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The Ruby project has done a new major release on Christmas for their popular programming language. Ruby offers performance speed-ups but without severe incompatibilities, according to the release announcement...

Last week was marked by the first Wayland/Weston 1.4 Alpha release ahead of the planned general availability in January. For those that aren't up to date on all of the development activity, I've now had the time go through and highlight all of the major changes that landed in Git...

Bloomberg Philanthropies recently launched the Mayors Challenge, a contest for funding in the European Union where large cities submit new, innovative ideas for solving local problems. The EU contest is modeled on a similar competition for cities in the United States, where more than 300 cities submitted ideas covering issues ranging from sustainable development to education to citizen development. The grand prize of that contest went to a program in Providence, R.I. that works to improve the vocabulary of children in low-income households.

The VideoLAN project has announced the release of libbluray 0.5.0, the latest version of the open-source Blu-ray library. This latest release has better BD-J Java support and other new/improved features...

Hardkernel and its community Odroid project have announced an open-hardware single board computer based on Samsung’s quad-core 1.7GHz Exynos 4412 Prime SoC. The Odroid-U3 is claimed to be “100 percent software compatible” with the Odroid-U2 that began in Dec. 2012 and is now being discontinued. As with other Odroid SBCs, the U3 runs a variety […]

Gummiboot 41 was released this weekend with new features and was followed immediately by Gummiboot 42 to correct the build system for this open-source simple UEFI boot manager...

Android variant gets VC greenbacks, green light for green robot from Google Champagne corks will be popping in a Seattle startup this evening.…

New tech promises browser apps at near native speed The Mozilla Foundation says it has reached an important milestone in the quest to improve JavaScript performance, with some JavaScript benchmarks now running only around 1.5 times slower than when the equivalent algorithms are compiled and executed as native binary code.…

Sights set on OpenStack Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat posted strong financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2014 on Thursday, with earnings that beat both analysts' estimates and the company's own earlier guidance.…

Open hardware is gaining speed. The appetite for open source vehicles is growing. And while we may not have flying cars yet, we do have Tabby—an open source car design released by Open Source Vehicle this October. Want to swap out an internal combustible engine for an eco-friendly electric? Tabby can do that. And, this open source vehicle is not just for makers—it’s production ready. Tabby will be rolling off the assembly line in early 2014. Will you see Tabby cruising your streets? In this interview, we found out more about Tabby and got some insight into the open hardware movement from the team at Open Source Vehicle.

Published today are benchmarks from two Intel systems comparing the performance of Fedora 19 "Schrödinger's Cat" to Fedora 20 "Heisenbug" for various workloads. Especially for those using open-source graphics drivers, Fedora 20 can be worth the upgrade for performance reasons.

With the end of the year quickly approaching, at Phoronix I have been re-testing all of the Linux graphics drivers to see how the performance has changed in 2013 and the features added/removed over the calendar year. I've been doing these annual Linux driver yearly recaps going back to 2005 when Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy compared to Windows. Yesterday I started with the NVIDIA 2013 Linux Year-In-Review of their first-rate binary driver while today I have some performance tests done for Intel's latest-generation Haswell graphics hardware.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in the District of Columbia declared Monday that America’s founding fathers would be “aghast” at the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata spying, that it infringes the Fourth Amendment, and the legal precedent a U.S. secret court has been citing to justify its existence is out of date.

For a recap on this year in open education, it's impossible to ignore the role of gaming, including massively multiplayer open online role-playing games (MMORGs or MMOs). MMOs have created quite a stir in education and are being recognized for their potential for better learning. MMOs differ from single-user games and are a far cry from much earlier video games. First, they are played via the Internet. Second, they enable very large numbers of players to interact with one another in a virtual world. And third, the games continue regardless of whether someone is playing or not.

Android, as a platform, is one of the fastest growing on the planet. It is available on smartphones and a series of different tablet sizes. Most devices also include a full spectrum of sensors that are available to programs you install, so it's a very inviting platform for development.

The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to KDE Applications delivering new features and fixes. With Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Platform frozen and receiving only long term support, those teams are focusing on the technical transition to Frameworks 5.

"Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there."

This year at Opensource.com, we challenged our contributors to give us the best and most useful guides, how-tos, and tutorials they could produce from their experiences and work in various open source industries and sectors. Our best guides and tutorials this year fell within the four buckets you see below. If you can answer YES to any of the following questions, there's an open source way guide here for you! Do you...

I've been following the progress of OpenShot, an open source video editor, for the past few years. I think it achieves just the right balance between ease-of-use and a rich feature set. When I heard about the OpenShot Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I was one of the first to contribute. By the deadline, their intended fund raising goal was more than doubled at $45,000+. This success also meant that OpenShot 2.0 will become available on Windows and Macintosh. 

Security firm Kaspersky Lab has been monitoring cyber attacks on gaming systems and the firm says that the release of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One coincides with sharp rise in hacking attacks in late November. Kaspersky says they estimate an average of 34,000 cyber attacks per day on a global scale. The firm now knows of 4.6 million malware pieces that are targeting these new gaming systems.