Linux (en)

• Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce (Phoronix)
  It is going on a year since showing how Unity, Compiz, GNOME Shell & KWin affect graphics/gaming performance, so here is an updated 2012 look. In this article are a variety of OpenGL benchmarks run under the current latest desktops as will be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce. AMD and NVIDIA graphics were tested with both the latest closed and open-source drivers.

  
  

  
• Introducing Comice OS 4: Mac-Looking Linux (Linux Today)
  Softpedia: "It looks like David Tavares, the developer of Pear OS, prepares these days a revamped version of his Linux operating system, under the name of Comice OS."
• Tizen's Dawati Is Using A Hybrid X-Wayland (Phoronix)
  Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more...

  
  

  
• Sabayon 8 Is Now An "Extreme-Rolling" Release Distro (Phoronix)
  The Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux distribution is out now with version 8 of their operating system. Besides many package updates and other new features, it's morphed into what the lead maintainer is calling the first "extreme-rolling release" distribution...

  
  

  
• X Input 2.2 Multi-Touch Is Feeling Good (Phoronix)
  X.Org Server 1.12, which will be officially released in March, is looking good when it comes to proper multi-touch support as exposed via X Input 2.2...

  
  

  

• 7 Best Free Alternative Git Clients (Linux Today)
  LinuxLinks: "Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Other popular tools in this field include Subversion, Bazaar, Mercurial, Monotone, CVS, and SVN."
• Capitol Records Motion To Enjoin ReDigi Denied (Slashdot)

  
  

  NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The motion by Capitol Records for a preliminary injunction against used digital music marketplace ReDigi has been denied. After hearing almost two hours of oral argument by attorneys for both sides, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled from the bench (PDF), holding that plaintiff had failed to show 'irreparable harm.'"

  

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• Python4Kids New Tutorial: Welcome back, Class Recap (Linux Today)
  Python4Kids: "Towards the end of last year we started working on classes and a GUI toolkit called Tkinter. In this tutorial we will recap classes."
• Controlling Liquor Loss with Linux (Linux Today)
  Open Source Matters: "Few people know that inside this dark little bar, Linux servers and some open source-based scripts are keeping an eye on liquor and its link to the bottom line."
• HDD Price Update: How the Thai Floods Have Affected Prices, 3 Months Later (Slashdot)

  
  

  New submitter jjslash writes "The hard disk drive supply chain was hit hard late last year when a series of floods struck Thailand. The Asian country accounts for about a quarter of the world's hard drive production, but thousands of factories had to close shop for weeks as facilities were under water, in what is considered the world's fourth costliest natural disaster according to World Bank estimates. That's on top of the human cost of over 800 lives. TechSpot has monitored a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months."

  

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• Chrome Web Browser Finally Comes to Android Phones, Tablets (Linux Today)
  WIRED Gadget Lab: "Android is finally getting Chromed out. Google had a reason to take its time: It wanted to do Chrome for Android right."
• Pasadena Police Encrypt, Deny Access To Police Radio (Slashdot)

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "There is media (but not public?) outcry over the Pasadena, CA police switch from analog radio that can be picked up by scanners to encrypted digital radio that cannot. 'On Friday, Pasadena police Lt. Phlunte Riddle said the department was unsure whether it could accommodate the media with digital scanners. Riddle said the greatest concern remains officer safety. "People who do bank robberies use scanners, and Radio Shack sells these things cheap," Riddle said. "We just had a robbery today on Hill Avenue and Washington Boulevard," Riddle said. "The last thing I want to do is to have the helicopter or the officers set up on the street and the criminals have a scanner and know where our officers are." Just prior to the switch over, city staffers said they would look into granting access to police radio chatter, most likely by loaning media outlets a scanner capable of picking up the secure signal.'"

