A new version of Dell's Kace K1000 Systems Management Appliance adds support for a wider array of devices, including Chromebooks, so enterprises and other organizations can better control these Chrome OS computers.
Chromebooks are laptops running Chrome OS that are good fits for many situations. The light OS doesn't require heavy hardware, and that makes them cheaper than many laptops. Those on a tight budget can find a couple of good Chromebooks from Acer for just $199.
To learn more about Rocket, and the Application Container spec which underlies is, we caught up with Jonathan Boulle. Boulle is an engineer at CoreOS who is leading the development of Rocket and doing a lot of the coordination work around the App Container spec. Before working at CoreOS, Boulle worked on a similar project at Twitter that never quite saw the light of day, but was able to apply some of the ideas and experiences to his current work on Rocket.
The company's new tool is itself a Docker container. Using Docker's Stats API, the software collects and logs data on the Docker environment, as well as specific containers. It can keep track of things like how much CPU time, memory and network bandwidth a Docker app is using.
There has been a lot of action on the container front recently. Version 1.5 of Docker rolled out with new features and upgrades. Survey results from StackEngine also arrived, shown in a detailed infographic, that describe some of the major trends going on in the container space, including Docker trends. And Rocket, a competitor to Docker that we've covered, reached new milestones.
Linus Torvalds, the father of the Linux kernel, posted a message on Google+ asking users to vote if they want the version numbering scheme of Linux kernel to change from 3.xx to 4.x. This is a very good opportunity for those of you who want the Linux kernel 4.0 to happen sooner to speak your mind.
While Coreboot has been ported to a number of older ThinkPads and other outdated Intel motherboards and laptops, you don't see many modern Intel systems supporting Coreboot. The reason for the lack of Coreboot support is due to a "feature" introduced with Haswell.
OverlayFS was added to the Linux 3.18 kernel and for Linux 3.19 this file-system popular to live Linux distributions gained multi-layer support. For Linux 3.20 this file-system is now having support for multiple read-only layers.
PulseAudio, the powerful and controversial sound system used in numerous GNU/Linux and UNIX-like computer and mobile operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD), reached version 6.0, a release that introduces several new features and fixes numerous annoying bugs reported by users from previous versions.
Live patching is the hottest trend when we’re talking about Linux kernel-based operating systems. It was created by SUSE, based on KGraft, and distributed in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distribution at the end of 2014. Everyone knows that Linux systems don’t require a reboot every time some packages have been updated, except for the kernel. Well, this is not the case anymore with live patching.
When Microsoft launched Windows 10 Technical Preview, the name came as something of a surprise; everyone had been, understandably, expecting Windows 9. Over in the world of Linux, as we know, things work a little differently.
The world of Linux-based operating systems is a fragmented one, but Linus Torvalds -- whose loins were partly responsible for giving birth to Linux -- is asking the community how version numbering should be handled moving forward. Should things be kept simple, or should version numbers just keep getting longer, and longer, and longer, and longer?
Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
Highlights of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 3.20 include:
- A new optional feature to add a small amount of polling on each executed HLT instruction in the guest, for improving latency by up to 50% for some scenarios. Right now this is a feature that needs to be manually toggled but in the future could be auto-tuned.
With Wayland's Weston compositor having the presentation feedback support, Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has written about Weston's repaint scheduling.
Back in 2012 there was a call for deprecating FBDEV within the Linux kernel considering that DRM and V4L2 drivers are much better options. Sadly there hasn't been any formal deprecation of FBDEV in the mainline kernel yet, but its still receiving a few changes each kernel cycle.
While I don't yet have my hands on a quad-core Cortex-A7 Raspberry Pi 2 board, there's already many running benchmarks with it using our open-source automated testing software. Some of the shared RPi2 benchmarks done by the community include:
As of today my ePad source is nearing a 1.0.0 release and the goal of this post is to let folks outside of Bodhi know it exists and that it is ready for them to give it a try. ePad in its current form supports most all of the features you would expect from a text editor: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Find, Replace, and displaying Line Numbers. On top of these it also supports opening multiple files in the same application window.
Data is the crucial bit in our personal and professional existence. Without data we would be lost in a vast expanse of nothingness. Spreadsheets, email, documents, contacts, databases, files, folders … the list goes on and on. In a perfect world, every byte of local storage would be backed up to an external hard drive or cloud storage service.
