Retired pastor James Anderson, age 84, has never worked in IT or had any formal computer training, but over the past two years he has rebuilt more than a hundred IBM ThinkPad laptops and sent them to schools and nonprofits in Africa – all running Linux.
For the past nine years, Anderson has volunteered at FreeGeek, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit that recycles and rehabilitates old computers for donation. He spends four hours every Friday testing and rebuilding the ThinkPads, which he then loads with Linux Mint 17 and sends one or two at a time to Africa via personal couriers.
One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success? I don't know the answer to that question. But I have rounded up some theories, which I'd like to lay out here.
You've always been able to run containers on a variety of operating systems: Zones on Solaris; Jails on BSD; Docker on Linux and now Windows Server; OpenVZ on Linux, and so on. As Docker in particular and containers in general explode in popularity, operating system companies are taking a different tack. They're now arguing that to make the most of containers you need a skinny operating system to go with them.
The folks at UK retailer Cloudsto have been offering tiny desktop computers loaded with Ubuntu Linux for a little while. But most have basically been Ubuntu versions of existing Android boxes with ARM-based processors.
Now Cloudsto is introducing a line of mini PCs with x86 processors, starting with the Cloudsto X86 Nano Mini PC. It’s available with either Windows 8.1 or Ubuntu 14.04.
What is Linux? For many this seems like a question with an obvious answer, but the truth is there are a large number of people who would shrug their shoulders. Many have never heard of Linux (gasp!) or aren't confident in their answer.
Here at Opensource.com, we want to help answer that question in a manner that allows others pass it around and share it with the world. So, we created a new resource page which gently introduces Linux, the world's most popular open source operating system.
Here’s why I’m even bothering to write this: I’m writing to the person who is considering Linux as a desktop system. I am writing to the kid who wants to explore computer programming. I’m writing to the person who is intrigued with the look and feel of Linux on the desktop.
Should you run into this kind of person while you are asking for help or even offering to help others, just write him off as someone who had an extremely bad day and move along. He is most certainly an anomaly within the global Free Software community…within the Linux community.
Cloudy Linux startup CoreOS kicked off its inaugural CoreOS Fest event in San Francisco on Monday with word that its homegrown rkt (pronounced "rocket") container runtime software will be integrated into the Google-derived Kubernetes container orchestration software.
Application containerization is potentially the biggest disruptive technology in the IT infrastructure world today. Containerization not only puts at risk a number of vendors (think those who make their money from virtualization) but it fundamentally promises to enable a business transformation as well.
Taking a major step forward in its quest to drive a Linux container standard that’s not created and controlled by Docker or any other company, CoreOS spun off management of its App Container project into a stand-alone foundation. Google, VMware, Red Hat, and Apcera have announced support for the standard.
Becoming a more formalized open source project, the App Container (appc) community now has a governance policy and has added a trio of top software engineers that work on infrastructure at Google, Twitter, and Red Hat as “community maintainers.”
It is well known that the term “high performance computing” (HPC) originally describes the use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly. The term applies especially to systems that function above a teraflop or 10^12 floating-point operations per second, and is also often used as a synonym for supercomputing. Technically a supercomputer is a system that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. To increase systems performance, over time the industry has moved from uni-processor to SMP to distributed-memory clusters, and finally to multicore and manycore chips.
However, for a growing number of users and vendors, HPC today refers not to cores, cycles, or FLOPS but to discovery, efficiency, or time to market. Some years ago, IDC came up with the interpretation of HPC to High Productivity Computing, highlighting the idea that HPC provides a more effective and scalable productivity to customers, and this term fits really well for most commercial customers.
Linux is a reliable and popular operating system – and this is quite fair. Any contemporary Linux dedicated server offers the best performance, maximum security, and reliability on the market without breaking your pocket book.
Linux kernel 3.14.40 LTS arrived a few days ago, as announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on the kernel mailinglist, and it brings a number of important improvements to the ARM and PowerPC architectures, as well as several updated drivers.
Someone at work recently asked me about code coverage tooling for the kernel. I played with this a little last year. At the time I was trying to figure out just how much of certain syscalls trinity was exercising. I ended up being a little disappointed at the level of post-processing tools to deal with the information presented, and added some things to my TODO list to find some time to hack up something, which quickly bubbled its way to the bottom.
Mark Shuttleworth has just announced the name of the Ubuntu 15.10, the next iteration of the Linux distribution from Canonical, and it's Wily Werewolf.
The founder of Canonical used to make these announcements on this personal blog, but he has chosen the Ubuntu Online Summit keynote to make this one. What's interesting about this particular name is the fact that it makes a full circle (almost) to the first Ubuntu release Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog), that dates back to October 2004.
Mark Canonical has announced that a pocket PC powered by Ubuntu will be released this year, but he just teased about it, and he didn't reveal any additional details.
