Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was a 1993 adventure game out of Sierra On-Line that was popular back in the day and is now being remade as "Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition." The title was announced back in October with plans to release the game for Windows, Apple OS X, iPad, Android, and Linux. The game re-make is being developed by Pinkerton Road and Phoenix Online Studios.

Cogent announced the CSB1890T10-Q15, a tiny (84 x 55mm) COM Express Type 10 Mini module with a 1.5GHz, quad-core AMD GX-415GA SoC, featuring PCI Express, SATA, and USB 3.0. Cogent Computer Systems offers a number of Atmel- and Marvell-based ARM computer-on-modules, and has now introduced a x86-based COM Express Type 10 module built around the AMD GX-415GA. This is the slower of AMD’s two quad-core, 64-bit G-Series SoCs at 1.5GHz, but offers the advantage of a much lower 15 Watt TDP. Other recent COMs built around the SoC include MSC Embedded’s C6C-GX COM Express Type 6 module.

The recently released Mint 16, nicknamed Petra, might be the perfect Linux desktop for newcomers. At its core is Ubuntu 13.10, but on top of this are desktops Mate and Cinnamon, the latter being the Mint project's homegrown user interface. Ubuntu gives a stable foundations on which to build, allowing the project to focus more on its desktops and less on the underpinnings. The result is a pair of desktops both worthy of consideration but with Cinnamon far more interesting as its hits version 2.0

RadiumBoards announced a $50 “HD Camera Cape” for the BeagleBone Black with a 1.3-megapixel Aptina sensor that provides 720p, 30fps video and Linux and Android support. There’s now a second commercially available camera cape (add-on board) for the BeagleBone Black single board computer, following up on CircuitCo’s 3.1-megapixel BeagleBone 3.1MP Camera Cape. The $50 HD Camera Cape comes from RadiumBoards, a Haryana, India based subsidiary of VVDN Technologies, and provides 720p, 30 frames per second video capture.

Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to the problem than simply running out of honey. Bees are one of the most abundant pollinators in the natural world. They are the unsung, unpaid facilitators of human agricultural practices and have been for as long as we have sewn seeds. Their disappearance would spell disaster for our food supply, with some estimating our species lasting only four years on this planet without them. So, what can be done?

Despite the backing of the Linux Foundation, this is a cross-platform effort, supporting all major desktop and mobile operating systems, initially including Linux, Android, Arduino, iOS, OS/X, Windows 7/8/RT, the Unity game engine, and “thin clients.” Missing here are the many controller-oriented real-time operating systems (RTOSes) that will initially dominate IoT at the device level, but Allseen appears to be looking at the long haul and the higher end of the market. Advanced OSes like Linux and Android are expected to increasingly move into controller-like, low end embedded duty as demand increases for greater intelligence and Internet connectivity.

I work for a private ISV and consultancy company focused on delivering software products for financial institutions. Three years ago my company decided to share our achievements and knowledge by publishing our application, FinTP, for processing financial transactions under an open source license. Here, I will explore the changes a company has to undertake when embarking on the transition from a traditional business model to a business model that supports open source. This is based on nine years of experience with a once commercially-available solution. The motivation for a transition like this comes from our company's ambition to be in a position of leadership in this changing and challenging industry.

Project Neon, the daily builds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 2 for Kubuntu, has started releasing ISO images for testing. These are very early previews of the next generation of KDE Software. It is strongly recommended not be installed on a production machine but can be tested as live images or installed into a VirtualBox or other VM. Crashes and bugs are virtually guaranteed. The only supported upgrade path is to install a later ISO image. More information on Rohan's blog. Project Neon introduction on the Dot. Experimental. Not for use in production environments. Dot Categories: Infrastructure

That's the headline and question NPR blogger Gene Demby explores in this article. Demby looks at why open source developers tend to be white men, interviewing people who say there are a variety of contributing factors that keep African Americans and Latinos from participating in software development including education, Internet access, pay inequality, and more.

The FreeBSD Foundation is sponsoring a new FreeBSD Journal publication that's about to begin publishing bi-monthly issues concerning BSD.

We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found..

Google is working on a webbified development to build the “next generation” of Chrome Apps. One of the search titan’s employees has revealed the existence of a Chrome App-based development environment codenamed Spark.

Close on the heels of the revelation that Samsung’s NX300M camera runs Tizen, this week saw an announcement by Nexcom of a developer-focused, Intel Atom-based automotive computer called the VTC 1010-IVI that supports the Tizen In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) stack, plus news of a Tizen-enabled Samsung smart refrigerator. Meanwhile, Samsung’s first Tizen phones are rumored to be under test at Korean mobile carriers.

How often have you thought of a way to improve a piece of software or hardware? How many times have you wondered why companies invest millions of dollars to produce a product that is obviously lacking from the moment it launches? Have you ever wished you were in a position, or had the skills, to change that? Chances are if you've typed 'open source' into your search engine then you've heard about SourceForge and OpenHatch. If you're not familiar with these sites, I'd absolutely recommend checking them out. They present an amazing platform where you can get involved with a variety of high-quality, open source projects.

Intermec unveiled a rugged, Android-ready handheld computer designed for field service applications. The CN51 is equipped with a 1.5GHz, dual-core TI OMAP4 SoC, a 4-inch, 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, IP64-rated sealing, 12-hour plus battery, and options including 1D and 2D barcode scanners, keypads, GLONASS-ready GPS, cellular, and a 5-megapixel camera.

I've teased about Steam, speculated about Steam and even bragged about Steam finally coming to Linux. Heck, check out the screenshot for just a partial list of games already running natively under our beloved OS. Little did I know that the folks at Valve not only planned to support Linux, but they're also putting a big part of their future behind it as well!

Hackers have fired up a large army of remote-controlled computers to get around GitHub's login rate-limiting policies, designed to thwart attempts to brute-force guess the passwords for its users' accounts. The bots, most likely unwitting PCs compromised by malware, have attacked the online source-code repository from "nearly 40,000 unique IP addresses", each trying to crack programmers' passwords, the company said this week.

All Things Open began with interesting and controversial keynotes; both centered on a call to action for the open source community. This part one of a two part series: first, a recap of Andy Hunt’s keynote, second and published next, a reacp of Whurley’s keynote.

After more than three years of development, Red Hat has released version 1.0.0 of Ceylon, its homebrewed, open-source programming language that's designed to be a replacement for Java. In its current form, King describes Ceylon as a "cross-platform" language. The 1.0.0 release, announced at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium on Tuesday, includes compilers that can output either Java bytecode or JavaScript.

Information is coming in fast and furiously (I adverbialized for all the English majors!) from the Open Stack summit that recently took place in Hong Kong. Among other tidbits came the results of a user study that offered some surprising news; namely that adoption and deployment of Open Stack is being driven by smaller companies right now rather than global behemoths as one may have surmised. While 21% of OpenStack installations are in companies with more than 10,000 employees, fully 42% of installations are in companies with fewer than 100 employees.