Monday, October 13 was a busy day in Linux news. One of the more interesting tidbits comes from Neil Rickert who said, "Microsoft is being sneaky" in trying to covertly upgrade his Windows installs to version 10. Another from Red Hat's Eike Rathke remembered OpenOffice.org fifteenth birthday. Elsewhere, Red Hat's Nathan Jones addressed the state of government cloud and Marco Fioretti shared some thoughts on the "Citizen Cloud."
I purchased my main desktop for use with linux. But it came with Windows 8 as a discount deal from Dell. So I kept the Windows 8, and added a second hard drive for linux. I did update to Windows 8.1. I kept Windows for experimenting with dual boot on a UEFI system.
My normal usage on this computer is to boot opensuse. But twice a week I boot to windows and update the anti-virus (Windows Defender). Once a month, I also do Windows updates. Then I boot straight back to linux.
Among the diverse things I found to read about was a relatively new but fast-growing computer operating system called Linux. It sounded fascinating: invented by a college student, developed by volunteers, used mainly by experts but available to amateurs; it appeared to defy not only the conventional business model, but the very concept of commercial software.
The short answer is I use Linux for the freedom that Free/Open Source Software provides. I use Linux and FOSS on principle—the principle that software should belong to those who contribute to its development and, ultimately, it should belong to all who wish to use it and make it better. Looking back, we’ve come a long way in the nine years I’ve been using Linux, to a point where now anyone can use it.
Welcome to our feature highlighting the numerous Colorado tech companies that make cool stuff. These little snippets are intended for readers to explore the technology being made right here. One company at a time, of course.
Recently, Linus Torvalds, Linux's inventor, spoke at LinuxCon Europe in Dublin and said, "I'm happy to see that ARM is making progress. One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it'll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop."
HP has announced the launch of the OpenSwitch community and a new open source network operating system (NOS). HP and key supporters, Accton Technology Corporation, Arista, Broadcom, Intel, and VMWare, are delivering a community-based platform that provides developers and users the ability to accelerate innovation, avoid vendor lock-in and realize investment protection as they rapidly build data center networks customized for unique business applications.
Over time, memory can become more and more fragmented on a system, making it difficult to find contiguous blocks of RAM to satisfy ongoing allocation requests. At certain times the running system may compact regions of memory together to free up larger blocks, but Vlastimil Babka recently pointed out that this wasn't done regularly enough to avoid latency problems for code that made larger memory requests.
Just a few moments ago, Ben Hutchings, the maintainer of the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel series, has had the pleasure of informing Linux users about the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.2.72 LTS.
The ONOS community hopes to expedite the advantages service providers can get from software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) by collaborating with the Linux Foundation in a strategic partnership.
The partnership will help ON.Lab/ONOS "transform service providers' infrastructure for increased monetization by achieving high capex and opex efficiencies and creating new innovative services using the power of open source SDN and NFV," according to a press release. The Linux Foundation will assist ONOS to "organize, grow and harness the power" of a global community to take ONOS and the solutions enabled by it to the next level of production and readiness.
ONOS, a carrier-grade open source software-defined networking (SDN) operating system, received a big endorsement this week from the Linux Foundation. Starting today, the two organizations will partner to develop open source SDN and NFV software.
Officials with the year-old project are looking to the Linux Foundation for help in growing the community around its open-source offerings.
Organizations have started to bypass the Linux kernel as they seek to push the limits of high-performance networking to cope with the increasing demands of the cloud and streaming high-resolution 4K video. The BBC and CloudFlare have both recently shown how they do this.
The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Everything through an open source software project, today announced 13 new members, many from the Asia-Pacific region, have joined the Alliance.
Alexandre Courbot, a developer at NVIDIA who has been working on the Tegra open-source graphics support a lot for Nouveau, presented last week at LinuxCon Europe 2015.
Thanks to the work by Courbot and others at NVIDIA, the Tegra K1 with its Kepler GPU has mainline Nouveau graphics support while the open-source graphics enablement for the Tegra X1 with Maxwell GPU continues to be upstreamed.
Wayland has been ported to DragonFlyBSD along with its Weston compositor!
In the past we've seen some minor experiments by BSD developers with Wayland/Weston, but for the most part all of the BSDs are still focused on X.Org Server support -- need I remind Phoronix readers that DRM/KMS support is in varying stages across the BSD distributions too as one of the support stepping stones. Just a few days ago I ran into the DragonFly Radeon kernel module failing to properly mode-set with a several year old (pre-GCN) graphics card while meanwhile FreeBSD's Radeon KMS port worked. It's still rather a mine field when it comes to open-source graphics acceleration and support on the BSDs while slowly but surely their catching up with the kernel code.
After CPU architect Jim Keller left AMD recently, Phil Rogers has now also left and joined up with Nvidia. According to the article on fudzilla his defection to Nvidia was kept under wraps, I wonder why.
Last month I wrote about an experimental Nouveau code branch that offered better GDDR5 Kepler re-clocking support. For some, this branch allows Nouveau users to finally fully re-clock their GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards. Those patches are now being offered up for mainline Nouveau.
