Showing all newswire headlines

In mid-September, the 3.6 kernel appeared to be stabilizing nicely. Most of the known regressions had been fixed, the patch volume was dropping, and Linus was relatively happy. Then Nikolay Ulyanitsky showed up with a problem: the pgbench PostgreSQL benchmark ran 20% slower than under 3.5. The resulting discussion shows just how hard scalability can be on contemporary hardware and how hard scheduling can be in general. Borislav Petkov was able to reproduce the problem; a dozen or so bisection iterations later he narrowed down the problem to this patch, which was duly reverted. There is just one little problem left: the offending patch was, itself, meant to improve scheduler performance. Reverting it fixed the PostgreSQL regression, but at the cost of losing an optimization that improves things for many (arguably most) other workloads. Naturally, that led to a search to figure out what the real problem was so that the optimization could be restored without harmful effects on PostgreSQL.

Now The Linux Foundation has stepped in with a solution which will allow every (and not just one distro or only Linux distro) open source operating system to run on UEFI secure boot systems.

Telling the time on Linux is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. To start with, the time command on Linux doesn't tell the time:

NVIDIA developer Robert Morell has proposed removing a marker for the Linux kernel's GPL licence from a Linux kernel driver interface, apparently in order to permit the use of the interface with proprietary drivers. A discussion thread on the topic has seen several key kernel developers express clear opposition to the proposal and debate over which developers would have to consent to such a change.

Patrick Verner announced a couple of days ago, October 10th, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_10_10 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.

EA CIO Mark Tonnasen spoke at BoxWorks this week about the need for CIOs to lead their companies from traditional IT maintenance roles to more modern ones around service.

For those Intel Sandy Bridge owners wondering if there's any worthwhile performance improvements when upgrading from Ubuntu 12.10 with Mesa 9.0 and the Linux 3.5 kernel up to the early Mesa 9.1-devel state with the Linux 3.7 Git kernel, here are some benchmarks...

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Copenhagen, a number of gaming-related development sessions are scheduled as Ubuntu developers try to push their Linux distribution as a first-rate gaming platform...

So for those not keeping up to date with Steam's CDR the list of games that will be available is growing!

Following its acquisition of Clutch.io in August, Twitter has made the Clutch A/B testing service and Clutch framework for writing native mobile apps available as open source.

The Bank of New Zealand was founded in 1861 and, on the verge of bankruptcy, purchased by the National Australia Bank Group in 1992. The acquisition was completed in 2003. It was rebranded BNZ, with a new logo and colors in 2008, to better align with its parent company, now known as NAB. BNZ promised its individual, agricultural and business customers positive, flexible and efficient service; access to a network of specialist expertise; and ongoing innovation.

Privileged control of your smartphone is one of the killer features of the Android operating system. This control, known as "root access," allows users to remove manufacturer and mobile operator hardware and software limits to takeover the device. I've written about competitor ClockworkMod's ROM Manager Premium app that you can use to automate and streamline maintenance and other tasks.

After having their project rejected by Kickstarter, the designers of the wireless lock system Lockitron went away and wrote their own crowdfunding platform, which they have now open sourced. Apigy Inc's Selfstarter enables companies to set up their own crowdfunding site, similar to Kickstarter, to host financing campaigns for their products. The very successful funding drive for Lockitron is already being run using the software.

The case was extraordinary in part because DDR was suing Digital River, an e-commerce company whose business not only pre-dated its patent by more than two years, but thrived in the marketplace; last year Digital River made almost $300 million in revenue. (That includes lines of business that weren't accused in this lawsuit.) By contrast, the dot-com started by the Rosses, Nexchange, was never profitable and went bust in 2000, as soon as it couldn't access more venture capital. Whatever the legal merits of its technology, Digital River had 1,000 clients by the end of 1997; that's more than 20 times the number of merchants Nexchange was working with when it went out of business in 2000.

A simple truth. A consumer-demand driven system like Kickstarter using Linux as a lure for crowd funding of games, means there must be consumer demand for Linux games.

Don’t you trust the websites you’re visiting? Thanks to Qubes, you can visit them in disposable virtual machines and isolate many other applications from each other

The latest version of Firefox, version 16, has returned to Mozilla's servers with the release of Firefox 16.0.1 after the discovery of vulnerabilities caused the organisation to remove the just-released open source web browser from circulation.

Trinity, the fork of the classic version of the KDE desktop which appeared in wake of the backlash against KDE 4.0, is still being developed and, after a year of work, a new stable release, version 3.5.13.1, of the desktop environment is now available. Trinity is a fork that continues development of the old 3.x branch of the KDE desktop and which has been enhanced with additional features but is also designed to be both compatible with newer hardware and responsive on older systems.

Clay Shirky has done it again. In a fascinating TED Talk, Shirky examines the impact that collaboration tools developed for and by open source communities will have on the way citizens participate in public life and how they can steer the political processes.

Censorship is practised for all kinds of political, social and commercial reasons, and all societies have limits on acceptable behaviour, but the point of the web is that there are no walled gardens and no limits to what we can access. If information wants to get out there, it will.