Showing headlines posted by Ridcully

The British spy agency GCHQ has secretly tapped more than 200 fiber-optic cables carrying phone and internet traffic and has been sharing data with the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a news report. One part of the operation, codenamed Tempora, has been operating for about 18 months and allows the agency to tap large volumes of data siphoned from the cables and store it for up to 30 days for sifting and analyzing. Each of the cables carries about 10 gigabits of data per second, which the paper likened to sending all of the information in all the books in the British Library through the cables 192 times every 24 hours.

DAVE announced an SODIMM-style computer-on-module based on a Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 system-on-chip, complete with dual CAN interfaces, Linux support, and two evaluation baseboard options. The Diva computer module is also available from U.S.-based Smart Embedded Systems, with turnkey support including Linux drivers and firmware for the processor’s programmable real-time unit (PRU).

Since the Computex launch of Intel's much anticipated Haswell processors at the beginning of the month, there's been much Linux coverage on Phoronix concerning the compatibility and performance of these new Intel processors from both the processing and graphics sides. Here's a summary of all of our discoveries and findings over the past few weeks.

Version 1.0 of the KScreen System Settings Module has been released for easy yet powerful RandR-based screen management from the KDE desktop. KScreen has been the talked about new way for KDE users for controlling your displays with support for preserving display configurations, setting up screens in a presentation mode, or virtually any other configuration you could desire for the KDE desktop.

After a brief respite, the Guardian newspaper has resumed its publication of leaked NSA documents. The latest round provides a look at the secret rules the government follows for collecting data on U.S. persons.

With the extensive coverage on Phoronix this month of Intel's new Haswell processors on Linux, many articles have shown that when using the latest components (e.g. Linux 3.10 kernel and Mesa 9.2) that the OpenGL performance is a whole lot faster. But are these changes specific to Haswell or benefit Intel's driver as a whole? In this article are new benchmarks from an older Intel "Sandy Bridge" system with HD 3000 graphics to see whether the performance there is also improving with the latest Linux code.

With new code going into Mesa on a daily basis, here's the very latest benchmarks comparing the state of stable Mesa 9.1.3 against the Mesa 9.2 development code with all of the performance optimizations it brings to the Intel DRI driver for the latest-generation Haswell graphics hardware.

Continuing in the weekly drops until Wine 1.6 is officially baked, Wine 1.6-rc3 was released this afternoon and has more bug-fixes. Since going into the release candidate phase two weeks ago, no new features are being introduced into the Wine trunk code-base but only bug-fixes under this code freeze.

One of the founders of file-sharing site Pirate Bay will apparently spend a couple more years in jail. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was arrested last September on charges that he was part of a cyberattack against Logica, an IT outfit that manages tax documents and services for Swedish companies.

Xiph.Org is now working on Daala, a new general-purpose video codec designed to be next-generation beyond VP9 and HEVC. The project is still considered "pre-pre-alpha", but it gives hope to a new generation of open-source video support.

Mom always said, "It's not nice to point." I'd argue Mom didn't manually enter long, cumbersome URLs, however. We're all familiar with services like TinyURL, but because we're Linux folks, we tend to prefer doing such things on our own. As with almost everything in Linux, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and in this article, I explore a bunch.

While the popularity and future of the Apple/Intel Thunderbolt interface can be debated, the current state of Thunderbolt on Linux still leaves a fair amount to be desired. While on the state of Linux hardware support, the Google Chromebook Pixel does work with modern Linux distributions, but not all support has been perfected...

Linux.com interviewed Wolfgang Denk, founder of Denx and the creator of the U-Boot bootloader. The embedded Linux pioneer spoke on a range of issues including the future of U-Boot, the importance of Yocto Project code and how it has changed Denx’s own ELDK distribution, and the growth of ARM and real-time Linux in embedded computing.

While there hasn't been any official communication out of NVIDIA yet, it's likely that their binary display driver will soon be bearing EGL support to complement their GLX windowing system support. The EGL interface is for sitting between OpenGL and the windowing system. EGL is used by Google's Android operating system for mobile devices. Beyond that, both the Mir Display Server and Wayland/Weston are using EGL rather than the GLX windowing system API.

The first alpha release of OpenMandriva Linux is now available. This new OpenMandriva distribution is derived from the Russian-based ROSA Linux distribution, which in turn was forked from mainline Mandriva last year. OpenMandriva Lx/2013.0 is the new version in development and this alpha release features the Linux 3.8 kernel, KDE SC 4.10, LibreOffice 4.0, Firefox 21, Clementine 1.1, and ROMP 1.6. OpenMandriva hopes to be in beta by the end of July.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced TypeScript 0.9.0, the latest version of its (JavaScript killer) alternative web language, which Redmond describes as the "largest update to TypeScript to date." In addition to the usual assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements, this release includes a number of significant new language features and introduces a new, more scalable compiler architecture, according to a blog post by TypeScript program manager Jonathan Turner.

The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day, powering GE nuclear power-plant robots - and will do so for another 37 years. That's right: PDP-11 assembler coders are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning on keeping the 16-bit machines ticking over until 2050 – long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go.

If you work with C#, you have already mixed object-oriented code with some aspects of functional programming. Why not master Scala? Scala usage in enterprise applications is growing faster than the number of available developers, so there is an increasing demand for .NET developers to learn Scala — using existing C#, VB.NET, LINQ, and F# knowledge as a foundation. In this first article in a series dedicated to Scala for C# developers, I provide an introduction to Scala and its most popular IDE.

One of the things I dislike about using Irssi in a terminal window on OS X is that I often miss the screen flash when someone mentions my name in IRC. With some fancy SSH tunneling (maybe more on that some other issue) and a really cool pop-up notification tool, if someone mentions my name, I can't miss it. "terminal-notifier" is a command-line tool for creating OS X-native user notifications.

Parrot has updated its Linux-based AR.Drone 2.0 quadrocopter with an optional 18-minute battery, as well as a “black box” Flight Recorder option for saving GPS data. The company has also released an updated smartphone piloting app that offers a Director Mode function for controlling the quadrocopter’s video camera.