His patch-set is now up to the fourth revision as of yesterday. Perhaps for Linux 4.4 we'll finally see this support cleaned up and ready for the mainline kernel.
Recently there were a number of requests about testing the latest state of Liquorix, the self-prcolaimed "better distro kernel" that is an optimized version of the Linux kernel with extra patches that makes it optimal for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. Here's some fresh Liquorix vs. mainline Linux kernel performance benchmarks.
We got pretty good feedback on Gnocchi so far, even if we only had little. Recently, in order to have a better feeling of where we were at, we wanted to know how fast (or slow) Gnocchi was.
The early benchmarks that some of the Mirantis engineers ran last year showed pretty good signs. But a year later, it was time to get real numbers and have a good understanding of Gnocchi capacity.
Although the numbers behind the name do not reflect it, the currently-named “SpeechLess” front end for MaryTTS is now being released as beta software. I was able to assemble a three man team to create a GUI and to my way of thinking, it has come along nicely. Although the demo is web-based, these guys have been able to construct it so the entire thing is local. That means little to no latency between hitting enter and having the text replicated to speech.
I’ve talked at length about how TTS in the Linuxsphere is less than user friendly at about every turn. Our goal is to create a front end that makes MaryTTS easy to use for everyone. We’re getting there.
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If you have ever done some statistics, it is possible that you have encountered the language R. If you have not, I really recommend this open source programming language which is tailored for statistics and data mining. Coming from a coding background, you might be thrown off a bit by the syntax, but hopefully you will get seduced by the speed of its vector operations. In short, try it. And to do so, what better way to start with an IDE? R being a cross platform language, there are a bunch of good IDEs which make data analysis in R far more pleasurable. If you are very attached to a particular editor, there are also some very good plugins to turn that editor into a fully-fledged R IDE.
FFmpeg, a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video, has received its first update for the 2.8 branch and is now ready for download.
CherryTree is a text editor, with the features of a modern editor, such as syntax highlighting, spell check, export to html, password protection, and many others.
As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.
As you may know, Blender is a powerful suite for animation, modeling, interactive creation, post-production with support for a lot of file formats.
Today, October 13, Google had the great pleasure of promoting its Google Chrome 46 web browser to the stable channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Apple's Mac OS X.
Campo Santo’s debut game Firewatch will release on PS4, PC, and Linux on February 9.
“We’re aiming for a world-wide release (as world-wide as our small studio can pull off) and will have more information in the lead-up to the date,” said Campo Santo’s Sean Vanaman, “and, if you’re in San Francisco, another opportunity for you to get your hands on the game (running on PS4 hardware!).”
The Wasteland 2: Director's Cut, a remake of the original game released back in September 2014, has been released today on all the supported platforms, including Linux.
The Wasteland 2 Director's Cut was released today in the Americas and will be out worldwide later this week. This Director's Cut edition is a free upgrade for current Wasteland 2 owners and upgrades the game engine to Unity 5.
Firewatch has me excited, as it seems to offer an interesting story and some quite striking visuals. Anyone else excited? Not many games outright stun me like this game, I imagine I will stream a good bit of it at release.
The description of Shutshimi was too hilarious to pass up, so I decided to take a look at this recent Linux game release.
Murder Miners is a highly rated indie first-person shooter, and it has been confirmed by the developers and porter that it's coming to Linux.
Skullgirls developer Lab Zero Games has released the Linux prototype for Indivisible and are still seeking funds on IndieGoGo for their planned side-scrolling action RPG.
Turbocharged will act as the initial testing stage for GMC, with the developers planning updates and additional features for the in-game purchase platform based on community feedback. There are also plans to implement GMC in two other games, EON: The Omega Event and Ring 13: The Curse of Nakamoto. All three will soon be available on Linux and other operating systems.
Guild Software announced a new update of their popular and cross-platform Vendetta Online 3D space combat massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for all supported platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and iOS.
The Journey Down, the superb point and click adventure title developed by SkyGoblin, is coming to an end. The third part in the series is now on Kickstarter, and it needs your help to happen.
What’s the best thing about Linux? Security, stability, performance or freedom? It does a cracking job in all of those areas, but another feature we’d highlight is its modularity. As an operating system deeply influenced by Unix, GNU/Linux is designed to be easy to pull apart – and, all being well, easy to put back together again. Major parts of the system are built up from smaller components that can be omitted or replaced, which is one of the reasons why we have so many different Linux distributions.
Sure, this modularity adds complexity at times. But it also adds reliability, as components are designed to work independently, and if one crashes or suffers from some kind of bug, the other parts will (ideally) keep chugging along. So you can replace Bash with another shell, or switch to an alternative SSL library, or even replace your entire init system – as we’ve seen with the migration of major distros to Systemd.
I'm happy to announce the availability of KDevelop 4.7.2. This is a bug fix release increasing the stability of our KDE 4 based branch. Please update to this version if you are currently using 4.7.1 or older.
The KDE Community has just announced that KDE Applications 15.08.2 has been released and is now available for download and testing.
On October 12, KDevelop developer Milian Wolff has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the KDevelop 4.7.2 open-source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for KDE developers.
