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The MySQL Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter engineering teams have joined forces to create their own version of MySQL, WebScaleSQL for their monster-sized databases.

Open source news for your reading pleasure. March 22-28, 2014 In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at power management in the new Linux version, the rise of open source CoderDojos, and more.

Most people think of their interactions with computer systems to occur via a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen. However, humans evolved to interact with thier environment and each other in much more intricate ways. Bridging the gap between the computational systems of the digital world and the natural world is being studied and tested in the Physical Computing course at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. As a professor of the course, we are currently leveraging a variety of open source software and hardware projects to learn about fundamental core concepts with hands-on experiences and implementation of open source tools. On the software side, we use an open-source IDE (Arduino Sketch) and develop 3D printer designs using OpenSCAD. On the open source hardware portion of the course, we utilize the Arduinos and the PrintrBot Simple.

Intel and Apress have released a free 380-page ebook called “Android on x86: an Introduction to Optimizing for Intel Architecture.” The “Android on x86″ announcement refers to the ebook as “a one-stop reference guide to mindful programming” of Android applications using x86 platforms. Presumably, un-mindful hackers who’ve never quite mastered the Lotus Position will get […]

Raymond "Jerry" Roberts - one of the last of a top World War Two codebreaking team at Bletchley Park - has died, aged 93, following a short illness. Capt Roberts, from Liphook, Hampshire, was part of a group that cracked the German High Command's Tunny code at the British codebreaking centre.

The GNOME Project recently announced the release of GNOME 3.12. This new version of GNOME provides updated versions of many of the core GNOME applications (notably, gedit, the GNOME text editor), as well as improvements to GNOME Shell.

When the GNOME 3.x desktop arrived it was, frankly, unusable. Fast-forward three years and while GNOME 3.12 – released Wednesday – still isn't the infinitely customisable experience of GNOME 2.x, not only has the GNOME Shell progressed by leaps and bounds but it now makes for a stable, productive desktop environment.

It's nice to have many people visit your Web site. It's even better when people don't just come to your site, but also enjoy your content. But, best of all is when visitors to your site do what you would like them to do - sign up for your newsletter, register for your SaaS application or buy one of your products.

This past Friday, we celebrated our Open Hardware Week here at Opensource.com with a staff open hardware workshop. Among the many fun things ranging from 3D printing to tinkering with Arduino boards and related electronics, I brought in a tiny remote control quadcopter which got back in December.

Web giants pool code for a turbo-charged open-source db Four internet giants have teamed up to create a branch of the MySQL database that's designed to handle massive web applications.…

Some of Linux's best and brightest kernel developers talk about the state of Linux development today.

A few weeks ago we entered the Icehouse development cycle feature freeze. But with the incredible growth of the OpenStack development community (508 different contributors over the last 30 days, including 101 new ones!), I hear a lot of questions about it. I’ve explained it on various forums in the past, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to write something a bit more definitive about it.

Verizon, yes, Verizon, is moving beyond being an open-source software user and becoming a much more active member in two vital open-source organizations.

A form of poetry in India called Vachana sahitya is part of the popular Indian language, Kannada. It evolved in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th as part of the religious Lingayatha movement. Since that time, more than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, have compiled over 11,000 Vachanas (verses). 21,000 of these verses were digitally published into 15 volumes, called Samagra Vachana Samputa, by the government of Karnataka. These volumes were then turned into a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya; this project was taken on by two Kannada Wikimedians, a Kannada linguist, and the author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy—to enrich the Kannada WikiSource. This team used Unicode, a standard of consistency for converting text (and code) into a new format.

You'll NEVER guess who it is Microsoft and Dell have inked a licensing deal for each other's patents that cover the technology found in Android, Chrome OS, and the Xbox.…

Updated kernel packages that fix multiple security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Important security impact.

3M has released Android 4.x and Linux 3.x kernel patches for its multitouch displays, supporting screens up to 46 inches. With Android increasingly appearing in all-in-one (AiO) PCs, and moving into kiosks and interactive digital signage, Android developers need help in optimizing their applications for the big screen.

Updated samba3x and samba packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 respectively. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate security impact.

Hackers have been busy causing service interruptions, breaching databases, and defacing hundreds of Ukrainian and Russian websites, as the crisis between the two countries plays out in cyberwarfare.

There are various ways to protect a wireless network. Some are generally considered to be more secure than others. Some, such as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), were broken several years ago and are not recommended as a way to keep intruders away from private networks.