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04.15.13

AICTE is Still Corrupt, Time to Shut it Down After Repeated Microsoft Collusions

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:24 pm by

AICTE

Summary: The India Council for Technical Education gives Microsoft total control over students, even in schools that adopted Free (as in freedom) software

Several years ago we wrote about BECTA in the UK (it got shut down since then), noting that Microsoft had been using it to covertly infiltrate British schools, turning children into clients at taxpayers’ expense. In India, something similar to it was already on the chopping block, but it got lucky. As Pogson explains in his post about the latest scandal: “In 2009, the government of India threatened to close down this organization. After some reforms they were allowed to continue. Perhaps this move will prompt further reform, like getting rid of the folks who made this decision.”

Well, the India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which we wrote about in [1, 2], has hardly changed. And as noted before, its main function seems to be contracting multi-nationals to take the money and the minds of Indian people, who need not depend on foreign companies (India has bright software developers). Well, as Saurav Modak pointed out:

Closed source apps like Windows Skydrive, Outlook and Microsoft Office 365 have no accessible source code and are developed and managed by large companies for their vested interests. Implementing on them in colleges will mean that teachers and student cannot see and edit the source code to their liking, and will have to fully rely on Microsoft for support and service. This will lead to vendor locking. Also, proprietary software is costly and implementing this project in a big country like India will lead to waste of several thousand dollars.

We already alluded to this the other day.

It is not just a case of promoting proprietary software and dependence on a criminal organisation with a long proven record; fog computing, or ‘cloud’, makes it far worse for many other reasons. Time for India to abandon the people behind this atrocious decision? It would be long overdue. Microsoft recently came after probes for bribing officials sand here too it is likely to have happened. It’s just how Microsoft does ‘business’. █

“I have lost my sleep and peace of mind for last two months over these distasteful activities by Microsoft.”

–Professor Deepak Phatak

Microsoft’s UEFI Restricted Boot Delays GNU/Linux Releases, Causes Many Issues for Windows ‘Refugees’

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:07 pm by

Dionaea

Summary: More reasons to treat UEFI restriction tricks from Microsoft as an antitrust violation and some new delays, bad experiences, and consistent rants

TO KICK OFF with a personal story, today I received a call from a loved one whose Windows computer had slowed down to the point of being useless. This is typical and it requites a ‘technician’ to routinely come and ‘fix’ it by reinstalling Windows. Next week that person will move to Linux, but not on the same hardware. I will purchase brand new hardware. The matter of fact is, dodging UEFI is becoming more difficult because of Microsoft’s legal traps. This is an antitrust-type abuse,

“This is not the first time we see these restrictions interfering with release cycles.”It is being reported that GNU/Linux development is being impeded due to UEFI, even where collaboration with Microsoft exists. Michael Larabel writes: “The Fedora 19 Alpha has been delayed by one week, thus pushing back all other milestones for this next version of Fedora Linux. The Fedora 19 Alpha delay is coming due to unresolved UEFI bugs blocking the release.”

UEFI Restricted Boot has already been flagged as an antitrust issue. “To do this thing right, the EU should also include that users who overwrite that other OS before or after accepting the EULA should be given a full refund of the retail price of that other OS,” Robert Pogson wrote.

This is not the first time we see these restrictions interfering with release cycles. A while back we saw Ubuntu releases whose purpose is to adjust for Microsoft's alleged UEFI violations alone. This is another company, Canonical, suffering from playing along with Microsoft.

Here is another rant about it and the original which states:

Today at Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip Fedora 19 Alpha release by one week due to unresolved UEFI bugs, see the blocker tracking app [1]. Otherwise we think we have pretty solid foundation for Alpha, please help us to identify the real impact of the UEFI issues. More details in meeting minutes [2].

Incidentally, Fabián Rodríguez, a rather prolific Free software proponent, wrote today:

I knew the time would come when I would meet someone that had #Windows 8 and they wanted to keep it either as dual-boot or as I suggest, virtualize it, to ease the transition into GNU/Linux. It doesn’t seem to be possible anymore.

My current advocacy focus are #Trisquel (with legacy BIOS + secure boot disabled) and #Debian. I use the FSF links and resources to inform about the problems with secure boot and Windows 8 and so far few people decided to keep Windows 8 – this means not using GNU/Linux at all since I don’t know yet how to keep #Windows 8 safely.

Debian latest installers support UEFI provided secure boot is disabled, but there is a bug that prevents easy dual-boot: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=679817

This also affects #Ubuntu (and therefore, Trisquel): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1024383

Virtualizing would require either using VMWare (free as in beer only) VM converter, which takes longer and I haven’t tested w/Windows 8, or re-installing from OEM media which can’t be obtained it seems: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_install/a-clean-install-of-windows-8-oem-media-download/1b1e2517-5658-450d-943e-7e81f902adec

I hate telling people “sorry, next” but I’d like to focus advocacy where it matters – not on having free software coexisting with Windows 8, specially when people don’t depend on it too heavily (yet) since it’s relatively recent.

The easiest is to simply wipe everything related to Windows 8 but so far I had been able to offer a smoother transition w/o learning a whole lot more.

What to do now?

Help the antitrust complaint? The above is no accident, Microsoft must have foreseen it with glee. █

Misleading Debates About Patents

Posted in Uncategorized at 2:46 pm by

Justifying monopolies on mathematics

A calculator

Summary: Where and how people manipulate the debate about software patents (short roundup)

Patent lawyers and software patents boosters such as the outspoken Lundberg continue to exploit the voices of people who do not represent the consensus among software developers. This is actually a big deal because unless software developers become more vocal, their interests will be undermined by those who wish to take part of their salary if not their job. Pamela Jones has this new article about an ongoing attempt to throw away patents which are used against Linux. To quote just the summary, “Samsung has been given leave [PDF] in Apple v. Samsung II to depose Toshiyuki Masui [PDF] in Japan regarding prior art. Specifically, it’s about POBox software, which it believes is relevant prior art.”