The eighth bug-fix release of Krita 2.9! We’re still fixing bugs and adding improvements, but a lot of work has gone into the kickstarter goals and the Krita 3.0 porting work, too. Ubuntu Linux users can use the ” krita-lod-unstable” packages from the Krita Lime repository to test-drive the first version of the animation support and the “LOD” performance improvements. Check the LOD option in the View menu, and many brushes and other features will be perform much better on large images!
Last week I attended QtWorldSummit in Berlin to help represent KDE manning the booth and chairing some sessions. I want to thank KDE e.V. for the support to go to this great event. It is awesome to see such a huge and vibrant Qt community and to see KDE as an important part. So many talks and also keynotes have speakers with a KDE background.
The GNOME developers are working hard these days to push the first point release of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment to users of Linux kernel-based operating systems.
Some of the GNOME developers are gathered together these days at the Boston GNOME Summit 2015 hackfest event that takes place between October 10-12 at the MIT building E51, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
While some of the GNOME developers have gathered together at the Boston GNOME Summit 2015 hackfest to add new features to some of GNOME's core components and apps, other GNOME devs are working hard on their own to add more cool features to the acclaimed desktop environment.
While the developers of the GNOME desktop environment are working hard these days to push the first point release of GNOME 3.18 to users worldwide, package maintainers have also prepared various updates to the project's core components and applications.
After releasing the Pinguy Builder tool, a Remastersys alternative for remixing Ubuntu, to the open source community, the developers behind the Pinguy OS project posted some details regarding the future of the GNU/Linux distribution.
Another update of Q4OS 'Orion' desktop is available, version 1.4.3. Bunch of important packages updates and security patches has been delivered. There are quite significant under the hood improvements, for example the 'Desktop Profiler' tool to be able to handle and fix possible software database inconsistencies automatically. Proprietary multimedia codecs installation script has been superseded by native Q4OS 'Setup' tool, that enables smooth and user friendly installation of external applications.
Zbigniew Konojacki, the lead developer and creator of the 4MLinux project, has had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia earlier today, October 11, 2015, about the immediate availability for download of his new BakAndImgCD 14.0 distrolette.
The Manjaro Community is proud to announce the release of our JWM Edition 15.09-1 (Bellatrix).
JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) is a lightweight stacking window manager for the X Window System written by Joe Wingbermuehle. JWM is written in C and uses only Xlib at a minimum. Configuration is by editing an XML file - no graphical configuration is supplied.
Arch Linux has much to offer savvy Linux users, but it's not for the faint of heart or those who want a distro that simply works with no input from the user. A Linux redditor recently shared his frustrations with Arch Linux and got some helpful feedback from his fellow redditors.
Besides Oracle Linux, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server were among the first tier-one Linux distributions really backing the Btrfs file-system. SUSE has liked Btrfs for years and at last week's LinuxCon Europe 2015 in Dublin there was a presentation on their use of Btrfs with handling system rollbacks.
It’s october, the leaves are falling, we had our first frost this week… and here is yet another KDE 5 release for Slackware to keep you warm and cozy. I am happy with my KDE 5_15.10 update. Again I waited until every KDE source was refreshed: this set contains Frameworks 5.15.0, Plasma 5.4.2 and Applications 15.08.2.
The federal government is projected to spend $7.7 billion on private cloud solutions by 2017, a nearly $6 billion increase from the projected $1.7 billion spent in 2014.
This panel will discuss government’s challenges and concerns when planning a cloud deployment from security, software development, managing virtualization, and load balancing. The latest trends in implementing cloud solutions including the use of open source will also be addressed.
I am pleased to announce general availability of the September 2015 snapshot for CentOS Linux. This release includes CentOS Linux 7 iso based install media, Generic Cloud images, Atomic Host, Docker containers, Vagrant images, vendor hosted cloud images and live media.
CentOS Linux rolling builds are point in time snapshot media rebuild from original release time, to include all updates pushed to mirror.centos.org's repositories. This includes all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates for CentOS Linux. Machines installed from this media will have all these updates pre-included and will look no different when compared with machines installed with older media that have been yum updated to the same point in time. All rpm/yum repos remain on mirror.centos.org with no changes in either layout or content.
Karanbir Singh, the lead developer and maintainer of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived CentOS distribution has just announced that new ISO images are available for download for the CentOS 7 rolling-release edition.
Azul Systems (Azul), the award-winning leader in Java runtime solutions, today announced that Zing€®, Azul’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM) used by enterprises worldwide which require low latency and high performance for their Java applications, is now available as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Azul’s collaboration with Red Hat through the Red Hat ISV ecosystem delivers enterprise-ready commercial software applications backed by the reliability and support of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
Java runtime solutions provider Azul Systems has made its flagship Zing JVM available as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company announced. The new 64-bit Java AMIs are available from the AWS Marketplace.
Norway's Central Securities Depository moves to OpenShift Enterprise to accelerate development and improve operational efficiency within business-critical infrastructure
The price to earnings ratio, or the valuation ratio of a company’s current share price compared to its per-share earnings sits at 72.98. This is an important indicator as a higher ratio typically suggests that investors are expecting higher future earnings growth compared to companies in the same industry with lower price to earnings ratios. When calculating in the EPS estimates for the current year from sell-side analysts, the Price to current year EPS stands at 40.84. Investors looking further ahead, will note that the Price to next year’s EPS is 34.69.
