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Last month I published benchmarks showing Windows 8 beating Ubuntu Linux when it came to the Intel OpenGL performance for the latest generation Intel "Haswell" desktop processors. Since then there's been lots of commits to Mesa and continued improvements to the Linux kernel and for some tests the open-source Linux driver is in better standing. For the testing today is a comparison of Windows 8 Pro against the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development packages when using a System76 Gazelle Professional laptop with Core i7 4900MQ CPU.

India is the second biggest market for MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the world, following the US. In time, however, India may surpass the US. After all, India's population is second to China's and India is third in terms of university enrollment worldwide; respectively the US and China are first and second for university enrollment at the moment but this may soon change. MOOCs represent a huge opportunity for Indians in terms of an open education revolution. It could potentially give millions access and availability to high quality learning if they have Internet connectivity. First, there are more applicants than slots at top Indian universities. Second, millions of Indians live in poverty and are unable to afford or gain access to a higher education.

The upcoming sixth game in the Tex Murphy series, "Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure", developed by Big Finish Games, will be released for Linux.

He makes a somewhat valid point, but he’s attempting to draw a hard boundary between usability and user-friendliness, forgetting that one derives from the other. If you build a “usable” system, people will tend to say that it is “user-friendly,” regardless of the technical capabilities of the users.

Open-source NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has raised a new $25 million Series D round of funding to further the technical and business development of the company's namesake database.

To process and analyze all the data generated on a multi-core embedded device, a safe and efficient database management system is necessary. ITTIA DB SQL addresses the challenge of increasing data volume on multi-core systems.

The world's largest patent-holding company, Intellectual Ventures (IV), has opened up a Washington DC office, according to The Washington Post's Capital Business blog. The move appears to be a ramping up of the company's lobbying efforts in a year in which "patent trolls" have come under unprecedented criticism in Congress.

EMAC announced a fanless, Linux-ready PC/104 format single-board computer built around Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, available in a wide temperature (-40 to 80°C) model. The PCM-1812 SBC ships with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a CompactFlash socket, supports dual VGA and LVDS displays, and offers a variety of interfaces including IDE, dual SATA, dual gigabit […]

Both OSes fail to ensure that browser cookies, document files, and other sensitive content from one Internet domain are off-limits to scripts controlled by a second address without explicit permission, according to a just-published academic paper from scientists at Microsoft Research and Indiana University. The so-called same-origin policy is a fundamental security mechanism enforced by desktop browsers, but the protection is woefully missing from many iOS and Android apps. To demonstrate the threat, the researchers devised several hacks that carry out so-called cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks to surreptitiously download user data from handsets.

yeah!

Ubuntu developers are looking at how to bring the Ubuntu SDK for application development to Windows and OS X operating systems...

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand's Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is "not an invention." Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty, which requires patents to be "available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology."

Red Hat has released a new professional certificate for OpenStack cloud professionals.

Today in Open Source: Tips for switching from Windows to Linux. Plus: Open Source drones, and a review of Parsix 5.0

A new Linux Foundation Collaborative Project has the potential to advance science through the use of open source software. The Linux Foundation announced this week that it is joining forces with the life sciences information framework OpenBEL, an open source software project that captures, integrates, stores, and shares biological knowledge through organizations.

Accounting software is an application software that records and processes accounting transactions within functional modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and trial balance.

All accounting software listed in the article are free and open-source and many of them can be used in all popular operating systems.

With the imminent release of Mesa 9.2, out this morning are Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver benchmarks comparing Mesa Git master (9.3-devel) to Mesa 9.2 Git, Mesa 9.1.6, Mesa 9.0.3, Mesa 8.0.5, and Mesa 7.11.2. These are the past two years worth of Mesa releases and testing occurred on an ATI Radeon HD 4890 (RV790XT) graphics card.

There's hope that Fedora 21 will do away with non-KMS graphics drivers by default. A whole set of conventional (UMS) X.Org drivers are set to be retired in this first Fedora Linux release of 2014.

VMware Player and VirtualBox are the two most popular virtualization software packages for x86 processor architecture. This post highlights advantages and disadvantages of VMware Player and VirtualBox in terms of their features.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can now be run on VMware instances on-premises or in the cloud. VMware and Linux vendor SUSE Linux have extended their partnership to the hybrid cloud. SUSE Linux announced Aug. 27 that its Linux distribution is available on the newly launched VMware vCloud Hybrid Service that just became generally available Aug. 26.