We’re getting so close to the release now! (Check the count-down counter on krita.org!) Sure, there are still a bunch of bugs to fix, but we’re down to very nearly no release blockers now. And we fixed an awful lot of bugs since the last beta release, too!
The 2.9.0 release is scheduled for February 26th, with monthly bug fix releases planned until we release Krita 3.1.
We’re pleased to announce the last Calligra 2.9 beta release for you to test. We are as good at fixing issues as your reports are so please keep up the good work.
New APIs must be fully documented
With GNOME 3.16 the developers are working hard at making their native Wayland support be rock-solid and reliable for day-to-day use for those wishing to abandon running their GNOME desktop on an X.Org Server. An important feature has finally landed for GTK+ applications in the Wayland world: the ability to minimize windows.
…and while I was playing with GNOME’s new Bugzilla instance trying to get rid of some upstream feature bloat, I looked at upstream’s Bugzilla front page and spend the next hours wondering where to add eight more Search buttons/links/forms so it’ll become a full dozen.
Utkarsh Sevekar has announced today, February 13, that his Debian-based Rebellin Linux 2.5 computer operating system is available for download for free. The distribution was previously only available for purchase for the sum of $9.99 (€8.8).
Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 0.8.12 is the second Community Edition of Manjaro that gets a new stable release after the announcement of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, a point release that introduced out-of-the-box support for Microsoft’s exFAT file system, as well as the Pacman 4.2 package manager.
February 14 is a day to express your love for others and in keeping with that theme, openSUSE extends its gratitude toward the organizations and people who make Free and Open Source Software a reality.
Every year, the Free Software Foundation Europe asks all FOSS users to think about the hard-working people in the Free Software community and to show them their appreciation individually on this “I love Free Software”-Day.
It took a long time after Red Hat's IPO in 1999 to see other significant open source exits. But things have been accelerating lately, with large funding rounds, acquisitions, and an IPO. Open source vendors are maturing, and making a deeper and deeper impact
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The good news is that both options -- industrial exit or IPO -- open new possibilities for open source vendors. Gone are the days where the only possible outcome would be to get picked up by a proprietary competitor, annoyed by the market shares lost to this alternative. Competitors don't spend hundreds of millions to remove an option from the market -- but they do so to acquire a mature technology, a large installed base, and a synergy with their existing product portfolio. Jaspersoft's acquisition by TIBCO is a great example -- there was little overlap between Jaspersoft's products and TIBCO Spotfire, and their successful cloud innovations and expertise have been beneficial to TIBCO's entire BI offerings. We will have to see how Pentaho gets rolled into Hitachi's "Social Innovation" group once the acquisition is completed but I am pretty sure this will be a tremendous value creator.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 delivers standardised services for mission critical workloads, and offers IT organisations greater visibility into provisioning, configuring and monitoring of their virtualisation infrastructure, all based on open standards.
The first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Tails 1.3 amnesic incognito live system has been officially released for testing, bringing three major new features and four minor improvements that are described for your reading pleasure in the next paragraphs.
VLANd is a simple (hah!) python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.
After the OpenTAC session at Linaro Connect, we do now have a mailing list to support any and all discussions related to OpenTAC. Thanks to Daniel Silverstone for the list.
Canonical seems to be set to release a smartphone that is based on Ubuntu OS platform in partnership with BQ of Spain, which is renowned for making tablets, smartphones and ebook readers in Europe. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition was launched in Europe on Feb 9.
Ubuntu 15.04 is using the Linux 3.18 kernel right now but with Linux 3.19 having just been released and it bringing new features and improvements, the Vivid Vervet archive will soon land Linux 3.19. As Ubuntu 15.04 is shipping in April, it will almost definitely finalize on Linux 3.19 given that Linux 3.20 would be too close of a call for shipping in time.
Erle Robotics, a Spanish company that creates all sorts of Linux-powered robots, such as Erle-brain, an open hardware Linux kernel-based autopilot for drones, Erle-plane, a Linux-based plane, and Erle-rover, a Linux-based rover, has announced Erle-copter, the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone, which can be used to capture amazing scenes (if you have a great camera).
On Kickstarter, Zyro is pitching a “DroneBall” quadcopter that runs Linux on Gumstix COMs and acts like a smart aerial ball for multi-player games.