  

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• 4G Phones Are Really Fast — At Draining Batteries (Slashdot)

  
  

  Hugh Pickens writes "With Verizon's 4G network covering a good chunk of the country and AT&T gaining ground, more smartphone users have access to the fastest wireless service available. But because 4G coverage isn't truly continuous in many locations, users' batteries are taking a big hit with 4G, as phones spend an lot of battery power trying to hunt down a signal. 'You've got a situation where the phones are sending out their signals searching and searching for a 4G tower, and that eats up your battery,' says Carl Howe, a vice president for research firm Yankee Group. The spottiness of 4G stems at least in part from the measured approach carriers have taken to it, rolling out the service city by city. There are a few tricks 4G users can try to extend battery life such as turning off your 4G connection when you don't need the fastest speeds — when using email, for instance — or using a program such as JuiceDefender to search for apps you may have downloaded that you don't need to run all the time, and erase them."

  

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• Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy? (Slashdot)

  
  

  DocDyson writes "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C/C++/Java developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm making a good living and having fun doing back-end Java work right now, but I strongly believe in being a generalist, so I'm finally trying to learn the HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript future of the Web. However, I find JavaScript's weak typing and dynamic nature difficult to adapt to because I'm so used to strongly-typed, compiled languages with lots of compile-time error-checking and help from the IDE. Does anyone out there who has made this transition have any tips in terms of the best tools and libraries to use to make JavaScript more palatable to us old-school developers?"

  

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• The Best Cloud Music Options for the Linux Desktop (Linux Today)
  Linux.com: Not that long ago, desktop Linux users were left out of most of the online music services.

• Should Next-Gen Game Consoles Be Upgradeable? (Slashdot)

  
  

  MojoKid writes "Historically, console add-ons that boosted the performance of the primary unit haven't done well. Any attempt to upgrade a system's core performance risks bifurcating the user base and increases work developers must do to ensure that a game runs smoothly on both original and upgraded systems. The other reason is that a number of games rely on very specific hardware characteristics to ensure proper operation. In a PC, swapping a CPU with 256K of L2 for a chip with 512K of L2 is a non-issue assuming proper platform support. Existing software will automatically take advantage of the additional cache. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, allows programmers to lock specific cache blocks and use them for storing data from particular threads. In that case, expanding the amount of L2 cache risks breaking previous games because it changes the range of available cache addresses. The other side of the upgrade argument is that the Xbox 360 has been upgraded more effectively than any previous console; current high-end versions ship with more than 10x the storage of the original, as well as support for HDMI and integrated WiFi. It would also forestall the decline in comparative image quality between console and PC platforms."

  

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• Major ReactOS Release: Themes, Shell, ACPI, WiFi (Phoronix)
  ReactOS, the open-source operating system project that's been aspiring to be Microsoft Windows NT binary compatible for more than a decade, is out with a major release -- the first in nearly one year...

  
  

  
• History Repeats Itself: KDP Select Is Amazon.com's 'Payback For Playback' (Slashdot)

  
  

  New submitter brennanw writes "Anyone who was active on mp3.com during the late 90s/early 2000's will find Amazon.com's KDP Select awfully familiar: authors who make their works exclusive to Amazon compete for a pool of money. Any time someone 'borrows' one of their books, they get a cut of a monthly sum (700K in January, 600K for February) based on how many of their books were checked out vs. how many other author's books were checked out. This is almost identical to the 'Payback for Playback' service MP3.com provided musicians a little over a decade ago. Payback for Playback effectively destroyed the original MP3.com artist community, and I don't think KDP Select is going to be much different for the self-publishing community that is growing on Amazon."

  

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• The Secret to Red Hat's Billion-Dollar Success: Everyone's The Boss (Linux Today)
  BusinessInsider: When Red Hat's new top strategy woman, Jackie Yeaney, joined the company six months ago, she hit culture shock.
• Higgs Signal Gains Strength (Slashdot)

  
  

  ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."

