Showing headlines posted by bob

ECMA International has formed a technical committee to work on a standard specification for the Dart web programming language that's developed by Google as an alternative to JavaScript...

I never realized how much I rely on open source and public libraries until I started homeschooling last year. When I started to write for Opensource.com, my son was in school. He's nearly eight years old, but he's already been in both public and private schools and in both special needs and gifted programs. I've thus been on both sides of the educational spectrum. As a librarian, former teacher, and homeschooling mother, I am familiar with what formal schools can offer and what homeschooling and open source resourcces (programs, tools, etc.) can offer. Homeschooling is increasingly popular due to the differences between what schools can provide and what open source can offer homeschoolers. Even in China, bright children like my son are increasingly being educated at home or having their public or private education supplemented at home. Parental dissatisfaction with a school's environment is now the prime reason given in a recent survey by the US Department of Education for homeschooling, but dissatisfaction with the curricula and academic instruction still ranks high. 

So you have a great business idea for a wonderful IT product or service, and you want to build your high tech startup around it. Having the idea is a great start, but you will have to build an IT solution/service to get your business off the ground; be it a website, software solution, social network, or mobile app. Which programming language to choose to write these IT products is always the question to get the startup going on a reasonable budget. The truth is, you can write a great product in any language, if you know what you are doing. And when users are looking at a great product they really don’t know which language was used to create it, or how much code it took, nor do they care. But when it comes to time and budgets, there are unique situations, like getting a startup off the ground, where the choice of a programming language can make a difference between success or failure.

The Acer C720 was recently released as the latest Google Chromebook selling for just $199 USD. I have been running the Acer C720 Chromebook recently but not with Chrome OS and instead Ubuntu 13.10 Linux. This Chromebook with a Haswell-based dual-core Celeron CPU runs Ubuntu Linux rather nicely. Here are the first thorough benchmarks from this low-cost laptop.

The Fedora project held a go/no-go meeting today and the decision was reached to go ahead with the release of F20 based on release candidate RC1.x. The mirrors are scheduled to open next Tuesday Dec 17.

To date, there has been no way to run apps on Android with real and reliable privacy controls. Android version 4.3 and higher take a huge step in the right direction, letting users install apps while denying some of the apps' attempts to collect the user's data.

We’re proud to announce that Qt 5.2 is now available. With the release of Qt 5.1 in July, we showcased the Qt for Android and iOS ports and laid down the beginning of some heavy improvements we have now done on Qt’s graphics capabilities. In the last 6 months, we’ve worked very hard to finalize this release and especially these ports.

It's been a while since last looking on the anti-aliasing performance of the R600 Gallium3D driver so for this article we have some fresh MSAA benchmarks of the driver from Mesa 10.1-devel and using a Cayman-based high-end AMD Radeon graphics card.

While the release of Qt 5.2 is imminent and it features full support for Apple iOS and Google Android along side Qt's other mobile platform support, but missing from the party is Tizen support. Qt for Tizen is still in an alpha state but today they've put out their fifth development release...

We like to use the analogy that open source is like a recipe. It's a great way to explain what open source is to non-technical folks. Last year, this pumpkin spice latte recipe was popular with our community. So, we thought it would be fun to share more recipes with you this year. We collected some great ones from a few of our open source friends: Chris Aniszczyk, Erica Brescia, Simon Phipps, and Jim Whitehurst. Share yours with us in the comments!

Opensource.com's Jason Hibbets recently had a chance to sit down with Google's Open Source Director Chris DiBona during the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, NC.

Open source software (OSS), unlike proprietary software, is software that keeps the code open so IT professionals can alter, improve, and distribute it. Although it has been around since relatively early in the history of computers, in the past several years OSS has truly taken off, in what some might see as a surprising example of a successful communal collaboration.

Open WhisperSystems' TextSecure tech now the default Users of the CyanogenMod alternative Android firmware gained additional security on Monday, thanks to the integration of Open WhisperSystems' TextSecure protocol.…

A patent loss in a German court may lead to trouble for Microsoft's Android strategy.

If, like me, you've jumped onto the Plex bandwagon with both feet, you've probably discovered how difficult it is to make a standalone Plex player. Sure, you can install an entire OS, then auto-start the Plex program in full screen, but it's not as simple as installing the XBMC distro, or even OpenELEC. If you own a Raspberry Pi, that has all changed.

On Monday the companies, led by Google and Microsoft, presented a plan to regulate online spying and urged the United States to lead a worldwide effort to restrict it. They accompanied it with an open letter, in the form of full-page ads in national newspapers, including The New York Times, and a website detailing their concerns.

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something... That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sam Beck is the guy behind Blueshift, an open source sustainable eletronics business that is all about building cool stuff. Helium speakers are the company's first product to market and will be the world's the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers. Not to mention the design files are open source. In this interview, Sam shares with me his unique business mindset and why he's not afraid anyone will steal his thunder, even while they might have access to his design. If we build stuff that's cool enough, we'll find a way to make money. Sam grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and went to college at Columbia University in New York City where he studied physics and art. He got his start with open source eletronics when he moved to Portland in 2008 and began building a bike stereo system that ran off of a dynamo hub (a bicycle part that generates electricity) and used capacitors as backup power. It was a few years later that Sam realized he could use supercapacitors as a primary power source. out the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers in this interview.

Which gadget from our holiday gift guide is your favorite? Raspberry Pi LulzBot TAZ 2 3D Printer Ouya Game Console SparkFun's Learn to Solder "Simon Says" Kit FLORA Wearable Tech Arduino BeagleBone Black Board littleBits Electronic Kits HexBright Flashlight In November, we gave you the ultimate open source gift guide for the holidays just in time to start preparing and brainstorming for a great gift for the tech and open source enthusiasts in your life.

This tutorial helps you learn the skills required to manage DB2 database servers, instances and databases. Furthermore, you will get introduced to DB2 autonomic computing capabilities and you will learn to use IBM data Studio to perform database administration tasks such as job scheduling and generating diagrams of access plans. This tutorial prepares you for Part 1 of the DB2 10.1 DBA for Linux, UNIX, and Windows certification exam 611.