The Zyro DroneBall doesn’t look like a ball — nor does it act like any ball you’ve ever seen that isn’t made of Flubber. The quadcopter can hover, zig, and zag within a virtual aerial arena, mimicking a hockey puck, soccer ball, or an Ultimate Frisbee disc, says Zyro. It can even take the role of an extra player on the field interacting with another DroneBall.
The Samsung Z1 was the first Tizen phone to be released with Spreadtrum’s SC7727S WCDMA chipsets running with the Tizen 2.3 Operating System. Today Spreadtrum Communications, a fabless semiconductor company based in China, have announced the successfully completion of the integration of the Tizen operating system (OS) with their WCDMA power-efficient chipsets.
Obsessed with mobile growth? Join us February 23-24 when we reveal the best technologies and strategies to help your company grow on mobile. It all takes place at our 5th annual Mobile Summit at the scenic Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, CA. See if you qualify here.
Using an Android device comes with a number of quirks and feelings that only Android users can understand. iPhone users lead a boring existence where everything is sliver and has perfectly rounded corners. Our world is full of color and unique shapes and sizes, but it’s not without #AndroidProblems. That’s exactly what makes Android users different, and why we can safely say no one else understands what it’s like.
“Be Together. Not the Same.” Android’s new motto is pretty much perfect. It describes the dual nature of Android and it’s a great reminder that, at the end of the day, we’re all just tech fans no matter the brands or models we prefer.
Google’s last Android ad had cute animals, lots of them. But for this newest project, Google’s getting back to the funky Androidified characters first introduced in the days before Lollipop’s arrival.
Google today launched the Android WebView beta channel. To participate, developers are asked to join the Google+ community and sign up for the testing program before they can download the beta from Google Play.
Are you a techie but also have a soft spot for classical music? Then you’ll probably love this video we’re about to share with you.
Google Japan has just posted a video showing an Android orchestra made up of 300 phones and tablets that sync together to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sonata.
OnePlus will launch its custom Android ROM OxygenOS next month - with a little help from the developers of Paranoid Android.
OnePlus is saying goodbye to CyanogenMod, the Android ROM that it had previously using for its OnePlus One devices globally, and is preparing to release a new alternative, OxygenOS, that it's developed in-house.
iOS 8 and Lollipop are the best versions to date of Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems, yet that doesn’t mean either one is free of flaws. Both iOS 8 and Android 5.0 crash, and a new study from Crittercism reveals that it’s Google’s OS that is more stable than Apple’s.
Google’s new Android 5.0 Lollipop update is slowly but surely making its way to more and more devices from the Moto X and Moto E, to the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8, and now today we have more good news for Motorola smartphone owners.
OnePlus One will receive a major CyanogenMod 11S system update (O5Q release) for Android 4.4.4 KitKat. The latest over-the-air (OTA) update is designed to offer a number of major fixes for the "Flagship Killer" smartphone.
With the arrival of products such as Motorola’s hotly anticipated Moto 360, the smartwatch market was expected to take off. But the data from market research company Canalys shows that consumers are still far from convinced that they need buy one.
Tourists who visit my home country of Croatia soon notice that a hallmark (besides beautiful beaches, fortified cities and wondrous sites of ancient Roman architecture) is how widespread smartphone use is. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index data for 2013, there were 114.5 mobile phones for every 100 Croatians — that’s a lot of phones!
One of the tasks of a digital team in any major news organisation is to make the newsroom more efficient. We leverage new technologies in ways that haven’t been done before, and at a pace that’s challenging to keep up with. At The Times and Sunday Times, our team is constantly on the lookout for ways of improving our editorial workflow, and ensuring we get the very best from our great quality journalism.
A foundation can do a lot for an open source project. Just look at The OpenStack Foundation or The Linux Foundation. This week, Node.js, the very popular server-side JavaScript framework that is used for building and running websites and online applications, got its own foundation. Among other things, that means that Joyent will no longer solely govern Node.js. The foundation should help the project gain more contributions and develop more quickly.
The economy is looking up mean that business budgets will likely see healthy growth in the new year. Forrester is predicting 4 to 6 percent growth for 2015 global IT budgets, reaching $620 billion. Much of the growth in spending will go towards technology like analytics, mobile, as-a-service, and enterprise applications like ERP and CRM. The US will lead IT spending, followed by India and the UK.
