Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Have you found some time to do any tinkering with Arduino? It's an open source electronics platform based on a microcontroller and microprocessor with I/O capabilities that allow it to drive many kinds of surprising inventions. We've covered the platform and the community that creates with it before. And now, the Arduino Due has arrived. It's a major upgrade to the 8-bit, 16-MHz microcontroller platform that now offers a 32-bit, 84-MHz processor. Look for a wave of new Arduino inventions based on it.

This tutorial is Part 1 of a three-part "Learning PHP" series teaching you how to use PHP through building a simple workflow application. This tutorial walks you through creating a basic PHP page using HTML forms and covers accessing databases.

A provocative research finding is that 75-90% of all large organizational projects fail to meet their original objectives, (Patterson et al. (2006)). The same research suggests human practices and behaviors—more than technical or financial matters—are at the root of the breakdowns.

Well it's been another wild week here in the Linux blogosphere, but this time the cause will come as no surprise to anyone who cares about Linux or FOSS. Last week, of course, was the week that included Oct. 18 -- a date most of us have had marked on our calendars for the past oh, say, six months. Why? Because it was none other than the official release date of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal."

While Ubuntu has been taking the ARM server and desktop markets seriously for quite some time and is leading quite well on that front, Fedora has been getting behind ARM, and other distributions like Gentoo and Arch have their own interesting ARM Linux undertakings, openSUSE has been rather late to the party.

Just three weeks ago at JavaOne, Oracle was still saying that the JavaFX RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform would become fully available as open source software by the end of the year. Now, JavaFX project architect Richard Bair has adjusted that schedule and moved the release date to February 2013.

My love affair with cities, San Francisco in particular, started early. Though my parents moved from San Francisco to the suburbs before I turned one, we visited the city often. One of my earliest memories of the City: In the family car driving up Interstate 280, face pressed to the window, I look out at the houseboats anchored in Mission Creek and wish that I could live there.

Earlier this month Samsung introduced a new Linux file-system, F2FS, that was designed for mobile devices with flash memory. Initial testing of F2FS yields very positive results against EXT4 and NILFS2..

Open-Source Intel developers have long been working towards a tear-free Linux desktop with proper vsync support. For Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware there's still been some tearing issues, but they hope to soon finally have it solved.

Technology professionals who work in and around SMBs know that sometimes bringing up information security in a smaller IT shop can be a tough sell. In many cases, SMBs feel that they don't present an attractive or large enough target for hackers to be interested in them.

Linus Torvalds has reaffirmed that at this point he doesn't intend to pull KVMTool into the mainline Linux kernel. KVMTool is the lightweight QEMU-free native KVM tool. KVMTool has been developed by several open-source developers for nearly two years.

The QUnit framework makes it easy to test Web apps directly in the browser. By showing the red/green results in the browser with links to the failing tests, it makes it possible to write, test, and correct quickly.

The opensource.com team has been working diligently on putting together a new resource for the open source community and beyond. What started out as "content bundles" are now the first iteration of our Open Voices eBooks.

Today, a powerful new Popcorn Maker demo makes its debut on TED.com, showcasing Popcorn’s potential to change the way the world tells stories on the web. Mozilla Chief Operating Officer, Ryan Merkley, presented Popcorn Maker with a live demo at … Continue reading

OpenStreetMap, a free crowdsourced online world map started eight years ago, has seen its ranks swell to over 800,000 volunteer mapmakers around the world — 300,000 in the last year alone — rapidly becoming the go-to source of map data for successful tech brands including Apple, Foursquare and Wikipedia, as well as for government agencies like the National Parks Service, all of whom are wary of Google’s decision to begin charging for heavy use of its Maps API starting in January 2012.

According to the 2012 Web Index Report, modern technologies are critically under utilized in Ireland—making the work of citizens like Denis Parfenov significantly challenging. If he wants to open up the Irish government, he's got to find a way to open up the data.

Unlike previous Chromebooks, which were all powered by x86 Intel CPUs, the new Chrome OS laptop uses an ARM-based processor from Samsung. The device features an 11.6 inch display and connectivity options include USB 2.0 and 3.0

While Thomas Edison is often lauded as the most prolific American inventor, his mother, Nancy Edison, and how she fostered an open education and an open mind in her son is often overlooked.  When a headmaster labelled Edison as being 'addled,' slow, and unteachable, his mother disagreed and decided to withdraw her son from school and teach him at home.  She knew her son was a bright, curious, creative child who thought divergently yet was often disorganized, disruptive, and hyperactive; today he would most likely be diagnosed as having ADHD.  

There's much to admire in Canonical’s Quantal Quetzal, which continues to refine and improve the Unity desktop, but you'd be forgiven if you missed the positives thanks to the late injection of a little Bezos since Ubuntu 12.04. As if the move to Unity hadn’t been contentious (and bumpy) enough, Canonical has dipped into controversy by adding the Amazon Search Lens to the Unity Dash. The Lens, enabled by default in Ubuntu 12.10, adds Amazon shopping results to your Unity searches.

The Secure Boot saga may seem like it's been dragging on forever here in the Linux blogosphere, but the truth is that it's a mere babe in Redmond arms compared with the never-ending Apple v. Samsung drama. It seems safe to say that most FOSS fans are sick to death of hearing about both of them, but recently the always-insightful team over at TuxRadar posed yet another interesting question.