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The ingenious hack that throws the company a lifeline Exclusive Some remarkable technical wizardry lies behind BlackBerry’s Android coup. When it was launched in January, BlackBerry’s new OS was brand new BlackBerry 10 and largely app-less. But today it can execute Android apps at impressive speed. How did they do it? Thanks to some helpful inside knowledge, The Register will reveal it all.…

Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission (EC), has a website called Comment Neelie to initiate and maintain a two-way conversation between herself, as a politician, and the public, as citizens. Kroes says that it's "a channel to communicate, not just broadcast."

The second release candidate of Mesa 10.0 has arrived. There's hope that the final version will be released next week...

At its investor meeting yesterday, Intel exhibited its readiness to face the new realities of the “post-PC era.” Led by CEO Brian Krzanich, top executives outlined strategic efforts to speed its mobile Atom system-on-chips toward 14 and 10nm geometries, 64-bits, and integrated basebands, and to look beyond Windows on the client end, with increased focus […]

OpenMandriva has put out their Lx 2013.0 release for those still hoping to relive the glorious Mandrake and Mandriva days...

Really Simple Software has begun accepting pre-orders for the second generation of its Linux-powered networked DVR. The new model, known as “Simple.TV by SiliconDust” and priced at $250, adds a second TV tuner and is expected to ship by the end of the year, by which time Android and iOS apps for both generations of […]

If you shut people in a room for a week with seven other people with the same interests, they have a ball and write a book. —Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals That’s what happened at the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Doc Camp. A group of 20 open source enthusiasts gathered together in the middle of October and wrote not just one but three books in the span of five days. I was fortunate enough to attend the event. Here’s a peek at what went down over those five days.

What started as an uphill battle in Burlington, Vermont on the National Day of Civic Hacking in June 2013, transversed into an understanding between local government, non-profits, the media, and the community four months later. What they came to understand was that we can grow stronger when we work together. When we partner. When we work on stuff that matters. Robert Coleburn, a Technology Librarian (and systems administrator) at Fletcher Free Library, jumped at the opportunity to partner with Code for Burlington, a Code for America brigade, to help host a hackathon on the last weekend in October called Hack the Stacks. The event drew over 30 people volunteering to improve their community through open source technology.

Run apps directly on the Glass hardware Google has unveiled what it's calling a "sneak peek" at its Glass Developer Kit (GDK), a new way to write software for the Chocolate Factory's privacy-stomping future-specs.…

In 2002, the GSyC/LibreSoft research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos successfully surveyed a broad swath of over 2500 respondents (mostly developers) from open source and free software communities. They have long been researching and collaborating with Free and Libre Open Sourse Software (FLOSS or FOSS) organizations and groups and are back again to recreate the survey with the goal of assessing where the community stands today after over ten years of evolution and innovation. This year, the Libresoft research group encourages anyone involved in a FLOSS project (not only developers) to participate in the survey.

Google's faster-than-expected upgrade of all its SSL certificates to an RSA key length of 2048 bits will make cracking connections to the company's services more difficult without affecting performance, experts say.

One of the best emails to get before a conference you're psyched to attend is the one that outlines all the final details. It links to the final speakers' schedule, reminds you of important things like where to park and when to check-in, and of course, that email tells you about the fun parties. That email revs you up and organizes you for the conference to come. So when I opened up the "final details" email for the recent All Things Open conference in Raleigh, I was expecting to see an outline of the typical who, what, when, where info. I wasn’t expecting the first item to be a reminder of the conference's anti/no harassment policy. But there it was—the first item on the list:

This is a condensed version of the blog post: Hey Civic Hackers! How about leaving the ninja skills at home and building really useful applications? It includes more analogies and cars. Comments welcome. Most hackers are deeply involved in the tech scene. They keep up to date with the latest technologies and will use tech that is in the early phases of adoption. They have no problem using cloud services, NoSQL data stores, languages with smaller communities, and target more recent browsers or phones. They don't mind doing custom configurations on server software, they probably already know some of the maintainers of the project and can get special help, and they know other hackers who they can reach out to. They generally come from a startup world or at least from software companies where budgets and skill sets are generally high for employees.

Recon Instruments announced an Android-based $399 heads-up display (HUD) designed to fit inside ski goggles. The Snow2 is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor, a 428 x 240 mini-display, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and sensors, and it syncs to Android and iOS devices. The Snow2 updates a previous MOD Live HUD wearable that was similarly […]

Olimex’s OLinuXino project announced a tiny, Android- and Linux-ready single board computer based on Allwinner’s 1GHz, Cortex-A8 based A10 processor, and the first one to be offered with a mini-PC enclosure. The open source A10-OLinuXino-Lime offers 512MB of DDR3 RAM, an optional 4GB of NAND flash, plus HDMI, SATA, USB, and Ethernet, starting at only […]

While (U)EFI is frowned upon by many Linux users due to the security disaster known as Secure Boot or other UEFI compatibility problems with running Linux on systems, there are a few benefits...

The latest edition of SUSE's community Linux distribution is ready to use.

AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 290 graphics card at the beginning of November as one step down from the new flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card. Numerous Windows reviews praised the graphics card for its great performance, but what wasn't clear at the time was how the Linux performance and compatibility was for this new $399 USD graphics card. AMD hadn't offered any review samples to Phoronix for conducting any Linux-based testing and benchmarking, but it's more clear now why that didn't happen: the Linux performance isn't stellar. I bought an XFX Radeon R9 290 and now there's many Linux benchmarks coming out of this graphics card that's riddled by what might be driver issues. I already regret having purchased the AMD Radeon R9 290 for use on Linux; the graphics card is hot, power hungry, noisy, and the OpenGL results aren't too good.

Jailhouse virtualization was announced today by Siemens to address real-time, safety, and security requirements.

At the school district where I am the director of information technology, over 90% of our information systems have been transitioned to open source software. Ubuntu is the server operating systems at the district office and schools, while the Ubuntu desktop is deployed for students, teachers, and administration through the use of diskless clients. As a result, students and teachers use primarily open source programs which include LibreOffice, Scribus, the Gimp, and Inkscape, to name a very few. We are able to centrally control over 2300 workstations at 16 schools and keep software much more current than many districts attempting to maintain commercial software packages. We have achieved significant energy savings, over 70% on our clients, and greatly reduced licensing costs.