Free software is particularly well-suite to Greece because it is a small market compared to those for the anglophone or francophone worlds, say. That means software is unlikely to be produced in regional versions as a priority. Open source, of course, can be modified by anyone, allowing localised versions of existing free software to be produced easily. All of these considerations apply elsewhere, especially among smaller countries, and it has always been something of a mystery to me why they don't embrace open source more readily.
What he means is that companies will no longer have to run Hadoop on one set of resources, while running the web servers, Spark and any other number of workloads on other resources managed by Mesos. Essentially, all of these things will now be available as data center services residing on the same set of machines. Mesos has always supported Hadoop as a workload type — and companies including Twitter and Airbnb have taken advantage of this — but YARN has appeal as the default resource manager for newer distributions of Hadoop because it’s designed specifically for that platform and, well, is one of the foundations of those newer distributions.
MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.
The Open Networking Forum (ONF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has announced the appointment of Saurav Das as principal system architect, and the establishment of a new project to build upon the OpenFlow Configuration and Management Protocol (OF-CONFIG) to support Open vSwitch (OVS). Saurav's contributions to ONF and the announcement of this project build on the organisation's open-source software efforts that began with the OpenFlow Driver competition, followed by ONF SampleTap and the Segment Routing project SPRING-OPEN, all of which were completed in 2014. Open-source software is a key route to developing de factor standards and fostering interoperability, both of which are ONF goals.
This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.
Node.js, the popular open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime project, will soon be governed by an independent foundation, its chief commercial sponsor announced this week.
HDS will offer open-source data muncher Hadoop to the enterprise after doing a deal with Hortonworks.
Hadoop distributor Hortonworks has signed an agreement with HDS to jointly promote and support the software. HDS can now deliver Hortonworks' Data Platform (HDP), Hadoop in other words, to its enterprise customers.
Hortonworks strategic marketing veep John Kreisa offered this canned quote: "The strategic agreement also provides a joint engineering commitment for the two companies on current and future projects that will help make Hadoop enterprise-ready."
Hadoop has made lots of big data headlines by now. But in a reminder that it is only part of the open source big data story, Sisense and Simba partnered this week to deliver data analytics via MongoDB, the open source NoSQL platform, which is increasingly importance in production big data use.
That was pretty fast! It looks like Oracle knows what it is doing and just updated its awesome VirtualBox virtualization software, which we have to admit that we use every day here on Softpedia to test all sorts of distributions of GNU/Linux and many other Linux-related applications, to version 4.3.22, bringing initial support for the recently released Linux kernel 3.19.
Hitachi is making a major play for the big data and Internet of Things markets with the acquisition, which is expected to close in June
Amid the well-deserved hype around the impact of cloud technology and big data analytics, it is possible that casual industry watchers may have missed the real story behind the recent wave of IT re-architecting.
Enabling many of these recent, powerful trends is a newly validated embrace of open source software technology. The movement to OSS solutions is empowering system designers and solution architects to re-examine methodologies that evolved out of the legacy proprietary, closed source software license model. Put simply, OSS allows developers of IT systems to create better results and cut costs.
The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licenses are now on our list of free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.
We have updated our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them to include the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Both of these licenses are free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.
CC BY 4.0 is a noncopyleft license that is compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), meaning you can combine a CC BY 4.0 licensed work with a GPLv3 licensed work a larger work that is then released under the terms of GPLv3.
Facebook isn't likely making many new friends among the big established networking vendors with its announcement today of the new 6-pack open hardware modular switch. The new 6-pack modular switch builds on Facebook's existing top-of-rack Wedge switch and its Linux-based network operating system FBOSS.
OSVR announced its creation at CES this year, and as a direct result 12 members have signed up their support, which includes Jaunt, a pioneering company in cinematic VR.
An open source virtual reality platform reports 13 new partners. This is the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem, envisioned as the platform that can bring together companies doing work in a number of areas of virtual reality. OSVR aims to set an open standard for virtual reality input devices, games and output. Its framework offers the potential to unite developers and gamers under a single platform.
The white Fiat drove on to the line at Baguley this afternoon, causing delays to services between Cornbrook and Manchester Airport.
