Comment Re:Burn it? (Score 2, Interesting) 134
Funny you should say that, they have another field that's been on fire for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Submission + - OpenScore: Liberating Sheet Music (kickstarter.com)
rDouglass writes: OpenScore, a new initiative by the popular open source music notation software vendor MuseScore, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create machine readable editions of iconic classical works in the public domain. Kickstarter backers will be able to influence which pieces get transcribed first. They have partnered with IMSLP, the largest repository of public domain musical scans, with the intention of creating a sustainable and scalable workflow for creating a semantically complete music notation library. These scores have many advantages over the PDF scans that are currently available. They support machine playback, so a viewer can actually hear the music; they are convertible into other meaningful music formats, such as MIDI, MusicXML, and Braille notation (for blind musicians); they can be edited, arranged, corrected, and improved. The project takes inspiration from text and image based projects such as Wikipedia, and will utilize Creative Commons licensing. MuseScore has previously been involved with public domain music projects such as the Open Goldberg Variations.
Microsoft Spending $75M To Boost K-12 CS Education, Put TEALS In 4,000 Schools 48
theodp writes: An NSF-funded evaluation of the Microsoft TEALS program — which sends volunteer software engineers with no teaching experience into high schools to teach kids and their teachers computer science — isn't scheduled to be completed until 2018. But having declared a K-12 CS education emergency (which it's linked to an H-1B visa emergency), Microsoft is going full speed ahead and spending $75 million to boost computer science in schools. The software giant told USA today that it aims to put TEALS in 700 high schools in the next three years and in 4,000 over the next decade, focusing on urban and rural districts to reach more young women and minorities. "In the U.S. alone, the economy will create 1.4 million new computing jobs by the year 2022," wrote Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith. "Yet, less than a quarter of U.S. high schools currently teach computer science. That's not enough and we're working with schools and policy-makers to change that."
Submission + - Sourceforge staff takes over a user's account and wraps their software installer (arstechnica.com) 11
An anonymous reader writes: Sourceforge staff took over the account of the GIMP-for-Windows maintainer claiming it was abandoned and used this opportunity to wrap the installer in crapware. Quoting Ars:
SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP's lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an installer replete with advertisements.
Submission + - Replicant hackers find and close Samsung Galaxy back-door
gnujoshua writes: Paul Kocialkowski (PaulK), a developer for the Replicant project, a fully free/libre version of Android, wrote a guest blog post for the Free Software Foundation announcing that whlie hacking on the Samsung Galaxy, they "discovered that the proprietary program running on the applications processor in charge of handling the communication protocol with the modem actually implements a back-door that lets the modem perform remote file I/O operations on the file system." They then replaced the proprietary program with free software.
While it may be a while before we can have a 100% free software microcode/firmware on the the cellular hardware itself, isolating that hardware from the rest of your programming and data is a seemingly important step that we can take right now. At least to the FSF anyhow. What do others think: is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?
While it may be a while before we can have a 100% free software microcode/firmware on the the cellular hardware itself, isolating that hardware from the rest of your programming and data is a seemingly important step that we can take right now. At least to the FSF anyhow. What do others think: is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?
Comment Re:Yes, but have they fixed the crashes? (Score 2) 167
Had this as well in Firefox 26 on Linux with Nvidia drivers, but Firefox stopped crashing when I updated to Nvidia driver 331.38.
Submission + - New Mesa OpenGL Extension Seeks Your Support
jones_supa writes: Want to improve OpenGL 4.3 support in Mesa? You can help by simply whipping a dollar in the guitar case. After that, Timothy Arceri will be your hired gun. Timothy has previously arranged a crowd-funding campaign which led to him successfully implementing KHR_debug support for Mesa. Now the developer is back, looking to implement more functionality. This time the planned support is for GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays, an extension which is part of the 4.3 specification and basically allows for multi-dimensional arrays to be used within OpenGL/GLSL by allowing arrays of arrays to be initialized. Tim has already been working on the ARB_arrays_of_arrays and is looking for just a paid week to work on some Piglit regression tests to work on his implementation. Most of the arrays-of-arrays work is being done within the GLSL code of Mesa and is being tested against Intel hardware, but it should be easily possible to hook up Gallium3D hardware drivers too. For those wanting more details on the proposed GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays crowd-funding project for Mesa, check out the IndieGoGo page.
Submission + - Cisco to release pre-licensed open-source "binary module" for H.264 in WebRTC (brendaneich.com)
SD-Arcadia writes: Mozilla Blog: "Cisco has announced today that they are going to release a gratis, high quality, open source H.264 implementation — along with gratis binary modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. This move enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco’s H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees.
Of course, this is not a not a complete solution. In a perfect world, codecs, like other basic Internet technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, would be fully open and free for anyone to modify, recompile, and redistribute without license agreements or fees. Mozilla is fully committed to working towards that better future. To that end, we are developing Daala, a fully open next generation codec. Daala is still under development, but our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of encumberances."
Link to Cisco's announcement: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc
Of course, this is not a not a complete solution. In a perfect world, codecs, like other basic Internet technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, would be fully open and free for anyone to modify, recompile, and redistribute without license agreements or fees. Mozilla is fully committed to working towards that better future. To that end, we are developing Daala, a fully open next generation codec. Daala is still under development, but our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of encumberances."
