Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In just a month since the last release of Cinnarch, during which the developers decided to drop Cinnamon for GNOME, they have produced a new release that brings a distribution that is more desktop agnostic than ever before. Cinnarch development was halted after the developers were finding it harder to synchronise the Cinnamon development with the rolling nature of Arch Linux.

Inforce Computing has spun a Qseven computer-on-module (COM) featuring Qualcomm’s quad-core, 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 system-on-chip (SOC). The $199 Linux- and Android-ready IFC6400 COM comes with 2GB RAM, 8GB flash, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a MIPI-CSI camera input, and is available with an optional Mini-ITX baseboard.

If Canonical has shown anything over the past few years, it's that it's not afraid of doing things differently. Ever since the arrival of Unity in Ubuntu 10.10's netbook edition back in 2010, it's been clear the company is "marching to the beat of its own drum," as they say, with a growing focus on mobile and convergence. Well, last week brought yet another example of Canonical's independent-mindedness when the company announced its decision to create a brand-new package format and installer.

Google has been using its own custom version of Linux, Google Compute Engine Linux, as it loads its customers' applications into its infrastructure as a service. It announced Thursday that it's dropping that approach in favor of using the Debian Linux distribution.

MongoDB is one of the most visible NoSQL databases out there and 10Gen's CTO is apparently one of the most hands-on coding CTOs out there. So when he was in London recently, The H just had to have a chat with Eliot Horowitz about his technical philosophy of what MongoDB is, where its going and how being an active developer informs his decision-making process..

Autokey, covered previously on Make Tech Easier, is a great place to store commonly-used text. But one of Autokey’s more advanced features is the ability to script it to do other things. We’ll take a look at two ways to tap Autokey for advanced desktop scripting.

Ouya, the Android-powered game console that began its career as a Kickstarter project, has just received $15 million in venture capital funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). For those who haven’t followed Ouya’s wild ride, its Kickstarter project generated a feeding frenzy of $8.6 million in pledges, more than 900 percent of its $950K goal.

United Space Alliance, one of NASA's IT contractors, has migrated several laptop computers used on the International Space Station (ISS) from Windows XP to Debian 6. Apparently, the computers are part of the OpsLAN network which is used to, among other things, log astronauts' movements through the space station, control its on-board cameras and provide astronauts with information about supply stocks and inventories.

On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers.

Mozilla’s mission compels us to provide people with an Internet experience that puts them in control of their online lives and that treats them with respect. Respecting someone includes respecting their privacy. We aspire to a “no surprises” principle: the … Continue reading

As Linux users, we tend to take programs like GIMP for granted. Thankfully, as of version 2.8.2, GIMP is available as a native application for OS X! Because everyone reading this most likely is familiar with how awesome GIMP is for photo editing, it's worth mentioning there is another open-source photo-editing application for OS X named Seashore.

Intel has announced the release of an open-source Linux Thermal Daemon package for Linux. Intel's Linux Thermal Daemon is for monitoring and controlling platform temperatures...

Broadcom is sampling a system-on-chip (SOC) aimed at control-plane and edge-networking devices. The StrataGX BCM58525 is equipped with a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, and features a packet-buffer subsystem, gigabit Ethernet PHY, cryptographic and programmable packet-handling accelerators, and a Linux development kit. Broadcom’s StrataGX BCM58525 is said to be 20 percent faster than previous StrataGX [...]

On the same day as sharing their plans for Ubuntu's own package format and installer, Rick Spencer of Canonical has laid out plans for the Ubuntu Phone to be "usable as our daily phones" by month's end...

It's not news that popular media have undergone significant changes due to participatory digital platforms. We tweet. We connect. We comment. Above all, we share. And the ability to share media has become a need and expectation in networked culture. There are already all sorts of buzzwords swirling around this topic—viral media, memes, prosumers, attention economy, Web 2.0, etc.

Debian, the daddy to many a Linux distro including Ubuntu and Mint, has been updated for the first time in more than two years. Codenamed Wheezy, Debian 7 actually brings the GPL operating system up to speed with some of its more famous offspring, though, true to its roots, Debian's stable release continues to focus on just that - stability. If you're looking for a stable, rock solid Linux distro the new Debian will not disappoint. If you prefer to have the latest and greatest software on your machine you're better off sticking with more popular Debian offspring, such as the Ubuntu or Mint distributions.

The open-source 3D modelling software Blender has a new release out this afternoon and it brings with it some prominent changes.

Now imagine that millions of Americans walk around each day wearing the equivalent of a drone on their head: a device capable of capturing video and audio recordings of everything that happens around them. And imagine that these devices upload the data to large-scale commercial enterprises that are able to collect the recordings from each and every American and integrate them together to form a minute-by-minute tracking of the activities of millions.

JavaScript has had a long-standing monopoly on client-side Web programming. It has a tremendously large user base, and countless libraries have been written in it. Surely it is the perfect language with no flaws at all! Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. JavaScript is not without its problems, and there exists a large number of libraries and "trans-pilers" that attempt to work around JavaScript's more quirky behaviors. JQuery, Coffeescript, Objective-J and RubyJS are examples of how people have been trying to make JavaScript better. However, a new contender is throwing its hat into the ring in a big way.

With the AMD R600 Gallium3D shader optimizing back-end having been merged last week, new benchmarks were carried out at Phoronix to see the impact of the experimental shader optimizations on multiple AMD Radeon HD graphics cards.