Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The massive blockbuster Avatar reintroduced 3D to the 21st century. The big difference from the previous 3D invasions was digital technology. Optically and physiologically the principle was the same: pairs of frames, representing a left eye view and a right eye view, are presented (near-) simultaneously to the viewer. The 3D picture then gets assembled by the human brain.

Kindle Fire users may have to damp their enthusiasm for rooting their devices: unless they’re prepared to chase up some other fixes and put up with some inconvenience, rooting the device kills video access.

In November 2001, IBM made its Java tools IDE and platform, developed for WebSphere Application Studio, available under an open source licence. It was the beginning of Eclipse, which now claims 65 per cent of the Java IDE market. But why was Eclipse founded and what has been its impact over a decade?

The Doom 3 source-code -- based upon the id Tech 4 engine -- is now available as open-source software to the gaming community under the GNU GPL license.

Elmer is an open-source multiphysics simulation software that has been around since 1995. It is developed by the CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd. This group is administered by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture in Finland. With Elmer, you can model physical systems, such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetism, heat transfer and acoustics. All of those problem areas have one thing in common—they are all described by partial differential equations (PDEs).

Dennis Ritchie created no gadgets to entrance the lustful desire of hundreds of millions of well-heeled consumers, built no companies that bestride the corporate world like Colossus, and made no billions from his revolutionary contributions to the world of computer science. I would venture to guess that less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the number of people who took shocked notice of the passing of Steve Jobs would even recognize his name. Time magazine will not rip apart its next issue to put the news of his death earlier this week, at age 70, on the cover. But the co-creator (with Ken Thompson) of the Unix operating system and author of the C programming language deserves more than just a moment of silence from programmers everywhere.

I don't normally post articles if they are more than a day or two out but thought this warranted an exception - Scott

The Android-based device, only unveiled by Barnes & Nobles in the US last week, was pwned by the same group of developers who previously rooted the Amazon Kindle Fire. In both cases rooting the devices gives users the ability to install apps themselves, rather than been restricted to those offered by the manufacturer.

LXer Feature: 21-Nov-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Ubuntu has been at the top of the Linux popularity contest for much of the past five years, but that's starting to change as Linux Mint's popularity grows. As the sands of Linux popularity shift, development on other distros and key components of Linux continued to move forward last week.

LXer Feature: 13-Nov-2011

This past we saw the usurping of Ubuntu off the top of the DistroWatch.com rankings which Ubuntu has held for several years, Kes Hess continues his search for the ultimate desktop, Sam Varghese thinks its time for Ubuntu to drop 'it', in a guest editorial by Cathy Malmrose she describes "The Computer I Need" and Larry Cafiero is gearing up for SCALE 10x..as well am I. Enjoy!

German lawyer Till Jaeger came to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe to update attendees on the AVM vs. Cybits case that is currently underway in Germany. The case has some potentially serious implications for users of GPL-licensed software, particularly in embedded Linux contexts, so Jaeger (and his client Harald Welte) felt it was important to publicize the details of the case. So important, in fact, that he and Welte are forgoing the usual practice of keeping all of the privileged information (between a lawyer and client) private.

LXer Feature: 06-Nov-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

There are many different Linux distributions, each offering a slightly different flavor of the free and open source operating system. Most readers of these pages are probably at least aware by now of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, which tends to dominate the headlines by far, but another very popular and excellent choice is Fedora, the free, community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora currently ranks at No. 3 in DistroWatch's popularity listings, and late Thursday the project behind it announced that the next big version--Fedora 16, or “Verne”--has been officially declared “gold” and ready for release on Tuesday.

Motorola Mobility updated its Xoom tablet with a 10.1-inch Xoom 2 and an 8.2-inch Xoom 2 Media Edition tablet, each running Android 3.2 on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. The Wi-Fi only devices are debuting in the U.K. and Ireland, and feature 1280 x 800-pixel screens with splashguard coating, while the 10.1-inch model is 10 percent lighter and 33 percent thinner than the original....

As I was reading yet another article about the problems people are having with Unity, I was thinking about how we may be focused on the wrong thing when we fret about how the desktop interface works. Shouldn't we, as a community, be focused on the application ecosystem? Or has the rise of software as a service caused the community to essentially declare this space "done"?

While the Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening right now in the United States, over in India there is FUDCon, the Fedora conference. Kicking off today and running through the start of next week (6 November) is FUDCon India 2011. This conference for users and developers of Fedora is happening in Pune, India. Details on this year's Fedora India conference can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki.

The more the Linux Foundation broadens its mandate beyond its core mission of "fostering the growth of Linux", the more it risks stepping on the toes of its most ardent supporters. This tension was on full display earlier this week when The Register reported an apparent conflict between the Linux Foundation's support for OpenMAMA, an API used in financial messaging systems, and AMQP, a financial messaging system wire protocol.

Sam Ramji insisted that he wasn’t joking, that he wasn’t crazy, and that he hadn’t joined some sort of dark Microsoft conspiracy. The year was 2006, and Ramji had just been named Microsoft’s head of open source software strategy. Up to then, Redmond’s most famous contribution to the open source community was CEO Steve Ballmer comparing Linux to a malignant cancer. Even Ramji was skeptical — and a little afraid — of his new job.

LOS ANGELES – The SCALE 10X team announces that registration has opened for the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America To register for SCALE 10X, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org and click on the Registration tab. Admission for SCALE 10X ranges from $10 for an Expo Only Ticket to $60 for a Full Access Pass. The Linux Beginner’s Training Class, a separate admission, is $25.

The 2011 Kernel Summit was held in Prague on October 23-25. The organization of the event was changed somewhat this year; the first day was dedicated to a small number of minisummits. We do not currently have coverage from those events - that is a gap we hope to fill in the near future.