Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

“Knowledge is Power,” said James Broughton. Oh, I know I’m going to catch flack for that quote, - it was Sir Francis Bacon, or Thomas Hobbes, depending upon how technical you want to get. However, this is a post about children and growing up to be future techies. So I’ll regale you with a little story before we get started. James of the ‘famous’ quote above is my father. One day, back in the early 90’s before I ventured into the tech world (and before I realized that Sir Francis Bacon said ‘knowledge is power’), my father and I were having a discussion over knowledge, power, opportunity and making it in the real world. He never directly quoted anyone at the time, but that one phrase he told me stuck with me my entire teenage life and throughout everything I do today : “Knowledge is Power”.

Mint is a relative newcomer to the world of popular desktop distros, but it has recently started to take the GNOME and Unity-hating Linux world by storm. The recent release of version 15, called Olivia, should help it secure a reputation as “the” alternative desktop. If you'd like a modern set of desktop tools without a completely new desktop interface to go with, then Mint 15 has what you're after.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThis Akademy keynote talk is based on Jolla and their Sailfish OS. It will cover project history, software architecture and collaboration between Jolla and various open source projects such as Qt, Mer, and Nemo Mobile. It will address the user interface concepts used in Sailfish OS and highlight the benefits of using Qt Quick to build the user experience in Sailfish OS.

Wind River has announced a KVM-based virtualization extension to Wind River Linux designed for the telecom industry. The Wind River Open Virtualization Profile offers an open source, real-time kernel virtualization platform that features CPU isolation and under 3-second latency, and supports future network functions virtualization (NFV) standards, says Wind River.

Sony revised its Android-based SmartWatch with a higher-resolution, water resistant SmartWatch 2 model featuring NFC sync and a longer-lasting battery. The 1.6-inch SmartWatch 2 was announced two weeks after the company open-sourced the Android firmware for the original SmartWatch.

Password and credit-card details leak online every day. So no one really knows just how much personally identifiable information is available by clicking on the right link to Pastebin, Pastie, or similar sites. Using a platform that runs on the hobbyist Raspberry Pi platform to drink from this fire hose, a security researcher has cataloged more than 3,000 such posts in less than three months while adding scores more each week.

Mozilla and National Science Foundation announce winning Gigabit apps from the Mozilla Ignite Challenge What’s possible on an internet without speed limits? What new applications can developers dream up when they’re able to move data at lightning speed? Today, Mozilla … Continue reading

Garmin announced a ruggedized, 4-inch personal navigation device (PND) that runs on Android. Expected to ship in the third quarter starting at $650, the handheld Monterra offers Google Play compatibility, a dual-band GPS/GLONASS receiver, a 3-axis compass, an 8-megapixel camera, and wireless features including WiFi, ANT+, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC, FM, and NOAA radios, and a sunlight-readable display.

Freeloaders: helpful or hurtful? Concerns are raised every once in a while in the broader free and open source software community about freeloaders. The attitude expressed is that if you're getting the benefit of FOSS, you should contribute. Building a business on a FOSS project you don't own, whether you're providing a service or product around a FOSS project should in return garner some sort of quid pro quo. In reality, freeloaders are desirable.

Earlier this month, Facebook officially announced its implementation of hashtags, prompting both celebration and outcry from users. But the event also sparked a spate of critical analyses addressing the nature of conversations today, as well as the ways technologies facilitate and organize even the most banal ones. Love them or hate them, hashtags have become an overwhelmingly popular convention for pursuing those recurring questions: What's going on right now? And how should we make sense of it?

Have you compared debuggers lately? Until recently, I'd been programming using only one debugger — the one supplied by my compiler vendor. Suddenly, with a new job programming on Linux, I find the range of choices in debuggers is dizzying. Wikipedia lists 18 GUI front ends for GDB alone. This article is the result of my effort to choose a debugger with a good GUI front end for my first UNIX/Linux job in several years.

Leszek Godlewski, the developer behind the Linux port of Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, gave a talk a few months ago about bringing games to Linux. The presentation was given at the Digital Dragons 2013 European Games Festival, but the slides and video recording are available and are quite interesting.

Samsung unveiled a quad-core, 20-megapixel Galaxy NX camera with 4G LTE and a 4.8-inch display, billed as being the first Android-based, connected interchangeable-lens camera, following up on last week’s announcement of its Android-powered 16-megapixel, 10x-zoom Galaxy S4 Zoom. Also today, Samsung unveiled the Ativ Q, a dual-boot 13.3-inch convertible tablet that runs Android and Windows 8 on an Intel “Haswell” Core processor.

I work at a public library in the Washington DC-area and often think about what needs to be designed into the space of future public libraries. I was recently visiting the MAKE magazine website when I saw a fascinating how-to video about building your own portable Raspberry Pi game system.

Companies allow US intelligence to exploit vulnerabilities before it patches them: Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process.

Scala's immutable values and mutable variables, classes and constructors, and its use of operators as method names.

The scala language is available in most Linux distributions.

Being released this Thursday is the first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8-Sokndal. The final 4.8 release isn't happening for another three months, but for those wishing to help out and provide feedback but aren't comfortable with Git, here's a tagged snapshot.

Taking a break from blogging about UEFI and Secure Boot, Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett is now writing about how Canonical's choice of license for their Mir Display Server is a bit scary. It's not the GPLv3 license alone that's raising eyebrows, but the GPLv3 combined with the Ubuntu Contributor's License Agreement that is unfortunate in the mobile space.

NYC Community Board offices all have filing cabinets overflowing with hundreds of paper folders containing documents related to land use in their districts—board resolutions, liquor license applications, meeting minutes, Uniform Land Use Review Procedures, sidewalk cafe applications, and more. A small fraction of these have been scanned and put online as pdfs, but they are not fully searchable.

SMART stands for Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool. It's an open source solution for wildlife managers working in areas of limited and constrained resources. This software helps them collect, measure, and evaluate data overlayed on a structure of best practices, to increase the mission of the conservation community: to protect and improve the lives of endangered species around the world, maintaining biodiversity.