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Tag: Open Source

  • GNOME Foundation Has Run Out Of Money

    GNOME Foundation Has Run Out Of Money

    The GNOME Foundation is one of the cornerstones of the open-source software development community. Not only does the foundation work to create their own free software computing platform, but it also funds outreach programs. As it turns out, those outreach programs combined with some bad bookkeeping has landed the foundation in trouble.

    The GNOME Foundation announced this week that it has exhausted its cash reserves and is putting an immediate freeze on any non-essential spending. The non-profit says that the current situation came about thanks to it not being able to keep up with the finances needed to fund the Outreach Program for Women – a program designed to get women into open source software development. Here’s the situation straight from The GNOME Foundation:

    The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) has proven to be extremely popular and has grown quite rapidly both in terms of the number of interns and the number of participating organizations. GNOME, as the lead organization, has been responsible for managing the finances for the entire effort. However, as the program grew, the processes did not keep up. The changes were not tracked effectively from the point when other organizations joined the OPW. This impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW administration, but also to keep up with the core financial tasks of the Foundation — tasks which already needed the full attention of the Foundation’s employees and the board.

    As a result of these issues, we have only just now finalized our 2014 budget. In the meantime, we made assumptions based on previous years’ incomes and expenditures, and we authorized expenditures for this year based on those assumptions. Those assumptions proved to be more optimistic than reality. In addition, while our outgoing payments to interns must be strictly timed, the incoming payments from sponsoring organizations are very fluid, thus we have had to front the costs of OPW. Fronting these costs has resulted in a budget shortfall.

    So, what does this mean for The GNOME Foundation and, more importantly, OPW? According to the announcement, organizations, like OPW, in which The GNOME Foundation handles expenses shouldn’t be affected by any of this. In the meantime, the Foundation will be working to recoup some money through a variety of means, including:

  • Invoicing our Advisory Board members for their annual subscription fees
  • Invoicing our conference sponsors
  • Following up on unpaid invoices more actively
  • Taking on the Executive Director’s administrative and fundraising duties
  • Invoicing the OPW sponsoring organizations for the upcoming round immediately
  • Increasing our general fundraising efforts for the Foundation and its events
  • Some of the OPW administrative workload is being shifted from Foundation employees to the OPW organizing team

    • The GNOME Foundation says that it should be able to life the spending freeze by July if everything works out. In the meantime, it encourages those who believe in their mission to spread the word and become a friend of GNOME.

    Image via GNOME Foundation

  • GoDaddy Partners With Spree To Offer eCommerce Solutions To Small Businesses

    Last year, GoDaddy moved away from super models to focus on small businesses and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Since then, the the company has entered into a number of key strategic partnerships to help out small businesses with everything from email management to eCommerce solutions.

    GoDaddy announced today that it has partnered up with Spree Commerce to offer its open-source eCommerce platform to small businesses. The partnership is another step in GoDaddy’s strategy of democratizing technology for small businesses.

    “Many of our customers do not have the technical expertise to build a successful online store, yet they all want to serve their customers who are increasingly online and mobile,” said GoDaddy Head of Product for Presence and Commerce Sandeep Grover. “With GoDaddy, our vision is to make it simple for any small business to create an eye-catching store that will stand out and help them sell more. With Spree Commerce on the back-end, we’ll be translating the great open-source work of the Spree community into a store experience available to the masses.”

    It’s noted that the eCommerce segment is expected to hit $370 billion by 2017. GoDaddy wants to be part of that growing trend by getting as many small businesses as it can online before then. With Spree, it will be able to do just that.

    “We’re pleased to partner with GoDaddy to provide a technology solution that can scale to tens of thousands of stores,” said Spree Commerce CEO Sean Schofield. “We also look forward to GoDaddy joining our worldwide open source movement, which is constantly innovating together to improve our platform’s capabilities.”

    As Schofield mentioned above, GoDaddy will be joining the open source movement with this latest partnership. In exchange for using Spree’s technology, GoDaddy will be contributing back to its open source community.

    “GoDaddy is embracing open ecosystems and communities in open source. This commitment not only allows GoDaddy to be a leader in the hosting and domains industries by adopting and contributing to the latest innovations in open source, but also expand our large-scale systems expertise,” said GoDaddy CTO Elissa Murphy. “Over the next year, GoDaddy will adopt and contribute new innovations focused on the VSB (very small business) customer to these communities.”

