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With the extensive coverage on Phoronix this month of Intel's new Haswell processors on Linux, many articles have shown that when using the latest components (e.g. Linux 3.10 kernel and Mesa 9.2) that the OpenGL performance is a whole lot faster. But are these changes specific to Haswell or benefit Intel's driver as a whole? In this article are new benchmarks from an older Intel "Sandy Bridge" system with HD 3000 graphics to see whether the performance there is also improving with the latest Linux code.

Companies buy Microsoft products for many reasons, but they all assume that the company is doing its best to protect them. The latest revelations shows that is a false assumption. A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows.

With new code going into Mesa on a daily basis, here's the very latest benchmarks comparing the state of stable Mesa 9.1.3 against the Mesa 9.2 development code with all of the performance optimizations it brings to the Intel DRI driver for the latest-generation Haswell graphics hardware.

The public cloud's heyday has passed, and enterprises should focus on hybrid cloud investment. So say executives at Rackspace (RAX), the OpenStack-powered cloud hosting vendor. And if deals like the one Rackspace just announced with Fidelity Investments to build an OpenStack cloud is any indication, Rackspace's vision is on the mark. Here's the scoop.

Continuing in the weekly drops until Wine 1.6 is officially baked, Wine 1.6-rc3 was released this afternoon and has more bug-fixes. Since going into the release candidate phase two weeks ago, no new features are being introduced into the Wine trunk code-base but only bug-fixes under this code freeze.

One of the founders of file-sharing site Pirate Bay will apparently spend a couple more years in jail. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was arrested last September on charges that he was part of a cyberattack against Logica, an IT outfit that manages tax documents and services for Swedish companies.

The Cheapskate's Corner: the place where we inform you about what you need to know to get the best deals in Linux games.

Xiph.Org is now working on Daala, a new general-purpose video codec designed to be next-generation beyond VP9 and HEVC. The project is still considered "pre-pre-alpha", but it gives hope to a new generation of open-source video support.

This article, on the cozy relationship between the commercial personal-data industry and the intelligence industry, has new information on the security of Skype.

Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

Sometimes the display brightness on laptops running Linux does not adjust properly or can't be controlled (it seems) from the desktop. Here's a solution that will work for some.

Have you compared debuggers lately? Until recently, I'd been programming using only one debugger — the one supplied by my compiler vendor. Suddenly, with a new job programming on Linux, I find the range of choices in debuggers is dizzying. Wikipedia lists 18 GUI front ends for GDB alone. This article is the result of my effort to choose a debugger with a good GUI front end for my first UNIX/Linux job in several years.

The OSPLC SMALL BRICK is an open-source PLC (programmable logic controller) that can be programmed using open source C language programming tools. The PLC is a general-purpose controller with a wide variety of applications. It is useful to the engineer, technician, student and hobbyist. All the source files for the small brick OSPLC are provided, including schematic diagrams so that you can build this project yourself or modify it.

KXStudio 12.04.1 is available. KXStudio is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with a collection of applications, artwork and plugins targeted at audio and video production.

Is the NoSQL database trend a threat to Oracle (ORCL)? This is a big week for the company, which announced somewhat disappointing Q4 new software licenses yesterday. While cloud computing and hardware sales are Oracle's big challenges, you can't overlook the open source database wars as well. Indeed, Oracle and MySQL faces challenges from smaller NoSQL vendors.

This week, how Linux seriously rules super computers, why the tin foil hat brigade is wrong to diss the cloud and 9 reasons your sys admin hates you.

The (NSA) rules seem to clearly say that if your data is encrypted, the NSA can keep it.

In this article, we will see some different command methods with which we can display the file contents with its line number.

On Debian Wheezy, it is now possible to run a i386-linux-gnu application on an amd64-linux-gnu system. This is called Multiarch and refers to the capability of a system to install and run applications of multiple different binary targets on the same system.

Leszek Godlewski, the developer behind the Linux port of Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, gave a talk a few months ago about bringing games to Linux. The presentation was given at the Digital Dragons 2013 European Games Festival, but the slides and video recording are available and are quite interesting.

Samsung unveiled a quad-core, 20-megapixel Galaxy NX camera with 4G LTE and a 4.8-inch display, billed as being the first Android-based, connected interchangeable-lens camera, following up on last week’s announcement of its Android-powered 16-megapixel, 10x-zoom Galaxy S4 Zoom. Also today, Samsung unveiled the Ativ Q, a dual-boot 13.3-inch convertible tablet that runs Android and Windows 8 on an Intel “Haswell” Core processor.