Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

"Patents are here to stay." This is the sort of statement that makes me uneasy. I guess in the 17th century the common wisdom was "slavery is here to stay." In the 18th century giving voting rights to women seemed absurd and foreseeing open borders between France and German was crazy talk in 1945. At a certain point, fortunately, those things changed for the better. Is it time to change the common wisdom on patents as well? Is the time ripe—will it ever be?—to utter the frightening word abolition? I do not have the privilege to know the answer, but I regard the question as a legitimate one. According to some patent experts, however, questioning the very existence of patents seems blasphemous.

Valve's Gabe Newell has confirmed their Steam Box will be Linux-based and will be open for its users and not a locked-down piece of hardware. Aside from showing off mini PCs built for Steam, Gabe Newell is at the Consumer Electronics Show this week and is talking to some of the press.

Ford pops bonnet on open dashboard APIs CES 2013 Phone app developers who fancy expanding onto car dashboards can now create programs for Ford cars, utilising the voice control and connectivity built into the vehicle through open software interfaces (APIs).…

Let's say you want to understand what makes free and open source software (FOSS) so vital today—and what makes those who write it so committed to their difficult work. How would you do this?

While Canonical developers previously said they "won't fix" GTK+ support for Wayland in Ubuntu, the matter has now changed. It looks like Ubuntu 13.04 will be able to handle GTK+ applications on Wayland...

Digia has shared that they're looking to release Qt 5.0.1 in January...

Marek Olšák has implemented support for buffer copying using the CP DMA engine on Radeon HD 4000 "R700" GPUs and newer...

KWin, KDE's window manager, in version 4.11 is moving along with being ported to using XCB rather than Xlib...

HP's Open webOS is being ported to a number of devices and over the holiday break one developer set out to get it running on the Nexus 7, with impressive results

The R600 LLVM back-end for the Radeon Gallium3D driver was removed from Mesa...

Dot Categories: DeveloperIn this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

While the AMD Radeon "R300g" Gallium3D driver has been effectively "done" for a while, only this weekend has multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support come to this open-source graphics driver that supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) GPUs and older hardware...

There hasn't been too many new Wayland/Weston developments to report on recently, but being published this weekend for review and comments is a new Pixman renderer for Weston. This Pixman renderer allows for pure software rendering with the Weston reference compositor and adds MIT-SHM support to the X11 back-end...

The open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack has been deprecating the user-space mode-setting (UMS) code for a while and is now finally making the kernel-space mode-setting (KMS) support the default Radeon interface for the Linux kernel...

Wine 1.5.21 has been made available as the first development build of 2013...

At the end of August I wrote a short post about an important reform that modified the rules for software adoption within the Italian public administration.

The Fedora developers have postponed the release of Fedora 18 yet again. More work needs to be done to remove blocker bugs that still exist in the code base

How do you resolve to be more open in 2013? Contribute to an open source project Take an open source course Be an open source mentor Recommend open source books to friends Other (tell us in the comments) It's a new year, with new opportunities for the open source way to change and innovate life, education, government, business, health, and law. For each of us as individuals, 2013 is a chance to resolve to be more open.

This tutorial is Part 3 of a three-part "Learning PHP" series teaching you how to use PHP through building a simple workflow application. In this tutorial, you will learn about using HTTP authentication, streaming files, and how to create objects and exceptions.

Samsung says it is pressing ahead with plans to release mobile phones running the Linux-based Tizen OS, with more than one model due to arrive in 2013. "We plan to release new, competitive Tizen devices within this year and will keep expanding the lineup depending on market conditions," the company told Bloomberg News in an emailed statement. It did not, however, give any information on when the new models would ship or what they might cost.