    Those using GoDaddy for their small business needs will be able to utilize Spree Commerce starting this Spring.

    Image via GoDaddy/YouTube

  • Google Introduces Benchmark For All Your Microbenchmarking Needs

    According to Google, you will rarely ever need to run microbenchmarks. Still, some developers will find it useful when they need to see if a piece of code they’re working on is truly worth it. While there are tools available to run microbenchmarks, Google thought it would be a good idea to make its own.

    Google announced today that it has created a new microbenchmarking tool called benchmark. The tool is built on a C++ library and was inspired by googletest. The tool “supports value- and type-parameterized benchmarks, various options for running the benchmarks including multithreading, and custom report generation.”

    While benchmark is based on googletest, Google notes that there is a major difference between the two. In benchmark, benchmarks are not automatically discovered like they are in googletest. This isn’t a bad thing though as Google notes the lack of automatic discovery “allows greater flexibility in terms of how benchmarks are run, and the parameters that are used by the benchmark.”

    Here’s what benchmark looks like:

    Google Introduces Benchmark

    As is the case with most of these tools, benchmark is an open source project. You can check it out on github and start contributing. If you just want to use it, you’ll also find test code on its github page as well.

  • Oracle Ends Commercial Support For GlassFish

    Oracle Ends Commercial Support For GlassFish

    As part of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the company also acquired the GlassFish application server project. Since its launch, GlassFish users have enjoyed commercial support for the latest releases of Java Enterprise Edition, but that’s no longer the case.

    Earlier this month, Oracle announced that it would be ending commercial support for GlassFish and Java EE. In other words, there will be no GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support. There will, however, be an open source version with GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 launching in 2014.

    So, what’s an enterprise using GlassFish to do? Oracle says that all your Java EE 7 needs will now be fulfilled by the company’s WebLogic Server service. It says that the the compatibility between the two server types is high and that you should be able to transfer your goods over to WebLogic in no time.

    For more information, here’s what Oracle recommends GlassFish Server customers do to begin the move to WebLogic:

  • Applications developed to Java EE standards can be deployed to both GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server
  • GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server have implementation-specific deployment descriptor interoperability (here and here).
  • GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server share quite a bit of code, so there are quite a bit of configuration and (extended) feature similarities. Shared code includes JPA, JAX-RS, WebSockets (pre JSR 356 in both cases), CDI, Bean Validation, JSF, JAX-WS, JAXB, and WS-AT.
  • Both Oracle GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server 12c support Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Coherence, Oracle Directory Server, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Manager and are entitled to support for the underlying Oracle JDK.

    • Before you think that this means Oracle is giving up on Java EE, you might want to dial it back a bit. The company says that’s it committed to both Java EE and GlassFish more than ever. In fact, it says that focusing entirely on GlassFish Open Source Edition will help its teams “to be more focused on the Java EE platform.”

    [Image: GlassFish/Twitter]
    [h/t: JavaWorld]

  • Ouya Launch Delayed By A Few Weeks To Meet “Greater Than Expected Demand”

    In February, Ouya announced that the little Android console that could would be launching on June 5. That date has been pushed back by just a little, but those interested in the new console will still be able to get their hands on one in June.

    Joystiq reports that the Ouya console has been delayed to June 25 in North America. The extra few weeks will allow the Ouya team to manufacture more units after seeing “greater than expected” demand from retail partners.

    “We’ve had incredibly positive reactions from our retail partners, and so in order to meet their greater than expected demand, we decided to shift the launch date by a couple of weeks – three weeks – which will allow us to create more units and, basically, have more units on store shelves in June,” said Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman in a statement to Joystiq.

    It’s not being reported as a cause of the delay, but the Ouya controller apparently had a small problem where the buttons would get stuck under the faceplate. The company is aware of the problem, and is enlarging holes on the faceplate by a few millimeters to ensure that there are no stuck buttons come launch.

    Even with the delay, the Ouya is still set to launch next month. As such, excitement for the console has grown and one influential gaming investor has decided to join the Ouya team. Former EA executive and investor guru Bing Gordon has joined the Ouya board of directors. He will advise the company on its development and retail plans.

