Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While they may or may not be reliable, there are reports showing up online claiming that the first Firefox OS phones could go on sale this week. The Verge and The Next Web have been providing updates, and the big surprise is that while companies ranging from ZTE to Alcatel, LG, Huawei and Sony have committed to producing Firefox OS phones, the first company to offer them out of the gate is a small Spanish player called Geeksphone. Whoever ships these phones first will get a leg up on what could become a big trend, and possibly the key to Mozilla's future. Here is a look at how Firefox OS phones could transform Mozilla.

When Oracle bought Sun, one of the reasons was to gain control of MySQL, the most popular open-source database management system (DBMS). It didn't work. Some of MySQL's founders and top programmers had already left to create the MySQL fork, MariaDB, while others started SkySQL, a MySQL and MariaDB support company. Now, the old core MySQL developers have rejoined forces.

For most home-based situations, you won’t have to bother with the security of your Linux machine. It is pretty secure by default. However, if you are using your computer as a server, either SSH server or Web server, or you are the system administrator for your company, then you will have to step up on the Linux security.

Detractors of open source software often point to its broad developer base and open source code as a potential security risk. But that's not a fair assessment, according to Dr Ian Levy, technical director with the CESG, a department of the UK's GCHQ intelligence agency that advises UK government on IT security.

Martin is a young accordion prodigy from Panama. Producer and DJ, Stephen Levitin (aka Apple Juice Kid), and myself, a UNC Professor and emcee, met him while building a Beat Making Lab at a community center in the city of Portobelo.

The first alpha/development release of Fedora 19 "Schrödinger's Cat" is now available after having been challenged by a delay...

Not all businesses can stand behind their products, and even fewer can stand on top of them. At LulzBot, it’s not uncommon to find the multi-talented and seriously committed team mounting their 3D printers upside down or bumping along Colorado mountain roads with a functioning 3D printer in tow—all in the interest of testing the durability and strength of their product under the most extreme conditions. And that’s only part of what makes LulzBot different. Based in Loveland, Colorado, LulzBot designs, builds, and sells desktop 3D printers, plus parts and plastics, for entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and experimenters.

Quick, when did the first Chromebooks (portable computers running Google's Chrome OS platform) arrive? The answer is that the initial Chromebooks went on sale in June of 2011, nearly two years ago. It's no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. But at the same time, many users have taken notice of the low prices that these portables are offered at, and the many freebies that they come with. For example, the Acer C7 Chromebook, shown here, sells for only $199.

After tallying the votes in a naming contest that kicked off in October 2012, leading Linux vendor Red Hat has announced that the product formerly known as the JBoss Application Server (AS) will henceforth be known as WildFly.

The Manjaro Linux distribution describes itself as a "user-friendly" version of the popular Arch Linux platform. Manjaro Linux still follows Arch in a rolling-release manner, but it's designed to offer greater user-friendliness and accessbility, complete with an easy installation routine.

The open source Xen hypervisor was all the rage in 2005 across many Linux vendors. At the time, Red Hat specifically called out Xen as being a key part of its technology roadmap for 2006 and beyond. Red Hat started to move away from Xen in 2008 with its acquisition of KVM founder Qumranet. Other Linux vendors have also progressively moved to embrace KVM as the Linux virtualization technology of choice as well.

Japanese internet service provider NTT Plala announced a TV set-top box (STB) that runs Linux or Android on an STMicroelectronics dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The Hikari TV Smart TV STB supports DLNA and OTT (over-the-top) services, can run HTML5 apps, and is optimized for NTT Plala’s Hikari TV cloud-based gaming service.

When I tell people about OpenGamma, reactions are often incredulous. We’ve built a full market risk analytics platform for capital markets—with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, such as a declarative calculation engine, a flashy HTML5 GUI, and a comprehensive analytics library—and we’ve released it under the Apache 2.0 License. And, our key customers and users at the moment are some of the world’s most secretive technologists: hedge fund managers. To an outsider, this may look like a curious combination.

With the release of the Linux 3.9 kernel being imminent, here's a recap of the most interesting features coming to this next Linux release.

Mentor Graphics has merged the Linux-based automotive infotainment technology it acquired in February from MontaVista Software into its own in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform. Additionally, the new Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) complies with Yocto Project 1.3 and GENIVI 3.0 requirements, says Mentor.

The push to cloud transforms the way we apply information security principles to systems and applications. Perimeters of the past, secured heavily with traditional network devices in the outermost ring, lose effectiveness day by day. Shifting the focus to defense in depth brings the perimeter down to the individual cloud instances running your application. Security-Enhanced Linux, or SELinux, forms an effective part of that perimeter.

CompuLab has introduced a rugged, fanless, microserver based on 3rd Generation Intel Core Processors, clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Linux-friendly “uSVR” runs from -20 to 60° C, accommodates up to four internal 2.5-inch drives, networks via WiFi and up to six GbE channels, and expands modularly.

Oracle has redoubled its efforts to address the recent spate of vulnerabilities related to Java running in web browsers, but the renewed focus on security has had an unfortunate side effect – namely, that Java 8 will no longer ship by its planned September 2013 release date. According to Mark Reinhold, chief architect for Oracle's Java platform group, the database giant's recent efforts to patch highly publicized security holes in the Java plug-in have sapped the resources of the ongoing Java 8 development effort.

If your password is as easy as 123, we need to talk. The first password I ever remember using when I started in system administration was ".redruM" (no quotes). It was by far the craftiest, most-impossible-to-guess password ever conceived by a sentient being. Sadly, a mere 17 years later (wow, it's been a long time!) that password probably could be brute-force compromised in ten minutes—with a cell phone.

Linus Torvalds cursed out NVIDIA ten months ago when he was asked about the lack of Linux support for Optimus, NVIDIA's hybrid graphics technology. NVIDIA has now released a beta of its proprietary Linux graphics driver which finally supports Optimus. The sad thing here is that NVIDIA will be praised for the Optimus support, even though they sat back and waited for quite a while to let others build foundations they now use in their driver, which is fairly popular among users, but fairly hated among open source developers.