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11.19.13

Links 18/8/2013: Free/Open Source Software News

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • OSv: The Open Source Cloud Operating System That is Not Linux

    For most tech professionals, the words “open source operating system” naturally translate to Linux. And so it’s understandable that those same tech pros would be a bit confused by startup Cloudius Systems’ announcement in September of a new open source operating system for the cloud, OSv.

  • 25 Open Source Alternatives For Costly Applications
  • Inspiring words from a Citrix open source exec, using GitHub for beehive building, and other interesting news
  • Inside the OpenMIND: Open Source Social Media Datamining and “Predictive” Policing

    Records obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy (DBA/CMD) shed new light on a technology, OpenMIND, utilized by law enforcement/counter-terrorism fusion center personnel in gathering and analyzing mass amounts of “open source intelligence” derived from the online lives of Americans.

  • SourceForge responds to GIMP grump with crowdsourcing caper
  • Andy Hunt: What are you going to invent next?

    Andy’s first point began with an astute observation. Open source software is often discussed in terms of being a “stack” (LAMP, for instance). It is no longer a stack, however, but a tower. A tower that spans software and hardware. With the source or schematics being available, not only can we stand on the shoulders of the giants of our field but on the shoulders of everyone who contributes. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

  • How to Run Your Small Business With Free Open Source Software

    From simple bookkeeping packages to full-blown ERP systems, open source software can provide free options for small businesses that don’t have the budget for big-ticket enterprise applications.

  • GIMP leaves SourceForge, EFF Tackles NSA & More…
  • Then, now, and the future of open source fonts

    In August, the Fedora Project held its first Flock conference, a replacement for the North American and European FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) events. Flock was a four-day, planned conference with talks, workshops, and hackfests, in contrast to FUDCon’s barcamp model. In the interest of reaching beyond the community and reminding everyone that Fedora is so much broader than just a Linux project, the invited keynote speakers were from open source areas outside of the Fedora Project. One of those keynotes was by Dave Crossland, creator of the open font Cantarell and an active part of the free font movement.

  • Open Source: A Platform for Innovation

    The hobbies that inspired the scientific curiosity of my generation were Erector Sets, Science Fair Electronic Kits from Radio Shack and model rockets with balsa wood fins that we meticulously assembled and painted. While these toys piqued our curiosity in science and engineering our ability to share our discoveries were limited by geography. These fascinating distractions were often purpose-built and confined our creativity within their intended purpose.

  • A developer’s story about passion for Open Source and Security

    This story is definitely a first for me. Not just because every story is unique in itself, but that it’s one of personal matter. The thing is, I quit my well-paid job, just to spend time on the things I’m very passionate about: open source development and information security. Not only was quitting my job a serious step, also the decision to share my personal story after 10+ years of working with open source software and security. Well, here you go. It’s my hope to intrigue others, find their passion in life and also go for it!

  • Salsa: an open source syllabus creator for educators

    Who wants to tackle the complex problem of helping educators create learning service agreements? I don’t see too many hands. How about you there, reading this article? Wait, you weren’t aware that this is an issue that impacts the education system? Well, here’s an open source project that solves this problem and needs more collaborators.

  • Facebook Open Compute Project picks switch specs
  • Facebook’s hardware VP says we’re very close to open source switches
  • Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom
  • This 23-year-old’s open-source project, a server running on Raspberry Pi, gives the middle finger to Google

    For most of us, Google shutting down Reader was annoying. For Jacob Cook, it was a call to arms.

    He’s now building an operating system that anyone can use to replace all of the services that Google provides — or any other cloud company, for that matter. Email, chat, file sharing, web hosting: With Cook’s arkOS, you’ll be able to run all of those essential services on a secure, private server in your own home that’s about the size of a credit card.

  • HHVM Going On A Big Performance, Feature Push

    Facebook’s HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) open-source project that’s been seeking to implement a high-performance PHP, is in the middle of a lock-down and for three weeks they are focusing on nothing bot boosting the performance of their PHP implementation and seeking to hit feature parity.

  • Matt Dugan Makes Case for Enterprise Open Source

    There was nothing new in what Matt Dugan said. There were no ground breaking revelations. He just methodically made his case, point by point, explaining why open source was usually, if not always, the best solution for business.

    To me, this was just what the doctor ordered. I’d just sat through a forty-five minute lecture in that very same room from an open core guy that had left me fearing that enterprise open source companies were just as greedy and potentially as unethical as the proprietary guys. Dugan fixed that and quickly reaffirmed my faith in the notion that open source is where the good guys live.