    “OUYA’s open source platform creates a new world of opportunity for established and emerging independent game creators and gamers alike,” said Gordon. “There are some types of games that can only be experienced on a TV, and OUYA is squarely focused on bringing back the living room gaming experience. OUYA will allow game developers to unleash their most creative ideas and satisfy gamers craving a new kind of experience.”

    Ouya will be available starting June 25 for the comparably low price of $99. It will be available through online retail and in-store at GameStop, Best Buy and Target.

  • Should Your Startup Use Open Source Software?

    Open source software is awesome, and it’s free. What more do you need to know? In all actuality, there’s a lot to consider when thinking about what software to use in your startup. Do you go with open source or proprietary? Maybe Google can help.

    Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source at Google, is interviewed by Don Dodge about how your startup should use open source software. It’s a given that you should use open source and perhaps contribute as well, but there are tricks to doing it correctly, so that you can scale, so you don’t run into legal trouble and so that you can be acquired.

  • VAR Guy: VARs Can Make FOSS Better For Enterprises

    Univa put out the results of a survey indicating that 75% of enterprises encounter problems when using open source software.

    The biggest gripe is a lack of enterprise-grade support , with 27% of respondents raising this as their top concern. Other issues: usability (24%), maintenance (20%), crashes (19%), bugs (18%), downtime (16%), loss off productivity (16%) and interoperability (16%).

    According to the survey, 64% are willing to pay for better quality, with the following listed as reasons to do so: Stability (25%), Enterprise-grade support (22%), Ease of use (20%), Extra functionality (18%), Bug reports/fixes (15%), Integrated solution (13%), Product upgrades (13%), and Predictable lifecycles (13%).

    “We have always said that users are willing to pay for quality when it comes to Open Source software, and the results of the survey have confirmed as such,” said Univa CEO Gary Tyreman. “A large number of organizations use Open Source Grid Engine as a key ingredient in product development, but as the company grows they can’t afford to rely on unsupported Open Source Grid Engine. That is when they can turn to us for peace of mind, scalability and reliability provided by our team and proven Univa Grid Engine.”

    Christopher Tozzi (“The VAR Guy”) thinks some of the areas of concern for enterprises are places where VARs can step up.

    “These [ software stability problems, bug reporting troubles and unpredictable product lifecycles] are all classic criticisms of FOSS, and there is a limit to the extent to which third-party solutions can address them without being able to change the behavior of independent open source projects,” he writes. “Yet several of the other problems with FOSS that the respondents cited are a VAR’s dream, since they represent places where third-party vendors can very feasibly add recognizable value to FOSS solutions. These include improving ease-of-use, providing extra functionality and integrating FOSS into broader solutions.”

    “The message for the channel, then, seems clear,” he concludes. “Open source is a crucial part of the operations of most enterprises today, yet those enterprises are willing to pay to make their FOSS experience smoother. And the opportunities for VARs to do so are rich, as long as they are able to home in on the specific areas where organizations demand better service.”

    An infographic with data from the survey can be found here.

  • Google Pledges Not To Sue Open Source Distributors Over Patents

    Google announced the ‘Open Patent Non-Assertion’ Pledge today, saying that it pledges not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.

    “We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used,” says Senior Patent Counsel Duane Valz (pictured). “Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.”

    On the pledge site, Google maintains a list of pledged patents, which include: System and method for analyzing data records, Large-scale data processing in a distributed and parallel processing environment, System and method for efficient large-scale data processing, System and method for analyzing data records, Joining tables in a MapReduce procedure, Processing data in a MapReduce framework, System and method for analyzing data records (another one), System and method for large-scale data processing using an application-independent framework, Joining tables in a MapReduce procedure (another one), and Processing data in a MapReduce environment.

    Google says it hopes the pledge will serve as a model for the industry. We’ll see.

    As far as Google is concerned, the benefits of the pledge are: transparency, breadth, defensive protection and durability.

    “Our pledge builds on past efforts by companies like IBM and Red Hat and the work of the Open Invention Network (of which Google is a member),” says Valz. “It also complements our efforts on cooperative licensing, where we’re working with like-minded companies to develop patent agreements that would cut down on lawsuits.”

    Google notes that it will also continue to support patent reforms to improve patent quality and reduce “excessive” litigation.

  • Firefox OS Simulator 3.0 Now Available

    Late last year, Mozilla released Firefox OS simulator 1.0. The preview software would give developers an idea of how Firefox OS looks when running on a mobile device while allowing them to develop apps for the HTML5-centric platform. It’s only been a few months since then, and Mozilla has already pushed out two new versions with the latest being made available this week.

