Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Intel has announced the release of an open-source Linux Thermal Daemon package for Linux. Intel's Linux Thermal Daemon is for monitoring and controlling platform temperatures...

Broadcom is sampling a system-on-chip (SOC) aimed at control-plane and edge-networking devices. The StrataGX BCM58525 is equipped with a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, and features a packet-buffer subsystem, gigabit Ethernet PHY, cryptographic and programmable packet-handling accelerators, and a Linux development kit. Broadcom’s StrataGX BCM58525 is said to be 20 percent faster than previous StrataGX [...]

On the same day as sharing their plans for Ubuntu's own package format and installer, Rick Spencer of Canonical has laid out plans for the Ubuntu Phone to be "usable as our daily phones" by month's end...

It's not news that popular media have undergone significant changes due to participatory digital platforms. We tweet. We connect. We comment. Above all, we share. And the ability to share media has become a need and expectation in networked culture. There are already all sorts of buzzwords swirling around this topic—viral media, memes, prosumers, attention economy, Web 2.0, etc.

Debian, the daddy to many a Linux distro including Ubuntu and Mint, has been updated for the first time in more than two years. Codenamed Wheezy, Debian 7 actually brings the GPL operating system up to speed with some of its more famous offspring, though, true to its roots, Debian's stable release continues to focus on just that - stability. If you're looking for a stable, rock solid Linux distro the new Debian will not disappoint. If you prefer to have the latest and greatest software on your machine you're better off sticking with more popular Debian offspring, such as the Ubuntu or Mint distributions.

The open-source 3D modelling software Blender has a new release out this afternoon and it brings with it some prominent changes.

Now imagine that millions of Americans walk around each day wearing the equivalent of a drone on their head: a device capable of capturing video and audio recordings of everything that happens around them. And imagine that these devices upload the data to large-scale commercial enterprises that are able to collect the recordings from each and every American and integrate them together to form a minute-by-minute tracking of the activities of millions.

JavaScript has had a long-standing monopoly on client-side Web programming. It has a tremendously large user base, and countless libraries have been written in it. Surely it is the perfect language with no flaws at all! Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. JavaScript is not without its problems, and there exists a large number of libraries and "trans-pilers" that attempt to work around JavaScript's more quirky behaviors. JQuery, Coffeescript, Objective-J and RubyJS are examples of how people have been trying to make JavaScript better. However, a new contender is throwing its hat into the ring in a big way.

With the AMD R600 Gallium3D shader optimizing back-end having been merged last week, new benchmarks were carried out at Phoronix to see the impact of the experimental shader optimizations on multiple AMD Radeon HD graphics cards.

Last week Open Source, Open Standards 2013 took place in London, an event focused on the public sector. Naturally these being two topics we’re very keen on here at OSS Watch I went along too. Overall the key message to take away from the event was just how central to public sector IT strategy these two themes have become, and also how policy is being rapidly turned into practice, everywhere from the NHS to local government.

Blender is a powerful open source 3D drawing and animation program. This software was previously a commercial product, but is now available as a free download. Blender has been used to create stunningly beautiful 3D animated videos, including Big Buck Bunny. Check out some of the gorgeous animated movies made with Blender at the web site's Features Gallery.

Mozilla released its first fully-baked simulation engine for Firefox OS, while the first Geeksphone “Keon” development phones for the open source Linux-based mobile operating system remain sold out. Firefox OS Simulator 3.0 adds rotation and geolocation API simulations, faster boot-times, and a push-to-device feature that lets users transfer apps to a developer phone. Firefox OS [...]

As anticipated, Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" has been officially released this weekend...

Just days after landing some OpenGL performance tweaks, Intel's Eric Anholt has committed some more performance optimizations for the Intel i965 Mesa driver...

Today is the seventh annual International Day Against DRM (Digital Rights Management). We've talked a lot here about DRM particularly in movies and books (read my two-part timeline, The DRM graveyard: A brief history of digital rights management in music and part 2 about video and TV). But what's most important for this year's Day Against DRM isn't any of that. Rather, it's the very future of the way we use the web, due to efforts to get DRM into HTML5. Read this post from the Free Culture Foundation to better understand why that's a problem.

I've been educating library professionals about open source software for nearly seven years now, and sometimes I feel like I've made huge strides and other times, like today, I feel like I have so much more work to do.

Shezhen, China-based Promate Technologies claims to have created the world’s first tablet-projector. The “LumiTab” sports a modest 1024×600 7-inch IPS screen, runs Android 4.2, and uses a Texas Instruments digital-light-processing (DLP) chip to render “incredibly sharp 1080p HD images” on walls and projection screens, according to the company.

As an open source project trusted by hundreds of millions of people around the world, defending Mozilla’s trademarks from this type of abuse is vital to our brand, our users and the continued success of our mission. Mozilla has a longstanding history of protecting users online and was named the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy in 2012 by the Ponemon Institute. We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be – and in several cases actually have been – used by Gamma’s customers to violate citizens’ human rights and online privacy.

The arrest of a 24-year-old Australian claiming to be the head of an international hacking ring and a Twitter hack that briefly sent Wall Street into a tailspin last week has shone the light on hackers as Perth prepares to host its first "hacker con". But the figures behind this weekend's WAHCKon conference say the term hacker has been hijacked and most hackers are simply curious people with a computer.

As the open source ethic has changed the way that we share and develop resources, crowdsourcing is redefining how we can create new resources based upon that willingness to share. One example of crowdsourcing at work for the betterment of us all is public health researchers turning to Twitter to collect real-time data about public health.