Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Building web scale applications means building systems that can survive any number of horrible things happening to your hardware or software. It means eliminating single points of failure, it means scaling horizontally, as well as vertically, and it means being able to respond to influxes of traffic without buckling under the weight. Increasingly, building web scale applications also means handling terabytes, or even petabytes of data; this is where the Apache Hadoop project comes in.

Old stuff rock again! The Hipster community is growing, Amiga is proposing a new computer (running Linux), vintage cars are trendy, etc. To follow the stream, nothing can beat the emulation of old games. Take a break from the most recent FPS and go back to the origin. What made video games what they are today? Story, game play, graphics, soundtrack? The best way to remember is to play again. And why not start with DOS games?

As most Ubuntu users will know, Ubuntu 12.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. As an LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin), released on 26 April 2012, is scheduled to receive updates and support, for both the desktop and server versions, until October 2017. What many Ubuntu users may not know is that Ubuntu 12.04 will see maintenance releases over this period. The first of those, 12.04.1, is due on 16 August.

For years now, in the field of robotics, open source platforms have been ushering in all kinds of innovation. And among the commercial companies focused on open source robotics, none is as prominent as Silicon Valley-based Willow Garage. Scott Hassan, a Google veteran, founded Willow Garage in 2006 as a well-funded robotics research shop. In addition to building innovative robots and robotics platforms, Willow Garage helped organize the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

Dave Mason of Mozilla talks about a possible replacement to "Gecko" and what makes Firefox better than other browsers.

VMware continued its embrace of open source software with its recent acquisition of open source and virtual network provider Nicira. The move continued VMware's aggressive M&A strategy and its effort to transition from proprietary software and virtualization to a broader market and cloud computing, largely through open source software.

The first certified NVIDIA 304 series Linux graphics driver has been released. The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver packs in 41 official changes affecting several areas of this leading proprietary graphics driver...

Matthias Clasen gave readers of his blog another one of his release previews this Saturday of the upcoming GNOME 3.5.5. The big feature this release is the "new screen lock implementation." Beyond that, various applications and System Settings received some improvements as well. Clasen said the new screen lock mechanism is actually a sheild that lifts when depressing "Esc" or by dragging with the mouse. Underneath is the unlock screen. Clasen said it still has a few issues, but it works well.

LXer Feature: 12-Aug-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Much as we here in the Linux community may wish that everyone could cut their proverbial computing "teeth" on our favorite operating system, the fact remains that the majority of the world starts off on Windows. That, after all, is why the tragedy of "Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome" has persisted all these years.

Open source has created a new way of mobilising communities but it has also allowed a democratic deficit to open up between developers and users. Glyn Moody offers his take on this gap and how it is being slowly closed.

Valve's SIGGRAPH 2012 presentation last night -- about the Source Engine on Linux and their experiences with maximizing the OpenGL performance of their game engine on Linux -- was a success. More details about the presentation will be available in the coming days, including the slides. However, for those overly-excited, here's a few photos from the Valve Linux presentation in Los Angeles. There's also a photo of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux, although it's not too clear and doesn't show (Ubuntu) Linux in the background with my photos from April when at Valve HQ being much more clear.

Nokia's back-room clear out continues with the Qt platform being sold to Finnish firm Digia Oyj for an undisclosed sum. As part of the deal 125 engineers will swap employers. Digia was a licensee of Qt, distributing commercial and freeware versions of the platform and development tools, but now it owns the whole shebang.

The speed of TCP data flows is dependent on two factors: transmission delay (the width of the data pipe) and propagation delay (the time that the data takes to travel from one end of the pipe to the other). Transmission delay is dependent on network bandwidth, which has increased steadily and substantially over the life of the Internet. On the other hand, propagation delay is a function of router latencies, which have not improved to the same extent as network bandwidth, and the speed of light, which has remained stubbornly constant. (At intercontinental distances, this physical limitation means that—leaving aside router latencies—transmission through the medium alone requires several milliseconds.) The relative change in the weighting of these two factors means that over time the propagation delay has become a steadily larger component in the overall latency of web services. (This is especially so for many web pages, where a browser often opens several connections to fetch multiple small objects that compose the page.)

The latest incarnation of the XFCE desktop proves once again that when you delve into the wonders of the Linux OS, something old definitely becomes something new again. The Linux Mint 13 team has released a specially flavored distro built around the latest version of the XFCE interface.

In Hollywood, the good guys nearly always win. In information security, the bad guys ("black hats") often win, in large part because the bad guys know how to collaborate much better than the good guys ("white hats"). Until now. From Lulzsec to Chaos Computer Club, hackers increasingly band together to spring sophisticated attacks on websites, mobile applications, and more, while the white hats have mostly failed to coordinate a robust defence.

Competition may be good for business, but competition among Linux desktops is currently so fierce that it may end up being to everyone's detriment in the medium-term. In a recent posting on his blog entitled Staring Into The Abyss, long-time GTK+ and GNOME developer Benjamin Otte addressed the idea that GNOME is both losing market share and declining in significance. That might sound like a GNOME-specific problem, but it also has implications for other desktops.

It should come as no surprise that Linux has a substantial presence in the scientific community. Solutions abound from high-performance computing clusters to visualization software. There's even an entire Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux targeted for scientific computation, appropriately named Scientific Linux.

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argues Brian Christian, chief technology officer of Zettaset.

The Open Group, the steward of the UNIX standards, has open sourced the CDE classic desktop for Unix under the LGPLv2 licence. The Common Desktop Environment and the Motif toolkit on which it is based, itself open sourced in 2000, became the de facto standard for Unix desktops in Unix's commercial hay day in the 1990s. CDE broadened the concept of simple window managers configured by means of text files which had previously dominated the Unix world; it included a desktop offering integrated applications and graphical configuration tools.