    Mozilla announced that Firefox OS Simulator 3.0 is now available to developers. What sets this apart from previous Simulator builds beyond the obvious new features is that it’s a really early build that’s still “rough around the edges.” Still, Mozilla wants you, the developers, to have a go at it to help the team build the best product they can.

    Here’s what you can expect to see in version 3.0 of the Firefox OS Simulator:

  • Push to Device
  • Rotation simulation
  • Basic geolocation API simulation
  • Manifest validation
  • Stability fixes for installation and updates to apps
  • Newer versions of the Firefox rendering engine and Gaia (the UI for Firefox OS)

    • The most helpful update in version 3.0 is probably the ability to push apps to a device loaded with Firefox OS. Sony has recently released an experimental version of the mobile OS for its Xperia E smartphone. With the latest version of the simulator, developers can now test apps on these devices to make sure they properly work in a true mobile environment.

    If you want to try out the latest version of Firefox OS Simulator, you can grab it for Windows, Mac or Linux. Be aware that it acts as an extension of Firefox so you’ll have to keep the browser open to play around with it.

  • Showcase Your Knowledge With Mozilla’s Open Badges

    Showcase Your Knowledge With Mozilla’s Open Badges

    For the past few years, Mozilla has been working on a project called Open Badges. You can think of the project like merit badges for the Internet. It allows people to prove that they have accomplished something, or are knowledgeable in a topic, in a visual format. Now after a year of extensive beta testing, the finished product is finally ready.

    Mozilla announced today that Open Badges 1.0 is ready for public use. The first release of Open Badges will be focused on three areas:

  • earn badges for skills you learn online and offline
  • give recognition for things you teach
  • show your badges in the places that matter.

    • Right from the start, Open Badges users will be able to prove their worth with badges from over 600 organizations. Mozilla itself offer a wide range of badges, including badges for Web development. Other organizations offering badges include the Girl Scouts and NASA.

    For a more in-depth breakdown of what Open Badges offer, the Mozilla blog explains:

    Knits skills together. Through the Open Badges shared standard, badges for the same skill-set can connect and build on one another — whether they’re issued by the same organization or many different ones. Individuals can earn badges that recognize learning and skills from multiple sources both online and offline — from learning HTML with Mozilla, to volunteering and leadership skills with Girl Scouts, to learning introductory robotics and engineering with NASA.

    Full of information. With Open Badges, every badge has important data built in that links back to who issued it, how it was earned, and even the projects a user completed to earn it. Employers and others can dig into this rich data and see the full story of each user’s skills and achievements.

    Can go anywhere on the web. The Open Badges backpack gives users an easy way to collect their badges, sort them by category, and display them across social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.

    Recognizes learning that matters. Open Badges’ free software allows any organization that meets the standard to begin issuing — and verifying — badges. Currently 600 organizations have issued 62,000 badges to 23,000 learners. A growing list of who is issuing badges is available here.

    Free, open to anyone, and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Open Badges is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors. The open source model means improvements made by one partner can benefit everyone, from bug fixes to new features.

    If you want to start working with Open Badges, you should start with the developer community. After that, check out the source code and contribute to its development. Open Badges has an opportunity to change how we learn and earn accomplishments on the Web, but it won’t be able to do anything if it doesn’t have the support of the open source community.

  • Kinect Code Samples Go Open Source To Encourage Development

    Kinect for Windows has inspired developers to create some really impressive applications. That’s apparently not good enough, though, as Microsoft is now making Kinect for Windows partially open source to encourage more development on the platform.

    The Kinect for Windows team that its sample code is now open source under an Apache 2.0 license. The 22 samples are available in C#, C++ and Visual Basic.

    So, why go open source? The team says that there are four reasons for the move:

  • Easy Access -> we will continue to release our sample applications as part of our Developer Toolkit. However, that’s a large download & install that can be cumbersome if you just want to quickly view or access code on the web
  • Reuse The Code -> we’re releasing all the samples under an Apache 2.0 license so that you can take the code and reuse, remix, etc. Also, we’re using a Git repository so it’s easy clone & fork if you want
  • Get Feedback -> we will use CodePlex’s built-in feedback & discussion tools to get community input on the samples. We want to hear from you to understand what we can do better with the samples
  • Faster Updates -> we will be able to update samples more quickly on CodePlex (compared to Toolkit releases). CodePlex also has a “Subscribe” feature that enables you to follow the project and get notified when something changes, a bug gets fixed, someone says something smart in the discussions, etc.