Link to Cisco's announcement: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc
Submission + - 1.8 million-year-old skull suggests three early human species were one (nature.com)
ananyo writes: A 1.8 million-year-old human skull dramatically simplifies the textbook story of human evolution, suggesting what were thought to be three distinct species of early human (Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus) was just one. 'Skull 5', along with four other skulls from the same excavation site at Dmanisi, Georgia, also shows that early humans were as physically diverse as we are today (paper abstract).
Submission + - NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau (lwn.net)
MM-tng writes: NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs,
with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability
of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau.
with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability
of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau.
Submission + - Open Well-Tempered Clavier: a Kickstarter campaign for open source Bach (kickstarter.com) 1
rDouglass writes: The Open Goldberg Variations team has launched a new project to make an open source, public domain version of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. The work is significant because of it's enormous influence on musicians and composers throughout history. A new studio recording, a new digital MuseScore score (with support for MusicXML and MIDI), as well as all source materials (multitrack WAV, lossless FLAC) will be provided as libre and gratis downloads. New to the project are publisher GRIN Verlag, as well as record label PARMA Recordings. GRIN and PARMA will produce and distribute the physical score and double CD, even though the digital versions are to be widely available and in the public domain. Their enthusiasm for the project runs counter to the general publishing and music industry's fear of digital file sharing, and shows growing momentum for finding new models to make free music commercially sustainable.
Submission + - Crowd-Funding Mesa3D development
An anonymous reader writes: "After years of wanting to I recently decided to make a real attempt at contributing to the Mesa project. I found a good extension to work on that was not to technical in the GL_KHR_debug extension (OpenGL 4.3) and set about trying to understand the Mesa codebase. I have made a good start in understanding Mesa and in setting up some infrastructure code for the extension and believe I will be able to come up with some working patches without too much trouble. My problem however is time, unlike most new Mesa contributors I'm not a University student and I'm not hired to work on the project as part of my day job. I also have a young family at home therefore my contributions to open source usually consist of hacking on my laptop while I commute on the train to and from work. While I would eventually come up with some working code continuing to work on this only in my spare time. I would be able to come up with something much faster and of better quality if I had some dedicated time to put towards this cause.
So, I've decided to setup an experiment of sorts. Multiple times I have read ideas about using crowd sourcing to fund open source driver development. Rather than go all out trying to raise a huge sum of money I have setup a small project on indiegogo as a type of proof of concept to see whether a larger project would really be viable. To make things a bit more interesting if I reach my stretch goal I will dedicate some of the time towards creating some documentation on Mesa based on my understanding of Mesa throughout development. This would hopefully be useful to others considering contributing but with no idea where to start.
For more information see my indiegogo campaign here: http://igg.me/p/475220/x/2053460"
So, I've decided to setup an experiment of sorts. Multiple times I have read ideas about using crowd sourcing to fund open source driver development. Rather than go all out trying to raise a huge sum of money I have setup a small project on indiegogo as a type of proof of concept to see whether a larger project would really be viable. To make things a bit more interesting if I reach my stretch goal I will dedicate some of the time towards creating some documentation on Mesa based on my understanding of Mesa throughout development. This would hopefully be useful to others considering contributing but with no idea where to start.
For more information see my indiegogo campaign here: http://igg.me/p/475220/x/2053460"
TextMate 2 Released As Open Source 193
First time accepted submitter DaBombDotCom writes "Allan Odgaard, the author of the popular text editor for Mac OS X, TextMate, has posted on his blog: 'Today I am happy to announce that you can find the source for TextMate 2 on GitHub. I've always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program. The choice of license is GPL 3. This is partly to avoid a closed source fork and partly because the hacker in me wants all software to be free (as in speech), so in a time where our platform vendor is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend.'"
Submission + - Raspberry Pi Released (raspberrypi.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), a $25 single board Linux computer, has been released today and available to ship. The two British companies distributing the Pi have had their web servers overloaded with requests this morning, so you might struggle to order one...
Submission + - MMORPG 'Ryzom' releases code and art assets (fsf.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Ryzom is a 3D science-fantasy massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. On May 6th of 2010, its developer and publisher Winch Gate Property Limited announced that they are working with the Free Software Foundation to release the game's client and server source code, along with most of the art assets, under the AGPLv3 and Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 respectively. Ryzom itself will remain an active commercial product.
What is not being released:
- Sound and music, because Winch Gate does not currently have the legal rights to release them. They are however "trying to find an arrangement that will see these files released under a free license as well."
- Level design files, a.k.a. the world of Ryzom. Thus "the integrity of the game and story line" will be undisturbed.
Everything else is available now at the following websites:
http://dev.ryzom.com/
http://media.ryzom.com/
What is not being released:
- Sound and music, because Winch Gate does not currently have the legal rights to release them. They are however "trying to find an arrangement that will see these files released under a free license as well."
- Level design files, a.k.a. the world of Ryzom. Thus "the integrity of the game and story line" will be undisturbed.
Everything else is available now at the following websites:
http://dev.ryzom.com/
http://media.ryzom.com/
