Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The more I learn about OpenStack, the more I see why there is so much buzz about the technology as well as about the community of developers and users. In a poll hosted on Opensource.com, we discovered that many of our readers are curious and eager to learn more about OpenStack. For those new to this technology, OpenStack can be described as a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds.

Nothing To Hide is an "anti-stealth game," in which you must carry cameras and spy gear to live in a world of self-surveillance and self-censorship. A world where you're made to be your own watchdog. Released for The Day We Fight Back, the game is now seeking crowdfunding to complete the open source game—10% of what's raised will first go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The VAB-1000 Pico-ITX single board computer debuts the Via Elite E1000, which appears to be the first ARM-based Via Technologies system-on-chip developed in-house instead of designed by its Wondermedia subsidiary. It’s not, however, the company’s first ARM-based VAB Pico-ITX SBC. In October, Via announced a Springboard VAB-600 kit running on a single-core, 800MHz Cortex-A9 Wondermedia WM8950 SoC, and based on an earlier VAB-600 board. Also in October, Via announced the VAB-820, which taps the quad-core Freescale i.MX6.

At the former Wired editor’s start-up, 3D Robotics, open-source robots take to the skies. Friday is Fly Day at 3D Robotics, a maker of small robotic aircraft. So here we are, on a windswept, grassy landfill with a spectacular view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, looking up at a six-prop copter with a gleaming metal frame. It’s like a spiffy toy from the future. Buzzing like a swarm of bees, it lifts off smartly, hovers, then pinwheels. “Jason’s making the hex twirl,” says CEO Chris Anderson, a trim man in jeans and an untucked oxford shirt. “That’s just for show—a human pilot couldn't do that.” That’s because Jason, the flight tester, did nothing more than figuratively push a button. The hexarotor—technically, the 3DR Y-6—is on autopilot, which it demonstrates by zooming off on a preprogrammed route. The Y-6 sells for US $619. That’s a lot for a toy, but it’s chicken feed for a capital investment.

Github has released a beta of what it says is “ the text editor we've always wanted.” Atom, for that is the software's name, is billed as “modern, approachable, and hackable to the core” and also “welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won't outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.”

Brooklyn based 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot has launched pre-sales for the second of three Replicator models that appear to be the world’s first commercial 3D printer based on embedded Linux. Almost all 3D printers are compatible with Linux desktops, just as they are with Windows and the Mac, and many, if not most, offer open source hardware and software designs. However, aside from some Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone hacks, the MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact appears to be the first to run embedded Linux.

Bruce Momjian years ago salvaged a nearly abandoned open source database project: PostgreSQL. Now he heads an international group helping to keep its community growing. He also is a key architect for a commercial database company that supports his advisory group and the Postgres open source community. PostreSQL, or "Postgres," is a popular open source object-relational database management system.

There has been a steady stream of open hardware stories in the news over the past year, but lately that stream has become an ocean. This is truly an exciting time for makers and consumers.

USA Today got it right last week when it claimed that Samsung was prepping a Tizen-based smartwatch successor to the Android-based Galaxy Gear. Well, they got it almost right — Samsung unveiled three Tizen smartwatches. Samsung did not, however, unveil a Tizen smartphone, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Samsung execs could not even definitively promise a Tizen phone in 2014.

When Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals more than four decades ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. Protests and demonstrations were among the most common tactics for bringing about social change, and they were used on such a broad scale that they helped define the Vietnam War era and counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The “Pro” model of the Fit-PC4 uses AMD’s newer G-Series SoC, which integrates the controller chipset along with 28nm “Jaguar” x86 cores and improved Radeon 8000 graphics. The Pro uses the top-of-the-line quad-core, 2GHz, AMD GX-420CA model, enabling the mini-PC to score over 5000 in Geekbench 2 benchmarks. This is three times faster than the scores of its earlier Fit-PC3 mini-PCs, claims CompuLab.

The OpenStack Foundation recently launched their voting tool for rating presentation proposals for the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, May 12-16. While the chairs for each track make the final decisions about which presentation topics make the cut, voting is a great way for the community to get involved and participate in the agenda-setting process. Conference talks are proposed from a variety of different individuals with different corporate affiliations and different relationships to the OpenStack project. Listing all of them here would be difficult, but in keeping with the theme of our Beginners in Open Source Week, here are a few that might appeal to beginners:

At an Intel news conference held during Mobile World Congress, Intel President Renee James launched the 64-bit Intel Atom Z34xx processor series (formerly “Merrifield”) for smartphones and tablets, announced a next-generation, quad-core Z35xx processor series codenamed “Moorefield,” and detailed a multi-mode 2G/3G/4G/LTE communications chipset dubbed the “XMM 7160.”

Whatever you may have heard about hackers, the truth is they do something really, really well: discover. Hackers are motivated, resourceful, and creative. They get deeply into how things work, to the point that they know how to take control of them and change them into something else. This lets them re-think even big ideas because they can really dig to the bottom of how things function. Furthermore, they aren't afraid to make the same mistake twice just out of a kind of scientific curiosity, to see if that mistake always has the same results. That's why hackers don't see failure as a mistake or a waste of time because every failure means something and something new to be learned. And these are all traits any society needs in order to make progress. Which is why we need to get it into schools. attachments:  How to get started with Hacker Highschool

A great deal of excitement has been generated by UK Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude's forceful announcement in late January that the UK government intends to mandate the adoption of compulsory document format standards in public administrations. In the on-going struggle of policy makers seeking to break away from procurement practices that have led to proprietary lock-in, limited interoperability, and excessive costs, the UK government has signaled that they fully intend to level the playing field not by mandating a preference for free or re-used software as in Italy and France, but by mandating choice through the requirement of open standard document formats (not just .odf, but other open document standards too) in procurement.

A gaggle of Chinese web firms have come together with a plan to protect Windows XP users in the Middle Kingdom for at least the next two or three years, according to local reports. The unusual step will see messaging giant Tencent, search engine Sogou, software company Kingsoft and several others offer technical support for XP including system upgrades and security services, said Xinhua.

I'm not saying I own a XP machine and use it for anything..but if I did this would be interesting to me.. - Scott

Linux distributions are flexible and modular in nature, allowing them to squeeze into all sorts of interesting niches. Some distributions package as much software as possible, others remain lean, some focus on the desktop market while others operate best in the server room. This week we take a look at projects working in a variety of markets. We start off with Chakra, a distribution which brings cutting-edge software and fast performance to desktop systems. Then we turn our eyes to the Ubuntu community where Canonical is making progress in their march to bring Ubuntu to mobile devices. We also discuss how Canonical is handling user privacy and confusion around the company's licensing policies. Plus, we share updates on the OpenBSD project's fund-raising efforts. In our Questions and Answers column this week we cover a few simple ways to protect servers against brute-force password guessing attacks. We are happy to bring you news of distribution releases from the past week, plus we look forward to fun new developments to come. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com January 2014 donation is the QupZilla web browser project. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!

When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It's easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don't fit with your needs, but what about altering the look and feel of the distribution to suit you? The key is to add a second desktop environment or window manager. This is an example of how Linux is all about freedom of the user, by the user.

Vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEM)—and their IT customers, governments, and academics—are all using, buying, and making open source software, and often all three activities at once. This is a good way to think about one’s relationship with open source software projects. There are three activities one typically engages in with respect to the open source software project: make, use, buy.

For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.