you understand how to use the internet more efficiently'.
The guide to 'Internet Research' is a 'how-to' book for its agents looking to get the most out of Google, Yahoo and other web search tools.
In this case, I don't know Rear Adm. Metts, but I sure found the move of this information warfare specialist interesting. Maybe the U.S. government is going to respond more actively to the stream of Chinese intrusions into American government and business computers:
The document, however, was labeled as "unclassified" (but for official use only), so the really juicy secrets and Internet tricks are probably still filed away. There's also a stamp on the guide that says the opinions in the guide "do not represent the official opinion of [the] NSA."
Pierre Lescure has handed in his report [fr] on culture at the digital era to French President François Hollande1. La Quadrature du Net denounces a flawed political process revealing the harmful influence of industrial groups at all levels of policy-making. How will the French government react to Lescure's proposal to expand the scope of competence of the audiovisual media regulator (CSA) to the Internet? Will it to pursue former President Sarkozy's anti-sharing policies and even supplement them with new ACTA-like measures encouraging online intermediaries to become private copyright police?