Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course. 

LDT has been published, a Linux Driver Template for helping new Linux kernel developers begin writing hardware device drivers.

Linux developer Andy Grover has posted to the kernel developer mailing list (LKML) to accuse RisingTide Systems of violating Linux kernel licensing conditions with its RTS OS storage operating system. This has led to a discussion in which prominent kernel developers, a RisingTide employee and a legal representative for the company have explained their positions. Discussion has also turned to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux drivers and related cease and desist notices.

The Research team at Mozilla has announced the launch of a new open SWF runtime project called "Shumway". Described as "an HTML5 technology experiment", Shumway is intended to provide a web-native implementation of Adobe's SWF Flash file format, used for vector graphics and multimedia.

In a guest post on Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli's blog, Kevin Carillo, a PhD student from the Victoria University of Wellington, is calling for participants for a survey that seeks to collect data on the experiences of newcomers joining open source communities. Carillo says he is "interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences." The goal of his research project is to collect data on how newcomers to open source communities turn into contributors or what prevents them from doing so.

I was lucky enough to interview Linus quite early in the history of Linux – back in 1996, when he was still living in Helsinki (you can read the fruits of that meeting in this old Wired feature.) It was at an important moment for him, both personally – his first child was born at this time – and in terms of his career. He was about to join the chip design company Transmeta, a move that didn't really work out, but led to him relocating to America, where he remains today.

"The world is built on C++ and so is Microsoft," proclaimed Herb Sutter at Microsoft's Build conference last week in Seattle, Washington. Sutter is chair of the ISO C++ standards committee and Microsoft's Visual C++ language architect. Native code is currently ascendant inside his company, with C++ prominent in SDKs for Windows Phone 8 and for the Windows Runtime - the touch-friendly app platform in Windows 8.

Back in March of this year, the University of Albany Student Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) organized its second Open Source Festival. The event brought together enthusiasts of open source from industry, government, and academia in the New York-Albany area. There, I shared my experience of teaching an open source class at RPI and the work that OSEHRA was doing on further promoting the use of open source software in healthcare. Among other topics of discussion was the need to educate college students on the basic concepts of NoSQL databases.

Facebook has open sourced its Corona scheduling component for Hadoop, which the company calls "the next version of Map-Reduce". Facebook is using its own fork of Apache Hadoop which is optimised for the massive scale of its operations.

In the latest beta release of its Chrome web browser, Google has added a number of new features aimed at developers. The first of these is expanded datalist support – now, developers can set specific dates and times for input elements. As pointed out by Google Software Engineer Peter Beverloo, arbitrary dates and times can still be entered.

While many Linux users are rightfully quite mad over AMD laying off many Linux kernel developers and shutting down their Operating System Research Center, not all hope is lost for future AMD CPU products being well supported under Linux. AMD's (few) graphics driver developers working on the open-source Radeon stack were unaffected by the recent layoffs and OSRC closure, while those Linux developers working on future CPU product enablement, compiler optimizations, enhancing Linux virtualization support, and other areas were the ones hit very hard.

DIY biology is a hot topic and has piqued the interest of the Wellcome Trust and NESTA in the UK and the FBI in the US. What has it got to do with open source and hacking? Quite a lot as it happens and those curious could get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, at a series of workshops held in Manchester over the weekend of 3 and 4 November 2012.

Eight years ago today, Mozilla launched the first version of Firefox. We had the audacity to believe that we could change things. We believed that a community of people who understood the power of the Web, and who put people above profits, could build something amazing.

During a panel discussion with Intel's Dirk Hohndel, Linus Torvalds discussed the latest technical advancements and problems in kernel development. The creator of Linux and Intel's Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist took the stage on day three of the LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain.

Struggling chipmaker AMD has shut down its Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC), handing pink slips to most of its Linux kernel developers in the process. Rumors of the site's closure had been bouncing around the open source community for several days, owing in part to ominous posts to Linux kernel development mailing lists. At the LinuxCon Europe conference on Wednesday, reporters for The H were able to confirm that AMD has indeed shut down OSRC and dismissed its entire staff of around 25.

It is always a pleasure to announce the official release of the new stable version 0.8.0 of the FreeMedForms project. This anniversary version (the FreeMedForms EMR one and its main admin) brings two major innovations..

Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira's organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

The recent release of Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal, is a more palatable version of the open source OS built around the Unity desktop environment. Perhaps I am growing more accustomed to Unity, or maybe Canonical's developers are succeeding in refining the graphical user interface, so it seems less objectionable for me to use.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Okay, that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but when I tweeted out a request for suggestions for an opening line, that was the most interesting response (thank you, @kantrn). I got others that were a lot more helpful (thank you, @justinlilly)—that's the power of community, right?

RISC OS, the operating system with its roots in Acorn's 1987 Archimedes micro and therefore the birth of the ARM processor architecture, has been released for the Raspberry Pi. Available as a free download, or pre-loaded onto an SD card for £10 plus postage, the release for the Pi is version 5.19 RC6. There's also a £35 software bundle on offer, dubbed NutPi, that includes all manner of useful applications to turn a RISC OS Pi into a viable everyday machine.