Software should never be patentable in the first place — a point so commonly overlooked these days because of the shift of attention to patent trolls. And it is not as though anything is being done about the latter, either. Despite promises from president Obama, we learn that regulators hardly do a thing except talk. Or as one opinion piece recently put it:

US antitrust regulators have recently developed great interest in patent trolls, which they have taken to calling “patent assertion entities” or PAEs. But it seems like they still haven’t decided what to do about trolls. At recent hearings, critics lamented extortion-like demands, while supporters proclaimed trolls’ benefits to “invention markets.”

What about cartels of large corporations, such as CPTN? Do those entities do a service to society? It is a rhetorical question. The USPTO should be challenged as a whole, not merely reformed very slightly. This evening I chatted to a good friend of mine who is a professor that’s afraid of patents in his field and whose friends are patenting software in the UK. It has become clear that more and more people become have familiar with the drawbacks of many kinds of patents. Now is the time to do something about it . █

Microsoft Virtualisation Suppresses UNIX and GNU/Linux

Posted in Uncategorized at 2:27 pm by

VPN

Summary: Why Microsoft ‘supports’ GNU/Linux (while attacking it) and why one must never rely on Microsoft products for managing UNIXy machines

Using Hyper-V hype for eternal deception, Microsoft wants people to believe that it is playing nice with the competition, but this article reveals that words are not actions:

Microsoft’s System Center platform includes a wide range of options for configuring and managing Unix and Linux systems. However, when it comes to rolling out and managing virtual machines and creating private cloud environments, there’s not much room for Unix.

The reason Microsoft has been pretending to support rivals is that those rivals are now market leaders and it is not getting easier for Microsoft because even its booster face the reality:

Maybe the PC isn’t dead, but the upgrade cycle may be at death’s door, according to an IDC analyst.

In the wake of very ugly numbers released today by market researchers IDC and Gartner, Windows 8 is getting a lot of the blame.

It deserves that. Vista 8 is a failure that even Microsoft folks admit is a failure; this is why Microsoft is now focusing on bringing Office to other platforms and wants to ‘play nice’ with Linux. It is everything to do with profit, just like the patent extortion. Without the desktop monopoly, Microsoft at the back end becomes irrelevant too.

Recalling antitrust testimonies from Microsoft’s patent troll, and writing about lack of technical edge in Microsoft products [1, 2] (today I had to explain to someone that many people use Windows definiteluynot out of choice),

Pogson says that desktops/laptops are on the decline, citing some more numbers and analyses. The end of Windows domination was long-awaited by many. We’re beyond the tipping point now. Patents are a threat right now and so is Restricted Boot, so the next two posts will deal with each in turn. █

Microsoft Falls as Another Major Ally Gives up on Investment in It

Posted in Uncategorized at 2:03 pm by

MSFT in 2013

Summary: A firm which championed and profited from the housing market bubble is coming to grips with Microsoft being just another bubble too

There is no questioning the reality that Microsoft suffers from Android. This has become such an urgent matter that Microsoft hypocritically attempts antitrust action against Android, which now easily outsells Windows.

Noting some analysis of the demise of Microsoft’s favoured form factors, Pogson debunks one of the myths being pushed in an attempt to shift blame away from Vista 8. “Higher resolutions can happen with ARM, x86/amd64,” he explains, “and GNU/Linux or Android/Linux. The salvation of the PC industry is */Linux. That’s the only way to reduce costs enough to improve price/performance for consumers. Businesses certainly don’t need 4K except for multimedia production and gaming. It’s beyond negligible return on investment for general use.”

Meanwhile, he notes Goldman Sachs, sees no turnaround here: [via]

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) tumbled the most in more than a year after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said the software maker is struggling with slack personal-computer sales and its push into consumer devices has failed to gain traction.

In a note to investors today, Heather Bellini, a New York- based analyst at Goldman Sachs, recommended that investors sell the stock. She downgraded the shares from a neutral rating. Since yesterday, at least two other analysts have also reduced their ratings on shares of the world’s largest software company, based in Redmond, Washington.

CBS, which works with Microsoft, tried to distract as well with this opening paragraph: “Goldman Sachs recommended selling Microsoft shares, as other analysts downgraded the stock. At least one analyst is more upbeat about Microsoft’s chances, though.” Microsoft booster try very hard to reduce the damage. We gave several examples last week. █

Links 15/4/2013: Underwater Linux, More Android Phones

Posted in Uncategorized at 7:44 am by

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • “Safety Linux” project touts progress, solicits commitments

    The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) wants to simplify the process of certifying Linux-based devices to the IEC’s Safety Integrity Level 2 specs. Now, the group is asking interested parties to sign a letter-of-intent, through which various system components would be pre-certified on a cost-shared basis.

  • Underwater vehicle with a Pi brain

    Seems with Raspberry Pi, creativity sees no limit. Recently, a group of National University of Singapore engineering undergraduates has created an autonomous underwater vehicle, with the help of the Pi for memory-intensive functions and Arduino for precise control. And they call it “Coconut Pi”.

  • Making a Living in a Microsoft World, Enriched by GNU/Linux

    I can appreciate someone who casts aside all other considerations in their quest for freedom from interference. We owe a debt to people like that. But not everyone needs to live up to that kind of standard. The differences in the nature of Linux and Windows software are instructive and eye-opening. I can use my experience with Windows to describe why I believe Linux is mostly just better than Windows.

    Microsoft software is tinged by the behavior of its maker and its fans. Otherwise, there would be no impulse to question why someone would use software from multiple sources.

