Showing headlines posted by jhansonxi

Freedom House’s Sanjay Kelly and Sarah Cook just released a new report: Freedom on the Net 2011: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media. According to the report, two electoral democracies - Turkey and South Korea - engage in substantial political censorship.

If we were already talking to our computers, etc. as we should be, I wouldn’t feel a need to write this to you. Given current rates of adoption, Linux still seems a generation away from being the priceless piece of free software useful to every child and PhD. This army your kernel enables has millions of people, but they often lose to smaller proprietary armies, because they are working inefficiently. My mail one year ago listed the biggest workitems, but I realize now I should have focused on one. In a sentence, I have discovered that we need GC lingua franca(s).

It was only a matter of time before AMD followed Nvidia's lead and finally jumped onto the Android bandwagon, as the company is now recruiting engineers to create chipset drivers for Android.

For those who were unaware, Myst Online: Uru Live for the PC lives. Again. In fact, the game has now gone open source, granting a whole plethora of new possibilities for the persistent universe based on Cyan Worlds' classic Myst franchise.

But first a little background. Myst Online was originally the multiplayer component to 2003's Uru: Ages Beyond Myst PC game.

Who says good software has to be expensive ... or cost money at all? This week on Upgrade Your Life, Yahoo! News' Becky Worley shows how to save hundreds of dollars, with free alternatives to pricey PC and Mac software packages.

Google's Android platform has been growing steadily since its release in 2008. Now, one out of every three U.S. smartphone owners is using an Android-based device, according to a recent report.

So why aren't developers more excited about the platform?

When a consumer gets the phone and they wanna play a game that uses our technology, it's got to be a consistent experience, and we can't guarantee that [on Android]. That's what held us off of Android.

Nevertheless, the brave souls at IDC offered up one of the wackier -- but quite possible -- tech forecasts in recent memory: They predict that Microsoft's all-but-dead-on-arrival Windows Phone 7 platform will outsell BlackBerry and, yes, the iPhone by 2015.

[Not FOSS related, really. But hillarious :-) -- Sander]

Google's vision of a universal library archiving all books ever published on Earth is once again at odds with laws protecting the authors of those books. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a settlement deal Google hammered out with publishers over its controversial Google Books archive, saying the proposed agreement went too far in giving Google control over the digitalization of books.

As mobile data usage skyrockets, wireless companies are spending billions each year to maximize capacity, and consumers end up footing the cost in the form of higher cell phone bills. But a cube that fits in the palm of your hand could help solve that problem.

Not FOSS related but very cool. - Scott

id Software mad scientist and first-person shooter "granddaddy" John Carmack said that DirectX has matured to the point where it's now a better API than OpenGL. It handles multi-threading better and newer versions manage state better. But he doesn't have plans in moving to DirectX any time soon, blaming inertia for the studio's continued use of OpenGL.

Today, a smartphone is really only as good as the applications that run on it. And despite what Nokia CEO Stephen Elop says, that battle has really become a two-horse race between Apple and Google.

But a new consortium of mobile carriers, developers and manufacturers called the Wholesale Application Community (WAC) is looking to shake up the landscape by introducing applications that will work across all devices and carriers.

Answer: Google still stores e-mail data on tape.

Yes, tape. Like, essentially the technology behind the cassette. Google doesn't specify what kind of tape it's using exactly, but as Seth Weintraub notes on a blog on the CNN partner site Fortune.com, using tape is a mess.

Originally, we intended to create a single article on Linux-based audio applications. However, it soon became apparent that the sheer number of audio production apps would not permit this. So that we don't bore casual users with audio production jabber, this article is split in two: content consumption and content creation. Most end-users will be more interested in this article, while musicians and audio professionals should look to the next one for their Linux audio needs.

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

Recovery Mode is a text-based interface to a few quick repair tools that is installed by default with most Ubuntu releases and derivatives. I wrote a few add-ons for it that increase its usefulness in remote repair and diagnostics situations. These were developed and tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

About half a year after Google announced its WebM video codec at Google I/O, Chromium has made some interesting announcements on how the open-source browser project plans to support open-source video.

It has been a full week now since the news about hacking group FailOverflow’s discovery of the PS3 “root key”, which would allow homebrew developers to sign their own applications, began to filter out of the 27C3 (Chaos Communication Congress) Hacker Conference 2010. It seems that Sony executives either hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, or simply discounted them as another easily-corrected security hole, as they had not released any type of statement regarding the discovery until today. (LOL reference: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/ )

It may be somewhat ironic that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published in the last week of 2010, a year with a boat load of questionable patent filings and approvals, a patent application from IBM, which automates the management of intellectual property and comes with a “defend” module to formulate a strategy in the case of patent infringement.

Windows Phone 7 hit the 5,000-application mark in its app store on Wednesday, as Microsoft announced it has shipped 1.5 million devices to retailers since the phone went on sale two month ago. But software giant also hasn't yet said how many sales to end users it has made. That's not usually a good sign.