ELECTRONICS FIRM Kogan has sprung out of nowhere with its announcement of the world's first laptop running Google's Chrome operating system (OS).
The Agora laptop is available to buy now and will be delivered on 7 June according to Kogan. The company has jumped ahead of Acer and Samsung to release the world's first laptop that runs Chrome OS. The Agora laptop is priced at €£269.
Peterson explained that having the visibility into the video delivery experience enables the service providers to intelligently fine-tune the delivery, either by adding bandwidth, deploying an on-net (internal) CDN, or partnering with an off-net (external) CDN vendor to move popular content closer to the subscribers.
While out celebrating the 7th birthday of Phoronix, Intel pushed out a new acceleration architecture for their open-source Linux driver. This new acceleration architecture is called "SNA" for "SandyBridge's New Acceleration", and it brings incredible results not only for Sandy Bridge, but for previous generations of Intel graphics as well. The results provided by Intel are absolutely stunning.
I've reported before about the efficiency of Lrzip. Now Con did a useful and fun thing: He created an lrzip archive of all the sources of all 2.6 linux kernels. And guess how much space it took? Update: Guess how big an archive of *all* Linux sources since 1.0 is. A few hints: - All sources in a tar are 10.3 GB. - The 2.6.39.1 kernel is 73 MB as a tar.bz2 archive. - Now it would be less, because the first kernel was smaller (just 32 MB). - So taking the average (73+32=105/2=52.5) times 39 would be just 2GB (compressed!).
All users of the 2.6.39 kernel series must upgrade.
In early 2012 we can expect to see the release of X.Org Server 1.12 with various touch improvements and other input related work. Also being queued up for the 1.12 release is support for smooth scrolling.
Most desktop distros include at least one music player, which many people won't even think about changing. But with Ubuntu 11.04 dropping its old Rhythmbox application and opting instead for Banshee, our curiosity was piqued: which are the best music players for Linux?
We compiled an initial shortlist of three that we felt everyone should try: Rhythmbox, the default Gnome player; Amarok, the default KDE player; and Banshee, a player that has been around for a while and has now supplanted Rhythmbox on Ubuntu. To this we added Songbird, a music player built on the Mozilla codebase; and the doughty VLC, which has been playing media in various formats and on various operating systems since 1996.
OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0.
Astronomy is a branch of science that deals with the study of celestial objects (including stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteor showers, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies) and other phenomena.
Like many others, I was introduced to the world of astronomy by the venerable Sir Patrick Moore. For anyone who does not know, Sir Patrick is an amateur astronomer who has presented The Sky at Night, the longest-running television programme, for over 54 years, and has made an outstanding contribution to astronomy.
Just found this platform game by the name of Fowl Space by Pixelante Game Studios which sports some attractive silhouette style visuals. Fowl Space is available on Windows, Mac and Linux and is available for pre-order priced at $10.
Big Little Team game development studio has released a new teaser video of their upcoming air combat game Molten Sky.
Wow plenty of news lately! My latest titbit is about a game called Smuggle Truck by Owlchemy Labs which is curently available on Pc/Mac and also on IOS in the app store. The Pc and Mac version is priced at €£3.15, but they are also working on a Linux version of the game
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Color It By Numbers is a fascinating series of coloring books that will leave no child indifferent. They are special in that numbers identify colors to be used in filling picture areas. This is an exciting process that helps develop the imagination. While painting the pictures, your child will quickly learn new numbers and colors while also gaining computer skills. This turns coloring into a useful pastime.
Naev 0.5.0 has been released after being in development for more than one year. Naev 0.5 brings huge changes and new gameplay elements over the last version making it essentially a new game. We have covered Naev many times in past with teaser videos showing development progress of the game.
A special interest group was recently started to improve the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. It is defined on the Xfce wiki as follows:
"The Xfce Design SIG aims at improving the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. Our goal is to bring interested users, designers and hackers together to ensure neither of them is working in a vacuum. By establishing a context in which they can collaborate on smaller and larger design-related projects we try to increase the chance of the proposed changes to be merged into the official Xfce repositories. "
One positive reaction from Pat is the fact that KDE is his favorite DE at this moment and i really hope that it would remain the same in the future
Necessitas is the project bringing Qt to the Android operating system. It has recently become part of KDE and now celebrates its second alpha release - its first as part of KDE.