  • 5 must read Linux Blogs
  • Dedoimedo with: A Beard and a Pipe

    Twenty years plus since being created, Linux remains a terrifying word in the global lexicon. Probably not as bad as it was for farmers watching cars take over the countryside in the early decades of the 20th century, but close. It’s an operating system all right, but one that does not warm the cockles of your heart. It’s the bastion of nerdy and geeky and difficult, and you are better off leaving it alone, to its bearded users. Which makes me think, why is the beard a status of sagacity in our society? Throw in a smoking pipe, and you have a PhD in trustworthiness. That’s how it works. And yet, even though Linux is an obvious choice among the people of science, academy and industry, the popular desire to emulate the prototype intellectual status is in low demand. For most folks, the hardship of becoming a Linux user outweighs the benefits. (Image credit: Wikipedia.org)

    Because of this phenomenon, if you happen to burrow your face into the job-seeking networks, you will see the string Linux featuring tall and mighty. There’s quite a bit of demand for Linux system administrators and engineers, global recession and all notwithstanding. True, you will find a wealth of other occupations, professions and skill being hawked to the lowest bidder, but Linux is sort of a star.

  • LPI Offers “Beta” Exams for Revised Linux Certifications
  • James Gosling Smartens up Floating Robot with Linux/Java “Regulus” OS

    Earlier this week, Liquid Robotics unveiled the latest in its line of “Wave Glider” autonomous aquatic craft, due to ship in the third quarter, billing it as “the world’s first hybrid wave and solar propelled unmanned ocean robot.” In addition to its energy harvesting marvels, the 9.5-foot, Wave Glider SV3 is also notable for being the first Linux-powered Wave Glider. With its Linux- and Java-based Regulus operating system, the floating robot is far more adept at autonomous navigation than the Wave Glider SV2, and can now coordinate with its siblings in fleet operations.

  • Desktop

    • ZFS is ready for your Linux desktop

      And now after more than two years in the experimental stage, the ZFS file system for Linux is ready for widespread use.

    • The Linux Setup – Meg Ford, GNOME Developer

      I am a member of the GNOME foundation and an MS in Computer Science student. I contribute to GNOME’s Documents application, co-organize monthly Linux user group meetups and GNOME hackfests in Chicago, and help out with the Chicago Python Workshop. I’m working as a web developer while I complete my degree.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Episode 190: JPEG and PNG, what’s in it?

      The last episode was for absolute beginners, this one is for Geeks. I try to explain (and understand on the way) how images are stored in PNG and JPEG files. PNG (pronounced “PING”) does this lossless, the image can be retrieved in the same quality as the original. PNG works wonders with graphics with a lot of lines and clear colour areas, comics and logos for example, but it creates monster files out of photos and similar images. JPEG looses details, aquires artefacts and generally mangles the image. But it has so beautifully small files and the losses are in most cases invisible – except in the area where PNG is good. So both have their niche to live in.

    • Apache Cloudstack
    • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 499
    • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 500
    • LB – Episode 77 – We Don’t Need No Claudio

      Kevin Wisher and Pegwole join Chad Wollenberg this episode. We discuss TLLTS 500th show, MakerFaire in Munich Germany, and we discuss network administration and how to utilize different utilities such as nmap and wireshark to do analysis on the packets causing problems. Make sure to catch Chad on Linux For the Rest of Us next week!

    • Podcast Season 5 Episode 6

      In this episode: We’ve got oodles of Google news, Nvidia’s new Optimus driver, Dell selling Ubuntu games PCs and our own discoveries. Plus a new podcast challenge and the Open Ballot.

  • Kernel Space

    • The People Who Support Linux: Tony Awtrey, Linux Developer and Opera Singer

      Listening to Tony Awtrey sing Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem is awe inspiring. The classically trained tenor has a euphonious voice capable of taking your breath away. He’s also a Linux developer and Chief Scientist in the defense industry.

    • Systemd 201 Ushers In New Features

      Lennart Poettering announced systemd 201 on Monday afternoon. Features of systemd 201 include journalctl sub-command updates, improvements to reading the crypttab file, a “systemctl status” command for showing various bits of useful status information, improvements to the systemd libraries, and much more.

    • Systemd: The New PulseAudio

      So, clearly, it’s different strokes for different folks and while change is good, the contention over whether systemd is really a good thing remains hotly debated. One thread concerning ‘The Bad’ in the Arch Linux community is fairly representative of the concern for adoption of systemd. Arch Linux has a loyal following of pragmatic users who enjoy working at a component level because of how it allows one to truly learn the ‘build your own’ Desktop. The result is a clean, lean system and their is purity in that. So, they might be the most vocal of all critics and rightly so.

    • 6 Best File Systems for Big Data

      Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.

    • Developer Dissatisfaction Looms with Systemd

      Things seem to be moving along swimmingly with ongoing development surrounding systemd, at least as far as Lead Developer Lennart Poettering is concerned who has outlined the plans for moving the project forward with hopefully full upstream community participation in lock step.

    • Nouveau Improves Some Games With Linux 3.9 Kernel

      Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, is faster for some OpenGL games when running on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.

      Early this morning I published some new Nouveau benchmarks from Mesa 9.2-devel. After that testing, from the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics, I then compared recent Linux kernel releases. The Linux 3.9 Git kernel as of yesterday was compared to the vanilla mainline releases of Linux 3.8, 3.7, and 3.6.

    • Linux Kernel Closer To Having Apple IR Support

      While some patches have turned up in the past, the mainline Linux kernel has yet to have support for Apple’s infrared remote control found on their computers since 2005. Fortunately, it looks like a new Apple IR driver is taking shape.

      Based upon the earlier work of James McKenzie, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Bastien Nocera, Benjamin Tissoires has now provided a new patch ushering in the “AppleIR” driver for the Linux kernel.

    • Linux Kernel Power Management Targeting Memory

      One of the areas of hardware power management that can yield a surprising amount of power-savings but is often overlooked comes down to the system memory. Fortunately, new Linux kernel patches continue to be written for improving the Linux kernel RAM power management.

      On modern hardware with DDR3 and similar, there’s power management functionality for putting unused DIMMs into a low-power state when the RAM hasn’t been accessed for a period of time. While this is a hardware feature, with the operating system being made aware of such information, better decisions could be made by the kernel and in particular the memory management subsystem, e.g. first touching RAM that is actively being used rather than storing data on a DIMM currently in a low-power state. Other benefits can also come from making the kernel and memory subsystem power-aware.