  • Machine Learning with Apache Mahout: Refining the Recommender

    Mahout components implement popular algorithms and can be unplugged easily when no longer needed.

  • MediaCore CE renamed to MediaDrop

    MediaCore CE is the community edition of MediaCore, a Web application that powers a multimedia hosted platform targeted towards the educational market and run by MediaCore, Inc. It is a Python application built atop the Django Web framework.

    Published under the GNU General Public License version 3, MediaDrop is free to download and use. However, because it is a Django application, installing it is a little bit more involved than the point-and-click process commonly associated with PHP applications.

  • OpenWFD Aims to Bring Wireless Display Streaming to Tablets, Phones

    Wireless connectivity between devices and display monitors remains mostly fantasy today, Google’s Chromecast notwithstanding. But it could become a big deal for tablets, smartphones and even traditional PCs in the future. And it may even work on Linux, if the nascent OpenWFD project succeeds—which would be very good news for open source hardware vendors.

  • Open-Source HTML5 Terminal Emulator To Support X11

    The Gate One HTML5-powered terminal emulator and SSH client that goes without needing any browser plug-ins and supports many SSH/terminal features is working on bringing X11 support to the web-browser. The developer claims that this X11 support in the browser written in HTML5 will be fast enough to support video playback and he’s made a video demo as proof.

  • 5 Open Source Platforms That Will Define 2014

    Linux and MySQL are old news. Partners must now open their minds to NoSQL, Hadoop, KVM, OpenStack and OpenDaylight

Links 18/8/2013: Applications and Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 18/11/2013: Games-related News

Posted in News Roundup at 5:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

11.18.13

Links 18/11/2013: Linux (Kernel) News Roundup

Posted in News Roundup at 9:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Recruitment

Version 3.13

  • Linux 3.13 Supports The Neonode zForce

    There’s many exciting Linux 3.13 kernel features already, but we have another one to talk about today. In the input subsystem update for 3.13, support for the Neonode zForce has been added, an interesting touch-screen technology based on infrared light fields.

  • KVM Pushes Linux Virtualization Forward In Linux 3.13

    The Kernel-based Virtual Machine updates for the Linux 3.13 kernel were filed today and includes a fair amount of improvements for virtualization on PowerPC hardware, but there’s also some x86 improvements too.

  • 13 Reasons Linux 3.13 Is Going To Be Very Exciting

    While the merge window for the Linux 3.13 kernel isn’t even over yet, this next major kernel update is already looking to be rather exciting with a number of new features.

  • F2FS File-System Major Linux 3.13 Enhancements

    For those in need of a high-performance specially-optimized file-system for flash storage devices, the F2FS file-system developed at Samsung has seen more “major enhancements” queued up for the Linux 3.13 kernel.

  • The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is Already Super Exciting

    The merge window hasn’t even officially opened yet on the Linux 3.13 kernel but it’s already super exciting and I can’t wait for the new code to start hitting mainline and to benchmark these massive changes to the Linux kernel. Here’s just a few things to expect so far but it’s already gearing up to be a super exciting release and perhaps the best of 2013.

More Development

Events

Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA, Mentor Graphics May Harm GCC

    Yesterday there was news that OpenACC 2.0 parallel programming support was coming to GCC complete with GPU acceleration support for NVIDIA GPUs. While it was exciting on the surface, it appears that this work may be poisonous and could have a very tough time making it upstream.

    The news yesterday was about Oak Ridge, Mentor Graphics, and NVIDIA working to add OpenACC 2.0 parallel programming support to the GCC compiler for C and Fortran. GCC right now doesn’t have any support for OpenACC, even the older versions of the specification, and the patches thus far haven’t fully exploited the GPU potential besides converting OpenACC to OpenCL or another implementation that just runs OpenACC over OpenMP on the CPU. Mentor Graphics is now responsible for bringing OpenACC 2.0 with NVIDIA GPU support to the GNU Compiler Collection.

  • Freedreno Graphics Driver Reaches Version 1.0

    The xf86-video-freedreno X.Org driver for providing support for Qualcomm’s Adreno/Snapdragon graphics hardware has reached version 1.0 in its first stable release.

  • Sub-Surfaces Support Added To Wayland Protocol

    After the support has been within Wayland’s Weston reference compositor for several months, developers have now added sub-surfaces support to the Wayland core protocol itself. Wayland sub-surfaces can make for efficient use of video players and windowed OpenGL games on Wayland.

  • Alt-Tab Support, Exposay For Wayland’s Weston

    Interesting in the Wayland camp this week has been lots of discussions about the XDG-Shell proposal but besides that, a patch-set just appeared that finally adds alt-tab support to Wayland’s Weston compositor and also updates the exposay feature.

