Besides shipping a large Team Fortress 2 update for Linux gamers this weekend, Valve also released another Dota 2 update on Friday.
…earlier beta releases of the Linux version have been disappointing. The latest beta sees this cross-platform video editor finally starting to live up to its promises.
Snappy is an open-source movie player that has become part of the GNOME project and is powered by GStreamer and features a user-interface written in Clutter. The project has been around for a while but releases are rare, except for a new update this week.
Everyone knows that keeping regular backups of our data is the No. 1 best insurance against mishaps. The No. 2 best insurance is smart partitioning on your Linux PC that puts your data on a different partition from the root filesystem. Having a single separate data partition is especially useful for distro-hoppers, and for multi-booting multiple distros; all your files are in one place, and protected from mad installation frenzies. And why not distro-hop and multi-boot random distros? Unlike certain inexplicably popular expensive fragile, low self-esteem proprietary operating systems it’s easy and fun. No hoops to jump, no blurry eleventy-eight digit registration numbers, no mother-may-I, no phoning your activities home to the mother ship: just download and start playing.
That’s what happened at the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Doc Camp. A group of 20 open source enthusiasts gathered together in the middle of October and wrote not just one but three books in the span of five days.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown will place you in control of a secret paramilitary organization called XCOM. As the XCOM commander, you will defend against a terrifying global alien invasion by managing resources, advancing technologies, and overseeing combat strategies and individual unit tactics.
I’ve teased about Steam, speculated about Steam and even bragged about Steam finally coming to Linux. Heck, check out the screenshot for just a partial list of games already running natively under our beloved OS. Little did I know that the folks at Valve not only planned to support Linux, but they’re also putting a big part of their future behind it as well!
Underdog microconsole Ouya is facing increased competition with the release of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this month, but the company will have its own new hardware this holiday season with a limited edition white version of the tiny device. The new Ouya doubles the internal Flash storage of the base model to 16GB, otherwise the two machines appear to be identical. But that new color and extra storage come at a price: the white Ouya is $129.99, $30 more than the original. The limited edition is available for pre-order now for those in North America. However, it remains to be seen whether a new coat of paint will lure many consumers to the struggling console, especially with the added cost. While Ouya recently boasted that it now offers more than 500 games, few of those are notable exclusives, and even those that are, like Towerfall, will soon be available on other platforms.
In their latest efforts to support independent content developers, OUYA has created a $1 million matching fund for game developers at http://freethegamesfund.com, which will double kickstarter pledged funds up to $250,000.
Abrash will be immediately followed by Joe Ludwig heading up a “Virtual Reality and Steam” session, wherein Valve will detail its plans to both support and promote VR gaming through the Steam store. The company behind the hallowed Half-Life series has already added support for Oculus Rift gameplay to Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Ludwig describes Valve’s relationship with Oculus as friendly and collaborative. Still, much as with the Steam Machine itself, Valve appears unwilling to sit back and let all the hardware design be done by others. While Valve will only be showing off its prototype headset to a selection of developers and publishers, it does mark an effort to expand the VR development and support ecosystem.
Speaking to members of a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Courts subcommittee, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy has urged that potential barriers to digital content delivery should be addressed in order to ensure the development of distribution platforms. Exorbitant statutory damage awards for copyright infringement could chill innovation, the executive warned, adding that the Internet should remain a non-discriminatory and open platform to maintain consumer choice.
Last week, Judge Denny Chin handed down the latest opinion in the now-eight year battle between Google and the Author’s Guild (among others) over Google’s massive book scanning project. If the Author’s Guild fails to overturn the Judge’s decision on appeal, it will mark an enormous watershed in the ability of Web site owners to display copyrighted works without the prior permission of the owners of those works.
At issue was the appropriate application of the “fair use” doctrine under U.S. law to the Google project, a rationale that allows certain types of copying to be permissible that would otherwise be actionable. As applied by Judge Chin, the scope of that doctrine has seemingly been expanded by orders of magnitude. Indeed, in the case at hand, the judge has broadened its scope so dramatically that it’s difficult not to conclude that he was struggling to find sufficient legal precedents to justify a favorable outcome for Google. Many will contend that he fell short in that effort, and that his intent was instead to rebalance, if not rewrite, the doctrine itself in order to bring it into the Internet age.
