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Submission + - New Mesa OpenGL Extension Seeks Your Support

Submitted by jones_supa
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)

Submitted by SD-Arcadia
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

Submission + - 1.8 million-year-old skull suggests three early human species were one (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
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)

Submitted by MM-tng
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.

Submission + - Open Well-Tempered Clavier: a Kickstarter campaign for open source Bach (kickstarter.com) 1

Submitted by rDouglass
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

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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"
Open Source

TextMate 2 Released As Open Source 193

Posted by timothy from the nice-move dept.
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.'"
Hardware

Submission + - Raspberry Pi Released (raspberrypi.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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...
Open Source

Submission + - MMORPG 'Ryzom' releases code and art assets (fsf.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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/
Media

Remote Kill Flags Surface In Kindle 630

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
PL/SQL Guy writes "The Kindle has a number of 'remote kill' flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. 'Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.' But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a 'read only once' flag? A 'no turning the pages backwards' flag?"
Privacy

Submission + - Pirate bay judge biased

Submitted by Zoolander
Zoolander writes: The judge of the Pirate Bay trial has been found to be a member of several organizations that deal with copyright issues, among them the Swedish Copyright Association, whose members also include Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky, who all represented the entertainment industry in the trial, and Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an organization which actively advocates more stringent copyright laws.
The Military

Konami Announces a Game Based On a 2004 Battle In Fallujah 644

Posted by Soulskill from the tread-lightly dept.
The LA Times reports that Konami has announced Six Days in Fallujah, a video game due out next year that is based on an actual battle fought in Iraq in 2004. Quoting: "The idea for the game ... came from US Marines who returned from the battle with video, photos and diaries of their experiences. Instead of dialing up Steven Spielberg to make a movie version of their stories, they turned to Atomic Games, a company in Raleigh, NC, that makes combat simulation software for the military. ... 'The soldiers wanted to tell their stories through a game because that's what they grew up playing,' said John Choon, senior brand manager for the game at Konami... More than a dozen Marines are featured in documentary-style video interviews that are interspersed with the game's action. The Marines reappear in the game itself, doing pretty much what they did during the war. One tells the story of how he furiously wrote a letter to his wife and begged a chaplain to give it to her if he died. Another, Eddie Garcia, talks about how his right leg was shredded in a mortar attack, and how he suffered survivor's guilt after he was taken out of combat."
GNOME

Submission + - GNOME 2.26 Released (gnome.org)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: The GNOME project has released new version of the GNOME desktop environment and developer platform, GNOME 2.26.

Among the hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements, GNOME 2.26 has several highly visible changes: the inclusion of a new disc burning application, simpler file sharing and a generally smoother user experience.

What's New for Users:
The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made, but these notes aim to highlight some of the more exciting, user-oriented features in this release.

1.Comprehensive New Disc Burning
2.Simpler File Sharing
3.Evolution Evolves its Migration from Windows
4.Media Player Improvements
5.Volume Control Integrated with PulseAudio
6.Support for multiple monitors and projectors
7.Almost Telepathic Communication
8.Location Epiphany
9.Fingerprint Reader Integration

More at http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.26/
Security

Hackers Jump On Newest IE7 Bug 162

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hop-on-pop dept.
CWmike writes "Attackers are already exploiting a bug in Internet Explorer 7 that Microsoft patched just last week, security researchers warned today. Although the attacks are currently in 'very, very small numbers,' they may be just the forerunner of a larger campaign, said Trend Micro's Jamz Yaneza. 'I see this as a proof-of-concept,' said Yaneza, who noted that the exploit's payload is extremely straightforward and explained that there has been no attempt to mask it by, say, planting a root kit on the victimized PC at the same time. 'I wouldn't be surprised to see this [exploit] show up in one of those Chinese exploit kits,' he added. The new attack code, which Trend Micro dubbed 'XML_Dloadr.a,' arrives in a spam message as a malicious file masquerading as a Microsoft Word document."

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