Today, May 3, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux kernel 4.1, due for release in summer 2015.
uGet 2.0 was released recently, bringing support for multi-thread downloading and mirrors for the curl plugin, individual download speed limiting, new settings dialog and more.
Guake is a drop-down terminal inspired by computer games consoles such as the one used in Quake, which slides down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed (F12 by default in Guake).
4MPlayer is new interesting Linux distribution that has been built with a single use in mind, to play any kind of video files, including CDs and DVDs, without having to boot an entire distro and its desktop environment.
A few days ago, Erik released a new version of his Annoy library -- a small, fast, and lightweight C++ template header library for approximate nearest neighbours -- which now no longer requires Boost. While I don't mind Boost (actually, quite the opposite), it appears to have been a blocker in getting the Python part of Annoy over to the world of python3.
Today I released virt-manager-1.2.0. You can read the release announcement here...
After a bogus Calligra 2.9.3 release, the developers of the number one open source office suite for the KDE desktop environment released Calligra 2.9.4, which brings multiple improvements to the popular Krita digital painting software.
On May 4, the Kubuntu developers had the pleasure of informing their users about the immediate availability of the recently announced KDE Applications 15.04 software suite for the Kubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system.
The modern and powerful Plex Media Server, a free and cross-platform media server software for GNU/Linux, BSD, OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms, has been updated recently to version 0.9.12.0.
Elasticsearch has offered Hadoop InputFormat and OutputFormat implementations for quite some time. These made it possible to process Elasticsearch indices with Spark just as you would any other Hadoop data source. Here’s an example of this in action, taken from Elastic’s documentation:
Tony Northrup is an Award-winning author and photographer who has published more than 30 how-to books and sold more than a million copies around the world. He has created a video tutorial, that is over an hour long, for beginners and more advanced users that aims at getting you familiar with your Samsung NX1 Compact Systems Camera (CSC).
Firejail is a generic Linux namespaces security sandbox, capable of running graphic interface programs as well as server programs. The sandbox is lightweight, the overhead is low. There are no socket connections open, no daemons running in the background. All security features are implemented directly in Linux kernel and available on any Linux computer.
While we didn't expect any big gains for the Linux gaming market-share over the past month, it does come as a surprise there's a significant drop.
When Valve first announced that the Steam gaming platform was going to be made available on Linux computers back in 2012, few expected the OS to become the first choice for gamers. However, even despite the many hundreds of titles that have been made available via the service since then, the share of Linux users on Steam struggles to remain relevent.
Packages for the release of KDE Applications 15.04 are available for Kubuntu 15.04. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.
To update, use the Software Repository Guide to add the following repository to your software sources list:
ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
Krita, an open-source digital painting software that proved to be a very powerful and useful solution, is once more present on Kickstarter and this time it wants to become faster than Photoshop.
I meant to have a post about Gardening efforts next, but KMouth is improving lately, so I'll throw out a quick post about progress.
KMouth master branch is now Qt3 free. It's still using K3Process for the speech synthesizer command-line calls, but all Qt3Support is gone.
In my last blog posts, I explained the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which guarantees the free availability of the Qt Toolkit. Today, The Qt Company introduced a new Qt online installer that requires users to accept additional license terms. Many people have contacted me with concerns about this change. I share this concern. Even before this, I have already been concerned about the structure of the qt.io download page, since it blurs the lines between the Qt Toolkit itself and additional, proprietary products.
As we reported last week, the GNOME development team started work on the next major version of the acclaimed desktop environment, GNOME 3.18, and they've just released the first snapshot, GNOME 3.17.1.
Mutter, the default window manager and compositor of the acclaimed GNOME desktop environment received an update as part of the first development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.18, due for release on October 23, 2015.
Linux offers a tremendous amount to any computer user, but the proliferation of distributions can sometimes be confusing to newer folks. A Linux redditor asked what the differences were and got some helpful answers.
Jacque Montague Raymer, the lead developer and founder of the MakuluLinux distribution based on the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, had the pleasure of announcing the release of MakuluLinux 9 Xfce.
Ultimate Boot CD, an ISO image that gathers together all the necessary tools for helping users with advanced system repair tasks and general system maintenance, reached version 5.3.4.
Today, we have the great pleasure of introducing you to the first ever openSUSE Live CD built around the MATE desktop environment, as it looks like the openSUSE team plans on delivering a MATE flavor as well, after Ubuntu got its own.
The openSUSE development team, through Dominique Leuenberger, had the pleasure of informing openSUSE users about what happened last week on Tumbleweed, the rolling-release branch of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
Docker has certainly gathered most of the headlines in the container space, but the team behind CoreOS deserves some praise for creativity, too. We've been covering their creation, dubbed Rocket, extensively. Rocket is a new container runtime, designed for composability, security, and speed, according to the CoreOS team.
The short answer appears to be yes. To varying degrees, Google, Red Hat, VMware, and Apcera have joined the list of App Container (AppC) adoptees. But preemptively replacing Docker doesn't seem to be on the agenda; it's more about increasing the list of container options available to customers and letting the market decide.
