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Over 280 attendees representing 177 mentoring organizations gathered for a two-day, code-munity extravaganza celebrating the conclusion of Google Summer of Code with the annual Mentor Summit held at Google in Mountain View, California.

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance. But, how can big data do more? We see companies and inventors coming out with ideas for improving healthcare, for one, by tracking human biometrics. I think we can take it to the next level and make more wide-scale improvements to our health and our lives.

Vuzix has begun shipping an Android-based eyewear computer to developers, and is now taking pre-orders from the general public. The $1,000 Vuzix M100 device is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor and a 16:9, WQVGA display, and offers WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, a five-megapixel camera, and voice and gesture recognition. Vuzix announced the M100 in […]

A man from Wisconsin was sentenced for participating in a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack by hacker group Anonymous on a Kansas company. Rosol, who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer, was sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay US$183,000 in restitution, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

One night, after reading the Who’s Hiring Freelance thread on HackerNews, I decided there had to be a more efficient way to match programmers with freelance jobs. While sites like oDesk and eLance are general-purpose marketplaces for freelance workers, they seem to have more of an emphasis on price than quality. On the other hand, sites like TopTal and ooomf vet freelance programmers that apply to join the site by screening the candidates. So, while I’m sure they have a pool of excellent programmers for hire, they require applicants to spend time on a process that may or may not yield work opportunities, even if they get accepted. So, I started CodeDoor, a platform

This is a condensed version of the blog post: A tale of two expanding clouds: Amazon and OpenStack. ere about the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. Comments welcome.

InfiniSQL is a massively scalable relational database system (RDBMS), composed entirely from scratch (not built upon some other technology). There is reproducible benchmark data described on InfiniSQL's blog proving that it can perform over 500,000 complex, multi-node transactions per second with over 100,000 simultaneous transactions—all on only 12 small server nodes. The limitation of 12 nodes was budgetary: this is an open source project entirely funded out of pocket, and not part of an institution. If I had access to more servers, I'm positive that scalability would grow much higher. But those kinds of details are on the blog. The bottomline is that this is a very high performance system, and in its infancy.

With patent reform legislation moving forward, an impressive group of law professors weighed in last week in favor of reform. The group submitted a letter to Congress that effectively demonstrates the seriousness of the problem of patent assertion entities (PAEs) and supports pending legislation. This issue is timely, because the Innovation Act (HR 3309) was approved by the House Judiciary Committee on November 20 with a strong majority (33-5) in favor. There is a good chance that the full House will take up the bill this week.

At the request of many Phoronix readers, here are some new battery power usage benchmarks on every recent Linux kernel release from Linux 3.7.0 to Linux 3.13 Git. Has an Intel "Ivy Bridge" Ultrabook's power consumption changed much due to the continuous kernel churn? Here's the answer...

Yesterday I ended up buying a new Intel ultrabook for Linux testing at Phoronix. Here's the hardware that will soon be featured in some new Linux benchmarks, plus my reasoning for going with this ultrabook and other thoughts on some of the laptops/ultrabooks this holiday season...

As an educator, you don't expect violence in school or prepare yourself for the inevitability of it. Even violence like suicide is far from your mind. Teachers are not prepared for that. Neither are they trained to handle behaviors that can lead to horrific violence: murder as well as fighting, bullying, sexual assualt and harassment, and alcohol and drug use. Despite the heartbreak of violence among youth in school, there is something educators, teachers and administrators alike can do. Self-control and attentional skills can be taught to youth who are exhibiting these riskly behaviors, that cause damage in and of themselves, and can lead to even worse violence.

According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.”

After some delays, the Qt 5.2 RC1 release happened this morning and with it is the first release candidate as well to the Qt Creator integrated development environment...

Open source news for your reading pleasure. November 17 - 22, 2013 We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found:

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has voted in favor of making a change to its packaging system that affects the compiler flags for how the RPM packages are built and will further improve the security of Fedora packages...

If yu waa good, yu nose affi run. "Success requires hard work" is the meaning of this Jamaican proverb. With a bright Caribbean sun and an even brighter welcoming crew, GNU Health unshipped in a new bay recently. In cooperation with the Jamaican Ministry of Health, a group from GNU Solidario visited the country and officially inaugurated the project of deploying GNU Health, a free health and hospital information system, within their public health care system. This step is a tipping point in health history worldwide; Jamacia is the first country to embrace GNU Health nationwide.

Creative Commons proudly introduces our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses—more than two years in the making—are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. Dozens of improvements have been incorporated that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.

DM&P Group has begun shipping an Arduino compatible boardset and mini-PC equipped with a new computer-on-module based on a new 300MHz x86 compatible Vortex86EX system-on-chip. The new SoC and COM are available as part of a $39 “86Duino Zero” boardset that mimics an Arduino Leonardo, in a $49 “86Duino Educake” mini-PC, and will soon be […]

Russian robot developer R.bot will soon launch a pair of low-cost telepresence robots in North America. The Synergy Mime and larger Synergy Swan use an attached BYOD Android smartphone or tablet for display, camera, microphone, and wireless communications and control functions, and are being offered for a limited time to Android developers for $250 and […]

A simple thank you goes a long way. That's why I would like to thank you, our readers and contributors, for making Opensource.com a vibrant community. We have experienced tremendous growth over the last year and much of that is because of you. Now, I'd like to challenge you to help us pay it forward—with just a simple thank you. Over the next week, try to thank at least five people that have contributed to an open source project you care about.