    • The majority of the code will still remain proprietary, but the release of code samples should at least help push Kinect for Windows development into new areas. The sensor has already provided a number of unique applications, and developers being able to muck around with the code might yield even more interesting results.

    All of this news was posted on Microsoft’s new Kinect development blog. It will be kept separate from the regular Kinect for Windows blog, and will focus entirely on “going behind the scenes with the K4W engineering team and will go deeper on the technology and APIs, share tips & tricks, and provide other tidbits of information relevant to those building K4W applications.”

    [h/t: CNET]

  • Last.fm Open Sources Moost, A C++ Library

    Last.fm Open Sources Moost, A C++ Library

    Last.fm may be well known for its Internet radio services, but the company is also breaking into the open source scene. It’s latest release is sure to pleas all the C++ coders out there.

    Last.fm’s Marcus Holland-Moritz announced today that moost, it’s C++ library is now available to all under an open source license. He says that moost has been in development by Last.fm’s MIR team over the past five years, and contains all the tools and utilities they use on the site. It’s based on the boost C++ libraries.

    Moost contains a number of features that programmers will find handy. Here’s some of the features you can expect when using it:

    There are a lot of different things in moost. Some are really simple, yet very helpful in day-to-day work, like the which template that allows you to use pairs (and containers storing pairs) more easily with standard algorithms; or stringify, a function template that turns complex objects into strings. Other parts are slightly more sophisticated: for example, moost contains the framework that is shared by all our backend services, and that allows you to write a daemonisable service with logging, a set of standard options and even a service shell that multiple users can connect to when the service is running, all in a few lines of code.

    As our backend services are inherently multi-threaded, there’s also a bit of threading support in moost. For example, the safe_shared_ptr template is immensely useful for resources that are shared between threads and need to be updated atomically.

    Moritz says that moost also features memory wrapped dataset classes and an abstraction for loading shared objects. Both of which will make it easier to manage resources while building out large datasets.

    You can check out moost for yourself now over at GitHub. Moritz encourages any interested developers to contribute to the project if they have the time.

  • White House Invites Developers To We The People 2.0 Hackathon

    To its credit, the Obama administration has been far more tech savvy than any before it. One of its defining moments in this area was the building of the We The People Web site and making the software behind it open source. Now the White House is ready to move on to the next step, but wants input from developers along the way.

    The White House announced today that Petitions 1.0, the code that the We the People site runs on, is finished. Now the team will be working on Petitions 2.0. Here’s the details from the White House blog:

    In software development, when you go from one version number to another it means that something big is going on. We’re taking a new approach to how the application works, one that starts with the assumption that it should be as open, transparent, and flexible as possible.

    As a result, Petitions 2.0 is based on an application programming interface, or API, that we will release to the public in the coming months. The first set of methods, Read API, will be released in March, 2013 and will allow anyone to retrieve data on petitions, signatures, and responses. Later, we’ll release a second set of methods, Write API, that will allow other websites and apps to collect and submit signatures without directly sending users to WhiteHouse.gov. With this API in place we’ll be able to decouple the presentation and data layers of the application and build a new, streamlined signature process. This also means that developers who reuse our code will be able to choose which database the application relies on. Between that and our continued work on a white label theme, Petitions 2.0 will be easier for others to contribute to and reuse.

    Before any of this is made public, however, the White House staff will be inviting a small number of developers to the White House Open Data Day Hackathon. Those invited will receive access to the new API methods before the event so they can mess around with it for a bit. At the event itself, developers will show off what they have done, and submit examples to be included with the public SDK.

    Are you interested in building the next open platform of citizen/government relations? If so, you can apply to join the hackathon here. If you are selected, you’ll be notified no later than February 8.

  • Make Your Own 3D Printed Six-Legged Robot

    Have you ever wanted to make a fully autonomous robot? If so, your dreams of kickstarting the robot apocalypse can be fulfilled with just a 3D printer, some simple software and a bit of electrical knowhow.

    Meet Bleuette, a free hexapod robot that can be created with a 3D printer. The robot is fully autonomous and each of its six legs has two degrees of freedom. Check it out in action below:

    Bleuette first step from hugo on Vimeo.

