Showing all newswire headlines

Recently the agency seems to have backed away from the “search bias” claims that are the major thrust of Google critics’ complaints against the company. The Post article suggests, however, that dissatisfied critics may now take their complaints to the Department of Justice.

With the recent improvements to MSAA Gallium3D support, if you have been wanting to benefit from anti-aliasing with the open-source Gallium3D drivers but your game/application doesn't have options to toggle the MSAA level, it's now a bit easier to configure...

When running some OpenGL performance benchmarks this week of the Radeon driver using "drm-next" code that's set to be merged into the Linux 3.8 kernel, some significant performance improvements were discovered thanks to AMD's code contribution. Curious to see if the Intel graphics performance is likely to change, I also ran some drm-next Linux benchmarks from an Intel Sandy Bridge system...

This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running CentOS 6.3. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

With word this week that Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition is being ported to Linux, GemRB came to mind. GemRB is the project that aims to provide an open-source implementation of Bioware's Infinity Engine to run games like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. Fortunately, the project is still active and putting out new releases...

DRM is becoming less and less prevalent these days as more companies are realizing that the backlash from crippling the purchases of paying customers far outweighs any perceived prevention of infringement. It's not a wholesale conversion, but new DRM-free converts are appearing more frequently, including some surprising holdouts.

The Digital Reader brings us the news that Sony, of all companies, is opening its own ebookstore in Germany, bringing with it a large selection of DRM-free books.

A new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel was announced on Saturday. This new scheduler is based upon the controversial "Brain Fuck Scheduler" scheduler but attempts to support multiple run-queues for better CPU scaling...

In contrast to that -- and what we found most exciting about many of the new companies that had popped up over the last decade or two -- was the rise of middlemen as "enablers." These were situations where the middlemen weren't gatekeepers, and weren't "required" to do what you wanted to do. Instead, they were companies that helped give people/organizations a lift up on what they were trying to do, while keeping them and their work (rather than the middlemen) central to the market. So, when you see things like eBay or Etsy or Kickstarter, those are more enablers (and, yes, they do have some restrictions on use, but they're more policy based, rather than "can you make us money"-based).

While we are just a few days into the Linux 3.8 kernel merge window and there's still a number of pull requests that have yet to appear for this next kernel development cycle with new features, there's already a ton of exciting work. If you missed the horde of Phoronix articles in the past few days covering the prominent features, here's a recap showing why this Linux kernel being developed over the holidays is a great gift for its users...

With the year coming to an end, here's a look again at the prominent Linux news from last year (2011) and whether the milestones reached then still have an impact today...

This is a script which checks a file's md5 hash, compares it to a previous (or given) hash and mails a report with the option of attaching the file with the email. I wrote it because I use AIDE on some systems, and I let it auto update the database. This script runs via cron before and after the AIDE run, so I have an archive of databases. But it can be used for all kind of files, not just for the AIDE database.

Here's a report on the state of KVM Nested Virtualization for Linux in dealing with multiple layers of virtualization...

The PowerPC feature pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel is significant in that it's the first release beginning to introduce support for IBM's next-generation POWER8 processors...

In the week ending 15 December - WhatsApp fixes its application again, Samba 4 is released, Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon apologises to Richard Stallman, and Thorsten Leemhuis looks at Linux 3.7

The Enlightenment project is out today with a new release ahead of the official E17 1.0 release expected on 21 December. With one week to go, the new E17 release is being called the "Lucky Rubber Ducky" by its developers...

As part of its ongoing process of pruning and streamlining its engineering efforts, Google has decided to terminate yet another batch of unloved and little-used services, in what it's calling its "winter cleaning." Citing a need to "focus on creating beautiful, useful products that improve millions of people's lives every day," Venkat Panchapakesan, the Chocolate Factory's VP of engineering, blogged the latest list of ugly, useless Google products to be discontinued, some as early as Friday.

ownCloud offers a Free software solution to synchronize your files across different devices. I’ve been working on a KDE Plasma client for this server technology. In this article, after giving a bit of background of the problem, I explain the design concepts behind the new ownCloud Plasma client and demonstrate how it works and integrates with different Plasma workspaces.

A civilization’s downfall or ascension always begins with one thing: you.

War For the Overworld is the Spiritual Successor of Dungeon Keeper series, Made by dedicated Dungeon Keeper fans from Keeper Klan.

Mobile application development is the process by which software is created for handheld devices. This article focuses on tools which help developers create applications for mobile phones. The purpose of application frameworks and libraries is to enable developers to spend their time on the creative and interesting part of development, alleviating the repetitive overhead associated with common development patterns.