John Stowers (the GNOME Tweak Tool developer) has updated the old skype-notify Python script to work with the new GNOME 3 notifications.
The 10 of may the backtrack team has released the version number 5 (codename “revolution”) of their penetration tool. Yes backtrack it’s a live Linux Distribution made with this goal, be the best penetration and learning tool around.
It’s Based on Ubuntu Lucid LTS (10.04). Kernel 2.6.38, patched with all relevant wireless injection patches. Fully open source and GPL compliant. In this release you can choose to have Gnome or KDE and install it on 32 or 64 bit computer. The former release supported only 32 bit installation.
I have been watching the Mageia development since it was first announced. As soon as I saw that Mageia 1...
Earlier this week there were Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks looking at the overall system performance as well as the power consumption. Both of these Linux distributions had performed close to one another, as is expected considering the similarities in their kernel and other packages, but there were some discrepancies in the disk tests. Speculations in the forums were that some of the performance differences might be attributed to SELinux, so here are some tests seeing the performance impact of SELinux on Fedora 15.
My first impression? It’s broken. My reaction to that? It’s an alpha, so that’s to be expected. Nowhere to go but up from here.
Git 1.7.5.3 was released on May 26, 2001 and as of yesterday, besides the git packages being available for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04, I also added the git packages for Ubuntu Oneiric. As per git 1.7.5.3 I also added a start menu for the git application git-gui. After installation you can find the menu item in under the menu Development. The packages are available in the repository in my Ubuntu PPA on launchpad.
Whether you're new to Linux or an old salt, it's worth following Tony Bradley's series of columns, currently being posted on PC World's site, where he describes his effort as a Windows user to go through a self-imposed 30 days of immersion in Ubuntu. You can find Part 1 of his series here, and Part 2 is here. Bradley's reports on installing and learning to live with Ubuntu shed much light on how users familiar with Windows and other proprietary operating systems approach Linux. The reports are also good fodder for discussions on Ubuntu's usability, or lack thereof.
Bradley makes reference to Ubuntu's "scorched Earth, leave no prisoners" installation process, which jettisons Windows from the hard disk and dedicates the whole thing to Ubuntu. However, he quickly revises that assessment and moves on to discussing Wubi and tools that allow users to have Ubuntu and Windows together on one system.
We updated Netrunner Chromatic with a maintenance release to 3.1.
MeeGo allows anyone to build their own user experience on top of the platform. Actually, this is expected of any serious manufacturer. Sure, there are some reference UXs available, including Tablet, Handset and Netbook, but none of these are quite product-ready, and are not necessarily even intended to be.
HP is actively considering licensing its WebOS operating system to other manufacturers, according to industry reports. "It's not correct to believe that [WebOS] should only be on HP devices," HP CEO Leo Apotheker was said to have told an audience at AllThingsD's D9 conference.
The new tablet was running Google Inc.'s (GOOG) popular Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" operating system, the second most used tablet OS in the world behind Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) iOS (found on the iPad and iPad 2).
About 20 minutes later we had Linux Mint installed on his laptop, and he was surfing the Web wirelessly using Firefox. Although he faced a punishing charge from Sony, he found a helping hand at his local public library. But I wonder: Do other public libraries help community members install Linux on computers? Do other public libraries hand out Linux CDs and/or CDs with OpenOffice? Perhaps a few public libraries do. For the most part, though, community members in other towns have few options when Sony requires a fee of $139 for a restore DVD.
Hmmmm. I wonder if that $139 includes the shipping and handling fee? If I were Sony, I'd charge $39 for shipping and handling. Might as well gouge people when they are at their most vulnerable, right? Might as well humiliate that high-school student in front of his parents. Serves him right for misplacing his restore DVD.
Commercial software purchases can quickly eat away at the budget you have. The good news is that there are many free Web tools and open source software for students that will help you stay on task and organize your busy student life.
If you are a student you're probably wondering how to manage the cost of tuition, books and living expenses – and still pay for the software you need for your student laptop or desktop computer for research and assignments.
As we've recently covered, Mozilla has moved to an agressive rapid release cycle for its Firefox browser, with the latest version 4 quickly emerging as the most popular version of Firefox. At the same time, though, Mozilla is pursuing rapid release cycle for other projects, including its Thunderbird email engine. Thunderbird is now out in a new beta version 5.01, featuring a number of upgrades.
