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After many months of development, the ported open-source AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver from the Linux kernel has been merged into FreeBSD trunk. This AMD kernel graphics driver now provides modern Radeon/FirePro graphics support for BSD users with FreeBSD 10.0 but might be backported to FreeBSD 9.

There are various tools that allow you to edit the metadata in digital photos or pdf documents. ExifTool is a powerful command-line utility that can read or write meta information in a file. This tutorial describes how to view or edit metadata in pdf documents or digital pictures from the command line on Linux with ExifTool.

Open source evangelist Matt Asay, now a VP at 10gen, describes how the NoSQL database provider has been embracing partnerships with Amazon, IBM, Windows Azure, and plenty more.

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.