Showing all newswire headlines

Earlier this week on Phoronix I noted the new release of the GNU RPG Engine. To no surprise given its very rudimentary feature-set for a game engine in 2014, it was laughed at by many Phoronix readers and several were appalled it is even a GNU project.

A teenager in Australia who thought he was doing a good deed by reporting a security vulnerability in a government website was reported to the police.

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with the planned patch-set for Wine that provides significant Direct3D performance improvements via work on the D3D command stream. Fortunately, the patches have been updated and now offer better support as well.

KStars adds support to online plate solving using astrometry.net web services API, optimizes memory usage; Umbrello adds duplication of diagrams; KWin adds and option in oxygenrc to disable window background; Krita supports kra and ora files; Numerous bug fixes in KMix; and more.

Here’s a good article about security in Apache HBase that I think some readers will love.

Apache HBase is a non-relational database for Hadoop.

Epson demonstrated Android-based Moverio BT-200 eyewear featuring a stereoscopic 3D VR display, a camera for augmented reality applications, and head tracking. Epson unveiled its Epson Moverio BT-100 eyewear computer concept back in February of last year to rather unsparing reviews, but at CES it demonstrated a lighter new BT-200 model that moves from Android 2.2 […]

New year. New blog. New feature. This week we look at cloud as the most disruptive force ever, a history of SaaS and the 10 worst outages of 2013.

arkOS is a project designed to make self-hosting common web services easy for the general public.

Belkin is expanding its line of WeMo home automation products with smart LED bulbs, an automated crockpot, and a Maker kit for WeMo-izing your own devices. What is it about home automation gizmos that inspires vendors to get so cute with their product names? Before there was the WigWag, the Piper, or the Ninja Blocks, […]

If you are trying to check Internet speed from a remote headless server, VPS or an otherwise desktop-less system, Speedtest.net's Flash-based user-friendly interface would be no good. For those of you, there is a command-line interface (CLI) version of Speedtest.net, known as speedtest-cli. Here I will demonstrate how to use speedtest-cli to check Internet speed from the command line in Linux.

Max Eddy, over at PC Mag, has a very interesting article about the experience of Nico Sell, of the company Wickr, talking about how an FBI agent casually approached her to ask if she'd install backdoors in her software allowing the FBI to retrieve information. As the article notes, this is how the FBI (much more so than the NSA) has acted towards many tech companies ever since attempts to mandate such backdoors by law failed (though, they're still trying). Some companies -- stupidly -- agree to this, while many do not. Those that do may think they're helping fight for "good," but the reality is different.

Today in Open Source: Is the Steam Controller too different to succeed? Plus: Korora 20 released, and the Darling Project rises from the ashes. I haven't used the Steam Controller, but it certainly looks different. I don't see that as a bad thing at all. It looks to me like Valve is thinking way outside the box, and that's probably very necessary if Steam Machines are doing to dethrone Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo in the gaming arena.

The latest Phoronix article covering AMD's latest graphics processors on Linux was pointing out that the Radeon R9 270 is far from perfect. One of the big problems with any Radeon HD 7000 series or newer GPU is the poor 2D acceleration performance with the open-source Linux driver, but performance improvements are coming.

Firefox OS has a couple of things going for it that the competition lacks. For one, it’s completely open, much more open than iOS and even more open than Android and Chrome. For two, it’s completely based on HTML5.

Korora was born out of a desire to make Linux easier for new users, while still being useful for experts. The main goal of Korora is to provide a complete, easy-to-use system for general computing. Originally based on Gentoo Linux in 2005, Korora was re-born in 2010 as a Fedora Remix with tweaks and extras to make the system "just work" out of the box.

I really don't understand folks who use songs as their ringtones. Isn't it annoying or confusing when the song comes on the radio? If it's your favorite song, don't you get desensitized to it when you listen to the CD (or digital equivalent of CD)? Nevertheless, you probably hear dozens of ringtones every day. Those probably vary from "super annoying" to "what a cool ringtone".

For those not keeping up, Desura has added a ton of games recently so it's time to highlight them! Useful for those of you who prefer other stores than Steam or don't like all your eggs in one basket.

It was inevitable: Roku, which shipped its 5 millionth streaming media player last year, is now having its Linux-based STB technology embedded directly within Smart TVs. Since the introduction of the “Netflix Player by Roku” in May 2008, Roku has successfully clawed its way to the top of the streaming media player heap. Last April, […]

While Linus's Law says "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", the GNOME project ended out 2013 with more than 46,000 open bugs. Here's some statistics out of the GNOME camp about the bugs and patch flow for 2013...

It’s the first OEM Windows 8 machine that I’ve had access to, and so I attempted to set up a dual-boot system between Ubuntu 13.10 and Windows 8. At the installation type step of the installation process, the Ubuntu installer failed to detect Windows 8 on the HDD, informing me that the “computer currently has no operating systems.” I knew that couldn’t be right, so I chose the Something else option.