Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

"It is a miracle that curiosity escapes formal education." These words by Albert Einstein reflect a lot about the current state of education. It also captures the need for overhauling the fabric of our school system. Society needs technology solutions that extract the best out of all the stakeholders in education—students, teachers, and parents. And we need enterprises that revolutionize the learning ecosystem. inBloom is one such company that utilizes and integrates massive amounts of data to change the landscape of the education sector.I talked to Vincent Mayers, open source community manager at inBloom, to learn how the company is changing school systems and how open source technologies aid in its mission.

The line between traditional, paid advertising and organic editorial content on the Internet can sometimes be hazy. A recent stealth promotional campaign between Microsoft and Machinima highlights just how hazy that line has become, and how behind-the-scenes payments can drive ostensibly independent opinion-mongering on by users on services like YouTube.

A recent Georgia Tech study found that Kickstarter projects often find success thanks to the use of effective marketing buzzwords like “guaranteed.” That word never shows up the Rex project’s Kickstarter page, which is perhaps one reason why this promising project has yet to reach a third of its $90,000 funding goal, with less than two weeks to go. We think Rex is worth a closer look. (Satisfaction guaranteed!)

For those users of the Phoronix Test Suite Git development code, over the past few days I have been transferring the Git repository to GitHub. The Phorogit repository location will still likely be updated in tandem with the GitHub repository for those that don't update their pull locations immediately, but the Phorogit interface has fallen badly outdated and its interface code hasn't been touched in about five years. GitHub is a much more pleasant experience in browsing the commits, branching, etc.

The Linux 3.13 kernel that will be released in the very near future is very worth the upgrade if you are a RadeonSI user -- in particular, the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer on the Gallium3D Linux graphics driver -- but other open-source graphics driver users as well may also see nice improvements in the new kernel release. Here's some benchmarks showing off the gains found with the Linux 3.13 kernel for Radeon HD and R9 graphics cards.

The world’s first tablet to run the open source Linux based Firefox OS was informally unveiled by Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler on his eponymous blog site. Dotzler posted some basic specs in the announcement, picked up first by Liliputing, as well as a screenshot photo of the tablet.

The recommended reforms to National Security Agency snooping announced by President Obama today are not likely to stem the recent trend of tech products promising to keep data secure from prying governmental agencies. The latest, greatest device promising to NSA-proof your digital life is the Blackphone, a collaboration between Firefox OS phone vendor Geeksphone and Silent Circle, a cryptography software development firm that counts PGP creator Phil Zimmerman (pictured at top) as its President.

Recently, the United Kingdom's Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) ran a series of tests to find out which operating system would be the most secure platform for the UK government. The test consisted of the following categories..

The project behind OpenBSD risks going dark after receiving a crippling server electricity bill which it needs help to pay off. The OpenBSD Foundation has revealed it needs to stump up $20,000 in the second appeal for help it has issued since December. It seems the first appeal didn't net it enough to settle the bill in full. The Foundation wants somebody to not only pay the bill but also to permanently take on the cost of running its servers – otherwise it risks going out of business.

Last October, our last look at graphics focused on the plans laid at September's X Developer's Conference. In the three months since then, these plans have come to fruition, reasserting the continuing relevance of X.org compared with Wayland and other compositing display servers.

For months now the Debian Technical Committee has been tasked with deciding between systemd and Upstart for the future init system of the Linux distribution that also has a FreeBSD kernel port, etc. The debate has been long and ongoing. Among other opinions, Ian Jackson of the committee came out last month in favor of using Upstart while Russ Allberry came out in favor of systemd.

Based in part on MontaVista’s GENIVI-compliant in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) distribution, the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) was released in April. In September, it was updated with an integrated version of Jungo Connectivity’s multimedia player middleware, and in October, Mentor Graphics announced a related Mentor Embedded Hypervisor that can work together with ATP and other IVI and telematics systems to enabled multiple VMs running on each core of a multicore SoC.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, you'll learn about some new partnerships that could lead to some new open source tech. Here's what we found:

When I founded my first startup in 2008, I was a programming newbie. A degree in economics from Oberlin College hadn’t prepared me for a career writing production-ready code. Despite my best efforts at slapping together crude HTML and CSS Django templates, my ability to contribute to our codebase was limited at best. So I started slowly teaching myself to code with online tutorials and lessons. After many disheartening starts and stops, I realized why I was having problems sticking with it: code lessons and videos felt like school to me, and I had no interest in returning to the classroom.

Based in part on MontaVista’s GENIVI-compliant in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) distribution, the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) was released in April. In September, it was updated with an integrated version of Jungo Connectivity’s multimedia player middleware, and in October, Mentor Graphics announced a related Mentor Embedded Hypervisor that can work together with ATP and other IVI and telematics systems to enabled multiple VMs running on each core of a multicore SoC.

Reports this week that the National Security Agency uses radio signals to collect data from tens of thousands of non-U.S. computers, some not connected to the Internet, is sure to fuel more acrimony towards the U.S. spy agency.

The remotely-piloted Beam+ bot, which can be controlled via a WiFi, runs low-latency Skype-like video conferencing software on top of a Ubuntu-based embedded Linux OS. The original Beam model was introduced about two years ago, and currently starts at $16,000 (not including charging dock). The new Beam+ consumer model will be sold for about $2,000 (including charging dock) after all the 1,000 specially priced pre-order units have been sold.

In a Reddit exchange yesterday, Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon answered a commenter’s question about the expected arrival of phones running the new Ubuntu Touch interface. Wrote Bacon: “This is a long road though with many components, and I would be surprised if we see anything like this before 2015.”

conf.kde.in was announced in November, to take place February 21 – 23, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. This three-day conference, the biggest KDE event in India, will bring together Qt developers, KDE contributors, open source enthusiasts and users from all across the nation. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn, share, contribute, innovate and create around Qt and KDE technology.

Zato is a Python-based platform for integrating applications and exposing back-end services to front-end clients. It's an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and an application server focused on data integrations. The platform doesn't enforce any limits on architectural style for designing systems and can be used for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), REST (Representational State Transfer) and for building systems of systems running in-house or in the cloud.