Middle managers have not fared well. Their ranks have been decimated in many organizations, and those that have survived are often perceived as powerless or, worse, as bureaucratic sticks-in-the-mud. This is not fair and it’s flat-out wrong.
Take what’s happening with Zappos at the moment. Much has been written about their adoption of a self-management system—holacracy—with no job titles and zero managers. That move earlier this month saw 14% of their workforce choose to leave the retailer. While I applaud their effort to break down unnecessary walls, getting rid of managers is not the answer.
According to the official release schedule for the forthcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, the day of October 13, 2015, marked the Final Freeze milestone in the distribution's development cycle.
The Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux computer operating system is becoming more and more popular with each day that passes, as its development cycle accelerated in the last year.
Ubuntu developers are talking about the future of Firefox in Ubuntu, which is creating a disturbance with its NPAPI support that will be deprecated in a little over a year.
The Ubuntu Internet browser is a little-known application that's been getting a lot of updates lately. It's developed internally by Canonical, and it seems to get better with each new edition.
We've talked a lot about the upcoming Ubuntu-powered drone with legs, called Erle-Spider, from the Erle Robotics team, who just demoed the device live earlier today, October 13, on Canonical's UbuntuOnAir YouTube channel (see the video below).
We have some hot news from the Ubuntu land, as Canonical's Michael Hall has just teased us with a photo from his Nexus 4 smartphone running the latest development version of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
We have just been informed by à Âukasz Zemczak from Canonical about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-7 software update.
With an Ubuntu Long Term Support release coming up in just a half-year, the discussion has been re-ignited again about whether Firefox should remain the default web-browser for the platform.
Firefox continues to be the default browser -- including for Ubuntu 15.10 -- but Bryan Quigley has restarted the discussion given that an LTS cycle is about to start. Complicating things this time around is Mozilla's plans at the end of 2016 to drop NPAPI plug-in support and then a few months later to stop maintaining the Flash NPAPI plug-in, which would mean breakage for LTS users or unmaintained support.
While Ubuntu 15.10 has Mesa 11.0 and it provides OpenGL 4 support for the Nouveau driver, it doesn't for RadeonSI. The issue is that in Ubuntu 15.10 is still an older version of LLVM that in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end lacks the needed support for OpenGL 4.0/4.1 compliance. Fortunately, a PPA has been updated for Ubuntu Wily with said support.
Canonical's Michael Vogt has informed us all about the release and immediate availability for download of the seventh update for the stable Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 operating system for IoT devices.
The Ubuntu Internet browser is a little-known application that's been getting a lot of updates lately. It's developed internally by Canonical, and it seems to get better with each new edition.
Its nice to see Ubuntu reverting to the Gnome scroll bars, the ones in Unity were a little on the strange side to say the least.
Its more of a wise move then anything else, Canonical replaced what they felt was broken. But when the upstream developers create their own fix which is as good as the one mentioned here, it makes sense to use the upstream code as its something less for Canonical to maintain.
Hi all,
we are excited to announce a new Snappy Ubuntu Core stable release (image 7 at 15.04/stable)!
Highlights of this release include: - fix uefi boot - support for secure boot - version sort speedup - add "current" symlink for the data dirs - hw-assign fixes
On October 13, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent his daily report to inform Ubuntu Touch developers and Ubuntu Phone users alike about the latest work done in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-7 software update.
It was via Ubuntu Forums that the name Full Circle was first suggested. It was also at this time that I made myself an unwritten rule: The magazine must be entirely produced using free and/or open source software. To me, it would be hypocritical to produce an Ubuntu magazine using anything other than FOSS. I settled on GIMP, LibreOffice, and Scribus.
The Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) is knocking at our door and it will be here next week, but there are still some annoying problems related to the Trash that don't seem to be acknowledged as important.
Canonical is making a push to get the ball rolling with Snappy packages, but for that it needs for developers to be able to quickly package their apps with this new format. Enter Snapcraft, which has been updated now to version 0.3.
The traditional Samhein (Halloween) wallpapers are here! This time we celebrate the Wily Werewolf cycle and, of course, a Celtic themed one. Happy creepy season!
The developers of the well-known BusyBox software, a collection of command-line tools for system administration tasks used under GNU/Linux operating systems, have announced the release of BusyBox 1.24.0.
The immensely popular Doctor Who science-fiction TV series has a lot of beloved characters and one of them is the K-9, which has been present on and off on the show for the past 30 years. An IBM engineer built an amazing functional replica of the K9 robot, and it's powered by a Raspberry Pi.
The project amounts to 1,000 lines of code, using software such as OpenWrt, and their paper explores how the IP stack and other networking protocols can be implemented on Linux-based VLC devices.
Today’s Geeky Gadgets Deal is the VoCore Mini Linux Computer with 13% off, the device normally retails for $45 and we have it available in the Geeky Gadgets Deal store for $39.