    Bleuette has been in the works for a few years now, but it wasn’t fully realized until 3D printing became as affordable as it is now. The latest robot is made out PLA plastics, and is rather sturdy.

    The best part about this robot is that anybody can make it. All the information you need, including the CAD file for the design, is available on the creator’s github page.

    It may not be the most beautiful or functional robot, but the little guy has a lot of charm for just being six legs attached to a central body.

    [h/t: 3ders]

  • Open Source Computing Brings Everybody’s Favorite Droid To Life

    I think we can all agree that R2-D2 is one of the most lovable robots ever created. Compared to his more terrifying contemporaries, the little guy just oozes charm. Now one man has made his very own R2-D2 using a Raspberry Pi linux computer.

    A Chinese Star Wars fan took an old R2-D2 interactive toy and outfitted it with a Raspberry Pi and some other enhancements. The result is a fully interactive R2-D2 unit that can understand both English and Chinese. It also has face recognition, motion detection, ultrasonic distance detection and Wi-Fi. Check it out:

    The best part about all of this is that the Droid is a gift for the creator’s girlfriend. She must be the luckiest lady alive to have somebody put this much work into a present. I know a few Star Wars fans that would kill to have a working R2 unit.

    It’s also a major win for the Raspberry Pi community as its one of the most impressive projects yet accomplished with the open source computer. As more people begin to work with the tiny computer, we’ll start seeing really cool projects like this one.

    [h/t: Pocket-lint]

  • Your Next Android Phone May Come With An Ubuntu PC

    Android is pretty versatile as far as operating systems go. It can be a lot of things, but we still haven’t seen Android take on the PC space in a big way just yet. Ubuntu might just change that.

    Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions available, will soon be available on Android phones sporting multi-core processors. The application allows the Android phone to perform normally when it’s a phone, but it transforms into an Ubuntu PC when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

    To be honest, it’s pretty cool. With it coming pre-loaded on Android devices, it might also drive the use of Ubuntu up. People are becoming more reliant on mobile devices, and being able to integrate the desktop experience into a mobile device just might push some people into the open source side of life.

    The folks at Ubuntu aren’t only thinking about increasing the user base. Their hope is that handset manufacturers will continue to push the limits of how far the processing power in Android devices can go. Ubuntu for Android doesn’t require a lot of power, but more power would be appreciated if users want to get the full Ubuntu desktop experience out of their phone.

    The Ubuntu team isn’t just looking at the already existing Android markets in the US, Europe and Asia to push Ubuntu for Android. Emerging markets, which Android has performed well in, will also benefit from the inclusion of Ubuntu. The team even thinks that some families will finally own a PC thanks to Ubuntu for Android.

    Ubuntu for Android isn’t available just yet, but the folks at Canonical are working hard to get handset manufacturers to include Ubuntu in future Android hardware releases. Current phones with USB and HDMI-outs will hopefully get Ubuntu support in the near future as well.

  • Nvidia Releases New Linux Drivers For Its GTX 600 Series

    Valve announced today that the closed beta for Linux is now beginning for those lucky few who were selected out of the 60,000 applicants. Those players will be able to start playing native versions of games like Team Fortress 2, but the performance may be a little spotty if the drivers aren’t up to date. It’s a good thing Nvidia is here with an update.

    Nvidia released the new GeForce R310 drivers today for Linux operating systems. The GPU manufacturer said that the new Linux drivers “double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times” for games on Linux.

    The drivers had apparently been in development for almost a year with Nvidia, Valve and other game companies helping to optimize them for the release of Steam on Linux. Valve’s Doug Lombardi even had some nice things to say about it:

    “With this release, Nvidia has managed to increase the overall gaming performance under Linux,” said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve. “Nvidia took an unquestioned leadership position developing R310 drivers with us and other studios to provide an absolutely unequalled solution for Linux gamers.”

    The new R310 drivers support the newest generation of Nvidia GPUs – the GeForce 600 line. Users with Nvidia-equipped Linux systems are still encouraged to download the drivers as it includes support to all GPUs from the 8800 GT and above.

    Linux users can grab the latest drivers here.

