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Meet Ellie, a six week old robot weighing 100 lbs who can launch a two foot diameter exercise ball over 10 feet in the air! Ellie even has eyes: a webcam fitted to the front of her chassis that uses code written in Python running on a Raspberry Pi to process images. Ellie’s main code is written in Java and allows her mecanum wheels to drive, her claw to catch exercise balls, and her kicker to launch balls into the air. In just a few weeks Ellie will be competing along with more than 50 other robots in her first competition.

So, Unity 5 is now a thing, I hear the sound of many developers who recently purchased version 4 crying out in horror at having to pay to upgrade so soon. Looks like a lot of new goodies for developers!

Distributed systems researcher Leslie Lamport has been awarded the A.M. Turing award, computer science's equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Updated ruby193-rubygem-actionpack packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Software Collections 1. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate security impact.

A number of commits to KDE Workspaces were pushed to Git this morning that will ultimately benefit the next-generation KDE desktop with its Wayland support.

Add the GNOME Do application launcher to your Ubuntu 13.10 system.

At Google's Pwnium hacking competition, two new security exploits in Chrome OS were demonstrated, while at Pwn2Own a Chrome Web browser problem was found that also impacted Chrome OS. All three problems have now been patched.

Unity has partnered with Mozilla for bringing their popular Unity Game Engine to web browsers via WebGL and ASM.js.

Add the GNOME Do application launcher to your Linux Mint 16 computer.

In today's open source roundup: Asus might release an Android gaming console called the Game Box. Plus: Watch Netflix in Linux with Pipelight, and Ubuntu 13.10 versus Windows 8 while running Portal 2.

The GOG.com online game store that offers various DRM-free game titles will finally begin shipping Linux games.

Controlling Amarok from a terminal may come in handy in various situations, and can also be a way of using scripts or aliases to give commands directly to Amarok, without having to even keep the window opened, instead leaving it running in the system tray.

Last week at CeBIT, KDE won the Linux New Media Readers Choice Award 2014 (link to German language Linux Magazine) for the best Linux Desktop Environment.

At a recent gathering of like-minded Linux users, I learned that many of my peers hadn't actually made the move to SSDs yet......it boiled down to three main concerns: reliability; compatability with Linux; and whether an SSD would make much of a difference. Luckily, these three concerns are based either on misunderstandings, outdated data, exaggeration or are just not correct.

Every once in a while here in the Linux blogosphere, a topic will suddenly pop up in multiple separate, unconnected places and take on a life of its own. Perhaps it's some unseen cosmic force guiding Linux geeks' conversations in the same direction, or perhaps it's just Linux Girl's proclivity for drawing connections. In any case, it happened again earlier this month.

A European telecom law approved by a committee today is intended to prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing down Web applications, but lets ISPs charge content providers for higher quality of service.

Critics say this allowance will create an Internet "fast lane" and undermine the principles of net neutrality, that Internet service providers should treat all traffic equally. The European Parliament's Industry Committee announced its vote in favor of the "Connected Continent" legislation, saying that "Internet providers should no longer be able to block or slow down Internet services provided by their competitors."

Check and wipe: The la-la-la-its-not-happening plan is no good Hackers using a Trojan seized control of over 25,000 Unix servers worldwide to create a potent spam and malware distribution platform.…

Gmusicbrowser is a music browser for GNOME written in Perl and GTK2, built to handle large collections, highly configurable, with integrated music library, plugin support, many view modes, lyrics and Wikipedia info integration, as well as equalizer.

The pragmatic programmer who popularized Ruby and katas and was an original signatory of the Agile Manifesto discusses what's wrong with Agile, why he thinks Elixir is the next killer language, and how to design your own programming challenges.

Adding fuel to the debate over the treatment of women in tech, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at GitHub, has stormed out of her job, accusing the company of ignoring harassment in the workplace. One of the company's three cofounders and his wife had persistently intimidated her, and an engineer had repeatedly ripped out her code after she turned down his advances, Horvath claimed.