The VoCore Mini Linux Computer comes with a Ralinek/Meditake 360 MHz RT5350 MIPS processor, 32MB of RAM and 8MB of Flash, the bundle includes the computer and the dock.
Browsing though the junk store one day [Alec] spotted an old school 8mm film editor. For those who weren’t around, video used to be shot on film and editing it was a mechanical task of cutting (with a sharp implement) and pasting (with special tape) back together. It’s sad to see these in junk stores, but great for [Alec] who thought it begged to have an LCD and a single board computer implanted in it. Once the editor was in hand, the machine was gutted of its very simple parts: a lamp, some mirrors and a couple of lenses. He took measurements of the hollowed out enclosure and got down to business.
Arbor and Advantech unveiled Linux-ready Mini-ITX boards using Intel’s 6th Gen Skylake CPUs, with options ranging from a 25W Xeon to a 65W Core i7-6700.
Arne Exton, the creator of several free and commercial GNU/Linux and Android-x86 distributions, has informed us earlier today, October 11, about a new update for his AndEX Live CD.
Developers and tech-savvy mobile enthusiasts can get Android 6.0 on their Xperia phones and tablets thanks to Sony's efforts.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge users on AT&T are now receiving the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop OTA update. At the end of the previous month, AT&T had released the Android 5.1.1 update for its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge users.
T-Mobile may have announced several Samsung Galaxy smartphones, among its devices updating to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. But a recent leak from tech blog SamMobile gives further details on which devices from the Korean manufacturer will receive the new Google software.
The unveiling is said to be on November, in time for the holidays -- when smartphone sales peak.
To be launched first in China, the phone is priced at $630, higher than most phones but a little cheaper than the Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6s.
But this kind of high-powered mobile computing won’t work on just any old Google handset. Here are the five best Android phones available today, all of which are either rumored or confirmed to get Marshmallow.
If you’re looking for a smartwatch that delivers a “next-generation” experience, the 2nd generation Moto 360 isn’t it. In fact, none of the Android Wear watches really move the platform forward in a significant way—perhaps because Google is largely in the driver’s seat for software development.
But if you want a smartwatch that delivers a great experience for everything Android Wear can do, this is the one. Numerous hardware refinements and a year of software development have made the new Moto 360 everything the first one should have been.
Motorola kicked off the age of Android Wear when it announced the original 360 more than six months before it was finally released. It was a beautiful piece of hardware, but was saddled with an ancient TI OMAP ARM chip and recessed lugs that led to cracked back panels. The second generation device addresses many of the shortcomings of that wearable, but some of them are still staring you in the face. Still, it might be the watch you've been waiting for.
One of the big benefits of strapping an Android Wear watch to your wrist is customizing your timepiece to suit your personality, current mood or sartorial taste. As Google’s wearable platform has grown, we’ve seen more and more Android Wear watch faces show up on Google Play—here are some of our favorites.
With smartphones getting larger and more powerful, there's a growing perception that tablets are a dying product category. A good phablet today has nearly all the advantages of a tablet, and is more likely to be conveniently accessible. Despite this, Asus continues to push the technology, and the ZenPad 8.0 (Z380KL) shows that the Taiwanese company isn't ready to give up on tablets just yet. It's a decent device with enough muscle and style to satisfy mid-range users. Even those who use tablets as their primary smartphones will be happy.
Magellan's new eXplorist TRX7 harnesses the power of the Android platform to deliver a navigation experience unbounded by roads and unaffected by mild to moderate "oops" events.
This Android-based GPS unit is built rugged for off-road vehicles. Its 7-inch, touch-sensitive LCD display is weatherproof. It's dust proof and it can be submerged in water as far down as a meter, just over three feet.
Tablets! Everyone wants one, but a lot of us don’t want the same old slab. We’re in a great era where you can get a decent tablet without breaking the bank, but you usually have to make some sacrifices. Today we’re looking at the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 8ââ¬Â³. As the name implies, it’s the third generation of Lenovo’s Yoga Android family. I looked at the original Yoga Tab back in 2013, but that’s forever and a day ago in tech time. What’s the latest version like?
For a long time, Apple’s iPhone was referred to as the standard in mobile photography but over the past 12-18 months, we’ve seen Apple’s rivals narrow the gap and – if DxOMark’s rankings are to be believed – surpass the best that Cupertino has to offer. It’s been nearly two months since the iPhone 6S was released onto the market promising the greatest in camera quality but according to DxOMark, Apple doesn’t quite hit the mark.
Some LastPass users were clearly not pleased to find out last week that the password management app had been acquired by LogMeIn. Fortunately, there are several alternatives to choose from.
Sure, there are premium options like Dashlane, Keeper, Passpack, 1Password, and RoboForm, but there are also free password management systems that anyone can inspect and even contribute to. No matter what you use, the idea is to be more secure than you would be if you were to just use “password” as the password for every app you sign up for.
Having just passed its thirtieth birthday, the Free Software Foundation has plenty to celebrate. Having begun as a fringe movement, free and open source software has become the backbone of the Internet, transforming business as a side-effect. Yet for all is accomplishments, the one thing it has not done is capture the popular imagination. As a result, I find myself wondering how free and open source software might present itself in the next thirty years to overcome this problem.
