Showing all newswire headlines

The lineup of value-added Big Data solutions for the open source Hadoop platform grew a little larger this week with the introduction of new data transfer and replication features from Attunity, an information-management vendor focused on the enterprise. The move also highlights the steady demand for integrative software packages that fill in the missing pieces for organizations aiming to build Big Data platforms based on open source tools.

This is a bugfix and stability release with several improvements.

Oracle Corp. President Mark Hurd says the Sun Microsystems acquisition, which occurred three years ago, has absolutely paid for itself in terms of cash flow vs. the purchase price, and thanks to acquired technologies like hardware and Java. Here’s the background from Hurd.

Jack Wallen takes another look at the GNOME 3 desktop and is surprised at what he finds. A desktop that is the target of much derision might deserve another chance.

Until recently it was illegal to jailbreak your own iPhone, and after Saturday it will be illegal to unlock a new smartphone, thereby allowing it to switch carriers. This is a result of the exception to the DMCA lapsing. It was not a mistake, but rather an intentional choice by the Librarian of Congress, that this was no longer fair use and acceptable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation among other groups has detailed the many failings of the DMCA Triennial Rulemaking process, which in this case led to this exception lapsing.

Pick up most items, from the soup can, to the library book, and you will find a data tag. In most cases, that tag is the simple, ubiquitous bar code that seems to have been around forever. They are the lineal representation of numbers in a machine readable format that most people do not even pay attention to any more (although some of us are old enough to remember a time before they were so common place). More recently, the shippers UPS and FedEx have moved to more complex data tags to help expedite the automated sorting and shipping of the thousands of products that they handle every day.

Microsoft has released a summary of the study compiled by HP on the Linux migration in Munich. In an article, German magazine Focus Money Online had last week quoted figures from an unpublished study that Microsoft had commissioned from HP. The study concludes that at €60.6 million (approximately £51 million), the City of Munich's Linux migration was considerably more expensive than reported by its council last November. However, last week, Microsoft Germany had emphasized that the study was compiled for internal purposes.

YALI (Yet Another Linux Installer) is the installer on Pardus, an original distribution (it is not based on any distribution). Development has, for now, ceased. And, as far as I know, it is not likely to be restarted, at least not by the original developers.

Today I am happy to announce our first public Bodhi images for the MK802 Android stick.

After only a few months Acer's Chromebook already accounts for 5 to 10% of Acer's US shipments and HP will soon be launching its own Chromebook. In the meantime, Windows 8 PC sales remain anemic.

Has Windows 8 been designed to hold people back rather than push them forward?, wonders Simon

Their findings were released today in celebration of an internationally recognized holiday that we at Mozilla look forward to as much as any bank holiday: Data Privacy Day. The study surveyed more than 100,000 consumers in the U.S., and after all the number crunching, Mozilla ranked highest in the Internet & Social Media industry. We also made it onto the top 20 list for all companies.

According to a report on the EC's open source portal, Joinup, Sweden is following the example of Norway in using the "Fix My Street" open source software that was developed in the UK. The software enables citizens to easily report problems and helps authorities identify and prioritise them. A pilot version of the national service, "Fixa Min Gata", is expected to become operational in March or April and will allow citizens to report such things as potholes, broken pavements, graffiti or non-functional street lighting.

Clonezilla is more than just a simple backup tool – it’s a dedicated live distro perfect for ghosting entire networks of computers

ScrumbleShip - It's got voxels, heat simulation, kilometer long spaceships, real world materials, organic ships, and awesome music. Eventually, it's going to have AI crew, multiplayer, inertia, planets, and more.

Munich's multiyear migration to Linux has been nothing if not an ongoing saga over the past decade or so, beset as it has been by stops, starts, and various twists and turns. The story appeared to have a happy ending in November when Munich reported that using Linux had already saved it more than 10 million euros, but last week Microsoft spoke up with a different tale.

This year I made a New Year resolution to foster a more open education at home by joining a growing subculture of society. To start, I began replacing some commercial household products, such as toothpaste, with 'open source' ones. After all, there is no patent on or trademark for baking soda (2/3 cup), salt (4 teaspoons), mint oil (1 tablespoon), or melted coconut oil (2-3 tablespoons)—what you need to make homemade toothpaste. They are readily available and accessible, except for the mint oil perhaps (but you can substitute it with cinnamon or vanilla extract, or other possibilities if you just use your creative, open mind).

How to make Chromium/ Chrome open magnet links in Linux Mint

This tutorial shows how to do data striping across four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 12.10) with GlusterFS. The client system (Ubuntu 12.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

What does a Linux kernel developer talk about when he sits down with a journalist with whom he had a minor stoush at the LCA a few years ago?