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Comment lost in translation (Score 1) 676

He probably meant that Linux is entering its "mature period" as an OS; it's stable. works on more platforms and devices than any other OS in the world, and is certainly something that has great potential to be used in new applications and devices - take Android as an example. Why would one even consider basing a new product on Linux otherwise?

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British Pizza Chain To Install Cones of Silence Screenshot-sm 122

itwbennett writes "British pizza chain Pizza Express is installing iPod docks and soundproof domes in booths of their new iPizzeria stores. 'The idea is that you can plug in your iPod and play whatever music you like without disturbing other diners,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'But I'm sure it'd work for talking about government secrets and other spy stuff, too.'"
Open Source

Linux 2.6.36 Released 238

diegocg writes "Version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes support for the Tilera architecture, a new filesystem notification interface called fanotify, CIFS local caching, support for Intel Intelligent Power Sharing in i3/5 systems, integration of the kernel debugger and KMS, inclusion of the AppArmor security system, a redesign of workqueues optimized for concurrency, and several new drivers and small improvements. See the full changelog here for more details."

Comment Re:Leave it to the FSF to go to the outer edges (Score 1) 273

It's not just opening the source on a product, it's also ensuring that the product is not 'defective by design' (in Stallman's own words). I.e. the vendor should not restrict the ability of somebody to modify and reinstall new software on a device with an openly available build and install system. One particular aspect of 'defective by design' is the concept of e-fuses that literally burn the jtag circuits of mobile phones for production runs. Now, whether or not the end-user actually gets the chip documentation required to modify their software in a meaningful way, is another story alltogether.

Comment Please tell me this isn't serious... (Score 1) 215

Please tell me I'm not the only one who sees this.

What if someone else uses your cellular phone, or worse, someone uses your cellular phone while you aren't aware of it? That's practically like giving anyone free access to your account.

I think the facebook geniuses are confusing the one-time-pass with the one-time-pad ... particularly in this case, they are two very different things, specifically because the pad is requires that the key be exchanged *securely*.

Comment Octave. ARM. (Score 2, Interesting) 283

Improve Octave. Specifically, for ARM. Remember that open-source does not necessarily mean architecture independent. Practically all software is written with the perception that the compiler optimizes any poorly written C / C++ code and that the target is a PC. While this is good for x86, relying on hardware instruction rescheduling to make code more 'efficient', it's pretty awful for anything else. Having done a lot of work with ARM / NEON optimizations myself, I can tell you first-hand that gcc does not do a great job of optimizing C code at all. This is going to become increasingly important as ARM outpaces x86, so please do everyone a favour, and write the code correctly the first time. There are several books about why this is so important, e.g. this one, but you'll probably find that its easier to just dive right in. Look at the Android source code, that's always a good example. uClibc / uClibc++ are also good examples.
Ubuntu

Submission + - ARM Cortex A9 Laptops to be Linux Powered (armdevices.net)

Charbax writes: In this video, Jerone Young, lead partner engineer at Canonical, explains some of the challenges that Canonical and other companies who are part of the new Linaro project have been working on for the past many months, in preparation for the now imminent release of a whole bunch of ARM Cortex A9 Powered laptops and desktops likely to be manufactured by giants of the industry such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Quanta, Invetec, Pegatron, Compal, all of whome have been showing tens of early prototype designs of these ARM Powered laptops at trade shows around the world during the past year and a half. They work to standardize the boot process, write drivers to use graphics and video hardware acceleration, they optimize the web browser (Chrome and Mozilla), they implement faster DDR3 RAM and faster I/O bus speeds, they also optimize the software to use the new faster dual core ARM Cortex A9 processors. The goal is to have these upcoming ARM Powered laptops feel as usable to end consumers as Intel x86 based laptops/netbooks. With increased competition thanks to this alternative CPU architecture, prices of laptops and desktops could rapidly go down (sub-$149 laptops and sub-$99 desktops are likely), battery life could run much longer (up to 30-50 hours using a Pixel Qi LCD screen), sizes and weights can be much smaller. This could be the type of low-power, low-cost computer that the next 5 billion people in the world may use as their first computer.

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