I’m pleased to announce the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.6. This release focused on improving code quality, security hardening, enablement of security appliances, and release cycle predictability — this is the most punctual release we have ever had. We had a significant amount of contributions from cloud providers, software vendors, hardware vendors, academic researchers and individuals to help with this release. We continue to strive to make Xen Project Hypervisor the most secure open source hypervisor to match the security challenges in cloud computing, and for embedded and IoT use-cases. We are also continuing to improve upon the performance and scalability for our users, and aim to continuously bring many new features to our users in a timely manor.
It's not every day that your CEO gives you a telephone ring, so I definitely remember the day mine phoned me. He'd called to tell me about a puzzling voicemail he'd just received.
I was a consultant for a tech community website and the team was rolling out a major site renovation. Our goal was to modernize the look and functionality of the site and, equally importantly, better monetize it so it could survive and thrive in the long term.
Apparently, however, not everyone welcomed the changes we'd made. In fact, that's why the CEO was calling me: an active and passionate member of the website's community, someone irked by our alterations, had found his home phone number and called him directly to protest. And he wanted me to intervene.
After building up its Node.js expertise with its StrongLoop acquisition, IBM has added Node.js debugging capabilities to its Bluemix PaaS.
Earlier today, October 13, the Xen Project, through Liu Wei, had the great pleasure of informing the world about the immediate availability for download of the Xen 4.6 open-source Linux hypervisor software.
Once again, you may have noticed a certain dose of quietness on Dedoimedo in the last week. For a good reason, because I was away in Dublin, Ireland, attending LinuxCon and its co-located sister events. Presenting. On OpenStack. Yay.
So let me tell you a few more details on how it all went. Should be interesting, I guess, especially some of the camera footage. Anyhow, if you care for one-man's retelling of the Three Days of the Condor, I mean Mordor, I mean Dublin, oh so witty I am, then please, keep on reading this lovely article. Right on.
I had (at least) three big reasons to be at the fOSSa 2015 conference, a couple of weeks ago. Two already covered elsewhere and one, “Citizen Cloud: Towards a more decentralized internet?”, that deserves its own separate post. Before getting to that, however, let me quickly remind the first two reasons: first, I and Wouter Tebbens had to present a great research project we of the Free Knowledge Institute are working on, that is Digital Do-It-Yourself (DiDIY). I described the social, cultural and economical characteristics of DiDIY, and Wouter its main legal issues, like Right To Repair. More about the “Digital DIY” side of fOSSa 2015 is here. We also wanted to check out what others are doing about Open Education, as you can read from Wouter here, and from me here. On to Citizen Clouds now.
We are excited to announce that Katharina Borchert will be transitioning from our Board of Directors to join the Mozilla leadership team as our new Chief Innovation Officer starting in January.
Mozilla has released a new report — mzl.la/localcontent — co-authored with the GSMA. Titled “Approaches to local content creation: realising the smartphone opportunity,” our report explores how the right tools, coupled with digital literacy education, can empower mobile-first Web users as content creators and develop a sustainable, inclusive mobile Web.
Rust is a systems programming language that got its start in 2010 with Mozilla Research. Today, one of Rust's most ardent developers and guardians is Steve Klabnik, who can you find traveling the globe touting it's features and teaching people how to use it.
At All Things Open 2015, Steve will give attendees all they need to know about Rust, but we got an exclusive interview prior to his talk in case you can't make it.
NoSQL benefits from open source in a number of ways. Open source projects often innovate faster than proprietary projects due largely to the openness of the community. Open source communities share and spread knowledge about the use of key technologies across companies and industries. This allows NoSQL developers to leverage the contributions from many outside developers.
Open source also allows for a more natural market adoption process. NoSQL technology can be adopted much more rapidly because it can be downloaded and tried for free for exploration or small usage.
15 years ago the original OpenOffice.org source code was published by Sun Microsystems, on Friday, October 13, 2000, a Full Moon day. The source code that changed the Free Software office suite world and laid the basis for LibreOffice.
The Document Foundation has revealed that the first Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.3 branch has been released and is now available for download.s
On October 12, The Document Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes and governs the open-source LibreOffice office suite loved by numerous Linux users around the globe, published details about next year's LibreOffice Conference event.
One Italian city has decided to move its 1,700s PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
Now, Microsoft is working on a brand new open source platform, under an Apache license, that seeks to allow developers to easily build cloud computing services and mobile applications that can analyze big streams of data. It is called Prajna, and the code is now on GitHub.
Christine Abernathy, developer advocate for the Facebook open source team, will be speaking at All Things Open this month. In this interview, she tells us more about how Facebook open sources projects at scale and what challenges lie ahead for the open source team there.
Christine also references the TODO group, which in the past year has seen its members ship 1,000 open source projects. The TODO group is "an open group of companies who want to collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects and programs." TODO stands for talk openly develop openly.
DataVisor, a startup company that is building big things around Apache Spark, has announced that it has secured $14.5 million in Series A funding, led by GSR and NEA, to purportedly help protect consumer-facing websites and mobile apps from cyber criminals. The young company's founders spent years working on computer security at Microsoft Research, and are now focused on big data.