Thunderbird is now based on the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is based on. Among enhancements in the new beta version of Thunderbird, there are these:
Download a free trial of VeriSign’s SSL certificates
VMware has invited Scala programmers onto Cloud Foundry, its open source "platform cloud," an online service for building and readily scaling applications.
When it first launched in April, the service let you build with Java, Ruby on Rails, the Ruby framework Sinatra, and Node.js, the current It Platform of the Silicon Valley development world. Now, VMware had added support for Scala, the Java Virtual Machine–based programming language that drives such big web names as Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn.
A follow-up to my previous post on the Apache Incubation proposal to move OpenOffice.org over to Apache and continue the project there. In that post, I described how Apache projects are run via a meritocracy, that members gain additional rights and responsibilities based on the approval of their peers, etc. But I have received a variety of questions related to this, and I’ve done my best to track down some answers. So here are what I found out, in my words, paraphrasing the questions and giving answers, possibly with my mistakes, but I’ll correct them as they are identified.
OpenOffice.org derivatives. The large ecosystem of OpenOffice.org derivatives can benefit from the continued development under the Apache umbrella, the success of the incubation process would help them all given the permissiveness of the license.
OpenOffice.org moving to Apache seems a good news for all stakeholders to me. Of course as usual code is the only things that matter, and all you need to do is just to wait and see, or if you like you can join and participate.
Just last week we were talking about the role of contributor licensing agreements (CLA's) and why some organizations/projects preferred to have the copyright in contributed code assigned rather than licensed, i.e., so the organization/project would be in a better position to enforce the copyright. A prime example of this centralized copyright ownership has been in a number of projects owned or managed by Sun Microsystems, includin OpenOffice. Of course, Sun is no longer Sun, and we have all been waiting to see what Oracle's intent would be with the various open source projects they acquired. Well, we are now getting our first insight with the proposed donation of OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation.
While the jury is still out on what exactly this assignment means for OpenOffice, I think it's safe to say that the Oracle announcement has elicited a range of reactions, a number of which have been less than enthusiastic. The biggest issue is the license change. The Apache Foundation requires all code donated to them to be under the Apache License. Since OpenOffice.org was not under that license, it means that the project changes from a true copyleft license to a more permissive license that allows companies to take the code proprietary. What kind of reaction will this draw from those who have been contributing freely to OpenOffice. Are they as likely to continue to contribute? Will Oracle be willing to continue to fund developers on the project? Will Attachmate, the new owner of Novell, allow their developers to continue to contribute to LibreOffice, the fork from OpenOffice? What realistic expectations should the Apache Foundation have?
[Editor's note: The Raleigh Public Record is a sponsor of CityCamp Raleigh]
More than 100 people are planning to converge downtown Raleigh this weekend for a three-day brainstorming session on how to use technology to increase the transparency of local government.
CityCamp Raleigh is looking to attract everyone from programmers to city officials to the “unconference,” which will be split between speaking events, work sessions and presentations all aimed at using the Web to connect citizens with government data. The event, which kicks off Friday at Vintage 21 on West Street, will mimic others by the same name held around the world from Chicago to Brighton, U.K.
So, in spite of all the naysayers here, FLOSS is alive and well on the desktop and making significant gains over the last few years. FLOSS is used on the desktop in more than twice as many institutions since 2008. There are obstacles to adoption but performance is not one of them. When people get around to thinking objectively about FLOSS they will choose it. The largest reason for not choosing FLOSS? “It’s not what users want.” As if IT is a democracy in education or anywhere else. Institutions should choose software that fits the current and future needs of the institution. Budgets and performance should be far more important than what the users want. Users are largely not knowledgeable about choices and only know what they have used previously, not a basis of rational thought.
This month openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, discusses copyright assignment and the buzz surrounding ‘Project Harmony’. As always, don’t forget to leave your comments and feedback – your opinion could feature in a future issue of Linux User magazine…
Identi.ca has been buzzing with ‘project Harmony’ discussions lately. Harmony aims to be the ‘Creative Commons’ of Copyright Assignment Agreements (CAAs). A CAA is basically a contract you sign where you give away ownership of your code, and some free software projects already allow or even demand this for contributions. The Free Software Foundation itself, for example, requires a CAA.