    • Linux 3.10 May Have New Multi-Platform Support

      The Linux 3.7 kernel brought ARM multi-platform support and now with the Linux 3.10 kernel it may be extended to support the Samsung Exynos SoC family.

      The ARM multi-platform feature allows for having support for multiple ARM SoCs/platforms within a single Linux kernel image. Traditionally, the ARM Linux kernel situation has been a fragmented mess and needing separate kernel images for different Systems-on-a-Chip. With the Linux 3.7 kernel and this multi-platform support, it became possible to have one kernel for covering Calxeda Highbank, Versatile Express, Altera, PicoXcell, and other SoCs.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Linux and Mesa 3D support for AMD’s video accelerator

        Mesa 3D can now use the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) of modern Radeon graphics chips; this decoder is more efficient with common video formats than software that decodes using the main processor or the graphics processor’s shaders. The UVD support arrived with extensions that were created by AMD developer Christian König and have recently been added to Mesa 3D (1, 2). Therefore, it should become part of the next Mesa 3D generation that will probably be versioned as 9.2 or 10.0; once released, this generation is expected to be integrated into the Linux distributions’ development branches quickly, because Mesa 3D is an important component for these distributions’ 3D support for current graphics chips.

      • 2013 X.Org Board of Director Election Results
      • NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers On Ubuntu 13.04

        After showing off early Mesa 9.2 benchmarks with Nouveau and Nouveau improvements with the Linux 3.9 kernel, our latest NVIDIA Linux benchmarks from one of our Lenovo ThinkPad laptops is comparing the NVIDIA vs. Nouveau driver performance on Ubuntu 13.04.

        For those deciding between the Nouveau (the open-source default NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu) and the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that can easily be installed from Ubuntu’s package repository, here’s some new benchmarks. Overall though, these new benchmarks aren’t terribly surprising… NVIDIA’s binary driver still largely wins by a landslide, in large part because the Nouveau driver still lacks proper GPU re-clocking support.

      • First steps towards FOSS 3D driver for NVIDIA’s Tegra

        Developer Thierry Reding has released patches for the Linux kernel that enable the use of 3D acceleration features on Tegra processors. According to Reding, the patches are, however, not fully mature and are based on changes from other developers, in some cases from NVIDIA, which have not yet been merged into the Linux kernel.

      • Linux and Mesa 3D support for AMD’s video accelerator

        Mesa 3D can now use the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) of modern Radeon graphics chips; this decoder is more efficient with common video formats than software that decodes using the main processor or the graphics processor’s shaders. The UVD support arrived with extensions that were created by AMD developer Christian König and have recently been added to Mesa 3D (1, 2). Therefore, it should become part of the next Mesa 3D generation that will probably be versioned as 9.2 or 10.0; once released, this generation is expected to be integrated into the Linux distributions’ development branches quickly, because Mesa 3D is an important component for these distributions’ 3D support for current graphics chips.

      • New NVIDIA driver supports Optimus
      • NVIDIA Has Major New Linux Driver: Optimus, RandR 1.4
      • 2D Tiling For AMD’s RadeonSI Is Stacking Up

        Building upon last week’s RadeonSI tiling patches for exposing this performance-boosting feature on the latest generation of AMD Radeon HD graphics hardware is the xf86-video-ati work. With a new patch, 2D tiling can be turned on for Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs on the open-source Linux driver.

        Published last week and still baking were the “RadeonSI” tiling changes as they affect the Linux kernel with the Radeon DRM, the libdrm library, and the RadeonSI Mesa Gallium3D driver. Jerome Glisse has now put out the small xf86-video-ati patch for flipping on 2D color tiling within the Radeon X.Org driver.

      • X.Org/Mesa/Wayland In GSoC 2013

        While the X.Org Foundation and other projects under its umbrella like Mesa and Wayland benefited from Google’s Summer of Code initiative for several years, last year it wasn’t accepted to participate in GSoC 2012. The list of accepted organizations for GSoC 2013 was announced today and X.Org/Mesa/Wayland again isn’t part of the acceptance list.

      • Wayland Support For IBus Proposed
      • Wayland 1.1, Weston 1.1 Pack Lots Of New Features

        Version 1.1 of Wayland and the Weston reference compositor will soon be released. The first major post-1.0 updates to Wayland/Weston bring a number of exciting features to this next-generation Linux display server.

        Kristian Høgsberg has been preparing to get Wayland/Weston 1.1 out the door, which originally he hoped to have done by the end of March. However, a few remaining issues lingered, but now those are getting addressed.

      • 2013 X.Org Board of Director Election Results

        The 2013 X.Org Board of Director election results are now in for the four new board members responsible for stewarding the X.Org Foundation and related projects like Mesa and Wayland.

        The four new board members though aren’t a surprise since there was only four candidates running for the four open spots this year… Those elected were Alan Coopersmith (110 votes), Peter Hutterer (86 votes), Martin peres (66 votes), and Stuart Kreitman (63 votes).

    • Benchmarks

      • Early Mesa 9.2 Benchmarks With Nouveau

        While the release of Mesa 9.2/10.0 is still a ways away, for those users of the Nouveau reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver, here are some early benchmarks for reference compared to the stable Mesa 9.0 and 9.1 series.

        The benchmarks being put out this morning are just some ThinkPad W510 numbers from an Intel Core i7 720QM system with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics. Ubuntu 13.04 was in use with the Linux 3.8 kernel and Unity 7.0 desktop. Being compared were Mesa 9.2 (master), 9.1, and 9.2 branches of Mesa Git.

      • Benchmarks Of NVIDIA’s New Linux GPU Driver
      • Btrfs File-System Tuning Benchmarks On Linux 3.9

        For those of you wondering the performance impact of using mount options for tuning the Btrfs file-system on the soon-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel, here’s some benchmarks of common Btrfs mount options.

