Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Learn how to analyze the performance of your application using the cycles per instruction (CPI) analysis tool. The CPI tool is part of the IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) for PowerLinux.

For ARM's new ARMv8 64-bit architecture, Red Hat developers are creating a completely open version of the OpenJDK and the HotSpot JVM in what is believed to be the first full and open port of HotSpot since OpenJDK was freed five years ago

A lot has changed in the three years since the last major Windows announcement. Netbooks were on the rise. The iPad wouldn’t be introduced for another six months and Nokia still had the lead for most smartphone sales in the world. Only 172 million smartphones were sold in 2009 vs. an estimated 146 million units in just one quarter of this year. Without wide adoption of tablets or smartphones, Microsoft still dominated the world of personal computing. Linux, while popular in the server room, was virtually non-existent in consumer products, except for its brief rise in netbooks before Microsoft reportedly pressured its OEMs to stop production and shift back to Windows.

The Code for America Brigade recently launched Race for Reuse. It's a different kind of contest that aims to increase adoption of existing open source projects with real dollars. The goal isn't to build something brand new—it's to encourage volunteer teams (called "brigades") across the U.S. to stand up and support existing open source projects. Because one of the more difficult parts of deploying open source apps is building the user community around the projects and getting citizens engaged.

I often discuss the Linux port of Scrivener with my writer friend Ken McConnell. We both like Scrivener's interface, and we both prefer to use Linux as our writing platform. Unfortunately, the Linux port of Scrivener just doesn't compare to the OS X version. The other day, Ken told me about Plume Creator.

While it looked hopeful at first with today's announcement of a fully open-source graphics stack for the Broadcom VideoCore found in the popular Raspberry Pi development board, upon closer examination it's actually not that good.

Linux kernel developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o has released a series of patches for what he has called "a Lance Armstrong bug" in the kernel, meaning behaviour that does not trip up tests but also makes the kernel work differently than intended. A user had reported a problem that caused them to lose data; the kernel developers quickly narrowed this down to a fault in the ext4 implementation that was introduced with the release of Linux 3.6.2, just over a week ago. Apparently, the data corruption bug was hard to track down as it only manifests itself if a system is rebooted twice in a relatively short period of time.

Today we have some really big news, which is going to mean a lot to many programmers in our community who have been asking about it ever since launch. This is one of those announcements that has been in the pipeline for quite some time, but we haven’t been able to talk about it until now.

A substantial number of apps available from Google Play had serious flaws in their Secure Sockets Layer implementations and thus were vulnerable to hack attacks, European researchers found. The team downloaded 13,500 popular free apps to study their use of the SSL or Transport Layer Security protocols, with a particular focus on the apps' vulnerabilities against Man-in-the-Middle attacks.

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of the latest version of the open source startup daemon systemd. With version 195, the tool, which is being used by Fedora, openSUSE and several other Linux distributions, has received what Poettering calls a "non-trivial amount of cool new features".

Have you found some time to do any tinkering with Arduino? It's an open source electronics platform based on a microcontroller and microprocessor with I/O capabilities that allow it to drive many kinds of surprising inventions. We've covered the platform and the community that creates with it before. And now, the Arduino Due has arrived. It's a major upgrade to the 8-bit, 16-MHz microcontroller platform that now offers a 32-bit, 84-MHz processor. Look for a wave of new Arduino inventions based on it.

This tutorial is Part 1 of a three-part "Learning PHP" series teaching you how to use PHP through building a simple workflow application. This tutorial walks you through creating a basic PHP page using HTML forms and covers accessing databases.

A provocative research finding is that 75-90% of all large organizational projects fail to meet their original objectives, (Patterson et al. (2006)). The same research suggests human practices and behaviors—more than technical or financial matters—are at the root of the breakdowns.

Well it's been another wild week here in the Linux blogosphere, but this time the cause will come as no surprise to anyone who cares about Linux or FOSS. Last week, of course, was the week that included Oct. 18 -- a date most of us have had marked on our calendars for the past oh, say, six months. Why? Because it was none other than the official release date of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal."

While Ubuntu has been taking the ARM server and desktop markets seriously for quite some time and is leading quite well on that front, Fedora has been getting behind ARM, and other distributions like Gentoo and Arch have their own interesting ARM Linux undertakings, openSUSE has been rather late to the party.

Just three weeks ago at JavaOne, Oracle was still saying that the JavaFX RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform would become fully available as open source software by the end of the year. Now, JavaFX project architect Richard Bair has adjusted that schedule and moved the release date to February 2013.

My love affair with cities, San Francisco in particular, started early. Though my parents moved from San Francisco to the suburbs before I turned one, we visited the city often. One of my earliest memories of the City: In the family car driving up Interstate 280, face pressed to the window, I look out at the houseboats anchored in Mission Creek and wish that I could live there.

Earlier this month Samsung introduced a new Linux file-system, F2FS, that was designed for mobile devices with flash memory. Initial testing of F2FS yields very positive results against EXT4 and NILFS2..

Open-Source Intel developers have long been working towards a tear-free Linux desktop with proper vsync support. For Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware there's still been some tearing issues, but they hope to soon finally have it solved.

Technology professionals who work in and around SMBs know that sometimes bringing up information security in a smaller IT shop can be a tough sell. In many cases, SMBs feel that they don't present an attractive or large enough target for hackers to be interested in them.