  

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• MIT Crowdsources and Gamifies Brain Analysis (Slashdot)

  
  

  MrSeb writes "There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. Starting small and working its way up, MIT today launched Eyewire, a crowdsourced 'game' that tasks users with wiring up the neurons in a mouse's retina. A future stage of the game will get users to find the synapses, too."

  

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• NGINX Adds Support for Open Source Web Server (Linux Today)
  ServerWatch: You too can get full support for NGINX for the low cost of only $70,000
• Saylor Foundation Awards Prizes To Free College Textbooks (Slashdot)

  
  

  Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."

  

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• Fracture Putty Can Heal a Broken Bone In Days (Slashdot)

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "If we break a bone it can take weeks or even month to heal depending on the type and severity of the break. In some extreme cases the complexity of the fracture can make it impossible to heal properly. Researchers at the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center have come up with a new solution for healing broken bones that cuts recovery time to days. It relies on the use of stem cells that contain a bone generating protein. These cells are injected in gel form directly into the area of the broken bone, where they quickly get to work forming new bone. The end result is very rapid recovery, possibly sidestepping the muscle atrophy that can come with long bone healing times. The gel has been proven to work on animals as big as a sheep and has funding from the DoD. Lets hope it is proven to work on humans in the coming years."

  

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• SUSE hits the big 2-0 (Linux Today)
  ITWorld: While Linux itself celebrated its twentieth anniversary in high style last year, 2012 will be the year of the lizard, as SUSE Linux steps up to celebrate two decades as the world's oldest commercial Linux entity.

• Apple Could Lose $1.6 Billion In iPad Lawsuit (Slashdot)

  
  

  redletterdave writes "Proview Technology, which currently uses the 'iPad' name on several of its products including computer monitors, stands to win up to $1.6 billion and an apology from Apple for allegedly infringing upon Proview's trademarked name to use on its bestselling tablet. Proview International, which owns subsidiaries Proview Technology in Shenzhen and Proview Electronics in Taiwan, originally registered the name 'iPad' in Taiwan in 2000 and mainland China in 2001. Proview eventually sued Apple in 2011, and even though the Cupertino-based company retaliated with a counter-suit of its own, Apple lost the case in local Chinese courts. Depending on the court's findings, Apple could be fined anywhere from $38 million to the $1.6 billion that Proview is seeking. In addition to the money, Proview also wants Apple to apologize. 'We have prepared well for a long-term legal battle,' said one of Proview's lawyers."

  

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• A Look at 3D Printing and Open Source (Linux Today)
  Linux.com: Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
• Google Releases Chrome For Android Beta (Slashdot)

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "Today Google announced the availability of a beta version of its Chrome browser for Android. Unfortunately, it's limited to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) devices. Google is trying to keep Chrome fast and easy to use, and part of that involved redesigning tabs so they work more naturally with touchscreens. 'You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you're holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web.' They've also including synchronization functionality that allows you to move from desktop browsing to phone or tablet browsing and pick up right where you left off."

  

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• The 20th IOCCC Winners Announced (Slashdot)

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "The 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest ended on February 5th, 2012, and the list of winners has been announced. According to the page, the source code for all the winning entries 'has not been released yet.' It will be available alongside code from previous years 'in late-February to mid-March.'"

  

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• Programming Error Doomed Russian Mars Probe (Slashdot)

  
  

  astroengine writes "So it turns out U.S. radars weren't to blame for the unfortunate demise of Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mars sample return mission — it was a computer programming error that doomed the probe, a government board investigating the accident has determined." According to the Planetary Society Blog's unofficial translation and paraphrasing of the incident report, "The spacecraft computer failed when two of the chips in the electronics suffered radiation damage. (The Russians say that radiation damage is the most likely cause, but the spacecraft was still in low Earth orbit beneath the radiation belts.) Whatever triggered the chip failure, the ultimate cause was the use of non-space-qualified electronic components. When the chips failed, the on-board computer program crashed."

  

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