Before we declare Docker the champion of the container wars, CoreOS begs to differ. If CoreOS was just doing this alone, it might not matter much. But, CoreOS has some big friends, Red Hat, Google, VMware and Apcera, that will make its efforts count.
Today, the EVP, Chief People Officer of Red Hat, Delisa Alexander, sold stocks of RHT for $815.6k.
Even though RHEL 7 is the latest version, the Linux vendor continues to add new features to RHEL6.x. Linux vendor Red Hat on May 5 released its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.7 beta, providing users with a preview of features and capabilities that will become generally available later this year.
We are pleased to announce the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7, the latest version of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. Nearly five years into its lifecycle, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 continues to provide a stable, proven, and predictable foundation for organizations seeking to build and deploy large, complex IT projects with confidence.
The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations preserve investments in existing infrastructure, bolster security, stability, and systems management/monitoring capabilities, and embrace the latest Linux innovations.
The Korora Project had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the MATE edition of the Korora 21 Linux distribution, based on the popular Fedora 21 operating system.
Hey everyone! Fedora 22 is on the cusp of being released and the Fedora Cloud Working Group has elected to organize a test day for May 7th in order to work out some bugs before shipping it off to the rest of the world.
All this issues fixed in RussianFedora always (we release alpha, beta versions of RFRemix with 1-2 days delay after Fedora), so we support devel branches of Fedora. Also we’re using Koji to build packages and git to store RPM specs, patches.
Today I did copy and update of ffmpeg and mpv packages from rpmfusion to RussianFedora. They already in F22 and rawhide repos. Tomorrow I will do the same for F21.
Something I was used to and which came as standard on wheezy if you installed acpi-support was screen locking when you where suspending, hibernating, ...
The Tails development team announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Tails 1.4 amnesic incognito Live CD distribution that has been used by Edward Snowden to stay invisible online and browse websites anonymously.
The development team behind the popular UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) project have announced recently that they are working on a Live version of Ultimate Boot CD, which is currently based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and has the ultimate goal of becoming a Parted Magic replacement.
At this year’s CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, Christopher von Eitzen sat down with Linux legend Klaus Knopper to discuss his popular Knoppix Linux distribution as well as Linux and accessibility in open source software.
Designed to boot and run directly from a CD, DVD or USB flash drive without needing to be installed on a computer’s hard drive, Knoppix incorporates automatic hardware detection with support for a wide range of video and sound cards, USB devices and other peripherals and uses and on-the-fly decompression to run entirely in a computer’s memory. The CD version carries up to 2GB of executable software, while the single-layer DVD edition stores up to 10GB of data. The operating system can be used, for example, as a rescue system, to demonstrate Linux, as an educational CD, or installed directly to a system.
Canonical released Ubuntu 15.04 a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that it's been a success. The community is mostly reporting a nice experience, which is important since this is the first Ubuntu release that uses systemd instead of upstart.
Canonical has announced that Git repositories can now be hosted directly on Launchpad, which was one of the most requested features of the community.
Ubuntu Touch is working great on the Bq Aquaris and Nexus 4 devices, especially after the previous update, and now the developers are focusing on a new OTA upgrade that should also bring some interesting fixes.
After introducing the Erle-Copter drone powered by Ubuntu Snappy Core back in February 2015, Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all sorts of Linux-powered robots, launched on May 3 the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone.
The first 'production' smartphone running the Ubuntu operating system is finally here. Designed and marketed by the Spanish company BQ (not to be confused with the Chinese company BQ Mobile) and made in China, the first Ubuntu Phone is based on the 4.5-inch BQ Aquaris E4.5, which normally ships with Android 4.4. Included with the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition are two copies of the quick-start guide (in four languages each, one of the eight being English), a charger (with a built-in two-pin continental mains plug) and a 1-metre USB-to-Micro-USB cable. A comprehensive User Manual is available for download from the BQ website. The list price for the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, which is only available in the EU, is €169.90 (~€£125).
Ubuntu also aims to offer a phone that would provide a middle ground between mobile and desktop before the year is out, according to the founder of the company behind the OS, Mark Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth confirmed that the device will launch in 2015 in a YouTube Q&A earlier this morning, according to a report by Liliputing.
In case you didn't have the time to watch today's live keynote video with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the famous Ubuntu Linux operating system, you can watch the recording right now (see the video at the end of the article).
In the online Ubuntu summit on Monday, Mark Shuttleworth announced that the 15.10 release of Ubuntu, due out in October, will be codenamed Wily Werewolf. Other names that I liked were Wooley Wammoth and Wicked Wabbit. The 15.10 release will see more work on convergence ready for the LTS release next year.
Canonical wanted to have Unity 8 and Mir ready for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in order to provide them by default, but it looks like that is not going to happen. Instead, the community will be able to choose the default desktop they want for that particular LTS release.
