Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Dot Categories: Applications The KDE community is happy to announce the release of 1.1 for KDE's Plasma Media Center — your first stop for media and entertainment created by the awesome KDE folk. Plasma Media Center is designed to provide an easy and comfortable way to watch your videos, browse your photo collection and listen to your music, all in one place.

What to do? I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it's good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don't know how to do Groklaw like this.

Another Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is set to take place next week to get a better grasp of the Ubuntu 13.10 goals reached and the work ahead within the Ubuntu ecosystem for the next three to six months...

The architect Alstair Parvin shared is this TED Talk—it's a fascinating view of how open source thinking can transform architecture and multiply its benefits to society at large.

Advantech has breathed new life into its Linux-friendly AMD-based PC/104 single board computer family with a fanless, ruggedized PC/104 model built around an AMD G-Series APU. The PCM-3356 offers up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, features dual gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA, four USB ports, three serial ports, and two Mini-PCie sockets, and supports -40 to 85°C extended temperature operation.

The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 (codenamed "Sonkdal") is expected in the next week. With the imminent release of our industry-leading open-source automated benchmarking platform for Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris, here's a look at some of the top features coming. Aside from just those carrying out the benchmarks, many of the features also benefit those viewing the results -- such as Phoronix.com readers.

This year Arianna Huffington delivered the commencement address at Smith College and dared the female graduates (it's still a female college) to change how society has been defining success for women from money and power to wonder, wisdom, giving back, and community. 

Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for five years straight. It is meant for people who could not get into Google Summer of Code for various reasons, or people who simply prefer a differently structured, somewhat less constrained program. Season of KDE is managed by the same team of admins and mentors that take care of Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in matters for KDE, with the same level of quality and care.

The Linux kernel community is busy integrating and testing 3.11 content, working on 3.12 development, and finalizing the topic agenda for the upcoming Linux Conference Europe and Kernel Summit that are scheduled to be held in Edinburgh, UK from October 21-23 2013. Let's start with the release news.

On the latest Linux 3.10 stable kernel we have taken ten common Linux file-systems and generated an interesting performance comparisons. The Linux file-systems being tested in this article include XFS, Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, F2FS, and ZFS.

Selena Deckelmann, a data architect and contributor to PostgreSQL, gave a keynote speech at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference this year called, What open source communities can do for teachers. At the end she encouraged the audience to connect with free and open source developers from their communities to schedule a 15-20 minute talk about their work with a student classroom.

The "blink"* element, a feature of early web browsers that made text blink on and off, has been banished in the latest version of Firefox. The element had already been removed from Internet Explorer, was never implemented in Chrome and was ignored by most browser-makers because it never made it into a W3C HTML spec. The W3C even went so far as to add a Blink-killing requirement to its web accessibility guidelines.

RFEL has unveiled board-level versions of its HALO video processing technology, which runs Linux on a Xylinx Zynq ARM+FPGA system-on-chip. Previously introduced as a ruggedized subsystem aimed at military intelligence applications, such as UAVs, the new HALO boards provide embeddable versions of RFEL’s image stabilization and fusion engines, which can form composite images by combining visible and IR data.

Avnet has unveiled a smaller, lower cost follow-on to its community backed ARM+FPGA based ZedBoard. The $199 Linux-ready MicroZed board is built with a Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC, and can be used as either a single-board computer (SBC) or as a computer-on-module (COM) feeding 100 programmable GPIO signals into a carrier board.

Pwnie Express has opened pre-orders on a Linux-based penetration testing device that supports 4G out-of-band SSH access. The Pwn Plug R2 runs the Kali Linux-based Pwnix distribution on a 1.2GHz Marvell Armada 370 SoC, and offers dual gigabit Ethernet ports, high-gain WiFi and Bluetooth, and a variety of one-click pen-testing tricks, like running the device as an Evil AP.

For decades anyone buying a new computer did so in the knowledge that within a few years it would be overtaken by a much faster machine. Driving this rapid evolution has been Moore's Law – which has allowed the building block of information processing, the transistor – to be packed in greater numbers onto ever smaller computer chips.

Congratulations to the Gluster Community! In addition to shipping GlusterFS 3.4, the latest release of the open source, scale-out storage system, the Gluster Community has significantly increased its number of projects and contributing developers in just three short months. Since May 2013, the Gluster Community has grown from seven projects for the GlusterFS distribution to more than 30 incubating open software-defined storage projects for big data, demonstrating nearly 300 percent growth in the number of developers.

Astute readers will have noticed that we’ve begun publishing our "Open Voices" eBooks in the ePub format. Now, some of our best essays and interviews are available as lightweight and portable files, and can be read on any electronic reading device that supports this open standard. And who better to undertake the task of converting our library than your friendly opensource.com intern? This summer, I’ve refined what I consider a simple, reliable method for creating eBooks the open source way. Today, I’d like to share it.

Dot Categories: DeveloperIn this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Are citizen CIOs a threat to local governments or a blessing in disguise? With government IT departments producing more open data and participation from community interest groups and citizens on the rise, we’re beginning to see the start of a new movement within open government: telling our government which technologies to deploy. Citizens are identifying—and some are creating themselves—the next wave of applications and resources for their municipalities, such as a crowdsourced answering platform for city services, an open data catalog, and a civic infrastructure adoption website for fire hydrants and storm drains. With this, the role of the citizen CIO is beginning to emerge.