        There were Btrfs tuning benchmarks on the Linux 3.7 kernel offered on Phoronix, but with this next-generation Linux file-system still being in a state of flux, new benchmarks were conducted this week from a Linux 3.9 Git kernel.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops – Part 2

      In my previous article I’ve tried to investigate the RAM memory requirements for running some of the most common light window managers and desktop environments available in the Linux world. Prompted by a number of readers, I’ve decided to include also the big, well-known memory hogs that grab most of the Linux market, i.e. KDE, Unity and Gnome 3.

    • What makes a “lightweight” desktop environment lightweight?

      Over the last few days I was wondering what is a “lightweight” desktop. And I must say I couldn’t come up with an answer to that question.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE and Google Summer of Code 2013

        We’re delighted to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC), for the ninth consecutive year. GSoC has been valuable in bringing new developers into the KDE Community and other free and open software projects. And it has been successful at achieving the goal of creating quality code for the use and benefit of all.

      • Dealing with Bugs in digiKam

        Bugs are inevitable in complex software, and digiKam is no exception. So what should you do when you’ve discovered a bug in your favorite photo management application? As a non-programmer, the best thing you can do is to file the bug with the KDE bug tracking system (digiKam is managed as part of the KDE project). Submitting bugs can be considered a tedious task, but this greatly helps the developers to improve digiKam, and the KDE bug tracking system makes it relatively easy to file bugs and issues.

      • The apps of KDE 4.10 Part III: KTorrent
      • KDE Outreach Program for Women

        We are pleased to announce that KDE will take part in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) this year. OPW started in 2006 with an intention to reach talented women who are passionate about technology, but who may be uncertain about how to start contributing to free and open software projects. Since its beginning, OPW has included commercial and non-profit organizations that are leaders in free and open software.

      • Development begins on a lightweight KDE version

        KDE and openSUSE developer Will Stephenson is working on a slimmed down version of KDE that he calls KLyDE, short for K Lightweight Desktop Environment. In a blog entry about the project, Stephenson says that he thinks: “KDE is not intrinsically bloated”, but that most distributions of the open source desktop environment would, by default, install almost all of the software developed within the project. In his opinion, this leads to an overwhelming number of applications, widgets and options being presented to users. With KLyDE, Stephenson wants to create a modular distribution of KDE that can be reduced to the bare bones of what is necessary for a desktop environment.

      • Qt 5.0.2 Brings 600+ Improvements

        While Qt 5.1 is just around the corner, Digia released Qt 5.0.2 today as the second stable point release update. Qt 5.0.2 incorporates more than 600 improvements in 17 different modules of Qt 5.0.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • SolusOS And Transparency

      Some of you will still remember the early days of SolusOS. Every community member was involved in testing and feedback, and we put out ISO after ISO with sequential improvements.
      It was fun, and it worked.

    • Five operating system alternatives to Windows 8 and XP

      XP’s end of life-support is in sight and not everybody wants Windows 8. So, what are your other choices?

    • Important Notice: The future of Cinnarch

      While Cinnamon is a great user interface and we’ve had a lot of fun implementing it, it’s become too much a burden to maintain/update going forward. We’d like to remain faithful and compatible to our parent distro, Arch Linux, and further support of Cinnamon would strain that by causing incompatibilities/hacks in the entirety of the Gnome packageset. It is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release as we are. They’re 1 year behind with upstream code. Arch Linux is going to have soon Gnome 3.8 and Cinnamon is not compatible with it. The Cinnamon team still have to migrate some of their tools to fully work with Gnome 3.6.

    • New Releases

      • Webconverger 19.1
      • Owl 3.0-20130408
      • Manjaro 0.8.5 released

        We are happy to announce the release of Manjaro 0.8.5. We worked hard to make this release the best Manjaro experience featuring Openbox 3.5.0 and Xfce 4.10. A graphical installer got added and a Manjaro settings manager handling user accounts, keyboard layouts, locales and translation packages is also included. Pamac got enhanced and is now translated to several languages. A special thanks flies out to Carl Duff for his great beginners guide, which makes it easy to install and start Manjaro Linux for everyone!

      • ClearOS Community 6.4.0 Released!

        ClearOS Community 6.4.0 is now available! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, this release introduces a new reports engine, a storage manager, an antimalware file scanner, RADIUS, a basic POP/IMAP server, and mail retrieval.

      • Pardus 2013 (Community)
      • Announcing Foresight Linux 2.5.3
      • NST 18-4509
      • This is version 1.2.20 of Gorm.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Good news are always welcome

        Getting hit by this seasonal flu has not been exactly fun. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with my work and studies but, at this busy hour, I’m glad it’s me who gets the virus and not my computer. Starting my work from scratch AND recovering from the flu would be a lot worse.

      • Mageia 3 Beta 4 Live Images are Here

        Mageia 3 Beta 4 was released two weeks ago with a note saying live images to come. Well, by last week, I’d given up. But, low and behold, Claire Robinson posted a little announcement today saying she hopes they were worth the wait. Hmmm, good question.

      • OpenMandriva Has a Face!

        Black smoke is bellowing, church bells are ringing, trumpets are blowing… well, bloggers are blogging at least. The OpenMandriva canon have pondered, discussed, argued, researched, star gazed, and flung spaghetti on the wall; but they’ve finally decided. They’ve reached a decision as to the new logo and face of the OpenMandriva Association (and assuming the still officially unnamed distribution too). Thank goodness, it’s a pretty one.

        As you might have guessed, the logo above is the winner. The announcement said of it, “after internal voting, this was the most voted and consensual proposal.” The following is the official soon-to-be-copyrighted logo for the OpenMandriva Association.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Where is JBoss 7.2.0.Final?

        Red Hat and the JBoss Community recently announced that they will be releasing a single compiled binary under the EAP.Alpha terminology, rather than posting a community release on the community site and a separate EAP early release on the Red Hat site. This naming change has confused some members of the community, but rest assured the EAP.Alpha release is still under the LGPL as per previous JBoss Community releases.

      • Red Hat’s John Mark Walker: The Open Cloud Needs Open Storage

        Open source leads the data center, says John Mark Walker, Gluster Community leader at Red Hat. OK, what’s next? This is the question Walker plans to address in his keynote on Monday at Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, though he hints at the answer in this Q&A.