  • AMD Wants Mantle On Linux, OS X, Mobile Devices

    As part of the recent Radeon Rx 200 series and Hawaii GPU launch, AMD also unveiled Mantle as a new graphics rendering API to compete with OpenGL and Direct3D. AMD claims Mantle is easier, faster, and all-around better than OpenGL for game engines and other purposes. This week AMD has renewed their push that they want to see Mantle on Linux and other platforms.

  • Intel X.Org Driver Released With New Stability Fixes

    The xf86-video-intel 3.0 driver is still on the way and Intel OTC’s Chris Wilson has put out today its latest development release that has stability fixes, including further TearFree updates.

  • NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 On Linux

    If you are after a low-end graphics card for use on Linux, up for review today is the Zotac GeForce GT 610 Synergy 1GB graphics card that sells for less than $50 USD. The results in this Linux hardware review compare the GT 610 to a range of other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards using the proprietary drivers under Ubuntu Linux. Even if you’re not interested in the GT 610, this article makes for a nice 12-way Linux graphics card comparison with the very latest AMD/NVIDIA GPU drivers.

  • Video Showing Off Hawaii Desktop Running On Wayland

    If you’re curious about the state of the Qt5-powered Hawaii Desktop running natively on Wayland, a new video has been uploaded that nicely shows off this new Linux desktop alternative that’s designed around Wayland.

Benchmarks

  • 13-Way AMD GPU Open-Source Linux Driver Comparison On The Source Engine

    For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve’s Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve’s Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?

  • AMD Radeon R9 290 Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

    Last week AMD released the Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” graphics card. The R9 290 is a cut-down R9 290X and sells for just $399 USD. Here are the first Linux benchmarks of the AMD R9 290 using Ubuntu 13.10!

  • 5-Way Amazon EC2 Cloud Linux OS Benchmarks

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09, Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 have been pitted against each other in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Linux performance benchmark results are now available.

  • 8-Way AMD Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Ubuntu GPU Benchmarks

    This testing isn’t too different from other open vs. closed-source GPU driver benchmarks run recently on Phoronix but is a fresh look and with some different tests. The Catalyst driver in use was the latest publicly available (Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 – OpenGL 4.3.12614 – fglrx 13.25.5) and the open-source version was Mesa 10.0-devel with an xf86-video-ati Git snapshot. The Linux 3.12 kernel was used throughout all testing and DPM was enabled for the Radeon Linux driver.

Links 18/11/2013: Applications and Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 5:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

11.17.13

Programming Links 17/11/2013

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • FreeMat—Yet Another MATLAB Replacement

    Many programs exist that try to serve as a replacement for MATLAB. They all differ in their capabilities—some extending beyond what is available in MATLAB, and others giving subsets of functions that focus on some problem area. In this article, let’s look at another available option: FreeMat.

    [...]

    The main Web site for FreeMat is hosted on SourceForge. Installation for most Linux distributions should be as easy as using your friendly neighborhood package manager.

  • Red Hat Puts Out Ceylon 1.0 Language, Compiler

    Red Hat is out this week with their first production release of Ceylon, a modular, modern, and statically-typed programming language for Java and JavaScript Virtual Machines. Ceylon 1.0 consists of a language specification, compiler, and Eclipse IDE integration.

  • Leadwerks: GDB Is Annoying; Editor Using GTK

    Leadwerks, one of the recent commercial game engines that’s being ported to Linux following a successful Kickstarter campaign, has shared more of their Linux game engine progress from a developer’s perspective.

  • Leaf: A New “Soon To Be Great” Programming Language
  • GNU Awk 4.1: Teaching an Old Bird Some New Tricks, Part II
  • Intro to Clojure on the Web

    Lisp is one of those languages that people either love or hate. Count me among the Lisp lovers. I was brainwashed during my undergraduate studies at MIT to believe that Lisp is the only “real” programming language out there, and that anything else is a pale imitation. True, I use Python and Ruby in my day-to-day work, but I often wish I had the chance to work with Lisp on a regular basis.

  • C++ Gtkmm Tutorial 4
  • 25-30 November is Europe Code Week!

    Want to get involved in a cool new initiative to promote it across Europe?

    My Young Advisors are a talented group of people advising and supporting me in my work. And they’ve been hard at work themselves. They’ve come up with a great idea: Europe Code Week – a week of initiatives at the end of November (25th-30th) with a focus on coding – workshops, teaching, or just raising awareness.

11.16.13

Applications and Instructionals: November 16th

Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

11.14.13

Applications and Instructionals: November 14th

Posted in News Roundup at 11:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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