Samsung is just one of many companies that has grown increasingly fond of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ front-end. Clang is in fact the default compiler for native applications on their Tizen platform, but they have a whole list of reasons why they like this compiler.
While the LLVM community tends to be very respectful to one another and I'm having a hard time thinking of when things have ever gotten out of hand in their mailing list discussions, they are now pursuing a Community Code of Conduct.
On Friday, October 9th, 2015 the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) submitted a comment with the United States Federal Communications Commission, which has proposed a number of revisions to its rules and regulations concerning approval of wireless devices. Notice of Proposed Rule Making, ET Docket No. 15-170. SFLC takes the position that the Commission does not possess the legal authority to adopt a rule that regulates the software running in devices that does not affect the operation of RF transmitters or create interference. SFLC further argues that, even within the scope of the Commission's regulatory jurisdiction, the Commission must tread carefully to avoid over-regulating radio frequency device software to the detriment of user innovation and after-market software modification. SFLC also urges the Commission to issue a policy statement (1) supporting the use of community developed or free software in networking devices; (2) recognizing the overwhelming social benefits generated from the high-quality software produced by non-profit communities; and (3) stating that preferring proprietary software over software whose source code is publicly available does not meaningfully enhance the security of software.
Today in Linux and Open Source news the Software Freedom Law Center filed a comment with the FCC arguing against overly-broad regulations that eliminate Open Source alternative on wireless devices. Elsewhere, My Linux Rig interviewed FOSSforce's Larry Cafiero and Rafael Laguna released Halloween wallpapers for Lubuntu.
This is a major release upgrade following the Extended Support Release upstream cycle, moving from v31.x-ESR to v38.x-ESR. All the features in previous releases have been preserved, along with extra polish and improvements in privacy.
Working as a senior software engineer at Red Hat on the GNOME Project, I was very impressed by the talent of the project contributors, by how rewarding it is to work on free software, and by the feeling of connectedness one gets when collaborating with people all over the world. Yet, at GUADEC 2009, of approximately 170 attendees, I believe I was one of only eight women. Of the software developers working on the entire GNOME project at the time, I was one of only three.
16 new GNU releases in the last month (as of September 24, 2015):
autogen-5.18.6 cpio-2.12 ddrescue-1.20 gdb-7.10 gettext-0.19.6 global-6.5.1 gnupg-2.1.8 gnutls-3.4.5 help2man-1.47.2 libgcrypt-1.6.4 libmicrohttpd-0.9.43 libtasn1-4.7 linux-libre-4.2-gnu parallel-20150922 sipwitch-1.9.10 ucommon-6.6.0
The campaign began in 2009 with the intent of removing advertisements for proprietary PDF reader software from public institutions' websites. To start it all off, volunteers submitted 2104 "bugs", or instances of proprietary PDF software being directly promoted by public authorities, and the FSFE listed[2] them online. Since then, hundreds of Free Software activists took action by writing to the relevant public institutions and calling for changes to their websites. We received a lot of positive feedback from the institutions thanking us for our letters, and to date, 1125 out of the 2104 websites (53%) edited their websites by removing links to proprietary PDF readers, or adding links to Free Software PDF readers.
For those who like their I/O packetised, GLib now has a companion for its GIOStream class — the GDatagramBased interface, which we’ve implemented as part of R&D work at Collabora. This is designed to be implemented by any class which does datagram-based I/O. GSocket implements it, essentially as an interface to recvmmsg() and sendmmsg(). The upcoming DTLS support in glib-networking will use it.
Five experts plan to challenge some of our traditional assumptions about the role of the public sector at the 'Public Sector Modernisation: Open(ing) Governments, Open(ing) minds' session on Wednesday 21 October. The experts will elaborate on questions like 'How can governments meet the expectations of 21st century citizens?' and 'How is the information revolution going to further transform our governments?'.
The Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Conservancy have released a statement of principles on how GPL enforcement work can and should be done in a community-oriented fashion. The president of the Open Source Initiative, Allison Randal, participated as a co-author in the drafting of the principles, together with the leadership of FSF and Conservancy.
The Open Source Initiative's mission centers on advocating for and supporting efforts to improve community best practices, in order to promote and protect open source (founded on the principles of free software). While the OSI's work doesn't include legal enforcement actions for the GPL or any of the family of licenses that conform to the Open Source Definition, we applaud these principles set forth by the FSF and Conservancy, clearly defining community best practices around GPL enforcement.
Google's Cloud Datalab and Cloud Shell continue company’s efforts to help developers with apps running on Cloud Platform. The developer community has been a key focus area for Google in its strategy to drive broader enterprise adoption of the company’s Cloud Platform service.
My college days were coming to an end with placements all around. I was sure to work in a startup. One fine day, I saw a job posting on hasjob on 12th December 2012 that boldly said “HackerEarth is buidling its initial team - Python/Django enthusiast needed”. The idea made me apply to HackerEarth and after a few rounds of email with Sachin and Vivek. I landed up in a remote intern position.