      • Jim Whitehurst takes support calls at Red Hat

        Support calls are extremely important for a billion dollar company like Red Hat. However, you won’t often hear about the CEO of company himself taking support calls. Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst does that. He takes support calls for customers.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Board: Fedora Userbase Discussion

          Last week the Fedora Board had an open, public meeting in IRC to discuss Fedora’s user base / target audience. Robyn announced the topic ahead of time and invited folks to join in. You can read the full meeting minutes, but I’ve gone through them and tried to pull out all of the interwoven threads of discussion and summarize it here for you as well.

    • Debian Family

      • Zombie Bug #645713 Still Lives

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Why I’m have not become an Ubuntu Member
          • Online Results in Ubuntu’s Dash: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

            Ubuntu wants to be the Google of your desktop. Yes, it really does. It wants you to be able to search for anything right from your desktop without even opening your browser. Sounds crazy right? On one side, you have Google letting you place all your world in your web browser, Ubuntu, on the other hand, tends to pull you away from the web and instead brings the web to your desktop. Now, as convenient as both ideas sound, many users are afraid of extremes. I, for example, would not like moving my whole life to a web browser much like Google Chromebook proponents do.

          • Why Canonical Is Using Android Drivers For Ubuntu Mir

            With Canonical’s Mir Display Server for future releases of Ubuntu Linux, they are supporting Android’s graphics layer and drivers rather than inventing their own solution, trying to push X.Org drivers, or demanding mobile graphics drivers modelled after the desktop Linux graphics stack. Why did they do this? Here’s an explanation.

          • Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) 13.05 announced

            The second edition of Ubuntu’s online developer summit, UDS 13.05, was announced yesterday. The virtual developer summit will run through May 14-16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. The summit is divided into five tracks – App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Emmabuntus 12.04.2-1.04 Review: Xubuntu LTS spiced up!

              I recently came across Emmabuntus in Distrowatch, it is a Xubuntu 12.04.2 LTS based distro which comes with a large number of pre-installed applications. You can say it to be Ultimate Edition for Xubuntu. Naturally, I was inclined to try it out – to check if it is just mindless collection of applications or the developers have used their judgement in selecting those apps.

            • Trisquel 6.0 LTS

              Trisquel 6.0 LTS was recently released so it’s time to give it another look. Trisquel is a popular distro for users that prefer to use only free software. You won’t find proprietary software included in Trisquel, it’s dedicated to the idea of truly free software.

            • Ubuntu 13.04 Sneak Peek

              Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2 has been released, so I thought I’d check it out for a sneak peek.

              The ISO file I downloaded weighed in at 825.5 MB. Note that Ubuntu 13.04 is a live distro, so you can try it without having to do an install on your system. I recommend this if you just want a quick look at it, while you wait for the final release.

            • 4 apps to install in Fuduntu 2013.2
            • Fuduntu 2013.2 review

              I havent tried any new distro for months. So on the occasion that a new version of Fuduntu got released, I decided to download then install it on my Samsung netbook. As a matter of fact, I had used an older version of Fuduntu last year and somehow liked it. However a problem occurred that the downloading speed was terribly slow back then, it just took me forever to upgrade system and install new packages. So I had to ditch Fuduntu for Linux Mint and havent tried Fuduntu again since then. But after installing and using the new Fuduntu for over a day, I can say that it is different now with many improvements.

            • Fuduntu 2013.2 Released – Download DVD Images and Installation Guide with Screenshots

              Fuduntu Linux, based on Fedora distribution released its Fuduntu 2013.2 version recently which has a user-friendly, rolling-release with RPM package management and the classic GNOME2 desktop environment. This release comes with many new features, application and bug fixes. It has released with two flavors. A Full version with lots of software installed by default and a new Lite version which uses 3-4GB less hard drive space depending on architecture. It supports Steam gaming and Netflix video streaming. XBMC, the popular media center developed by the XBMC Foundation is also now available in Fuduntu 2013.2 distribution.

            • One thing to edit in Fuduntu 2013.2
            • Fuduntu 2013.2 released with full and lite versions

              Fuduntu, the Linux based operating system earns its name by its ambition to fit somewhere in-between Fedora and Ubuntu. It had started a few years ago as a netbook-friendly OS. It had at that time, featured some desktop environment tweaks, which had sure improved performance on Eee PC netbooks with slow SSDs and small screens. Fuduntu has come a long way since then. The OS that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu, uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but the design and usability get their tinge from Ubuntu.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny Atom-powered COM aims Linux at harsh apps

      VersaLogic announced a rugged, credit card-sized COM Express Mini module based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom E6x0T processor. The Linux-ready VL-COMm-26 is also available as part of a “Falcon” subsystem that sandwiches the module with an I/O board of the same size.

    • 5-millionth Linux-powered Roku player ships

      In a post on the company’s blog today, Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood announced that more than 5 million of the company’s iconic Roku players have now shipped. Wood provides a brief history of the Roku player, from its modest 2008 launch as “the Netflix player,” to the point where it offers “about 750 channels,” including games.

    • 10 Things to Connect to Your Raspberry Pi
    • Meet UDOO – the Super Pi

      The hype of Raspberry Pi still going strong. But a new single board tiny computer just joined the game and currently raising fund on Kickstarter. It is UDOO ( pronounced “you do”) , and it can run both Android and Linux.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • LG Optimus F7 coming to Boost Mobile’s LTE lineup

          We’ve learned that Boost Mobile will be adding the highest-end model, the F7, to its LTE lineup in short order. It will be the carrier’s third LTE-capable device, following the HTC One SV and Boost/ZTE Force. Featuring a 4.7-inch, 720p display, 1.5GHz dual core processor, and eight-megapixel camera, the F7 (Boost codename: LG FX1) should prove a popular addition to the prepaid carrier’s handset portfolio.