In response to Matthews' call for "bombing the hell out of them," Sheehan does make an important point about ISIS's well-publicized display of violence, which is "they did this for a purpose." The purpose he proposes–"They're doing this to try to intimidate us so that we go home"–is implausible, since ISIS surely knows that the United States, like most countries, generally responds to violence with more violence. It's much more likely that ISIS, like the Al-Qaeda movement it springs from, believes spectacular acts of terror will draw a military response from the United States that will help it to build its movement (Extra!, 7/11). But at least Sheehan is thinking of violence as being part of a political strategy rather than as a form of emotional release, as Matthews seems to see it:
Questions persist over the true role of the United States in the events leading up to the deadly encounter in Mamasapano and in the immediate aftermath.
Did the US provide all or part of the intelligence that formed the basis for the ill-fated Special Action Force operation?
Were its operatives involved in the planning of the mission and in its execution?
“The blood debt of the US which include the genocide of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American war remain unpaid and their atrocities continue to spiral up. They’re even using Filipino troops as pawns in their interventionist terror war such as what happened the covert SAF operation Mamasapano,” said Charisse Bañez, national spokesperson of the League of Filipino Students.
Vencer Crisostomo, Anakbayan National Chair, said that Aquino “sacrificed his own troops in the name of the US war on terror.”
“This disastrous collaboration between Aquino and the US is a disrespect to all the victims of the Filipino genocide during Filipino-American War,” said Crisostomo.
Common sense tells you, of course, that when people say someone is "in another world," they don't generally mean that they are actually psychotic. For what it's worth, Merkel's office said she hadn't meant to imply any such thing, clarifying that her point was that "Putin has a different perception on Crimea."
Rush Limbaugh: If Young People Listen To Liberal Professors "It Stands To Reason People Are Going To Sign Up With ISIS"
Recent Paris attacks have triggered a wave of securitarian discourse and dangerous upcoming legislative measures that are spreading way beyond France. Increased control of communications online, surveillance, attacks against anonymous speech and encryption are already on the table, under the pretence of fighting an invisible enemy in a perpetual war.
Fahwad Al-Khadoumi (nsnbc) : Facebook teamed up with several corporate “friends” to adapt Facebook’s in-house software to identify cyber threats and their source with other corporations. Countering cyber threats sounds positive while there are serious questions about transparency when smaller, independent media fall victim to major corporation’s unwillingness to reveal the source of attacks resulted in websites being closed for hours or days. Transparency, yes, but for whom?
The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.
David Carr, the 58-year-old media columnist for the New York Times, collapsed suddenly at the newspaper’s office this evening and died after being rushed to the hospital.
Carr was previously the editor-in-chief of Washington City Paper and the author of a memoir, Year of the Gun, about his recovery from drug addiction and cancer while raising two young daughters.
Technology companies can enact all sorts of political agendas, and right now the dominant agendas enforce neoliberalism and austerity, using centralized data to identify immigrants to be deported, or poor people likely to default on their debts. Yet I believe there is a huge positive potential in the accumulation of more data, in a good institutional—and by that I mean political—setup. Once you monitor one part of my activity and offer me some proposals or predictions about it, it’s reasonable to suppose your service would be better if you also monitored my other activities. The fact that Google monitors my Web searches, my email, my location, makes its predictions in each of these categories much more accurate than if it were to monitor only one of them. If you take this logic to its ultimate conclusion, it becomes clear you don’t want two hundred different providers of information services—you want just one, because the scale-effects make things much easier for users. The big question, of course, is whether that player has to be a private capitalist corporation, or some federated, publicly-run set of services that could reach a data-sharing agreement free of monitoring by intelligence agencies.
New York Times columnist David Carr, one of the most incisive and influential writers on the media business, died Thursday night after collapsing in the paper's midtown Manhattan newsroom. He was 58.
Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff of the death of their "wonderful, esteemed colleague" in a newsroom memo.
[...]
Earlier Thursday, Carr moderated a TimesTalk on the National Security Agency leaks with Edward Snowden, and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Within hours, he was dead.
This is the second article (Part 1) in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward an expansion of the legal system has been capitalized upon by the prison industrial complex.
Rush: "It Seems Like Any Man That Goes To College Could Randomly Be Accused Of Committing Rape"
Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.
Despite its extensive implications, TTIP has generated relatively little coverage, not least because negotiations are shrouded in secrecy and conducted primarily with corporate lobbyists, who have minimal obligations to the public interest. So clandestine are the talks that the few MEPs that are granted access can only view the plans in their original documentation, in a secure location, with the threat of espionage charges if they try to make copies or share the details with the public.