Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In quantum physics, one of the calculations you might want to do is figure out how two or more particles may interact. This can become rather complicated and confusing once you get to more than two particles interacting, however. Also, depending on the interaction, there may be the creation and annihilation of virtual particles as part of the interaction. How can you keep all of this straight and figure out what could be happening? Enter the Feynman diagram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram). American physicist Richard Feynman developed Feynman diagrams in 1948. They represent complex quantum particle interactions through a set of very simple diagrams, made up of straight lines, wavy lines and curly lines. This works really well if you happen to be using a chalk board or white board. But, these media are not very useful when sharing your ideas across the Internet. Additionally, most word-processing software is unable to draw these diagrams for your articles, papers and documents. So what can you do? Use the JaxoDraw software package (http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net).

Splashtop, which is especially well-known to many people for its history of letting users run a lightweight version of Linux alongside other operating systems, has a new spin on streaming with Slashtop Streamer for Linux. Splashtop Streamer is an audio-video streaming server, enabling remote access to a computer from an Android device (tablet/phone) or an iOS device (iPad/iPhone/iPod). You can connect within a Local Area Network or through a cross-network or Internet connection. You can use Splashtop Streamer for Linux in conjunction with Splashtop 2 to connect to a remote computer running Ubuntu to use Linux applications and access their data.

Well half a year has passed since Linux Girl last wrote about the invasion of the tiny, Linux-powered PCs, and she's delighted to report that the trend has shown no sign of slowing down. No indeed! "Tiny $57 PC is like the Raspberry Pi, but faster and fully open" is one headline that recently appeared, for example. "Meet the PengPod, a 'true Linux' tablet starting at $120" is yet another.

Google has updated the Stable, Beta and Developer Channels of the desktop version of its Chrome browser with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The Stable Channel update closes seven security vulnerabilities, three of them rated High, and includes bug fixes. New stable Chrome versions for iOS and Android have also been released and include minor improvements. The iOS version of the browser now supports Apple's Passbook application.

In preparation for the imminent release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.2-Randaberg, final validation testing was done on a variety of Linux operating systems in Amazon's EC2 compute cloud. Many of the official Linux images were benchmarked from the c1.xlarge High-CPU Extra Large Instance, including Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

The developers of MongoDB at 10gen have announced that they are making MongoDB's APIs report failed writes by default. The previous default behaviour of the open source NoSQL database had been to return from API calls as soon as possible, without reporting errors, because the design of MongoDB was predicated on the API working with an HTTP-based web server and a pattern was developed of checking for write errors for an entire page being loaded.

FocusWriter uses an intriguing concept that makes you wonder why other word-processing tools do not offer the same hide-away tools panels to eliminate distractions. It offers a set of writing tools with the ease and speed of unencumbered text editors. Focuswriter is a full-screen writing program. It has no option to resize or minimize.

Dear Esther, a unique first person adventure game powered by Valve's Source Engine, will soon be released as a native Linux client. Currently the company is seeking out testers to try out the Linux port.

A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.

For Ubuntu users, Splashtop Streamer offers a supercharged, high-performance alternative to Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and other remote desktop software. Due to its efficient protocol, algorithms and optimizations, Splashtop has been shown in performance benchmarks to deliver up to 15x higher video frame rates and up to 10x lower latency times than its competition. Splashtop sessions are secured with SSL and 256-bit AES encryption, allowing it to serve as a secure pipe between devices, in some cases allowing users to eliminate their need for separate VPN solutions.

New details have been shared with Phoronix about the back-story that led to the work on the open-source NVIDIA Tegra DRM graphics driver that will be introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel. For months there has been an independently-developed Tegra DRM driver that is finally being merged during the next kernel cycle (3.8). In September it was then shared at XDC2012 that NVIDIA would be opening up some Tegra documentation and then days ago I wrote that NVIDIA was contributing to this open-source driver. This week they even dropped some Tegra 2D acceleration code that works with this open-source Linux graphics driver.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsToday (November 27, 2012) is the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Tomorrow, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts. On Thursday there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.

I became aware of the Arduino Project from occasional media reports and a presentation at Atlanta LinuxFest 2009. I was impressed with what the Arduino community was doing, but at that time, I saw no personal use for it. It took a grandson who is heavily involved in a high-school competitive robotics program to change things for me. During a 2011 Thanksgiving family gathering, he asked me some questions about robotics-related electronics, and I told him to google Arduino. He did. Arduino ended up on his Christmas list, and Santa delivered.

Netflix has moved on from just releasing the tools it uses to test the resilience of the cloud services that power the video streaming company, and has now open sourced a library that it uses to engineer in that resilience. Hystrix is an Apache 2 licensed library which Netflix engineers have been developing over the course of 2012 and which has been adopted by many teams within the company. It is designed to manage how distributed services interact and give more tolerance to latency within those connections and the inevitable failures that can occur.

The latest release of Canonical's innovative open source operating system, Ubuntu 12.10, maintains its twice-annual upgrade pattern. Even though the last few releases have generated a steady chorus of cries for longer release schedules, Canonical's leadership stands by the schedule and the rationale behind it.

I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the Free Software Foundation's office. More specifically, we are using Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, which features the free-software-supported Atheros AR9132 chipset with 32MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM.

NVIDIA has added infrastructure to the Linux kernel graphics drivers for Tegra SoCs (system on a chip) which supports the use of hardware-accelerated 2D on Tegra20 and Tegra30 chips. NVIDIA staff are working on integrating the extension, which is released under an open source licence, into the Linux kernel. At present, it does not look like this will be completed in time for Linux 3.8.

Some major changes are supposed to make drivers for Intel and NVIDIA's graphics processors more robust. Linux 3.7 also includes a number of new DVB drivers and makes better use of modern audio chips' power-saving features.

Java dvelopment After some time in preparation, Oracle has now proposed a new project for OpenJDK called Nashorn. The Nashorn project sets out to implement a lightweight high-performance JavaScript runtime in Java which runs on the JVM. Under the direction of Jim Laskey, Multi-language Lead at Oracle, and John Coomes, OpenJDK HotSpot Group Lead, the proposal is to create a JavaScript implementation that can run standalone JavaScript applications or be called via the JSR 223 APIs by Java applications. Nashorn, German for Rhino, will be designed to take advantage of newer JVM technologies such as MethodHandles and InvokeDynamic APIs, which were introduced to make dynamic languages operate faster on the JVM.

In this article is a large OpenGL performance comparison looking at the frame-rates in different Linux games for different AMD Radeon Linux graphics cards when running the stock Ubuntu 12.10 operating system (Mesa 9.0 + Linux 3.5), the Catalyst Linux driver (fglrx 9.0.2) as found in the Ubuntu Quantal archive, and then when running the very latest Radeon Git code: The Linux 3.7 kernel, Mesa 9.1-devel, and xf86-video-ati 7.0.99 Git.