Ubuntu dominated the headlines today with its Ubuntu Online Summit for 2015 beginning today. Mark Shuttleworth gave the keynote and informed a loyal public of the new 15.10 lsb_release -a. Elsewhere, Ubuntu 15.04 gets a thumbs-up and Ebuyer.com is now selling Ubuntu laptops.
Developers from Canonical explained last week that they intended to rebase the Ubuntu Next flavor (featuring Mir and Unity8) on Snappy, which means that they were also considering moving to a rolling release model, even if it was just for this branch.
Wow! What wonderment! The Ubuntu 15.10 has has been revealed as ‘Wily Werewolf’.
Most users will notice very little overall difference in this latest Ubuntu release, but it’s this change that packs the biggest punch.
There are a couple of new things that make 15.04 worth the upgrade from previous versions, but the really big changes – like the move to Unity 8 and the whole "convergence" of the desktop and mobile versions – remain in the future.
The Ubuntu community is having a vivacious discussion regarding the placement of the window buttons on the left side. From the looks of it, some users would prefer to have the option of moving the buttons to the right side.
Snow melts and trees blossom, but nothing really says spring around the Ars Orbital HQ like the arrival of a new version of Ubuntu Linux. Right on schedule, Canonical has recently released Ubuntu 15.04, also known as Vivid Vervet.
Ubuntu 15.04 arrived in late April and has, judging by other reviews, largely underwhelmed. According to the popular storyline, there's not much new in 15.04. Of course, a slew of changes and unforeseen features in 15.04 could have just as easily earned a negative reaction, probably from the same people calling the actual release boring. The top of the Linux mountain is a lonely, criticism-strewn place.
The truth is, this line of thought is partially correct. There isn't much new in 15.04, at least not in terms of visible changes to the Unity desktop.
Erle Robotics has launched an Ubuntu Core “Snappy” version of its open source Linux and ROS-based Erle-Copter quadcopter, with Erle-Copter app store access.
Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Dnsmasq vulnerability in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, that has been found and fixed.
The Bq Aquaris e4.5 Ubuntu Edition has been out for some time and is available for purchase right now. It's the only Ubuntu phone on sale, and one of the users found out how to access a hidden Factory Mode that gives access to all kinds of cool stuff.
Mark Shuttleworth has announced today that Ubuntu 15.10, scheduled for release in October 2015, will be named Wily Werewolf.
After announcing that the code name of Ubuntu 15.10 will be Wily Werewolf, Mark Shuttleworth has also announced that a new Ubuntu phone will be released this year, its vendor being still unknown for now.
Mark Shuttleworth has announced yesterday that the codename of Ubuntu 15.10 will be Wily Werewolf and that a new Ubuntu phone will get released this year.
The Ubuntu MATE project is known for the fact that it contributes back, and it rewards developers for their work. It happened a few times already, and the latest projects awarded are Ubuntu and Debian.
Today, We have come up with an interesting news for both Ubuntu and Chrome OS users. Meet Chromixium – the new modern desktop operating system based on Ubuntu that has the functionality, look and feel of Google’s “Chrome OS”. Chromixium has brought the elegant simplicity of Chromebook and flexibility and stability of Ubuntu together. Chromixium puts the web front and center of the user experience. Web and Chrome apps work straight out of the browser to connect you to all your personal, work and education networks. Sign into Chromium to sync all your apps and bookmarks. When you are offline or when you need more power, you can install any number of applications for work or play, including LibreOffice, Skype, Steam and a whole lot more. Security updates are installed seamlessly and effortlessly in the background and will be supplied until 2019. You can install Chromixium in place of any existing operating system, or alongside Windows or Linux.
Raspberry Pi, when first launched about two years ago, became an instant phenomenon. After all, who could have thought of a $35 computer that lets you browse the web and does most of your office work? What is even more surprising is the reception it got from average users. Usually, one would expect a bare-minimum $35 board computer that runs Linux to be popular only among developers or geeks. However, as many as 100,000 Raspberry Pi units were sold on the day of its launch eventually selling more than 2.5 million units till date.
Gateworks unveiled a tiny, UAV-oriented SBC that runs Linux or Android on an i.MX6 SoC, and offers HDMI in/out, USB, serial, GPIO, CAN, mini-PCIe, and more.
Like other Gateworks Ventana boards, such as the recent Ventana GW5200, the tiny “Ventana GW5510ââ¬Â³ runs Linux or Android on a Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6 SoC clocked to 800MHz, and offers a wide-range power supply and -40 to 85€°C temperature support. Other Ventana-like features include a programmable pushbutton switch, as well as programmable board shut-down and wake-up for remote sensor applications.
Armadeus has launched a Linux-equipped module that integrates a Freescale i.MX6 SoC with a Cyclone V GX FPGA, and offers SATA, CSI, DSI, and optional WiFi.
