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A simple device powered by an Arduino Leonardo microcontroller board, it can be used to add interactivity to any interface. It’s the type of device that a DIYer will love.

Valve's Steam service for PC distribution and sales has over 65 million users playing its over 3,000 games, the company announced this afternoon. That's a 30 percent increase (15 million accounts) over the last 12 months -- not too shabby! -- putting the service's userbase well above that of Microsoft's Xbox Live (which has 48 million, according to MS). Not quite the 110 million that belong to Sony's PlayStation Network, but not too shabby.

It might seem strange coming from the founder of OpenLogic, a company focused on helping others succeed with open source, but the fact is that closed source is better than open source in certain situations.

A few days back I delivered benchmark results of a 13-way graphics card comparison comparing the OpenGL gaming performance between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8.1. In that article there were multiple AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards tested using the binary drivers for each operating system. On Wednesday I then shared results with the Radeon Gallium3D driver compared to Catalyst on Linux and Windows while today are some of the early Nouveau results compared to the proprietary NVIDIA GPU drivers on Windows and Linux.

Dark Mail Alliance, co-founded by Lavabit and Silent Circle, aims to create an open source email protocol and architecture that has end-to-end encryption built-in.

New Version Includes Full Integration of OpenZFS. Zetavault supports both your current and future network fabric without having to change your storage hardware. The software is designed to dramatically simplify the creation and ongoing management of storage servers.

Kwheezy version 1.3 is now available from the download page. This release focuses on improving the installation and post-install process. Also there is quite a bit of tidying up and polishing. Changes in version 1.3: Updated to Debian 7.2; added GPT partitioning support to the installer (requires BIOS/Legacy boot); a new post-installation wizard adds polish, hopefully the need to add a regular user account will be clearer; a few redundant (duplicate functionality) applications have been removed; the administrator account has UID/GID changed to 999, so the first real user will be 1000; the menu has been tidied up, so it should be easier to browse; Kwheezy Keyboard Selector now has a text box for testing the new configuration.

Big Data has always made sense in the cloud. After all, if you need more resources, they'll give you as much as you need, but up until fairly recently, if you wanted to crunch big data using Hadoop, you were limited to your datacenter. But that's changing as cloud vendors from HP to Rackspace, to Amazon to Microsoft Azure are swarming to move your Hadoop business to the cloud.

Smartphone developers have a lot of options besides iOS and Android, and this infographic illustrates some of the latest trends in mobile development including the most popular platforms. Number 3 might just surprise you.

ITTIA today announced new features with which value-added application developers and original equipment manufacturers, using Android, can bring their own business data onto Android devices.

The latest company now offering low-cost ARM development boards for pushing their platform to ARM Linux and Android developers is VIA Technologies. VIA claims their new Springboard platform is "the fast path from prototype to production" and only costs $100 USD, but the specifications aren't all that impressive.

Toradex has launched a pair of Linux-ready SODIMM style computer-on-modules that incorporate the Freescale Vybrid SoC and start at as little as $26 in volume. The Colibri VF61 COM incorporates the Vybrid VF6xx SoC, which combines a 500MHz Cortex-A5 processor running Linux with a 167MHz Cortex-M4 microcontroller, while the low-cost Colibri VF50 COM uses the VF5x SoC model which omits the Cortex-M4 and runs at 400MHz.

With all the benefits of open source, improper management of its use may result in substantial legal, business, and technical risks. Most research and design managers know that they have to manage open source licenses, but not many are monitoring for security vulnerabilities and other bugs in open source libraries they use. Do you know the importance of monitoring open source for vulnerabilities before, during, and after using it?

Mahout greatly simplifies extracting recommendations and relationships from input datasets. Here we look at setting up Mahuout and running its recommender on a small data sample.

Whether you are using an email client or a web-based email solution, you can encrypt your email.

If you feel that package installation by apt-get or aptitude is often too slow on your Debian or Ubuntu system, there are several ways to improve the situation. One option is to use apt-fast, which is actually a shell script wrapper written around apt-get and aptitude, and can accelerate package download speed.

Google is one of those few companies which maintain a fine balance between free software/open source and their commercial offerings. They are fairly successful in both. Google is also one of the strongest proponents of free software/open source and do as much as they can.

Every day is a tease: Will Google launch Kit Kat today? Was that really the Nexus 5 we saw floating around in that one video? Is this real life?

That old hoary chestnut, the question of women being selected on merit for work/positions in the technology industry, has reared its head again. And this time it is on a mailing list hosted by Linux Australia, the umbrella group for Linux associations Down Under.

Overall, the Linux Foundation is growing because Linux itself is growing. "We're a mirror of Linux, so it's not that we're growing; it's that Linux is growing," Zemlin said. "We reflect the technical adoption that is happening."