        • Source: LG to hold New York press event on May 1
        • Samsung goes Mega with two new Galaxy smartphones

          Samsung has unveiled two new smartphones that push the envelope of screen size in the smartphone space.

          Dubbed Mega, the two devices Samsung showed off today come with the customer’s choice of a 5.8-inch screen or a 6.3-inch option. Both devices come with Android 4.2 (Jelly Ben) and a dual-core processor. The higher-end 6.3-inch option comes with a 1.7GHz processor, while the 5.8-inch version has a 1.4GHz chip. Both handsets have 8-megapixel rear-facing cameras and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras.

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • Profound Open Sources UI Tool Framework

    Profound Logic has open sourced its User Interface application development tool framework citing user and developer flexibility among its key reasons for doing so. Profound UI version 4.5 will now also benefit from improved integration between the IBM i and other compatible platforms.

  • What is Cisco’s Biggest Open Source Contribution Ever?

    Networking giant Cisco Systems is no stranger to the world of open source software. In 2009, Cisco was identified as one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and its core IOS XE operating is based on Linux as well.

  • Funf 0.4 brings under the hood changes to sensor framework

    The developers of the Funf open source Java-based sensor framework for mobile phones have released version 0.4 of their software. Most changes in this version, the developers say, are under the hood and affect the architecture of the framework. Changes include a new pipeline interface, a redesigned configuration process, and changes that mean that Funf now runs as a single service instead of spawning a service for each sensor probe.

  • Open source app: Kaldin, an online exam tool

    Kaldin is an open-source web-based examination software that supports creation and management of various types of online assessments – exams and tests.

  • ProxMox – An Open Source Data Center Platform

    proxmox_logoMy journey in finding the best platform for web scale applications has brought me to ProxMox, an open source virtual environment that combines OpenVZ containers and KVM virtualization in a single pane of glass. ProxMox has the best balance between management and performance optimization using containers. We spent today bringing up a four node cluster, and it was dead easy.

    I love the architectural concept of containers. They allow you to slice up a single hardware server into multiple, independent environments, while still allowing full access to the hardware. It is not really virtualization, because none of the hardware resources are virtualized like they are with KVM or VMware. The ProxMox management layer is actually a base install of Debian running a modified OpenVZ Red Hat kernel. The base install weighs in at right around 1GB, and is so thin that there is only a 1-3% processing overhead incurred.

  • RunRev launches LiveCode 6.0, the first open source version of its app development software
  • Making Enterprise Penetration Testing Less Mysterious

    Since 2003 the open source Metasploit framework has been actively developed and used as a penetration testing tool for IT security. While ease-of-use was not top of mind in the early days of Metasploit, that is changing with the latest Metasploit 4.6 Pro release.

    “In the industry, there is a shortage of security folks and that puts a lot of pressure on the people that are working in security today,” said Christian Kirsch, product manager for Metasploit at Rapid7. “With the Metasploit Pro 4.6 release, there is the concept of wizards to make things easier.”

  • Negative to Positive: Interview with Mayan Developer Roberto Rosario

    The free and open source software community operates on a very simple principle: obey the license which the software is released under. But what happens when the rules of engagement set down in FOSS licenses like the GNU GPL are ignored? What do you do if a rival developer or company takes your code and doesn’t pass on the freedoms afforded by your original license?

    This is a fear that every FOSS developer has had at one point or another, and it only gets stronger as your project gains momentum and grows. It’s something that has kept untold lines of code closed up; arguably the biggest argument against opening up the source of a particular piece of software.

  • Check_MK simplifies Nagios monitoring

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla CEO Stepping Down Amidst Other Leadership Changes

        In a huge announcement from Mozilla, the nonprofit entity behind the Firefox browser and other open source tools has detailed significant changes to its executive management. CEO Gary Kovacs, who has been running Mozilla for three years, will step down later this year, and there is a search on for a Kovacs replacement. Kovacs will remain on Mozilla’s board of directors, and there are other executive shifts as well, during a time of transition for the company.

      • Mozilla Forges Ahead with Persona Authentication/Privacy Scheme
      • Firefox development versions show privacy plans moving forward

        The latest Aurora and Beta releases of the open source Firefox browser show privacy features are at the top of the feature list for the browser. Currently in Beta, Firefox 21 now includes a new user interface for the Do Not Track (DNT) system and Firefox 22, available in the Aurora test channel, has the new cookie policy, announced in February, implemented.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack grows up: But is it grown up enough for enterprise IT?

      Network World – Less than a year ago the cool thing for IT vendors to do was jump on the OpenStack bandwagon.

      Everyone was hopping on: Red Hat, IBM, and even VMware signed on as partners to the open source cloud computing platform, joining Rackspace, HP, Cisco and Dell that were already backing the project. All these companies had a unified goal, says Marc Brien, an analyst at Domicity, who tracks the movers and shakers of the cloud world. They wanted to stave off the fast-growing dominance of Amazon Web Services in the cloud.

    • OpenStack vs Amazon Cloud Battle Goes Coast to Coast

      The OpenStack vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud battle will stretch across the United States next week. Indeed, cloud consultants and integrators will flock to OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. (April 15-18), while Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) partners and customers will gather for an AWS Summit in New York (April 17-18). Terry Wise, head of AWS’s wordwide partner ecosystem, will be on hand for the conference. For channel partners, it’s nearly time to choose sides

    • Hadoop-as-a-Service Expected to Top $1.9 Billion by 2016

      There is some skepticism about whether vendors and channel partners providing Hadoop services are yet bringing in the revenue they need to make it a viable business case, but according to a new report from TechNavio, the big bucks are ahead. And not that far ahead, really.

    • OpenStack To Crack Down On Incompatible Clouds
    • How Open Is Your OpenStack Platform?

      There have been reports that the OpenStack cloud computing platform is becoming overly fragmented for some time, and now it appears that the OpenStack Foundation is going to take aim at some players in the OpenStack space who don’t seem to be following interoperability guidelines. ITWorld, among other sites, has reported on comments from Josh McKenty, CTO of Piston Cloud and an OpenStack Foundation board member, who points out that HP and Rackspace, in particular, need to shore up their OpenStack interoperability efforts.

