Showing all newswire headlines

Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media. Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

The main problem you face when you're attempting to lift the lid on what makes Linux tick is knowing where to start. It's a complicated stack of software that's been developed by thousands of people. Following the boot sequence would be a reasonable approach, explaining what Grub actually does, before jumping into the initiation of a RAM disk and the loading of the kernel. But the problem with this is obvious. Mention Grub too early in any article and you're likely to scare many readers away. We'd have the same problem explaining the kernel if we took a chronological approach.

The biannual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world was released at the beginning of June and unsurprisingly, the vast majority (91 percent, to be exact) run some form of the Linux operating system. The Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson discussed the positive effect this statistic has on end users by citing that any improvements to Linux made by one of the supercomputer manufacturers got poured back into the kernel.

Since its 2008 debut, Android has grown - not only meeting all of the functionalities of the iPhone, but besting it in nearly all aspects. Here is our list of the top 10 things Android does better than the iPhone.

At Computex, Shenzhen-based Joyplus announced four tablets that run Android, only two of which use the same CPU. The five-inch Joyplus M508 and seven-inch 5701 both tap the 624MHz Marvell PXA303, while the seven-inch M702 runs on a 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm MW8505, and the seven-inch M703 uses a 600MHz ARM926 CPU paired with a 600MHz DSP, says Joyplus.

Google is adopting the BSD license for WebM in order to address a licensing conflict. When Google opened up the VP8 codec and announced the launch of the WebM project during the Google I/O conference last month, the actual license under which the code was distributed was not an official open source software license. It was a custom license that had not yet been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization responsible for maintaining the open source definition and validating licenses.

Open source development can appear to be a very practical magic, and where better to bring its community leaders together with academics and businesses than a conference at Oxford's Keble College whose Hall provided the inspiration for Hogwarts hall in the Harry Potter films.

As an update to my story from last week about the WebM CODEC project started by Google, I am pleased to say that the project is now fully open source, with the copyright licensed under the BSD licence. Many thanks to Google for addressing the concerns that I and many other members of the community expressed over the licence under which the project was initially announced. We are spared yet another open source licence, something I welcome as an OSI director.

The SD times has announced their ‘SD Times 100‘ for 2010. The SD Times recognizes top leaders and innovators of the software development industry. However upon looking at the list you’ll see two names that stick out like sore thumb: ‘Microsoft‘ and the ‘Mono Project‘.

Nautilus Elementary just added a customizable toolbar as well as a button to toggle between a text-mode and breadcrumbs location bar - something which almost everybody has been missing in the default Nautilus that comes with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Linux-based mobile operating system is gaining momentum. It may be one of the least-cool names for an operating system but MeeGo is lining up to be the next-big-thing on mobile devices.

A server log is a log file which is created and updated by a server. A common example is an access log generated by Apache (open source web server software), which provides a history of web page requests. However, Apache does not only capture information to that access log. There is also information captured in its error log as well as a process id file, script log and a rewrite log.

You'll see on the WebM license page and in our source code repositories that we've made a small change to our open source license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the patent clause was written. As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.

IBM, Samsung, TI, Arm, Freescale and ST-Ericsson are founding members of Linaro. A group of chip makers including IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments on Thursday unveiled Linaro, a new software-engineering foundation dedicated to improving Linux distributions, including Android, MeeGo and Ubuntu, used in consumer devices.

Your preferences while browsing the web depend largely upon what tasks you perform while using the browser. If speed is a concern, give the lightweight Midori web browser a try. Named after the Japanese word for green, I've found the Midori web browser to be just that.

Qimo 2.0 Linux distribution based on Ubuntu designed specially for kids with Xfce window manager, looks really simple to use and suitable for small kids and integrated with many games will help the kid to improve his/her skills. Mathematical, typing, drawing, learning ABCs. will show you all that in the review.

Amarok was my favorite for a long time. But when the new Amarok 2.0 series started coming in, I was left with no option but to leave my beloved music player in Ubuntu. Amarok 1.4 was by far the best music player I ever had in Linux. After a long time I gave a try at the latest Amarok 2.3.1 in Ubuntu, and I have to say, this is impressive work. Amarok is slowly getting back to its past glory and Amarok 2.3.1 is another huge leap.

The Device has 2 reasonable sized screens in a clam shell form factor, a smart design for a device which children are thought to be carrying around in their backpacks. The Kno will also feature HD video. I guess I want to go back to school as soon as this is common teaching material. This would make school more fun for me.

I received an email overnight that has me re-evaluating what my smart phone will be. But the email also raised a number of other questions in my mind that are more diverse and apply to more than just the decision of what smart phone to upgrade to.

Last month we reported on four indie games going open-source that were part of the pay-what-you-want "Humble Indie Bundle" after the developers experienced very favorable returns. The source-code to Aquaria has now been published with the source-code to the three other titles (Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture) already being available.