French technology firm Armadeus Systems has been selling Freescale i.MX based modules for years, including the circa-2009, i.MX27 based APF27. For the new “APF6_SP” computer-on-module, Amadeus has turned to Freescale’s Cortex-A9 i.MX6 SoC, which it had previous adopted for its APF6 COM. The feature set on the APF6_SP is very similar, with one major exception: the addition of an Altera Cyclone V GX FPGA.
We have mentioned previously about the rumoured upcoming Samsung Z2 Smartphone and an un-named Global Tizen Smartphone. Well today these are allegedly leaked images of the Samsung Z2, a Tizen based Quad core Smartphone with 1Gb memory, 540 x 960 Screen to be released 1H 2015, which is potentially only a few weeks away.
The new line of Tizen 4K Samsung SUHD TVs has now officially been launched in the Philippines at an event held a few days ago. The new line-up of TVs includes the JS9500, JS9000 and JS8500 models, supporting screen sizes ranging from 55 to 88 inches. Samsung boasts that their TV technology, which uses nano-crystal semiconductors, leads in color and brightness compared to its competitors.
Samsung started pushing the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to the Galaxy S5 flagship smartphone late last year.
Soon after the update rolled out, users began reporting various bugs in the final Android 5.0 Lollipop build for the Samsung Galaxy S5. This even led the company to pause the Android Lollipop update in European regions for a major period. Samsung Norway back in March while replying a user on Facebook had confirmed that the update caused various bugs.
Android has had an unfortunate reputation over the years. There have been numerous criticisms that the open source mobile operating system is unsafe; that it’s riddled by constant security threats and malware.
Moto X 2014 owners will soon be able to update their smartphone to the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop software. Motorola announced that the update is set to make its way to the units next week.
The Android platform will soar past iOS in terms of revenue in a few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more money for Google.
Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop. No, these aren't just the names of various delicious treats – they're also the names of each consecutive, major Android release after Alpha and Beta.
Last week, Google’s Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update finally started to pick up steam. With Android 5.1.1 Lollipop updates finally on the move, we want to take a look at five things Nexus users need to know now about Google’s Android 5.1.1 update and its release.
Security researchers have developed an Android application that's capable of alerting when other apps on a phone or tablet are covertly tracking users and connecting to ad networks.
The team at France's Eurecom and Technicolor Research – explained in a paper published in the Cornell University Library archive that their prototype NoSuchApp application* functions as an on-board proxy: it monitors traffic and compares URLs silently requested by apps to a list of known ad-serving and user-tracking domains.
It took a while for Android Lollipop to even get its own slice on the OS pie chart Google releases regularly, but it now seems to be steadily gaining popularity. According to the latest Android stats collected from April 28th to May 4th, nine percent of devices are now running Lollipop. While that's still quite small, it's almost double last month's percentage (five percent). KitKat's stat slid down to 39.8 percent from last month's 41.4 percent, so a number of stragglers might have finally upgraded. However, we're sure the new flagships that recently started shipping with Lollipop out of the box (such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge) helped boost the version's usage. All the older versions' percentage are slightly down from last month's, as well, but Froyo's impressively still hanging on at 0.3 percent.
Last week Google finally released the latest Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update aimed at fixing a few last outstanding bugs and issues since the initial Lollipop release back in November. This is the fourth update, however, the Nexus 9 hasn’t received anything past Android 5.0.1 back in November, but we’re hearing the Nexus 9 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update could be here any day now.
Users of the LG G2 and G3 smartphones are experiencing widespread performance issues after receiving the Android 5.0 Lollipop update. LG G2 and G3 owners report various problems involving battery drain, slow charging and Wi-Fi connectivity, among others.
Back in January, the news came out that after just three months, the brand new Android 5.0 Lollipop was installed on roughly 1.6% of active Android devices. Since then, it has been slowly but surely climbed upward. In the latest distribution numbers, Google’s tasty sweet treat has reached 9.7 percent market share.
Valve has recently gone through a major PR debacle after the company announced that it's implementing paid mods for games and Skyrim in particular. Their decision was short-lived, and it was retracted, but they have managed to incur the rage of the community. Independent developers are now working on a new game launcher that will make Steam obsolete.
After the announcement, our community growth skyrocketed. Our investors were so impressed by the welcoming of our open source announcement that they let us go ahead with open sourcing biicode early. We worked hard to release most of it in biicode 3.0.
Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has decided to reveal the source code of the Sudoku-solving app he personally coded.
The PM revealed he likes to program in his spare time last month and mentioned the Sudoku-solver. He's since taken to Facebook to announce the source code dump.
“The program is pretty basic,' the PM writes, “it runs at the command prompt, in a DOS window. Type in the data line by line (e.g. 1-3-8---6), then the solver will print out the solution (or all the solutions if there are several), the number of steps the program took searching for the solution, plus some search statistics.”
Welcome to the third installment of my monthly column, where I explore how open source software and the open source way are used in the digital humanities. Every month I take a look at open source tools you can use in your digital humanities researc, as well as, a few humanities research projects that are using open source tools today. I will also cover news about how transparency and open exchange, and principles of the open source way, being applied to the humanities.
