Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux 3.7 introduces a range of Btrfs performance improvements. The kernel now supports the SMB data exchange protocol used by recent Windows versions, and it offers discard functionality for software RAIDs, which is important for SSDs

What a difference a year makes. It used to be that gaming was Linux's "Achilles' heel" of sorts, cited by more than a few enthusiasts as justification for their reluctance to switch away from Windows. Fast forward to today, and gaming may well be the focus of more Linux-centered excitement than any other area. How did we get from point A to point B, you may ask?

It's already no secret that Linux tends to dominate as the operating system of choice on the world's fastest supercomputers, but the release on Monday of the 40th edition of the twice-yearly Top500 List of the world’s top supercomputers made that connection more clear than ever.

Engineers from Google's Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced book scanner under an open source licence on Google Code. The Verge reports that the engineers developed a prototype during the "20 per cent time" that Google allocates to its employees for personal projects. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner can automatically digitise entire books.

Have you ever heard the following? "Welcome to the team! Here's a list of 15 applications to install, the instructions are in the team room, somewhere. See you in a week!" Or: "What do you mean it broke production, it runs fine on my machine?" Or: "Why is this working on her machine and his machine, but not my machine?" Development environments are becoming more complex, with more moving parts and tricky dependencies. Virtualization has been a huge boon for the IT industry in saving costs, increasing flexibility and maintaining control over complex environments. Rather than focusing on virtualization on the delivery side, let's look at how you can provide that flexibility and control to developers to manage multiple development environments easily using Vagrant.

Free, open source software projects have relied on a wide array of strategies and procedures to attract new contributors. Retaining newcomers and having them become valued sustainable contributors is a much more delicate challenge. What a person experiences when he or she is a project newcomer seems to have an important impact on the kind of contributor this person will become within a project. There has been little research about what it takes to provide a greater newcomer experience to ensure that projects keep getting quality contributors. This is what I am trying to find out in my PhD thesis.

There's a call for unification of the four largest *BSD operating systems in a move to create a "unified BSD" with the best features in order to better compete with GNU/Linux. It's unlikely that this call for unification will result in any action, but an independent user has written a brief statement cross-posted to several BSD mailing lists about a Unified BSD? The user asks why the BSD community can't band together and form a unified platform rather than fragmenting their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. He wants to see the four largest BSD variants merged: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD.

MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course. 

LDT has been published, a Linux Driver Template for helping new Linux kernel developers begin writing hardware device drivers.

Linux developer Andy Grover has posted to the kernel developer mailing list (LKML) to accuse RisingTide Systems of violating Linux kernel licensing conditions with its RTS OS storage operating system. This has led to a discussion in which prominent kernel developers, a RisingTide employee and a legal representative for the company have explained their positions. Discussion has also turned to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux drivers and related cease and desist notices.

The Research team at Mozilla has announced the launch of a new open SWF runtime project called "Shumway". Described as "an HTML5 technology experiment", Shumway is intended to provide a web-native implementation of Adobe's SWF Flash file format, used for vector graphics and multimedia.

In a guest post on Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli's blog, Kevin Carillo, a PhD student from the Victoria University of Wellington, is calling for participants for a survey that seeks to collect data on the experiences of newcomers joining open source communities. Carillo says he is "interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences." The goal of his research project is to collect data on how newcomers to open source communities turn into contributors or what prevents them from doing so.

I was lucky enough to interview Linus quite early in the history of Linux – back in 1996, when he was still living in Helsinki (you can read the fruits of that meeting in this old Wired feature.) It was at an important moment for him, both personally – his first child was born at this time – and in terms of his career. He was about to join the chip design company Transmeta, a move that didn't really work out, but led to him relocating to America, where he remains today.

"The world is built on C++ and so is Microsoft," proclaimed Herb Sutter at Microsoft's Build conference last week in Seattle, Washington. Sutter is chair of the ISO C++ standards committee and Microsoft's Visual C++ language architect. Native code is currently ascendant inside his company, with C++ prominent in SDKs for Windows Phone 8 and for the Windows Runtime - the touch-friendly app platform in Windows 8.

Back in March of this year, the University of Albany Student Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) organized its second Open Source Festival. The event brought together enthusiasts of open source from industry, government, and academia in the New York-Albany area. There, I shared my experience of teaching an open source class at RPI and the work that OSEHRA was doing on further promoting the use of open source software in healthcare. Among other topics of discussion was the need to educate college students on the basic concepts of NoSQL databases.

Facebook has open sourced its Corona scheduling component for Hadoop, which the company calls "the next version of Map-Reduce". Facebook is using its own fork of Apache Hadoop which is optimised for the massive scale of its operations.

In the latest beta release of its Chrome web browser, Google has added a number of new features aimed at developers. The first of these is expanded datalist support – now, developers can set specific dates and times for input elements. As pointed out by Google Software Engineer Peter Beverloo, arbitrary dates and times can still be entered.

While many Linux users are rightfully quite mad over AMD laying off many Linux kernel developers and shutting down their Operating System Research Center, not all hope is lost for future AMD CPU products being well supported under Linux. AMD's (few) graphics driver developers working on the open-source Radeon stack were unaffected by the recent layoffs and OSRC closure, while those Linux developers working on future CPU product enablement, compiler optimizations, enhancing Linux virtualization support, and other areas were the ones hit very hard.

DIY biology is a hot topic and has piqued the interest of the Wellcome Trust and NESTA in the UK and the FBI in the US. What has it got to do with open source and hacking? Quite a lot as it happens and those curious could get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, at a series of workshops held in Manchester over the weekend of 3 and 4 November 2012.

Eight years ago today, Mozilla launched the first version of Firefox. We had the audacity to believe that we could change things. We believed that a community of people who understood the power of the Web, and who put people above profits, could build something amazing.