Showing headlines posted by bob

Hardware and software go hand in hand – one doesn’t work without the other. Despite being so closely linked, the two industries operate very differently. For the most part, hardware is produced in isolation and product designs are concealed by manufacturers, while software is created in a largely open and collaborative environment, available for anyone to use.

Javier Serrano, a hardware designer for accelerator systems at CERN, set out to change that.

Debain is known to be widely ported, being available for as many as nine architectures: i386, amd64, powerpc, sparc, mips, mipsel, ia64 s390 and armel. In the previous Debian 6 release, the distribution added the option of using a FreeBSD kernel (i386 or amd64) with the Debain software collection, and in the next version they intend to provide similar support for the GNU Hurd kernel.

Tired of creating complicated passwords? Having trouble remembering passwords for different sites? Mozilla is attempting to eliminate the password and add more privacy with one click.

At Phoronix we benchmark Linux, obviously, but of course we also run some tests of Mac OS X, the *BSDs, Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived distributions, and even Microsoft Windows when doing a hardware/driver comparison to other platforms. It's the platforms that are supported by the Phoronix Test Suite, and with better mobile device support coming, we'll be delivering Phoronix.com benchmarks there too. But there's yet another new platform target with Lillesand: GNU Hurd. Yes, we have benchmarks running now even under GNU Hurd...

PayPal announced a peer-to-peer (P2P) near field communications (NFC) solution for Android, designed to support direct payments between Samsung Nexus S owners. Due late this summer, the technology will be followed later this year by an expanded NFC solution that will compete with Google Wallet by supporting retail payments, PayPal says....

Sony offered the press a glimpse of its upcoming S1 and S2 tablets, which will enter an already-crowded market at an unannounced point later this year. Both run Android, but the S1 features a single 9.4-inch display, while the foldable (and pocketable) S2 features a hinge connecting a pair of 5.5-inch screens....

Linux isn't just for servers anymore.

Android 3.2 has begun rolling out to selected tablets, starting with the Wi-Fi only Motorola Xoom, bringing support for seven-inch displays and native hardware support for SD cards, says an industry report. Android 3.2, the source code of which has been partially released, also features an automatic zoom-to-fit resizing feature tipped by Google earlier this week....

Radio-frequency energy from television, AM, FM, cellular, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and other broadcasts can now be harvested to power electronic devices, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have claimed. It's said applications could include security, environmental sensing, structural monitoring, and bio-monitoring devices....

Over on the GNU.org Hurd news page is a status update for the GNU Hurd operating system for Q2'2011...

NionCom is preparing an Android 2.3 mini-tablet reference design that includes an embedded pico projector, capable of displaying content on a wall or screen sized up to 100 inches diagonal. The & MemoryKick Vision& offers a 4.3-inch capacitive WVGA display, 4GB flash memory, a 500GB hard disk drive (HDD), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, plus HDMI in and out ports, according to a story in Picopros....

'Eventually, there comes a time to give us more money' Microsoft continued its campaign yesterday to convince stuck-in-the-mud Windows XP customers to upgrade to Windows 7, the company's current operating system.…

Today, KDE has released a second release candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases.

Up for review today is a low-end NVIDIA Fermi graphics card, the GeForce GT 520. The low-end graphics processor it uses, the GF119, was released back in April. The graphics card only has 48 Stream processors and uses DDR3 memory with a 64-bit bus, except the cost on this creation is just around $60 USD.

Yet again Marek Olšák has made another great improvement to Mesa. Recently this independent developer has been working quite a lot in implementing OpenGL 3.0 support for the open-source Mesa stack. Ending out this weekend, he now has working OGL3 floating-point depth buffers per the GL_ARB_depth_buffer_float extension...

Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, 242 days have passed. Additionally, 129 days have passed since the release of Scientific Linux 6.0, which is one of the popular community rebuilds of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 source packages. Only today, however, is CentOS 6.0 ISOs beginning to surface...

One of the items I've been working on recently for Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand is new ways to visualize performance result data generated by the many test profiles and suites available via OpenBenchmarking.org. Here's one of the new ways that was committed over the weekend to the Lillesand Git code-base...

Apple Time Machine is a feature that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 nearly four years ago, which allows the automatic creation of incremental file back-ups that can be restored at a later date, either for the entire system or just an individual file. Mac OS X programs can also become Time Machine-aware themselves to take advantage of these incremental backups. Basic read-only support for better managing Apple Time Machine back-ups is now available to Linux users via a new virtual file-system aptly called the Time Machine File-System...

A non-revolution five years in the making Oracle has published the first release candidate for JDK 7, the long-awaited next version of Java set to officially debut on July 28.…

McCain says it will supply San Francisco with a new Linux-based traffic controller computer that meets the latest Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) standards. Built around a Freescale PowerQUICC II Pro processor, the & 2070LXN2 NEMA& offers several keypads, an 8x40 display, plus Ethernet, USB, serial, and SDLC connections, says the company.