Showing all newswire headlines

Programmers love to optimize their code and their tools. Why then is there so much slow and bloated code and so many arcane and fragile tool chains? Because programmers aren’t always optimizing for efficiency. There are many things programmers can optimize for, and a team can quickly end up working at cross purposes when everyone is optimizing for something different.

Is the market becoming flooded with too many OpenStack distributions and services? There are observers who are concerned that the market is now becoming overwhelmed with distributions and companies supporting them, which could become a detriment to those who deploy them later. In five years, it's unlikely that we'll see so many distributions being supported.

I personally believe that open source is a better methodology for building, procuring and deploying software. However I also know full well that when it comes to security, configuration choices and implementation often make the difference between being breach and being safe.

The developers of GParted have released version 0.15.0 of their open source partitioning tool and the accompanying GParted Live distribution. GParted 0.15.0 includes a number of significant changes that allow users to get status information on running processes and also make the tool twice as fast, according to the developers. Work has gone into making it easier to cancel running operations as well. GParted allows users to change their partition layout, recover and resize partitions and create new ones.

Numantian Games have announced Lord of Xulima, a turn-based rpg in the good old 2D isometric style. It will appear on windows first and after that on mac & Linux. From the screenshots it appears the outside world is like 2D isometric like Baldurs Gate while the combat appears to be more even older school with loads of mobs facing your party.

If you are in search of an alternative for Google Reader, this article offers a list to choose from. They have been listed under three categories – Desktop, Self-hosted, and Web service. Three are under each category, and are the ones I’ve either used in the past, or have read about.

Linux.com has published a short Q&A with Steven Rostedt, kernel developer at Red Hat and maintainer of the stable Linux real-time patch. Rostedt discusses issues such as “hard” vs “soft” real-time, what the Preempt-RT patch can and can’t do, and how to get started using it.

This week, we look at 7 free Android editors, Microsoft's personality disorder and the most profitable mobile apps.

Automated installation a lot of useful software extras on Ubuntu after the initial desktop install.

Intel hasn't yet even released their Haswell processors to the general public for use within notebooks, ultrabooks, and desktops, but Google engineers are already hard at work on prepping Haswell Chromebooks. Hitting the Coreboot repository yesterday was some Haswell-related commits by Google/Chrome developers, e.g. haswell: use dynamic cbmem and haswell boards: support added chromeos function, among others.

Sabayon is Gentoo-out-of-the-box, but does the “for human beings” approach not work for the Linux distro built on being infinitely customisable?

Describing themselves as “a disruptive open source software company”, Open-Xchange - a team made up of some of the key developers of OpenOffice, has announced the launch of OX Documents, a cloud-based office productivity suite, featuring OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool.

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I'd been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

ecurity vendors analyzing the code used in the cyber attacks against South Korea are finding nasty components designed to wreck infected computers. Tucked inside a piece of Windows malware used in the attacks is a component that erases Linux machines, an analysis from Symantec has found. The malware, which it called Jokra, is unusual, Symantec said.

SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") is a new networking protocol whose goal is to speed up the web. It is Google's alternative to the HTTP protocol and a candidate for HTTP/2.0. SPDY augments HTTP with several speed-related features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. To use SPDY, you need a web server and a browser (like Google Chrome and upcoming versions of Firefox) that both support SPDY. mod_spdy is an open-source Apache module that adds support for the SPDY protocol to the Apache HTTPD server. This tutorial explains how to use mod_spdy with Apache2 on CentOS 6.4.

Have you ever dreamed of playing good old Playstation games on your favourite O.S.? This is exactly what you need! Ladies and gentlemen, i give to you the best PSX emulator for Ubuntu... PCSXE!

A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: "We're not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house."

If you have a Web hosting account, but not enough resources to host Piwik, OpenShift Online presents an alternative platform to host it on. OpenShift Online is a cloud computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) provided by Red Hat, Inc.

Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013. For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has signed a deal with the Chinese government to create a new version of Ubuntu. For China, this is widely seen as an attempt "to wean its IT sector off Western software in favour of more home-grown alternatives," the BBC reported.