  • C++ Is Powering The Future Of Robots And Dance

    C++ Is Powering The Future Of Robots And Dance

    Developers and programmers use a variety of programming languages to get things done. C++ is one of the more complicated languages to learn, but its use can lead to some pretty amazing applications. For instance, the language is being used to power the dancing moves of one of the world’s most advanced robots- the CHARLI.

    CHARLI was built by a team of researchers at Virginia Tech who wanted to develop “a research platform to study bipedal walking and autonomous behaviors for humanoid robots.” Such a task requires top of the line mechanical engineering as well as the programming required to make it all work.

    For fun, the researchers decided to program some dance moves for CHARLI-2. Perhaps riding on the song’s success, they chose PSY’s Korean hit Gangnam Style. CHARLI-2’s performance isn’t an exact replication, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

    For those interested in programming for robotics, there are a number of open source projects currently available. One of the more popular is OpenRAVE which focuses on “motion planning algorithms in real-world robotics applications.” It’s mostly used for arm movements, but you can still have a crazy dance party with just a robot’s arms.

    It may not help your robot dance, but here’s some other open source C++ development platforms for robotics – Urbi and Orocos.

    [h/t: Geek.com]

  • Google Open Sources Supersonic Query Engine

    Google announced today that it is open sourcing a query engine library called Supersonic, which the company says is “extremely useful for creating a column oriented database back-end.”

    “Supersonic’s main strength lies in its speed,” says Google’s Supersonic Team in a post to Google’s Open Source blog. “It is a cache-aware engine which exploits several low-level optimization techniques to ensure second-to-none execution times and high throughput. By making use of SIMD instructions and efficient pipelining we make columnar data processing very fast.”

    “The engine supports a wide variety of typical columnar operations as well as many other specialized functionalities,” the team adds. “We believe it be a useful tool for those of you working on new DBMS solutions to help handle your data more effectively.”

    Supersonic query engine

    The library is written in C++. More on the project can be found on its Google Code page.

  • Twitter Releases Clutch.io Code Under Open Source License

    Back in August, Twitter acquired the Clutch.io staff to work with their growth and international teams. Some users were concerned about the fate of Clutch’s tools that enabled many developers to easily create iOS apps. The team said that they would release the tools in the coming weeks that would allow developers to run Clutch.io on their own servers. It’s been more than a few weeks, but the team has finally fulfilled their promise.

    Twitter announced that Clutch.io is now completely open source. Twitter released the code on GitHub under the Apache Public License 2.0. They have even gone back and fixed up the documentation to make getting started easier.

    As previously stated, the hosted version of Clutch.io will continue to operate until November 1. After that point, it will be taken down, but with no negative consequences for those who were using the service. Twitter encourages all Clutch.io users to download the source code and implement Clutch.io on your own servers.

    Twitter is also hoping that the developer community helps them make Clutch.io even better. They say that certain areas like documentation and setup could use some improvement. It’s now up to the community to make that happen. The open source community has proven many times that they’re more than capable of making it happen.

    Interested parties can grab the source code right now from GitHub. Here’s some documentation to get you started. Twitter also states that the the Clutch team is more than happy to answer any questions via their Twitter account.

  • Google Takes mod_pagespeed Out Of Beta For A Faster Web

    Nearly two years ago, Google unveiled mod_pagespeed, an open source Apache module tool for developers to help make the web faster. Today, Google announced that it has left beta status. It has gone through eighteen different releases to get here.

    “We’re committed to working with the open-source community to continue evolving mod_pagespeed, including more, better and smarter optimizations and support for other web servers,” Joshua Marantz and Ilya Grigorik of Google’s PageSpeed Team say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog. “Over 120,000 sites are already using mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages using the latest techniques and trends in optimization. The product is used worldwide by individual sites, and is also offered by hosting providers, such as DreamHost, Go Daddy and content delivery networks like EdgeCast. With the move out of beta we hope that even more sites will soon benefit from the web performance improvements offered through mod_pagespeed.”

    Here’s an hour-long discussion about mod_pagespeed:

    “mod_pagespeed is a key part of our goal to help make the web faster for everyone,” the pair adds. “Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. In fact, page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores. Besides evangelizing for speed, we offer tools and technologies to help measure, quantify, and improve performance, such as Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and PageSpeed Optimization products. In fact, both mod_pagespeed and PageSpeed Service are based on our open-source PageSpeed Optimization Libraries project, and are important ways in which we help websites take advantage of the latest performance best practices.”

    Emphasis added.