Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Portwell announced a computer-on-module along with a pair of single-board computers built around Intel’s new embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The three Linux-friendly boards include a Type 6 COM Express Compact COM, a Mini-ITX style embedded motherboard, and an SBC implemented in the rarely seen Nano-ITX form factor.

Code.org, the organisation that believes “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming” has signed up Microsoft Bill Gates and Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg to teach programming. The pair will each participate in an “Hour of Code”, 60-minute programming tutorials that are one one of the initiatives planned for 2013's Computer Science Education Week (CSEW) starting on December 9th. Gates will also participate in a one-hour video conference with a school that signs up for CSEW.

A Shenzhen-based startup called Wizarm has launched an Indiegogo campaign for a hackable media player with DVR recording, HDMI pass-through, Miracast support, and video overlay capabilities. The Wizarm device dual-boots Android and Linux on a Samsung Exynos 5250 system-on-chip, and offers SATA storage and extensive I/O including USB, HDMI in/out, DisplayPort, and S/PDIF.

Oracle has popped out a white paper that may well turn some heads, because it contains robust criticism of open source software. Titled “The Department of Defense (DoD) and Open Source Software” and available here as a PDF to those with Oracle accounts or here in Dropbox, the document's premise is that folks in the USA's Department of Defense (DoD) could think it is possible to save money if they “... avoid buying commercial software products simply by starting with open source software and developing their own applications.”

Jessica McKellar is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and open source developer. She helps organize the Boston Python user group and plays a big role in diversity outreach by introducing and welcoming more beginners and women. Participation has increased from 0-2% to 15% and the user group has sustained this over the past two years.

Earlier this week there was the news of Intel contributing their OpenMP Runtime to LLVM in order to advance the open-source compiler project. Now to end off the week is news that Apple, who continues to invest significantly into LLVM and employs many of the key contributors, has open-sourced their stack unwinder for the project.

ISEE is shipping one of the tiniest Linux-enabled SODIMM style computer-on-modules we’ve encountered. The IGEP Aquila COM is based on TI’s popular, industrial-focused Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 system-on-chip, offers 3D-accelerated video, Ethernet, USB OTG and Host ports, serial, CAN, and numerous other interfaces, and is supported with a compact baseboard and Yocto-built embedded Linux.

Mad Catz announced $250 pre-orders for its Nvidia Tegra 4-based Android game console. The MOJO Micro-Console for Android ships with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, USB and Ethernet ports, and a separate gamepad controller with multiple modes for playing games on TVs, PCs, or other Android devices.

[Updated Oct 10] — Intel unveiled a family of embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips based on its 22nm Silvermont architecture, featuring TDPs ranging from 5 to 10 Watts, and offering interoperability with its Quark SoCs. The Intel Atom E3800 SoCs have already been tapped by a handful of companies for new computer-on-modules (COMs) and single-board computers (SBCs) of various shapes and sizes.

You've probably heard of OpenStack. It's that cloud software that's getting a lot of attention from big names in the IT industry and major users like CERN, Comcast and PayPal. However, did you know that it's more than that? It's also the fastest growing open source community in the world, and a very interesting collaboration among technology vendors and users.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

For nearly two years there's been a feature branch of LibreOffice to provide an OpenGL-based canvas implementation to LibreOffice. This OpenGL canvas has now finally been merged into the open-source office suite.

ADL Embedded Solutions is shipping one of the industry’s first PC/104-style single board computers to use Intel’s 4th Generation Core i7 (“Haswell”) processors. The Linux-friendly ADLQM87PC SBC provides numerous interfaces for storage, networking, display, and USB, offers PCI Express expansion via a mini-PCIe socket and a self-stacking PCIe/104 bus, and can support -40 to +85°C operation.

Popular source-code warehouse GitHub was back online today after weathering a huge denial-of-service attack throughout the week. The status page of the San Francisco-based outfit charts the progress of the assault and the attempts to end it. Problems with the web service first cropped up on Tuesday, 1 October, before the team realised they were facing a denial-of-service storm. This first wave was dealt with late on Wednesday only for a second phase of the attack to flare up again on Thursday.

Adobe Systems has warned that hackers breached its defences and stole source code along with credit card numbers and other information relating to nearly three million customers. "Very recently, Adobe's security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving illegal access of customer information as well as source code for numerous Adobe products," Adobe chief security officer Brad Arkin said in a blog post.

ABI Research says its data from the first half of 2013 shows that leadership of the mobile tablet market has now shifted from Apple to Android. Data from the second quarter show the number of Android-powered tablets sold surpassing iPads for the first time, and the share of tablet-related hardware revenues achieving parity.

Image placeholder services are useful tools for web app developers. They serve the singular purpose of marking the location of a future image within a design or layout. Spaces that will eventually be filled with production images can be worked around while the artists or photographers prepare the images behind the scenes. From the perspective of rapid application development, an image placeholder service is a standard part of the developer’s toolkit.

Hampton Catlin is the creator of Sass, Haml, Wikipedia Mobile, Tritium, and Moovweb. He's also the author of the Pragmatic Guide to Sass and is the founder of the libsass project.

Intel ramped up its race to the bottom against ARM today, with the launch of an Arduino-compatible single board computer (SBC) based on its new Quark system-on-chip (SoC), and supported with a full Linux OS. In conjunction with the Galileo launch, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said Intel will donate of 50,000 Galileo SBCs to 1,000 universities worldwide over the next 18 months.

The GNOME 3.10 Wayland Tech Preview for Fedora 20 is nearing reality. While there wasn't the Wayland tech preview ready for the recent Fedora 20 Alpha, with the latest Fedora packages it's now possible to run the updated GNOME stack atop Wayland without the use of an X.Org Server.