Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to the problem than simply running out of honey. Bees are one of the most abundant pollinators in the natural world. They are the unsung, unpaid facilitators of human agricultural practices and have been for as long as we have sewn seeds. Their disappearance would spell disaster for our food supply, with some estimating our species lasting only four years on this planet without them. So, what can be done?

The microcontrollers allow any developer to “add vibrational feedback to all capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels on mobile computing and gaming devices, smart TV remotes, cameras, printers, industrial control panels, point-of-sale terminals and toys.”

The Book of Audacity is a fun to read, comprehensive guidebook to the popular free audio recording and editing program. The real value in this book? Tons of useful tips.

If you read the technology press today, odds are you already know about the launching of the AllSeen Alliance That’s not a surprise, because this is an important and ambitious project. But there’s a story behind the story that likely won’t get the attention that it deserves.

It kept nagging at me. Why was the "hot corner" in Debian's version of GNOME 3 so "sensitive," compared to the GNOME 3 desktop's hot corner in Fedora 19? I did a bit of searching and found out that "hot corner" sensitivity was something that the user can set, not in stock GNOME 3 but with the Activities Configurator extension.

Linux Mint Xfce, a modern, elegant, and comfortable operating system based on Ubuntu and Debian, has just reached version 16 RC.

The Joomla community announced Joomla Framework 1.0, making a major step forward for the Joomla project.

The Princess Bride remains quite the iconic book and movie for tons of people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s (and, hopefully, other ages as well... but I can only speak from experience). A huge number of lines have lived on from that movie and become mainstays in popular culture. And like all sorts of great culture, it has inspired plenty of additional creativity around the original as well.

In a Network Operation Centre (NOC) environment, setting up alerts is extremely important. As one of the most popular NOC monitoring systems, Nagios features powerful alerting services. Alerts generated by Nagios can be sent out in various means, so that they can be acted upon immediately. Email notification is the most common option used. This tutorial presents two other ways to send out Nagios alerts: (1) audio alerts via web browser, and (2) audio/vibration alerts via an Android app.

After one year of development, we're glad to announce the availability of Tango Studio 2.1 Live ISOs. This new version is based on Debian Wheezy 7.2 and contains a collection of the best open-source applications available for audio creation. Thanks to all who helped with making up this news ISOs ! (especially Lionel and those who tested the beta ISOs and reporting bugs).

The GNOME Project has announced a few days ago that immediate availability for download of the two new versions of the GNOME Software application, 3.10.4 and 3.11.2.

The Linux Foundation will be guiding consumer electronic players to one, universally compatible system of the Internet of Things.

Today in Open Source: Will Microsoft lose its Android revenue? Plus: Linux Mint 16 Xfce RC released, and a review of openSUSE 13.1 GNOME.

When Nokia completes the sale of its telephone business to Microsoft, a transfer of its substantial patent portfolio will be conspicuously absent from the deal. Microsoft got licenses to those patents but won't buy the patents themselves. That situation immediately led to speculation that Nokia was interested in doing standalone patent-licensing when it would be mostly immune to counterattack.

Despite the backing of the Linux Foundation, this is a cross-platform effort, supporting all major desktop and mobile operating systems, initially including Linux, Android, Arduino, iOS, OS/X, Windows 7/8/RT, the Unity game engine, and “thin clients.” Missing here are the many controller-oriented real-time operating systems (RTOSes) that will initially dominate IoT at the device level, but Allseen appears to be looking at the long haul and the higher end of the market. Advanced OSes like Linux and Android are expected to increasingly move into controller-like, low end embedded duty as demand increases for greater intelligence and Internet connectivity.

Get the free Circle app for your Android device.

Get the Monopoly Slots game free for Android

The main objective of the alliance, which draws membership from across the technology spectrum, is to “advance adoption and innovation in the “Internet of Everything” in homes and industry.”

While the release of Qt 5.2 is imminent and it features full support for Apple iOS and Google Android along side Qt's other mobile platform support, but missing from the party is Tizen support. Qt for Tizen is still in an alpha state but today they've put out their fifth development release...

Puppet is an open-source & enterprise software for configuration management in UNIX like operating system. Puppet is a IT automation software used to push configuration to its clients (puppet agents) using code.

It's always difficult to separate marketing drivel from reality when making a technology purchase and databases are no different. That's why a site called DB-Engines, which ranks each database vendor according to a set of pre-defined metrics could be a useful resource for you when you make a database choice. And it's worth noting there are a mix of open source and proprietary choices.

We like to use the analogy that open source is like a recipe. It's a great way to explain what open source is to non-technical folks. Last year, this pumpkin spice latte recipe was popular with our community. So, we thought it would be fun to share more recipes with you this year. We collected some great ones from a few of our open source friends: Chris Aniszczyk, Erica Brescia, Simon Phipps, and Jim Whitehurst. Share yours with us in the comments!

Today, December 10, Softpedia is happy to report that the final packages of the Mozilla Firefox 26.0 web browser are now available for download for all supported platforms, including Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, ahead of the official announcement.

Although the cloud can be used for general computing purposes, a general-purpose operating system is not necessarily the best fit for the cloud. To that end, the Linux Foundation's Xen Collaborative project today announced the Mirage OS 1.0 cloud operating system.

Opensource.com's Jason Hibbets recently had a chance to sit down with Google's Open Source Director Chris DiBona during the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, NC.

Like practically every other open source project, the openSUSE community Linux project is low on female participation. But that hasn't deterred Stella Rouzi from joining and making her contribution.

Linux Mint 16 RC (Xfce) was quietly released. The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 16 'Petra'. Linux Mint 16 is the result of 6 months of incremental development on top of stable and reliable technologies. This new release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components.

YaST didn't work quite right, but it wasn't a total turnoff; overall it was pretty good. Plus, GNOME has improved a lot with version 3.10, though it is rather resource-heavy.

Open source software (OSS), unlike proprietary software, is software that keeps the code open so IT professionals can alter, improve, and distribute it. Although it has been around since relatively early in the history of computers, in the past several years OSS has truly taken off, in what some might see as a surprising example of a successful communal collaboration.

VIDEO: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, talks about the next major release of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system.