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One of my favorite quotes is "We are what we celebrate." Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics, says this and it comes up on an almost daily basis one way or another in my work in open source hardware and education. One of the challenges of getting more young people into engineering and computer programming is that we're collectively competing with the high profile status that becoming a famous, professional athlete or musician, or reality show star, promises. I don't expect the mass media to change, because change happens from small groups of motivated people. And, this is where the maker, hacker, and open source software and hardware communities are making great progress.

Ohava Computers will be releasing their Alpha early spring 2014 which will include: Free On-Demand Computing, (a free 512MB virtual machine, or 1000 hour/month scalable cloud instance), and an open source marketplace.

Intel’s Linux-friendly (Next Unit of Computing) mini-PCs are aimed at home theater applications, as well as other general-purpose mini-PC duties. Previous models have featured Intel Core processors, including 4th Gen. “Haswell” CPUs, but for the first time, Intel has launched a NUC Kit DN2820FYKH model based on the Celeron N2820. This 2.4GHz dual-core processor shares the same 22nm “Silvermont” architecture as the Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I).

pax is one of the lesser known utilities in a typical Linux installation. That's too bad, because pax has a very good feature set, and its command-line options are easy to understand and remember. pax is an archiver, like tar(1), but it's also a better version of cp(1) in some ways, not least because you can use pax with SSH to copy sets of files over a network. Once you learn pax, you may wonder how you lived without it all these years.

After this weekend carrying out a 25-way open-source Linux graphics driver comparison featuring AMD Radeon, Intel HD Graphics, and NVIDIA GeForce hardware, the tables have now turned to look at nearly the same assortment of hardware but when using the high-performance, proprietary Linux graphics drivers. We've also upped the demanding OpenGL benchmarks used -- including the Source Engine -- as we see how the AMD and NVIDIA binary graphics drivers are doing to start 2014.

The goal is to write an app’s non-UI code (such as data access, or application logic) in Java, which is then shared by web apps (using GWT), Android apps and iOS apps.

With a fresh round of Mesa Git commits on Monday morning the support landed for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL 3.3 within Nouveau's NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers.

For those curious about performance differences between the current Debian 7.3 "Wheezy" stable release and the upcoming but currently unstable Debian 8.0 "Jessie", here are some performance benchmarks comparing Debian's stable and testing releases on the same hardware. Making things more interesting, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development form was also tossed into the mix.

Google, through Karen Grunberg and Daniel Xie, has announced earlier today, January 27, the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release for the stable branch of the Google Chrome 32 web browser, for Linux, Windows, Mac and Chrome Frame platforms.

Gigastrand OS 1.0 is available. Gigastrand has a vision of a purpose-built operating system that appeals to a wide-variety of people and aids Windows and MAC users in the transition to Linux. Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others have done a beautiful job of creating an OS that appeals to most of what Gigastrand sets out to do - but not everything. The areas that we feel Linux Mint does not cover are areas for improvement and areas that fit well into the Gigastrand model.

Today in Open Source: A Windows user bashes Linux. Plus: Linux as a gaming platform, and a review of Korora 20.

The upcoming game Dungeon Colony I preview in a GOL Cast before has had quite a lot of updates recently including a brand new trailer to show it off.

Documents linked with law enforcement inquiries appear to have been stolen in recent phishing attacks on certain employee email accounts, Microsoft said.

i3 is a tilling window manager. In this tutorial, I will try to explain the basics.

Often referred to as the "swiss army of knife" for TCP/IP networking, Netcat is an extremely versatile Linux utility that allows you to do anything under the sun using TCP/UDP sockets. It is one of the most favorite tools for system admins when they need to do networking related troubleshooting and experimentation. This tutorial presents a few useful netcat examples, although the sky is the limit when it comes to possible netcat use cases.

The KDE edition works great all around. Compiz in an Ubuntu-based system outside of Unity appears to be a lost cause, but otherwise the Xfce edition, especially in conjunction with Devilspie2, works great as well.

I recently listed five best practices for community managers in 2014. Today, on Community Manager Appreciation Day, we've collected the wisdom of 14 great leaders from a variety of open source communities to find out: What is the best thing about being a community manager?  Here's what they said.

The following is a short reminder for those of you who still use the Ubuntu 13.04 operating system, that Canonical will no longer provide security/critical fixes and software updates for the Raring Ringtail distribution.

Catherine Dumas is a PhD student in the College of Computing and Information (CCI) at the University at Albany at the State University of New York (SUNY). She teaches two undergraduate courses, one in the Computer Science department and one in the Informatics Department. Aside from her PhD work and teaching, Catherine is very involved in encouraging men and women to pursue their dreams in the field. She does this by staying active in the student chapter of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) and in the activites going on at the College of Computing and Information Women in Technology (CCIWiT) group. Open source software is also a topic she's passionate about, and for the past three years she has helped organize the annual Open Source Festival at SUNY. this interview.

About two weeks ago, on January 10th to be exact, a call went out for a massive Internet protest, not unlike the protest two years ago against SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation. On that day, David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, one of the founders of the planned protest, said, “Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime. If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”