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Consumer Linux efforts are alive and growing in 2013

This tutorial is Part 1 of a three-part "Learning PHP" series teaching you how to use PHP through building a simple workflow application. This tutorial walks you through creating a basic PHP page using HTML forms and covers accessing databases.

Amazon's preliminary Christmas sales information is in and Linux-powered gear was a holiday-season winner.

Fast and furious firms battle to design dashboard of the future CES 2014 Apple and Google are preparing to compete on yet another front. They reportedly plan to race each other to design the world's most powerful smart car dashboard.…

As an extra holiday present for Linux and open-source fans, Intel has quietly released a large batch of new programming documentation that covers their latest-generation Haswell graphics cores. The new "programmer's reference manuals" cover the 2013 Haswell HD Graphics, Iris Graphics, and Iris Pro Graphics. This massive batch of documentation is spread across twelve volumes and does document their hardware registers...

Over the last five years, e-learning platforms have gained popularity and notoriety for alleviating some of the strain caused by our education problems. Namely, for helping bring resources and materials to classrooms and countries that can't afford the proprietary and closed options.

Why don't academics discuss research before starting the work? In a recent blog post, Jack Kelly asked this simple question, and it is a striking one for those of us who are familiar with collaborating at high levels as part of an open source community. One of the pillars of the open source way is rapid prototyping and the idea of: release early, release often. In the scientific research community, however, the history of and current state of affairs is closed and secretive. Jack Kelly even began his post with: Warning: this is a hopelessly idealistic proposal...

According to a new report from Der Spiegel based on internal NSA documents, the signals intelligence agency's elite hacking unit (TAO) is able to conduct sophisticated wiretaps in ways that make Hollywood fantasy look more like reality. The report indicates that the NSA, in collaboration with the CIA and FBI, routinely and secretly intercepts shipping deliveries for laptops or other computer accessories in order to implant bugs before they reach their destinations. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA's TAO group is able to divert shipping deliveries to its own "secret workshops" in a method called interdiction, where agents load malware onto the electronics or install malicious hardware that can give US intelligence agencies remote access.

Last week I began sharing my Linux performance benchmarks from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VD, an Intel ultrabook with some nice hardware and build quality. In last week's initial testing I carried out NVIDIA Optimus benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux and compared it to Windows 8.1. In today's article I have a number of reference benchmarks comparing the performance of the ASUS Zenbook Prime to six other systems, all running Ubuntu 13.10.

Samsung’s first Tizen phone reportedly will debut at Mobile World Congress Feb. 23, and will reach consumers in Europe and Japan in the second half of 2014. Samsung will likely announce the first Tizen phones at Mobile World Congress on Feb.23 in Barcelona, according to a recent report in IDG News Service. The story repeated […]

Open-source developers this week achieved a pleasant late Christmas present for Fedora users of having a working system with using the in-development Linux kernel DBus implementation (KDBUS) paired with the latest systemd code can now yield a booting system...

"Check Engine Soon"—that little orange light on your car's instrument panel is possibly one of the more annoying things about modern automobiles. Ever had it pop on during a trip and wonder whether it was just something mundane, like your gas cap being loose, or whether it's something deathly serious and a piston could come shooting out the side of your engine block at any time?

The year 2013 brought great progress for the adoption of open source in the health and science industries. We covered some excellent open source stories, here the highlights from 2013.

Giulio Camuffo has announced a new pet project he's been working on for Wayland: Termistor. The open-source Termistor is a drop-down, tabbed, terminal for Wayland...

I gave a talk at this year's TEDx Albany event, "Saving Science - Open Up or Perish," where I talked about something that I am very passionate about. For me, TEDx was an opportunity to try out a very different format from my usual technical talks and dig deep down to tell a very general audience about what's going on in science that should matter to them. I shared my journey from my education in Physics to becoming a software developer working almost exclusively on open source software for scientific research and development.

While extensive benchmarks of the GCC 4.9 development compiler are currently ongoing, here's a preview of the performance that the GNU Compiler Collection is set to offer in 2014 with its next major update. For this article an Intel Pentium "Haswell" dual-core processor was tested on a GCC 4.9 development snapshot and compared to GCC 4.8.2 and GCC 4.7.3 in a wide variety of C/C++ workloads. New LLVM Clang 3.4 benchmarks are also happening.

RSA denies the Reuters report published Friday that said the NSA paid RSA $10 million to use a flawed encryption formula. The agency-developed Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) was used in RSA's BSAFE product.

In my last article, I started discussing Compojure, a Web framework written in the Clojure language. Clojure already has generated a great deal of excitement among software developers, in that it combines the beauty and expressive elegance of Lisp with the efficiency and ubiquity of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

The most-read posts this year on the Opensource.com Law channel showed a strong interest in diverse legal issues in the open source world. Many readers were reaching out for a better understanding open source licensing and related questions, such as:

Is that a Grub in your pocket or are you booting up? Canonical has just given curious Reg readers something interesting to to do in the dead days between Christmas and whenever you go back to work: figuring out how to dual boot an Android phone.…