Showing headlines posted by Ridcully

MSC launched a COM Express Type 6 module based on 4th Generation “Haswell” Intel Core processors. The MSC C6B-8S runs the 2.4GHz, quad-core Core i7-4700EQ processor, accepts up to 16GB SODIMM SDRAM, offers interfaces including SATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0, and three DisplayPort/HDMI/DVI ports with triple-display support, expands with PCI Express, and has a ready-to-go Linux BSP.

In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype -- owned by Microsoft -- was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company's blog to deny it.

To be released soon is the Alien Arena 7.66 game update, but more interesting than this small update that just provides minor optimizations and an overhauled menu system, is the introduction of a new Alien Arena game. Alien Arena: Tactical is the new CRX-powered open-source game.

Lego Group announced that its $350 hackable Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot will ship Sept. 1. Lego also unveiled a dozen new downloadable fan-built designs for the educational and hobbyist robot, which runs Linux on an ARM9 processor, and supports Bluetooth remote access via Android and iOS devices.

Through the new Project Neon initiative, daily builds of the next-generation KDE stack -- KDE Frameworks 5 -- can be easily installed via Debian packages for Kubuntu.

This week we have the DefCon 20 and Black Hat computer security conferences in Las Vegas -- reasons enough for me to do 2-3 columns about computer security. These columns will be heading in a direction I don’t think you expect, but first please indulge my look back at the origin of these two conferences, which were started by the same guy, Jeff Moss, known 20 years ago as The Dark Tangent.

Yesterday I published results that show NVIDIA's Linux driver is very competitive with Microsoft Windows 8 when it comes to OpenGL gaming performance. It turns out that the NVIDIA BSD driver, which is still mostly shared common code with Linux and Solaris and Windows, pairs very well with FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility layer. For some OpenGL workloads the Linux games are running faster on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 than Ubuntu!

The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support is quickly taking shape as the leading ARM Linux graphics driver for the (non-Android) Linux desktop.

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has been updated so it can be used with the stable Linux 3.10 kernel series. While it doesn't look like Reiser4 will ever be merged into the mainline Linux kernel, work on the file-system continues by the remaining developers. The most recent Reiser4 file-system patch was uploaded this month to its SourceForge page.

To complement the LLVM 3.4 SVN compiler benchmarks from yesterday that were looking at the impact of using the SLP Vectorizer that's soon to be enabled by default for some optimization levels, here are some more LLVM Clang compiler development benchmarks. This time around are fresh benchmarks of the open-source C/C++ compiler when trying out the different compiler optimization levels, including -O0, -O1, -O2, -Os, -O3, and -Ofast.

Hewlett-Packard has agreed that there is an undocumented administrative account in its StoreVirtual products, and is promising a patch by 17 July. The issue, which seems to have existed since 2009, was brought to the attention of The Register by Technion, the blogger who earlier published an undocumented backdoor in the company's StoreOnce products.

Open source software offers the promise of a revolutionary transformation in defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and government technology at a cost and pace that satisfies the competing requirements of shrinking resources and constantly accelerating global operations. While this technological transformation is emphasized by engineers and developers within industry and the acquisition community, it is often perceived as tangential to those with an operational focus.

The GNOME annual developer conference, GUADEC, is beginning this week in the Czech Republic. At this GNOME-focused open-source event, the developers will be joined by Intel Wayland developers as they plot their eventual departure from the X.Org Server.

After a series of Mesa commits today by Marek Olšák, the R600 Radeon Gallium3D driver is now handling Unigine Heaven 3.0, the visually impressive OpenGL tech demo. There's also been other important Mesa Git commits that happened today.

Having already teased some of the consumer and small business features of Windows 8.1 with a preview release in June, Microsoft on Tuesday announced a second preview, this one with new features targeting larger IT departments.

MediaTek announced a quad-core system-on-chip with dual ARM Cortex-A15 and dual Cortex-A7 cores that is said to be the first Big.Little SoC to operate all four cores simultaneously. The tablet-focused MT8135 is further equipped with a new PowerVR Series6 G6200 GPU from Imagination Technologies, and will be followed by an eight-core “True Octa-Core” Big.Little SoC with similar heterogeneous multi-processing capabilities.

Gateworks Corp. announced a family of six Linux-ready single board computers for network processing running Freescale’s ARM Cortex-A9-based i.MX6 processors. The Ventana SBCs range from a dual-core 800MHz model with one mini-PCIe slot, to a quad-core 1GHz board with HD video and six mini-PCIe slots, and can be expanded modularly using a choice of four stackable mini-PCIe, PCI, and Gig-Ethernet (copper and fiber) boards.

Phytec announced a pair of community backed single-board computers built around its PhyCore-Vybrid SOM computer-on-modules, which are based on Freescale’s Vybrid system-on-chips. The $55 Cosmic SBC uses a Vybrid SoC with a single 500MHz Cortex-A5 core, while the $65 Cosmic+ SBC provides the dual-core Vybrid SoC version, which runs Linux on its Cortex-A5 core along with Freescale’s MQX RTOS on its Cortex-M4 core.

If you happen to need a low-cost keyboard that's quite reliable yet simple and doesn't cost much at all, there's a very nice USB keyboard from Amazon.

After making more widespread use of the Loop Vectorizer, developers at Apple and Google are at least agreeing that LLVM's SLP Vectorizer should be more widely-used as well.