Remember the notorious ‘Instagram Act’? If you recall, clauses smuggled into April’s Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) – in the name of allowing reuse of orphan works – paved the way for the Government to grab your photographs and other visual images, in breach of international conventions.
The mechanics of the scheme were promised for later in the year, to be detailed in a statutory instrument (SI).
Pirate Parties International (PPI), the international umbrella organization for dozens of Pirate Parties worldwide, has been granted observer status by the World Trade Organization. PPI will join a host of major international players during the upcoming conference in Bali next month. The WTO’s decision is a major breakthrough for the political organization, which hopes to influence decision making on key issues related to copyright and privacy on the Internet.
The International Olympic Committee is pushing for the most concerted effort yet to ensure that pirate coverage of the 2014 Olympic Games reaches as few unauthorized screens as possible. In order to protect four major local media companies and others internationally, the IOC has issued demands for the creation of a “rapid response team” authorized to remove or block infringing content and links “within minutes.”
One of the bizarre side notes to Hollywood’s big lawsuit against the cyberlocker Hotfile was a countersuit against Warner Bros. by Hotfile, for using the easy takedown tool that Hotfile had provided, to take down a variety of content that was (a) non-infringing and (b) had nothing to do with Warner Bros. at all (i.e., the company did not hold the copyright on those files). In that case, WB admitted that it filed a bunch of false takedowns, but said it was no big deal because it was all done by a computer. Of course, it then came out that at least one work was taken down by a WB employee, and that employee had done so on purpose, annoyed that JDownloader could help possible infringers download more quickly.
From October 24 to October 30, the KDE Educational team (KDE Edu) gathered for its annual work sprint at the Computer Science faculty of Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. The sprint was a mixture of hacking, discussing, getting to know more about Spanish culture, socializing, and meeting new team mates.
conf.kde.in 2014 is taking place February 21 – 24, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. The conference is a vibrant occasion for sharing ideas, knowledge and, most importantly, support and enthusiasm for KDE and for open source. It is an event for both new and experienced technology enthusiasts. Collaboration and freedom are the main features.
We welcome contributors, users, people who want to become either of those, anyone interested in free and open source software, freedom and community. This is an opportunity to learn about the latest from KDE, to discuss technical points with technical contributors, and to discover how to use the wide range of KDE software.
Digia’s Heikkinen Jani shared this morning that the Qt 5.2 RC1 version won’t be out tomorrow as was originally expected. The release isn’t happening since there’s still a lot of pending integration for Qt5 Git and so further testing is needed to verify the fixes and work through any issues. They are hoping though to have out a new pre-RC1 test snapshot soon. Ideally, Qt 5.2 RC1 will be released later in the week.
KDE has released the second beta of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested.
The second development version towards the GVFS 1.20 application for the upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment, has been released for testing a few days ago, introducing several important features, improvements, cleanups, translations, and bugfixes.
Various areas have been covered in this new development release of GVFS, the virtual filesystem for the GNOME desktop environment, designed to allow users to easily access remote data via FTP, SFTP, SMB, WebDAV, as well as local data via MTP, OBEX, or Udev integration, including SFTP, SMB, AFP, archive, trash, recent, and daemon.
The first development release towards GNOME Power Manager 3.12 has been announced a few days ago by the GNOME developers. This version introduces a few fixes, updated translations, and one new feature.
The GNOME development team has released the second maintenance release for the stable GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, which is part of the GNOME 3.10.2 desktop upgrade.
Speculation notwithstanding, the GNOME desktop environment is not dependent on systemd, the init system that has been the subject of much discussion, two senior GNOME developers say.
The second and most probably the last maintenance release of the stable Evince 3.10 document viewer application for the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment has been released a few days ago, a version that fixes five annoying bugs and updates several translations.
Broadway, an HTML5 back-end for GTK3 to allow running GTK3 programs in modern web-browsers, has picked up an interesting feature.
As of this morning, GTK+ Git has initial touch event support for Broadway. The commit message by Red Hat’s Alexander Larsson reads, “This seems to get something going on an ipad, but some events seem to get swallowed. For instance, window dragging doesn’t work.”
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