Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With quite some time having passed since we last benchmarked the Reiser4 file-system, to end out July we have some fresh benchmarks of Reiser4 from the newly released patches for the Linux 3.10 kernel. There's fairly good performance out of the experimental file-system when compared to the original ReiserFS as well as EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS.

“Rewire your Brain”. The quote from the back of this book couldn’t have said it any better. I acquired this book to add to my every growing list of programming and scripting books in hopes that I can work through some of the ‘humps’ in my troubleshooting skills. Before I get started in this quick review I’ll give you a little background.

LinuxSecurity.com: This week we have the DefCon 20 and Black Hat computer security conferences in Las Vegas -- reasons enough for me to do 2-3 columns about computer security. These columns will be heading in a direction I don't think you expect, but first please indulge my look back at the origin of these two conferences, which were started by the same guy, Jeff Moss, known 20 years ago as The Dark Tangent.

The Intel-backed MinnowBoard.org project has shipped its first open source SBC for $199. The MinnowBoard runs a Yocto-compatible Angstrom Linux build on a 1GHz Intel Atom E640 with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and provides SATA, gigabit Ethernet, USB, HDMI, and PCI Express interfaces, as well as stackable expansion boards called Lures.

Mozilla continues to build the Web as a platform for security which is a crucial part of our mission to move the Web forward as a platform for openness, innovation and opportunity for all. Today this platform for security is being advanced through Mozilla and BlackBerry collaborating on advanced automated security testing techniques known as fuzzing and Mozilla introducing Minion, an open source security testing platform intended to be used by developers and security professionals. These research efforts are some of the many ways Mozilla helps make the Web more secure and protect Firefox users.

There are only a few days left to apply. Code for America is looking for developers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and product managers for their 2014 Fellowship. It's a chance to make a difference with code, design, data, and much more.

Co-authors: Thomas Jansen and Hannes Meyle The GPLv2 continues to be the most widely used FOSS license, but has been rarely interpreted by courts. Most of these decisions have come from Germany as a result of the enforcement actions of Harold Welte. The recent Fantec decision in Germany is the latest such decision and provides guidance on the requirements for companies to manage their use of FOSS and the lack of ability to rely on statements from their suppliers.

Anyone who knows me well enough knows I love mobile devices. Phones, tablets and other shiny glowing gadgets are almost an addiction for me. I've talked about my addiction in other articles and columns, and Kyle Rankin even made fun of me once in a Point/Counterpoint column because my household has a bunch of iOS devices in it. Well, I was fortunate enough to add an Android device to the mix recently—a Nexus 7 tablet. I actually won this device at the Southern California Linux Expo as part of the Rackspace Break/Fix Contest, but that's a different story.

The security community remains in a mixed state of grief and confusion this morning, as word of Barnaby Jack's passing spreads. Known for his work on embedded devices, from the financial world to the medical one, the 35 year-old hacker was a beloved family member to the InfoSec community.

As a self-professed metadata geek, I’ve recently been participating in an online discussion about metadata and the Learning Registry. I have to say, it feels as if I’m on a merry-go-round that won’t stop, because for the past 10 years I’ve engaged in dozens if not hundreds of conversations about the use of OER (open education resources) metadata concerning these same issues: Do we need it? How should it be licensed? Who owns it?

I'm in the process of preparing some Tux3 file-system benchmarks on Phoronix compared to Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, etc. In the process of benchmarking Tux3, I've also been looking to see what the latest activity has been for this out-of-tree project. The last time I wrote about Tux3 was last May when they claimed to be faster than Tmpfs and previous to that was a Tux3 status update from March.

Those of us that live and work on the Linux Planet have long known that Linux is Super. It's Super for a number of reasons, among them is its dominance at both ends of the computing spectrum, from mobile to High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Next week, security professionals and hackers will descend on Las Vegas for the Black Hat security conference and Def Con 21. Security vendors and news organizations often talk about precautions and offer security advice this time of year, but Chris Hadnagy, from Social-Engineer Inc., has some additional thoughts, which focus on the human side of security.

While AMD has their open-source Linux driver stack, their GPU's BIOS hasn't been open-source though in years prior there was talk of reverse-engineering the ATI BIOS. That project didn't pan out but now there's a new developer claiming to have an open-source video BIOS for Radeon hardware.

We are pleased to accept nominations for this year's Readers' Choice Awards! Please peruse the following list of categories and write in your favorites to nominate them. We will accept nominations until August 18, 2013. Voting will begin on August 26, 2013, so please check back at that time to cast your vote.

Geeksphone has started taking pre-orders for its first commercial smartphone running Firefox OS. The Peak+ offers double the RAM and offers better battery and graphics performance than the original Peak developers phone, and it runs the latest Firefox OS 1.1 build.

Elizabeth Leddy gave the next talk I attended entitled, Wish I Knew How to Quit You: 10 Secrets to Sustainable Open Source Communities. Elizabeth works with Plone but wasn’t really involved in open source until about five years ago. With open source we often start by working at a company that supports a specific open source application and there are two paths we can take. One path is that you start to get annoyed with the way things are going and so you jump to another open source project. Or you can get involved in the open source community so thoroughly that you can move from one related company to another (this is what I have been doing with Koha so I totally understand this path).

While 64-bit Linux desktop support has been in good shape for years, it seems there's a surprising number of Intel/AMD Linux desktop users undecided whether to use the 32-bit or 64-bit installation images of their favorite Linux distribution. For the latest perspective on 32-bit versus 64-bit Linux performance, here are said benchmarks from the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development state.

The Mozilla Labs team recently posted about a new personalization initiative for Firefox, which fits into the larger “Personalization with Respect” aspiration that Jay Sullivan articulated in May. We want to give individuals more participation in their Web interactions so they can more easily get what they want, in a clearly defined way. This idea is gaining traction with leading publishers and marketers who see their craft as providing valuable, engaging and content-rich experiences to their audiences.

Every year I attend the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference as an exhibitor. This year's conference was busier than any I've ever been to. So many people had either heard of us (ByWater Solutions) or Koha or just about open source in general. One librarian though approached our booth with caution. She informed me that she was told to come see what we were about by a manager but that she was very nervous. What she actually said was, "Open source scares me."