ViPR is software storage controller tech that separates the control and data planes of operation, enabling different data services to be layered onto a set of storage hardware products - such as EMC's own arrays, Vblocks, selected third-party arrays, JBODs and cloud storage. The data services are typically ways of accessing data, such as file services,
The open source software will be called Project CoprHD* and be made available on GitHub for community development. It will include all the storage automation and control functionality and be supplied under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0). Public supporting partners for CoprHD are Intel, Verizon and SAP.
When Kurt Rohloff was working as a senior scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies, he quickly realized the value of encryption when storing data in the cloud. However, he viewed the fact that the data couldn’t be computed on after encryption as a major obstacle in what he needed to accomplish.
Netflix has released source code for its automated incident response tool to help organisations cut through the noise of security alerts.
Project lead and security boffin Rob Fry together with Brooks Evans, and Jason Chan announced the unleashing of the Fully Integrated Defense Operation (FIDO) saying it has chewed the time to respond to incidents from weeks to hours.
I recently attended the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Shenzhen, China, to promote Intel’s software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) software solutions. During this year’s IDF, Intel has made several announcements and our CEO Brian Krzanich showcased Intel’s innovation leadership across a wide range of technologies with our local partners in China. On the heel of Krzanich’s announcements, Intel Software & Services Group Senior VP Doug Fisher extended Krzanich’s message to stress the importance of open source collaboration to drive industry innovation and transformation, citing OpenStack and Hadoop as prime examples.
A recent article by Gizmodo's Alissa Walker gives a great overview of how these massive projects have benefitted from recent advances in technology. One of the bigger innovations of the last 10 years has been the open-source software Arches. Developed by The World Monuments Fund (WMF) and the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the software provides collaborative tools to document and analyze the "before" data for a damaged site. A group, whether of historians, architects, or a whole city, can contribute information they have from the site, like aerial photos or video, among other documentation.
The open source community lives and grows through collaboration. That collaboration is driven online but we’ve witnessed first hand how much can be done and quickened by face-to-face meetings. This is due, in part, to the session speakers at events like LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Embedded Linux Conference and more. Speakers at our events represent the leaders and subject matter experts across a diverse range of technology areas and lend so much more to the event experience than just speaking. They help grow the community through their contribution; they make the experience for attendees so much more rich; and they represent the passion and genius that Linux and open source are known for.
Google has taken another step toward protecting users from fishing attempts by releasing a new Google Chrome extension 'Password Alert'. The extension protects users from being gmail account overused with other non-google websites. As soon as it detects that the password has been exposed to any non-google website/service, it prompts to reset password immediately.
We've been writing about the benefits of HTTPS (HTTP Secure) connections, as opposed to basic HTTP connections, for years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even endorses a browser extension called HTTPS Everywhere that uses it to encrypt communications on the web.
Chris C Kemp, the former NASA CIO credited with originating OpenStack, has predicted stacks-in-a-box that make the cloud platform more accessible and easier to use aren't far off.
Speaking at CeBIT Australia, Kemp responded to a Register question about OpenStack usability by saying “in 1996 Linux was no fun either, but it provided a lot of value.” That value, and the fact the platform was open, led to innovation and the more polished Linuxes available and widely-used today.
Kemp reckons that cycle will repeat for OpenStack.
The Document Foundation has just announced that the second RC (Release Candidate) for the LibreOffice 4.4.3 branch has been released and is now available for download and testing.
The GSOC 2014 Color Selector is in LibreOffice 4.4, but it's not used for the "area fill" dropdown in impress or draw. So I spent a little time today for LibreOffice 5.0 to hack things up so that instead of using the old color drop down list for that we now have the new color selector in the toolbar instead. Gives access to custom colors, multiple palettes, and recently used colors all in one place.
WordPress issued an emergency update last week to patch a fresh zero-day vulnerability that could have enabled commenters to compromise a site. The previously unknown and unpatched weakness affected current versions of WordPress, according to Finnish company Klikki Oy.
On April 26 — just three days after WordPress released it's latest version, 4.2 — Klikki Oy released a video and proof of concept code for an exploit of the flaw, which allows a hacker to store malicious JavaScript code on WordPress site comments. The script is triggered when the comment is viewed.
I'm very excited about Joshua Lee's talk on the Drupal-powered International Biosecurity Intelligence System (IBIS) at DrupalCon 2015. Though I'm no biosecurity expert, the aggregation methods and process workflow for gathering biosecurity information is relevant to many industries. In his talk, the technology for creating this data aggregation system will be covered, as well as how the Drupal community can both benefit and contribute to this project.
The European Commission has published a new version of its strategy for the internal use of Free Software. The FSFE provided input to the Commission during the update phase and while the strategy is broadly similar to the previous version, there are some improvements.
