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Benchmarks up this afternoon are of a Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX, an internal enterprise hard drive, being tested from Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. This Linux disk drive comparison was done with an EXT4 file-system and other disk benchmarks are available from different solid-state and traditional rotating hard drives.

So Canonical is chaining its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to a phone/tablet/TV future, and they want us, the community, to write apps for their in-the-works devices and not care so much about the core operating system itself. That’s OK. If you really care about free (as in freedom) desktop computing, upstream is where you should be. Not an upstream just for Ubuntu Phone/Tablet, but an upstream for every(damn)body.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS 6.4 install media for i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 6.4 is based on the upstream release EL 6.4 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. There are many fundamental changes in this release, compared with the past CentOS 6 releases, and we highly recommend that everyone study the release notes as well as the upstream technical notes about the changes and how they might impact your installation. Everyone who has centos-cr repositories enabled and in use would already be running CentOS 6.4 as of two weeks ago.

McAfee has released new security software for Android-based embedded devices. Application Control for Android is claimed to be the only kernel-level security solution for protecting devices running embedded Android from installing or executing malicious apps.

The aim of the Hackathon is to give developers the opportunity to meet face-to-face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other developers.

Did you ever think that Canonical/Ubuntu’s massive ambitions and accelerated technical path toward them just might work? Ubuntu is always in the position of making its future users happy. Whether the same things bring present users happiness is another matter. Always has been.

Open Source software has had a special area for itself at the CeBIT trade show for the last five years. The H went along to see what was new this year and in the process met Knoppix creator, Klaus Knopper, saw the latest in 3D printing, and talked with John "Maddog" Hall about Project Cauã.

Ardour chief developer Paul Davis has released version 3.0 of his digital audio workstation. Ardour 3's most important new feature is the multi-track recorder's comprehensive MIDI support and MIDI sequencing functionality. Ardour supports instrument plugins in Steinberg's VST format, the AudioUnit format of Mac OS X, and the LV2 Linux standard, successor to the LADSPA format. The MIDI workflow is modelled after the audio workflow: notes played on a MIDI device can be recorded as separate tracks and then played back via a software synthesizer. An overview of the MIDI-enabled multi-track recorder's capabilities is available on the project's feature page.

According to a Google+ posting from Google, there were no winners in Google's own Pwnium competition, which followed Pwn2Own at the CanSecWest conference in Canada. Google had offered a prize fund, inspired by the constant pi, of $3.14159 million with $110,000 prizes if the browser or system could be compromised and $150,000 prizes if the compromise could be persisted over a reboot. The target for the attacks was a Series 5 550 Chromebook running the latest stable ChromeOS.

Daylight savings just began, which means it’s the time of year to start looking forward to the spring release of Ubuntu. But could this year’s version, 13.04, be the last one in the biannual release cycle that Canonical has stalwartly maintained for almost a decade? For the moment, that remains uncertain, but the issue, which has produced a stunning amount of debate, could have ramifications well beyond the Ubuntu ecosystem.

When I heard, in a tutorial video, the multi-platform programmer's editor Sublime described as "the cool kids' code editor" (or possibly "the Cool Kid's code editor" - the speaker didn't enunciate his capitals and apostrophes very clearly) I was puzzled. As the goto (or, rather, the call-by-reference) consultant on Agile Harlem Shake in the northwest corner of our floor, surely no such assertion could plausibly be made without first interviewing me? Nothing would have come of this if TextPad, normally as reliable as a tax demand, had not crashed. Twice. Unprovoked. Editing piddly little config files.

Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech. Ignore, for a second, the fact COBOL doesn’t feature in the top 20 of languages developers are using in anger today. Those in charge of setting university IT curricula reckon there’s no better guarantee of a job than tooling up on COBOL.

It seems that the FOSS community sees its ranks expand just about every day, as new fans of free and open source software join the fold. What's much less common is to see former advocates of Linux and FOSS change their minds and depart. That's pretty much what happened last week, when GNOME cofounder Miguel de Icaza announced that he has abandoned desktop Linux in favor of Apple's Mac platform.

It's no secret that Linux and open-source projects have fights over the direction of a project, but it's unusual for Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, to public fuss with programmers via his blog.

Cloud computing requires good configuration management, see how Puppet and CloudStack play well with each other.

Canonical, and the open source Ubuntu operating system it sponsors, seem to be in the midst of a major watershed moment. In the past the Ubuntu world was a disparate one, but it is now finally converging around all types of devices. Whether that convergence succeeds will have a lot to do with the channel. But community opinion also plays a big role, and that may be Canonical’s biggest challenge going forward.

How many times have you heard, "there's an app for that"? But sometimes, there actually isn't "an app for that", or the apps that do exist don't meet your needs. As Linux users, we tend to like to scratch our own itches, and if that means we write some code to do it, so be it. However, writing code to run on an Android phone or tablet has a bit of a learning curve, and it's even worse on Apple products. Fortunately, Phonegap provides a simple way to create standalone apps for Android, iPhone, WebOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone, among others. You just need to be reasonably proficient in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and you can develop native apps for the majority of smartphones currently in use. And, the same code base can run, with obvious limitations, on any Web browser.

In a previous interview, former Product Manager, Runa Bhattacharjee, and Lead Developer, Sean Flanigan, gave us some insight into the development of Zanata. Today's Product Manager for the open source translation platform, Isaac Rooskov, tells us what complaints about other products influenced the design of Zanata, clears up some misconceptions about translation tools, and announces the newest release.

The Ubuntu Technical board has given the official designation to two Ubuntu flavours, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. The decision was made in an IRC meeting and announced by the projects this week. Ubuntu GNOME 3 sets out to deliver the GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu, while UbuntuKylin aims to offer a fully customised Chinese user experience on Ubuntu 13.04. The official blessing gives the developers of each flavour access to Ubuntu's build infrastructure and allows them to be managed as part of the Ubuntu project rather than as an unsupported fork.

PHP 5.5 will come with the Zend Optimizer+ integrated into it and boosting PHP performance by 5 to 20 per cent over other opcode caches. It is likely though to result in a delay to the release of PHP 5.5