Showing headlines posted by bob

BeagleBoard.org tomorrow will announce a faster 1GHz version of its hackable, open source BeagleBone SBC for only $45. The BeagleBone Black runs Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3359 processor, doubles RAM to 512MB of DDR3, adds 2GB of onboard flash, and features a new micro-HDMI port. The BeagleBone Black’s low price, almost [...]

A Spanish Linux software group has filed a complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission over its controversial implementation of UEFI Secure Boot for Windows 8 hardware.

There is now no question that genomics, the study of the genomes of organisms and a field that includes intensive efforts to determine the entire DNA sequence of organisms, has joined the big data club. The development of prolific new DNA sequencing technologies is forcing biologists to embrace the dizzying terms of terabytes, petabytes and, looming on the horizon, exabytes.

Zhuhai, China-based Allwinner Technology has added one dual- and two quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 models to its A-series system-on-chip (SOC) family. Recently, the company’s SOCs have begun showing up as the engines powering low-cost Android- and Linux-based tablets, smartphones, and specialized board-level embedded designs. The expanded Allwinner A-series SOC line now encompasses seven models: four single-core [...]

Ubuntu Touch, the version of the Linux operating system for smartphones and tablets, is now available.

"Got code?" is the theme of the Alameda County Apps Challenge 2013.1, the second in a series of unique day-long events designed to challenge the public to create web and mobile applications using Alameda County open data sets. The Apps Challenge will run from 8:30 am to 7:00 pm on Saturday, April 27, 2013 at Berkeley High School, one block from the Downtown Berkeley BART.

Raspberry Pi co-creator Gert Van Loo (pictured) and master-modder Ben Heck will be active participants in electronic distributor Newark element14′s expo booth at Design West (ESC) in San Jose next week. Events and activities at the booth will include hands-on demos, product giveaways, Q&A sessions, and tutorials on developing Arduino-based applications and using ARM development [...]

Kids these days, they just don't care Code-sharing website GitHub has grown so popular that it and open source are practically synonymous for many developers. But new research shows that most of the projects now on GitHub are released under license terms that are unclear, inconsistent, or nonexistent, leaving their legal status as open source software uncertain.…

Red Hat's Carlos O'Donell provided an update this week on the GNU C Library along with some recent and upcoming features for glibc...

Do you have access to a 3D printer? Yes No 3D printing is changing the game. The way we strategize, plan, create, and do business is different now that objects can be materialized by adding layer upon layer.

Smart composite parts, from carbon fiber to nanocomposites, are transforming our everyday lives. So much so, even the White House is interested. In the first decade of the twentieth century, science advanced material structures and content to a point where, when coupled with technology, we can now produce new, advanced materials. Think of a modern prosthetic leg: Advances in smart composite parts have allowed us to combine new materials like carbon fiber with technology to create robotic limbs that a person can move and feel.

Karen Cranston (@kcranstn) is an evolutionary biologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. NESCent promotes the synthesis of information, concepts, and knowledge to address significant, emerging, or novel questions in evolutionary science and its applications. They collect new data under a Creative Commons license (CC0) to free scientific data and make it more widely available.

Imagine the kind of havoc a malicious hacker could cause if he or she were able to take over an airplane simply using his Android phone. With a tap of his or her fingers, the hacker could arbitrarily control the plane remotely and redirect its path. If you think this is only something that could happen in a Hollywood movie, think again, because that's exactly the scenario a German security researcher laid out on Wednesday at a conference in Amsterdam.

The OSI steps up on its educational mission around open source licensing by hosting an event at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the home of the US Government and many federal agencies    

At the RTS Embedded Systems show in Paris this week, Sysgo demonstrated its PikeOS microkernel using ARM’s TrustZone technology to enable secure communications between Android apps in “Normal World” and a PikeOS-based cryptographic app in “Secure World.” Lost? Wait. There’s more. Sysgo points out that the embedded market is evolving rapidly due to the growing [...]

The latest release of the open source photo editing software adds Lightroom import, camera profiles for automatic de-noising, the ability to use the same plugin multiple times and JPEG2000 support    

Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012. As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.

Google, Red Hat, BlackBerry and Earthlink have called on the US regulators to start an investigation into the "outsourcing" of patent litigation to specialised patent assertion entities    

It's not exactly any secret that Microsoft has had its fair share of legal troubles over the years, many of them arising from its pesky little habit of finding ways to shut the door on competitors.

So when Secure Boot came along in Windows 8, many considered it just a matter of time before a formal complaint was made.

I wonder why more open source users do not actively participate in the open source community and become committers or contributors. After understanding a project's capabilities and roadmap, anyone is able to start directly hacking the source code and contributing useful extensions. Because open source is a distributed, participatory meritocracy, the upside benefit is high and the barrier to entry is low—you don't have to move, be employed by a Valley startup, give up your day job, or wait to obtain a 4 year degree.