Unlike previous versions, this time the strategy is accompanied by an action plan aimed at putting it into practice. However, the action plan is not public, so it is not possible to assess the Commission's progress towards its own goals. We would welcome it, if the Commission would soon publish its action plan.
The city administration of Helsinki (Finland) will prefer open source software solutions for new IT solutions. The city council on 13 April adopted a new IT strategy, emphasising a preference for open source, especially when developing or commissioning the development of software solutions.
Switzerland’s public administrations are increasingly turning to using open source, according to the country’s IT trade group SwissICT and the open source advocacy group /ch/open. Like in 2012, the two groups have surveyed public administrations and companies in the country. They notice a “high increase in the use of open source software.”
The Turkish government will restart the process of participating in the Open Government Partnership, after having been found “acting contrary to the OGP process for two consecutive Action Plan cycles”.
People in tech companies and particularly in open source communities believe in and value meritocracy—letting the best ideas win. One thing that's become increasingly clear to me over the past few years is this: meritocracy is a great driver of innovation, but if we want to get to the best ideas, we need diversity of thought and an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome to participate and offer different perspectives. Indeed, to live up to our ideal of meritocracy, we must consistently question and seek to improve it.
A group of Cambridge computer scientists have set a new gold standard for openness and reproducibility in research by sharing the more than 200GB of data and 20,000 lines of code behind their latest results - an unprecedented degree of openness in a peer-reviewed publication. The researchers hope that this new gold standard will be adopted by other fields, increasing the reliability of research results, especially for work which is publicly funded.
A new gold standard has been set for openness and reproducibility in research - and it was done by Cambridge computer scientists. At a talk today at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in Oakland, they are going to unveil peer-reviewed results with 200 GB of data and 20,000 lines of code.
Now the design the engineering team came up with is available as an open source device for anyone who wants to help a handicapped animal. The construction plan, the print data, and parts lists can all be downloaded from the Multec website or this Instructable the company published.
This low cost magnetic resonance imager isn’t [Peter]’s first attempt at medical imaging, and it isn’t his first project for the Hackaday Prize, either. He’s already built a CT scanner using a barium check source and a CCD marketed as a high-energy particle detector. His Hackaday Prize entry last year, an Open Source Science Tricorder with enough sensors to make [Spock] jealous, ended up winning fourth place.
Facebook today announced the public release of HHVM 3.7.0, the latest version of the HipHop Virtual Machine that powers their Hack language and PHP implementation.
Linux has a well deserved reputation as being one of the most secure platforms for individuals and businesses. This is largely due to the way security is integrated into the system, but there is a great risk in being too complacent. Recent events serve to remind us that there is no such thing as an uncrackable system.
"It's more a question of an uptick in publicity," suggested Bill Weinberg, senior director of open source strategy at Black Duck Software.
Britain and Nato have launched their biggest war games on Russia's doorstep amid growing tensions over Vladimir Putin's military aggression.
The largest ever Nato anti-submarine exercise, including the Royal Navy, is under way off the coast of Norway just weeks after reports of Russian submarines encroaching in to foreign waters.
The UK Supreme Court recently ruled on the law relating to prosecutions for entering into, or becoming concerned in, an arrangement which facilitates the acquisition, retention, use or control of criminal property for, or on behalf of, another person – contrary to s328 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.
It’s USA Today, not the unions, who are being simplistic here. The data they are relying on refers to gross output. This would include the full value of a car assembled in the United States, even if the engine, transmission and the other major components are imported.
It also doesn’t adjust for inflation. If USA Today used the correct table, it would find that real value added in manufacturing hasn’t “nearly doubled”–it’s risen by a bit less than 41.0 percent since 1997, compared to growth of 45.8 percent for the economy as a whole.
The story here is a one of very basic macroeconomics. The $500 billion annual trade deficit ($600 billion at an annual rate in March) implies a loss of demand of almost 3.0 percent of GDP. In the context of an economy that is below full employment, this has the same impact on the economy as if consumers took $500 billion every year and stuffed it under their mattress instead of spending it. USA Today might try working on its numbers and economics a bit before calling people names.
The male gaze theory posits that because men control the creation of media; the media messages are dominated by a male point of view. The CEOs of the six companies that own 90% of media are all white males. Those same corporations are also heavily invested in the entertainment industry.
The Guardian reflects the metropolitan London world of New Labour, and nothing else. Its coverage of the referendum, particularly by Severin Carrell, achieved the remarkable feat of being even less fair and containing even more lies than the Scotsman. But if you want really to get inside the mind of Labour, the Guardian remains the place to go to know what the Labour elite – London’s Balls, Cooper, Miliband, Harman, Umunna, Jowell etc. are thinking.
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd can’t seem to get enough of the 2016 presidential race. Yet the one major candidate who announced he was running last week–Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who declared on April 30 he was running for the Democratic nomination–was strikingly ignored on Meet the Press‘s May 2 broadcast.
