Showing headlines posted by bob

I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do. 

Roll-your-own app store means game on for BYOD Organisations planning to give users access to curated collection of Android apps can now do so with their Google Apps account, after the advertising giant quietly threw the switch on what it has poetically dubbed “The Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps”.…

Over the last months, I became more and more aware of the "open" movement. "Open" as in open access, open source, open data, open science. In mid 2011, I had a project where I needed to annotate the tandem mass spectra of some cyclic peptides. So I sat down, fragmented the compound structures "on paper" to see what theoretical fragments I would likely find in my spectra, and compared them with my experimental spectra. This was one of the most stupid and boring tasks I had ever done. And it took me more than 2 full days of work to annotate my two spectra. I mused that for such stupid work computers had been invented.

The open-source Alien Arena game is going to see a major update soon that will enhance its renderer and bring other improvements. Alien Arena 7.65 is this exciting game update that's forthcoming...

The developers of Linux Mint have released version 14.1 of their distribution and have remastered the corresponding ISO images to fix three bugs affecting performance with Intel GPUs and booting on EFI systems

The Fedora developers have released the first and final beta of Fedora 18 after almost two months' delay. The latest version of the distribution introduces the MATE and Cinnamon desktops to the repositories

According to a press release issued by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve a single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement. And that format is not OOXML.

Now that full-fledged computers are approaching the size of a USB Flash drive and are being sold for less than $75, my interest in designing a Linux computer of my own has been re-awakened. As an educator, I would stock that computer full of free creativity and learning software, logic puzzle games, tutorial screencasts, engaging multimedia and artwork created with open source software. Naturally, I would use Linux as the operating system for that computer. No matter how hard I worked designing such a computer, finding purchasers would not be easy. People are naturally wary of spending money on a computer designed by an unknown entity. So I started thinking, could I volunteer my time to support some well-known entity to sell a very affordable, very lightweight Linux computer that would benefit students worldwide? This entity or organization would need to composed of millions of smart and energetic youth and parents who already collaborate effectively to raise funds for their cause. I'm thinking the Girl Scouts of the USA.

The Fedora Project team is excited to announce the beta release of its free, fully functional Linux operating system, Fedora 18, code-named “Spherical Cow.” Fedora continues to enable users to experience the latest in free and open source technology, integrated into a Linux distribution and ready for free download, use, modification and redistribution.

The Qt Developer Days conference took place earlier this month in Berlin, Germany. For those not in attendance at this open-source development conference, the slides for many of the Qt talks have been uploaded with coverage on Qt Quick, KDE Frameworks 5, and other interesting areas surrounding this tool-kit soon to finally reach its major 5.0 milestone...

The developers of the eudev fork of udev plan to support the separate mounting of /usr/, which isn't possible with udev; udev inventor Greg Kroah-Hartman has criticised the approach

Aside from why LLVM/Clang was ported to one of the fastest super computer's in the world and using Clang to implement Microsoft's C++ AMP, another interesting session at this month's LLVM Developers' Conference in San Jose was about using Clang to analyze code comments...

In the week ending 17 November - Google open sourced Android 4.2, an RC of Linux Mint 14 arrived and Popcorn Maker 1.0 was released. Also, an interview with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and the Kernel Log looked at filesystems and storage for Linux 3.7

Netflix video streaming is now available on Linux through the use of Wine. When running a specially patched version of Wine in conjunction with the Microsoft Windows versions of Firefox and Microsoft Silverlight, Netflix can now do Internet video streaming to the Linux desktop...

Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has announced the results of the naming of version 19 of the popular Linux distribution. The successor to Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" will be called "Schrödinger's Cat"

For governments looking for cutting edge, open source messaging solutions, the recent action by the OASIS standards consortium to approve the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) Version 1.0 is a major development. The need for cutting edge, mission critical messaging options is arising in a variety of contexts: it is a key component to interoperable 'smart grid' frameworks, as well as 'cloud' solutions.

BYOD = Bill Your Own Director as comms costs soar RIM's share of the business market continues to slide: new figures put BlackBerrys into third place behind Android and iOS as staff are increasingly allowed to use their preferred handsets for work.…

Microsoft has released Skype 4.1 for Linux...

Along with the release of the new Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet on Tuesday and the rollout of updates to Android 4.2 to several existing Nexus devices, Google has also pushed the source code for the new Jelly Bean flavour of its mobile operating system to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). In a post on the Android Developers Blog, the company detailed the features in the latest Android version, which also brings with it a new SDK revision (API level 17).

Today, I have a piece over on Tech President about how the new UK government website—Gov.uk—does a lot of things right. I'd love to see more governments invest two of the key ingredients that made the website work—good design and better analytics.