One of the many benefits of open source software is that it offers some protection from having programs disappear or stop working. If part of a platform changes in a non-compatible way, users are free to modify the program so that it continues to work in the new environment. At a level above the software, open standards protect the information itself. Everybody expects to be able to open a JPEG image they took with their digital camera 5 years ago. And, it is not unreasonable to expect to be able to open that same image decades from now. For example, an ASCII text file written 40 years ago can be easily viewed today.
The cuts come as reinstalled CEO Jack Dorsey looks to boost Twitter's fortunes after nearly a decade of financial losses.
Twitter is laying off up to 336 staff, with Jack Dorsey swinging the axe at the social network just a week after being appointed permanent chief executive.
Ada Lovelace was born two centuries ago this year, and is widely recognized as a visionary who saw the potential of computational machines long before the development of the modern computer – a prescience often credited to her devotion to metaphor-heavy “poetical” science. Lovelace’s mother provided her daughter with a thorough mathematical education, both to dissuade her from following in the footsteps of her father – the famed poet Lord Byron – and to provide her with intellectual and emotional stability. At age seventeen, Lovelace witnessed a demonstration of Charles Babbage’s difference engine, and eventually worked with him as he devised the analytical engine, furnishing Babbage with her own original set of groundbreaking notes.
I'm not generally a privacy nut when it comes to my digital life. That's not really a good thing, as I think privacy is important, but it often can be very inconvenient. For example, if you strolled into my home office, you'd find I don't password-protect my screensaver. Again, it's not because I want to invite snoops, but rather it's just a pain to type in my password every time I come back from going to get a cup of tea. (Note: when I worked in a traditional office environment, I did lock my screen. I'm sure working from a home office is why I'm comfortable with lax security.)
Flight MH17 was confirmed shot down in eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile on July 17, 2014, in a final report by the Dutch Safety Board, but the 15-month investigation did not say who fired it.
Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time leftist dissident, has won a stunning victory in the contest for leadership of Britain’s Labour Party. Political pundits say that this means doom for Labour’s electoral prospects; they could be right, although I’m not the only person wondering why commentators who completely failed to predict the Corbyn phenomenon have so much confidence in their analyses of what it means.
But I won’t try to get into that game. What I want to do instead is talk about one crucial piece of background to the Corbyn surge — the implosion of Labour’s moderates. On economic policy, in particular, the striking thing about the leadership contest was that every candidate other than Mr. Corbyn essentially supported the Conservative government’s austerity policies.
Worse, they all implicitly accepted the bogus justification for those policies, in effect pleading guilty to policy crimes that Labour did not, in fact, commit. If you want a U.S. analogy, it’s as if all the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2004 had gone around declaring, “We were weak on national security, and 9/11 was our fault.” Would we have been surprised if Democratic primary voters had turned to a candidate who rejected that canard, whatever other views he or she held?
The UK Trade Union Bill is a brazen attempt to crush worker power and restrict democratic rights.
Larry Pratt, the leader of the firearm lobbyist group Gun Owners of America (GOA), suggested in a recent interview with FoxNews.com that Jews in Europe lacked "determination" to stop the Holocaust.
Although Pratt and GOA routinely promote such extreme views, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said at the September 16 GOP primary debate that he was "honored" to be endorsed by GOA. Pratt was once a contributing editor at an anti-Semitic publication.
As of this month, 567 relays from our 2014 Tor Challenge are still up and running—more than were established during the entire inaugural Tor Challenge back in 2011. To put that number in perspective, these nodes represent more than 8.5% of the roughly 6,500 public relays currently active on the entire Tor network, a system that supports more than 2-million directly connecting clients worldwide.
The Government has cancelled a contract that would have seen the Ministry of Justice provide prison services to Saudi Arabia, Downing Street has said.
The €£5.9m deal, which Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn recently called on David Cameron to scrap, was controversial because of the autocratic kingdom’s weak human rights record.
The commercial venture would have seen the trading arm of the National Offender Management Service, JSi, provide development programmes for the country’s prison service.
Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on Tuesday morning on behalf of three former U.S. detainees against the psychologists responsible for conceiving and supervising the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program that used systematic torture.
Do you remember when the President first said he wanted to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay?
“I would very much like to end Guantanamo,” he said in 2006. I’m talking, of course, about President George W. Bush.
At the time, I was a senior Defense Department counterterrorism official. My colleagues and I had been trying to transfer or release Guantanamo detainees since 2002, when we had discovered that an overwhelming majority had neither intelligence value nor value for prosecution. Most were not taken off the battlefield, as we had been told. Many were just victims of circumstance.
Of course, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, campaigned on closing the prison — and on his second day in office signed an executive order pledging to shut it down within a year. More than seven years later, this prison is still open — 114 people still languish there, down substantially from its height of 775.
We asked the agencies for every document that mentioned or referred to Mohammed Raghead. More than a year later, the FBI responded by turning over 56 pages of heavily redacted documents; the NSA and CIA are still processing our request. The FBI said it found a grand total of 86 pages, but redacted and/or withheld information on national security and privacy grounds, because they are considered "deliberative," and because disclosure of the withheld material could reveal law enforcement techniques and procedures. Some Mohammed Raghead–related records, according to the FBI, originated with other government agencies and were sent to them for review for a final decision on whether they could be released.