Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

USA Today got it right last week when it claimed that Samsung was prepping a Tizen-based smartwatch successor to the Android-based Galaxy Gear. Well, they got it almost right — Samsung unveiled three Tizen smartwatches. Samsung did not, however, unveil a Tizen smartphone, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Samsung execs could not even definitively promise a Tizen phone in 2014.

When Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals more than four decades ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. Protests and demonstrations were among the most common tactics for bringing about social change, and they were used on such a broad scale that they helped define the Vietnam War era and counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The “Pro” model of the Fit-PC4 uses AMD’s newer G-Series SoC, which integrates the controller chipset along with 28nm “Jaguar” x86 cores and improved Radeon 8000 graphics. The Pro uses the top-of-the-line quad-core, 2GHz, AMD GX-420CA model, enabling the mini-PC to score over 5000 in Geekbench 2 benchmarks. This is three times faster than the scores of its earlier Fit-PC3 mini-PCs, claims CompuLab.

The OpenStack Foundation recently launched their voting tool for rating presentation proposals for the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, May 12-16. While the chairs for each track make the final decisions about which presentation topics make the cut, voting is a great way for the community to get involved and participate in the agenda-setting process. Conference talks are proposed from a variety of different individuals with different corporate affiliations and different relationships to the OpenStack project. Listing all of them here would be difficult, but in keeping with the theme of our Beginners in Open Source Week, here are a few that might appeal to beginners:

At an Intel news conference held during Mobile World Congress, Intel President Renee James launched the 64-bit Intel Atom Z34xx processor series (formerly “Merrifield”) for smartphones and tablets, announced a next-generation, quad-core Z35xx processor series codenamed “Moorefield,” and detailed a multi-mode 2G/3G/4G/LTE communications chipset dubbed the “XMM 7160.”

Whatever you may have heard about hackers, the truth is they do something really, really well: discover. Hackers are motivated, resourceful, and creative. They get deeply into how things work, to the point that they know how to take control of them and change them into something else. This lets them re-think even big ideas because they can really dig to the bottom of how things function. Furthermore, they aren't afraid to make the same mistake twice just out of a kind of scientific curiosity, to see if that mistake always has the same results. That's why hackers don't see failure as a mistake or a waste of time because every failure means something and something new to be learned. And these are all traits any society needs in order to make progress. Which is why we need to get it into schools. attachments:  How to get started with Hacker Highschool

A great deal of excitement has been generated by UK Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude's forceful announcement in late January that the UK government intends to mandate the adoption of compulsory document format standards in public administrations. In the on-going struggle of policy makers seeking to break away from procurement practices that have led to proprietary lock-in, limited interoperability, and excessive costs, the UK government has signaled that they fully intend to level the playing field not by mandating a preference for free or re-used software as in Italy and France, but by mandating choice through the requirement of open standard document formats (not just .odf, but other open document standards too) in procurement.

A gaggle of Chinese web firms have come together with a plan to protect Windows XP users in the Middle Kingdom for at least the next two or three years, according to local reports. The unusual step will see messaging giant Tencent, search engine Sogou, software company Kingsoft and several others offer technical support for XP including system upgrades and security services, said Xinhua.

I'm not saying I own a XP machine and use it for anything..but if I did this would be interesting to me.. - Scott

Linux distributions are flexible and modular in nature, allowing them to squeeze into all sorts of interesting niches. Some distributions package as much software as possible, others remain lean, some focus on the desktop market while others operate best in the server room. This week we take a look at projects working in a variety of markets. We start off with Chakra, a distribution which brings cutting-edge software and fast performance to desktop systems. Then we turn our eyes to the Ubuntu community where Canonical is making progress in their march to bring Ubuntu to mobile devices. We also discuss how Canonical is handling user privacy and confusion around the company's licensing policies. Plus, we share updates on the OpenBSD project's fund-raising efforts. In our Questions and Answers column this week we cover a few simple ways to protect servers against brute-force password guessing attacks. We are happy to bring you news of distribution releases from the past week, plus we look forward to fun new developments to come. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com January 2014 donation is the QupZilla web browser project. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!

When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It's easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don't fit with your needs, but what about altering the look and feel of the distribution to suit you? The key is to add a second desktop environment or window manager. This is an example of how Linux is all about freedom of the user, by the user.

Vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEM)—and their IT customers, governments, and academics—are all using, buying, and making open source software, and often all three activities at once. This is a good way to think about one’s relationship with open source software projects. There are three activities one typically engages in with respect to the open source software project: make, use, buy.

For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.

Per an announcement to the vim developers, Diego Viola who's interested in Neovim explains it as "to refactor and modernize the [vim] codebase." This was already criticized by vim's Bram Moolenaar who was quick to say, "It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly? Total refactoring is not a solution. It's much better to improve what we have. Perhaps with some small refactorings specifically aimed at making Vim work better for users."

The company, which is famed mostly for its Firefox browser, has partnered with Chinese low-cost chip maker Spreadtrum. While not as powerful as more expensive models, the device will run apps and make use of mobile internet. It would appeal to the sorts of people who currently buy cheap "feature" phones, analysts said.

Open source software in healthcare has been instrumental for sharing common tools and increasing adoption of emerging medical information technology (IT) standards. By leading the effort to digitize health data, imaging informatics has set the precedent for the adoption of the technology industry's best practices and subsequently open source software.

This past week saw a number of interesting events on the Linux Planet, including a quickly resolved incident between Red Hat and Piston Computing.

3 Laws of Hospital Health Information Technology (HIT) Implementation. 1) Implementers and salespeople who don't know what they are doing will always get a binding, multi-year contract first. 2) Hospital management and owners will always do the wrong thing. 3) Everyone will grossly underestimate the time, difficulty, and expense it takes to fully implement Health IT in a hospital.

It's always "somewhat interesting and entertaining to see the ebb and flow of the top Linux distributions," said 451 Research's Jay Lyman. "One of the highlights is typically the Linux operating systems with staying power. After years of jockeying, we've seen Ubuntu in the top few distributions consistently for some time, which speaks to its desktop and developer popularity."

After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.

The Aaeon “RTC-900R” rugged tablet is designed for service workforces in applications including field service, law enforcement, defense, public sector, utilities, logistics, healthcare, restaurants, and retail management, says Aaeon. The tablet’s 2.4-pound heft 1-inch profile may be plus-size by commercial Android tablet standards, but the device is thinner and lighter than typical field service tablets, says the company.