Todd may think seeing whether or not someone has been mentioned on Meet the Press is “some arbitrary way to judge the show,” but it seems to us to be a fairly straightforward way to gauge who the show thinks is an important part of the political discussion and who is not. And a tally of the show’s mentions of potential presidential candidates so far in 2015 is revealing.
How the European Commission gave lobbyists pretty much what they wanted
Two people were fatally shot Sunday outside a Garland, Texas, community center that was hosting an event displaying cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, local officials said.
Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said that two men drove up to the community center and "opened fire on the security officers" hired to protect the event before being shot themselves.
French MPs are due to approve a bill reforming French intelligence law to counter terrorist threats. But critics warn that the draft law is a license to spy on citizens' private lives. Erin Conroy reports from Paris.
The Intelligence Bill, which was presented on the fast track on 19 March by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, rallied a very large, argued and vigorous opposition, from a number of civil rights associations, collectives, lawyers' and magistrates' unions, but also administrative authorities such as the CNIL (French Data Protection authority) and the CNCDH (French National Consultative Committee for Human Rights).
As we've noted, there's a new USA Freedom Act in town, and it's on the fast track through Congress. It has some good stuff in there, and is generally a step forward on surveillance reform and ending certain forms of bulk collection -- though there are some concerns about how it can be abused. But one thing that plenty of people agree on, is that even if it's a step, it doesn't go nearly far enough. Last Thursday, there was a markup in the House Judiciary Committee, to help move the bill to the floor, and some amendments were proposed to improve the bill -- all of which got rejected.
What was especially frustrating, was that for at least one key amendment, everyone agreed that it was important and supported it, and yet they still refused to support it. The reasoning, basically, was that the existing bill was the work of many, many months of back and forth and compromises, and the administration and the House leadership had made it clear that it would not approve a single deviation, even if it was really important. The amendment in question was basically a replica of an appropriations amendment from Reps. Ted Poe, Zoe Lofgren and Thomas Massie that we wrote about last year, which surprised many by passing overwhelmingly in the House, only to be stripped out by the Senate.
If you were holding onto the faint hope that federal election campaigns were ever going to be anything but "buy your way into office" spending sprees, you may as well kiss it goodbye. The Federal Election Committee's head has just admitted her agency is completely powerless to do the one thing it's supposed to be doing.
The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.
New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
Facebook's Internet.org, which aims to give impoverished people around the world free mobile access to a selection of Internet services, is opening the platform to developers after facing criticism that the program's restrictions violate net neutrality principles.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is opening up his Internet.org platform to developers to help bring new types of content to the more than four billion people who lack Internet access.
The move comes weeks after several Indian firms decided to pull out of the project due to concerns that the app does not provide equal access to information, one of the principles of net neutrality.
Today, a wide variety of community groups, activist organizations, and businesses are taking part in the ninth International Day Against DRM (dayagainstdrm.org).
Techdirt has covered its fair share of idiotic legal threats over trademarks, but the following example is spectacular even for a field that has many superb examples of corporate bullying. It concerns the village of Copthorne (population 5,000), in the English county of West Sussex. It's rather well established: it's been around for a thousand years, and is mentioned in the Domesday Book, which was compiled in 1086. Recently, though, its village association was threatened with legal action for using the name 'Copthorne' on its Web site, as the Plymouth Herald newspaper reports...
A presumed pirate with an unusually large appetite for activating Windows 7 has incurred the wrath of Microsoft. In a lawsuit filed at a Washington court, the Seattle-based company said that it logged hundreds of suspicious product activations from a Verizon IP address and is now seeking damages.
A couple of years ago in the Svensson case, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) made it clear (finally) that merely linking to content is not infringement. That was a case involving a news aggregator linking to official sources. However, in a new case that has been referred to the CJEU, the court will examine if links to unauthorized versions of content is infringing as well. The excellent IPKat has the details of the case which involves a blog that linked to some pre-publication Playboy photos in the Netherlands. A lower court had said that it wasn't copyright infringement, but still broke the law, by facilitating access. On appeal, the court found that the free speech concerns outweighed the copyright concerns. From the description by the lawyer representing the blogger ("Geen Stijl news"):
Remember, just last week, when HBO and Showtime were flipping out about a couple of streaming sites promising to broadcast live streams of the big Floyd Mayweather/Manny Pacquiao fight? Apparently, they had the wrong target.
As Kim Dotcom remains stuck in legal limbo, his once-extravagant life keeps moving on and costing plenty of money. Auckland Now reports that Dotcom will theoretically be able to keep the balancing act up for a while longer, as this week a New Zealand court released some of Dotcom's frozen financial assets to specifically allow the Mega mogul to pay for his continual monthly expenses.
A few months ago the UK Government legalized copying of MP3s, CDs and DVDs for personal use, as that would be in the best interest of consumers. A common sense decision for many, but leaked emails now show that Hollywood fiercely protested the changes behind the scenes.