    • Piston Herds Cows with Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 Cloud
    • New OpenStack initiative could address interoperability questions
    • Piston Ships Enterprise OpenStack 2.0, Focused on Easy Deployment

      Very steadily, Piston Cloud has gained a reputation as a company with some smart strategies surrounding the OpenStack open cloud computing platform and how it can serve enterprises. In February, the company also announced that it had raised $8 million in Series B financing follows a $4.5 million Series A round in July, 2011.

      This week, the company has delivered its “turnkey” Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 distribution, which looks like a relatively easy way to start dabbling with an OpenStack cloud deployment.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.6.6 Arrives with 50 Fixes

      The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6. This version, available for those more conservative users, is said to have arrived with over 50 bug fixes, many of which were backported from LibreOffice 4 and most of which were quite juicy. It’s always recommended to upgraded to the latest release.

    • LibreOffice 3.6.6 released, fixes over 50 bugs

      The Document Foundation has released a new update of the LibreOffice suite, LibreOffice 3.6.6. This release fixes over 50 bugs and other improves the software’s stability greatly. As it is a bug fix release, no new features have been added and all users are advised to update to this release as soon as possibile.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • VLC Media Player releases version 2.0.6

      VideoLAN has released a new update of popular open-source media player, VLC. This version is an important release, and all users are advised to update to this release as soon as possibile. Some of the notable changes in this release are:

      * fixes some regressions of the 2.0.x branch of VLC.
      * introduces support for Matroska v4 files.
      * introduces an important number of fixes for MKV, Ogg, AVI, WMV, HTTPS and subtitles support.

    • New Releases: Wine 1.5.28, VirtualBox 4.2.12, FileBot 3.6

      A new development release of Wine v1.5.28 is out. Among other new stuff in this release are: built-in FixedSys fonts, new icon for the joystick control panel, and postscript driver improvements. This release fixes 21 bugs, including some graphics issue with Guild Wars 2 and Bioshock Infinite. In fact, it has been confirmed that this years blockbuster game Bioshock Infinite works with Wine 1.5.28.

    • DarkTable 1.2 Handles JPEG2000, Profiled Denoising

  • Public Services/Government

    • The Open Source Initiative reaches out to Washington DC

      The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been reforming itself into a more outward-facing organisation and has now taken another step in that process by announcing that it will be hosting a “small open source license clinic” at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in May. The event is designed to bring together individuals, organisations and government agencies to help all better understand the nature of open source licences. Discussions will also look at identifying problems unique to government. Although a small event, it is the first of what will, hopefully, be many, as the OSI pursues its “non-profit educational mission”.

    • Dutch government to use open source for its new e-ID card

      The Dutch government will use open source software for developing its e-ID card solution. The e-ID plans were presented to the Dutch Parliament by Ronald Plasterk, Minister of the Interior last week Wednesday.
      The ministry is considering to use a chip card similar to the German government, according to a spokesperson for the minister. It has also looked at the smart card system developed by the Belgian government. “Apparently the German approach for smart card allows a few more options that we’re interested in, but it is too early to tell.”

  • Licensing

    • The Dangers of a Post-License Era

      You don’t see many discussions about free software licenses any more. Once a burning issue, licenses and their implication hardly seem to be mentioned these days. Increasingly, we seem to be moving into a post-license era, and the implications for free and open source software are potentially troubling.

      The reasons for this apparent shift of interest aren’t hard to find. To start with, most of the important license issues have already been resolved. It’s hard to imagine any licensing issue today that would be as significant to the community at large as the release of the OpenOffice.org code in 2000, or of the discussion of the third version of the GPL in 2005-07.

    • IFOSSLR 5.1 available

  • Openness/Sharing

    • iPad Mini Getting Open Source Game D Game Controller Case Combo
    • Where Are the Women?

      If you’ve been to your local hacker/makerspace and there weren’t many women, did you stop and wonder about that? I hope so, but unfortunately a common reaction is to think, “I guess women just aren’t into building stuff.” As one of the few women directors of a U.S. makerspace, I know that this just isn’t true. In this and future posts I’d like to share my perspective on the problem, and what I think can be done about it.

    • Open Data

      • Freeing scientific data with CC0 and Dryad repository

        Karen Cranston (@kcranstn) is an evolutionary biologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. NESCent promotes the synthesis of information, concepts, and knowledge to address significant, emerging, or novel questions in evolutionary science and its applications. They collect new data under a Creative Commons license (CC0) to free scientific data and make it more widely available.

    • Open Hardware

      • 3D printed fighter jet parts and open community vehicles
      • Nano Quadcopter open source tiny drone kit

        Designed by Bitcraze, the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter is an open source development kit to make your own tiny drones. It’s $173 from Seeed Studio Depot and looks like great fun to make and fly! “Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter Kit 10-DOF with Crazyradio”

      • ARM: Vendors Want a Single Chip Design, Single OS

        Lakshmi Mandyam, ARM director of Server Systems and Ecosystems, said on last week that ODMs are looking to standardize on both a single operating system and a single chip architecture across their product stacks. In other words, they want a single chip that can scale from a smartphone to a server and one OS like Linux to rule them all. Vendors are finding this idea “very interesting”.

      • Open hardware quad-core ARM SBC hits Kickstarter

        A project to build a compact, low cost, open-hardware SBC (single board computer) has turned to Kickstarter for funding its way to production. The 110×85 mm UDOO board runs Linux or Android on an ARM i.MX6 Freescale applications processor, and also has a built-in Arduino Due-compatible subsystem.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Web app development lags device readiness, says analyst

      ABI Research forecasts that by the end of 2013, about 1.4 billion devices in the wild will be equipped with HTML5-compatible browsers. Despite this tantalizing opportunity for new HTML-enabled web apps, however, the “vast majority” of developers continue to create “native model” apps rather than web apps, reports the analyst firm.

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