Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Unity Technologies has announced that it has dropped support for Adobe Flash from its cross-platform Unity game development toolset, citing the declining popularity of the technology among developers and inconsistent support from Adobe. "As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses," Unity founder and CEO David Helgason wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "We will continue to support our existing Flash customers throughout the 4.x cycle."

AMD has added full-fledged system-on-chips (SOCs) to its Embedded G-Series integrated x86 processor family, by merging the APU (CPU + GPU) and I/O controller hub functions into a single chip. The Linux-ready AMD Embedded G-Series SOC incorporates up to four “Jaguar” CPU cores (clocked as high as 2GHz), a Radeon 8000 GPU, video accelerators, and an I/O controller, and is available in five versions featuring 9 to 25W TDPs.

Inforce Computing has unveiled a $149 Linux- and Android-friendly Pico-ITX single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. The tiny SBC comes with 2GB RAM and 4GB flash memory, and provides HDMI out, MIPI-CSI camera input, WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, a GbE port, and numerous other functions.

Last week, members of the Plasma team met in Nürnberg, Germany to discuss open questions on the road to Plasma Workspaces 2. The meeting was kindly hosted by SUSE and supported by the KDE e.V.. For the Plasma team, the meeting came at a perfect point in time: porting of Plasma to a new graphics has commenced, is in fact well under way, and has raised some questions that are best discussed in a high-bandwidth setting in person.

Typically, a Linux-based system has the following structure of volatile memory. The first section is filled with a Linux kernel loader, which in turn can be executed in several stages. For example, a small-size bootloader is copied to the CPU internal memory, performs initialization of external memory and copies the second-level loader to the external RAM. The second-level loader (for example, U-Boot) copies the Linux kernel to RAM and hands over control to it. Finally, the system launches custom applications stored in the last section of the Flash memory. So obviously, it's necessary to update the memory sections with user applications and the OS kernel.

I’d heard some time ago of a couple of Stanford Professors running an online course in Machine Learning, with over 100,000 students registered for their course worldwide. Fortunately for me, 10gen—the company behind the wildly successful MongoDB database—started doing free training using the same delivery method.

Here's a job title you may not have considered: Open Source Officer. The CIA hires Open Source Officers (OSOs) to collect and analyze publicly available information in foreign affairs to provide unique insights into national security issues. OSOs may specialize in an area of the world (country or region) or a specific topic (like, emerging media technologies or cyber security).

This year, the Fest will be held on April 27th & 28th in 2013, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. both days. People often arrive early to chat over coffee or to help with Fest set-up. There's even an after-Fest party on Saturday. Stay informed by subscribing to the Fest mailing list.

Inforce Computing has unveiled a $149 Linux- and Android-friendly Pico-ITX boardset based on a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. The tiny IFC6410 module is equipped with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and provides HDMI, LVDS, a MIPI-CSI camera interface, built-in WiFi/Bluetooth, and numerous other functions.

Virtualization is now a staple of the modern enterprise. As more and more shops switch to the virtual paradigm, managing those new virtual resources is a critical part of any deployment. For admins using Microsoft- or VMware-based hypervisors, powerful management tools are available to keep their virtual houses in order.

While they may or may not be reliable, there are reports showing up online claiming that the first Firefox OS phones could go on sale this week. The Verge and The Next Web have been providing updates, and the big surprise is that while companies ranging from ZTE to Alcatel, LG, Huawei and Sony have committed to producing Firefox OS phones, the first company to offer them out of the gate is a small Spanish player called Geeksphone. Whoever ships these phones first will get a leg up on what could become a big trend, and possibly the key to Mozilla's future. Here is a look at how Firefox OS phones could transform Mozilla.

When Oracle bought Sun, one of the reasons was to gain control of MySQL, the most popular open-source database management system (DBMS). It didn't work. Some of MySQL's founders and top programmers had already left to create the MySQL fork, MariaDB, while others started SkySQL, a MySQL and MariaDB support company. Now, the old core MySQL developers have rejoined forces.

For most home-based situations, you won’t have to bother with the security of your Linux machine. It is pretty secure by default. However, if you are using your computer as a server, either SSH server or Web server, or you are the system administrator for your company, then you will have to step up on the Linux security.

Detractors of open source software often point to its broad developer base and open source code as a potential security risk. But that's not a fair assessment, according to Dr Ian Levy, technical director with the CESG, a department of the UK's GCHQ intelligence agency that advises UK government on IT security.

Martin is a young accordion prodigy from Panama. Producer and DJ, Stephen Levitin (aka Apple Juice Kid), and myself, a UNC Professor and emcee, met him while building a Beat Making Lab at a community center in the city of Portobelo.

The first alpha/development release of Fedora 19 "Schrödinger's Cat" is now available after having been challenged by a delay...

Not all businesses can stand behind their products, and even fewer can stand on top of them. At LulzBot, it’s not uncommon to find the multi-talented and seriously committed team mounting their 3D printers upside down or bumping along Colorado mountain roads with a functioning 3D printer in tow—all in the interest of testing the durability and strength of their product under the most extreme conditions. And that’s only part of what makes LulzBot different. Based in Loveland, Colorado, LulzBot designs, builds, and sells desktop 3D printers, plus parts and plastics, for entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and experimenters.

Quick, when did the first Chromebooks (portable computers running Google's Chrome OS platform) arrive? The answer is that the initial Chromebooks went on sale in June of 2011, nearly two years ago. It's no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. But at the same time, many users have taken notice of the low prices that these portables are offered at, and the many freebies that they come with. For example, the Acer C7 Chromebook, shown here, sells for only $199.

After tallying the votes in a naming contest that kicked off in October 2012, leading Linux vendor Red Hat has announced that the product formerly known as the JBoss Application Server (AS) will henceforth be known as WildFly.

The Manjaro Linux distribution describes itself as a "user-friendly" version of the popular Arch Linux platform. Manjaro Linux still follows Arch in a rolling-release manner, but it's designed to offer greater user-friendliness and accessbility, complete with an easy installation routine.