Tech contract negotiations frequently involve a lot of argument about who gets to own the copyright generated. They essentially boil down to points of principle, rather than reasoned argument. Like many other complex issues, it’s worth going back to first principles. What does “owning the copyright” mean?
It means:
1. You can use the copyright yourself;
2. You can stop other people from using the copyright
New data released this week shows a new center in the open source developer's universe, as GitHub takes its place as the number one forge tool.
Have you ever claimed you could build a faster machine than top-tier vendors, but needed proof? We dig into five off-the-shelf sub-$500 configurations to figure out what they can and cannot do. The results probably won't surprise Tom's Hardware regulars.
You Tube continues to prove that it is the future of where the internet is going to be in the next few years by introducing the ultimate in internet media viewership. Meeting the demand from a growing number of 3D enthusiasts, You Tube introduced the 3D channel and today has close to a thousand and more 3D videos. Augmenting its
Sony Pictures Entertainment has issued a statement blaming "a group of criminal hackers known as 'LulzSec'" for attacking its web sites.
In the statement signed by chairman and CEO Michael Lynton and co-chairman Amy Pascal, Sony said the "cybercrime wave that has affected Sony companies and a number of government agencies, businesses and individuals in recent months has hit Sony Pictures as well."
LulzSec previously claimed it had penetrated databases attached to sonypictures.com, sonybmg.be and sonybmg.nl.
"Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets on Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer
The Nation magazine, in partnership with the Haitian weekly newspaper, Haïti Liberté, has launched a series of reports based on more than 19,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. Called "The PetroCaribe Files," the series begins with an exposé of how the United States—with pressure from Exxon and Chevron—tried to interfere with an oil agreement between Haiti and Venezuela that would save Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, $100 million per year.
Ireland’s foreign-affairs minister assured the US ambassador in Dublin in 2006 that the Irish government was prepared to change the law that had allowed the acquittal of five anti-war activists for damaging a US Navy plane.
The revelation that a senior Irish official discussed possible amendments to domestic criminal law with the US ambassador is contained in a Wikileaks cable (see below) that has not been published or reported upon elsewhere, but which has been seen by Counterpunch.
Wall Street’s most notorious bank was subpoenaed by the Manhattan district attorney. The DA wants more information about Goldman’s business activity leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
A prosecutor in New York has subpoenaed Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs for information related to the financial crisis, a person familiar with the development said Thursday.
The broad request from the Manhattan district attorney, issued last month, stems from an April report by Senate investigators that accused Goldman Sachs of abusive behavior, according to the source.
Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) shares are dropping on news that a Manhattan Prosecutor is subpoenaing the company.
In addition to this bad news, Moody's has put the debt of Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) on credit watch.
A new inquiry into Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s (GS) activities during the financial crisis, prompted this time by Manhattan's district attorney, has Goldman scrambling once again to control its image.
The disclosure Thursday of a subpoena of the firm by the district attorney comes just weeks before Goldman is scheduled to meet with one of its most important constituencies: retired partners who have moved on to found prominent hedge funds, perform government service, or dabble in a range of endeavors. Goldman calls them home twice a year to hear from top management about the state of the firm.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) is closing in on the sale of Litton Loan Servicing LP to Ocwen Financial Corp. (OCN), two months after writing down the value of the mortgage- servicing business by about $200 million, according to a person briefed on the negotiations.
The sale of the unit to Ocwen, a mortgage servicer based in West Palm Beach, Florida, may be announced within days, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.
The Wall Street investment bank has received a subpoena from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, which is investigating Goldman’s role in the financial crisis, said one person familiar with the subpoena.
It comes amid increased enforcement scrutiny of the company, which has faced blistering criticism that it shorted — or bet against — the mortgage market before it collapsed and that it knowingly sold bundles of bad mortgages to its clients. Goldman denies these accusations.
.. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) won’t face criminal prosecution related to sales of mortgage-linked securities because such a move could threaten the U.S. financial system, according to Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. ...
New York prosecutors have delivered a subpoena to Goldman Sachs seeking information on the investment bank's mortgage and derivatives business, a person familiar with the matter said.
Today the National Academies Press announced it would offer its entire PDF catalog of books for free, as files that can be downloaded by anyone. The press is the publishing arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, and publishes books and reports that scientists, educators, and policy makers rely on.
Tomb Raider "Turning Point" Debut Trailer [US Version]