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Government Analytics Forum: Handling Big Data With Apache Spark

By Phil Shapiro on May 13, 2016 |

Business, Software and Video

Government Analytics Forum: Handling Big Data With Apache Sparkbig data application Apache Spark logo

The Video Screening Room

If you’re like us, your eyes glaze over whenever the subject of big data or Hadoop comes up. Watch this video and you’ll be able to join the conversation the next time the subject is broached.

When you’re talking big data analysis, you’re almost always talking open source. Apache Hadoop is what often comes to mind as a valuable big data analysis tool. But do you know the advantages that Apache Spark has to offer? This May 5 presentation from IBM’s Government Analytics Forum in Washington, DC does a nice job of explaining the advantages.

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Opera ‘Power Saving Mode’ Extends Battery Life 40-50%Opera logo

Opera ‘Power Saving Mode’ Extends Battery Life 40-50%

By Christine Hall on May 12, 2016 |

Browsers

Numbers supplied by Opera show that the browser’s new Power Saving Mode, currently found only in developer builds, can considerably extend laptop battery life.

The folks behind the free but proprietary Opera browser announced today that the latest developer build includes Power Saving Mode, a new feature that the company claims can extend battery life by up to 50 percent. If true, this could be a serious game changer. Free and open source software advocates should hope that the developers at Mozilla are paying attention.

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Firefox Lets Users Try New Features With ‘Test Pilot’Mozilla Firefox Test Pilot logo

Firefox Lets Users Try New Features With ‘Test Pilot’

By FOSS Force on May 11, 2016 |

Browsers, Community and News

Mozilla seeks user feedback with a new project that gives users a chance to take planned features for a test flight.

On Tuesday Mozilla announced a new program for Firefox that allows users to try features that are in the works but not yet ready for prime time. The news of the new program, called Test Pilot, came by way of a Mozilla Blog post by Nick Nguyen, the organization’s vice president of Firefox product. He said that the program will not only allow users an early look at yet to be implemented planned features, but will give Firefox’s developers a chance to get feedback from the community.

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Mozilla Firefox Test Pilot logo“When building features for hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide, it’s important to get them right,” he wrote. “To help figure out which features should ship and how they should work, we created the new Test Pilot program.”

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Slices of Raspberry PiTimothy Peake

Slices of Raspberry Pi

By Isaac Carter on May 11, 2016 |

Hardware and News

The Raspberry Pi Report

Covered in this report: The Pi gets new cameras, another U.S. Picademy, monitoring health conditions with MedPi and the AstroPi in low Earth orbit.

Quite a lot has happened in the Raspberry Pi world since my last article. From new hardware to Picademy, the past couple of weeks have been great, filled with news story after great news story. The month of April ended on a high note, with the release of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for the Pi, and the month of May looks to keep carrying that trend. I realize how hard it is to keep up with the all the Raspberry Pi news, so here are what I consider to be some of the high points.

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ImageMagick’s ImageTragick: Exploits Not Yet WidespreadImageMagick logo

ImageMagick’s ImageTragick: Exploits Not Yet Widespread

By FOSS Force on May 10, 2016 |

Internet, News, Security and Web Apps

Breaking News: Patched versions of ImageMagick now available.

FOSS Force has now learned that the ImageTragick hole has been patched in versions 7.0.1-2 and 6.9.4-0. Websites using ImageMagick are urged to upgrade.

Security researchers are reporting that cracker/hackers are currently taking advantage of ImageTragick, the easy to exploit security vulnerability in ImageMagick, a popular open source image manipulation tool used by many websites. However, so far the attacks don’t appear to be widespread.

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A Truly Easy New User Linux Distro? Let’s Get SeriousDisk partitioning

A Truly Easy New User Linux Distro? Let’s Get Serious

By Ken Starks on May 10, 2016 |

Operating Systems

The Heart of Linux

Is disk partitioning a stumbling block to the new user installing Linux for the first time?

I remember it clearly. Well, as clearly as my teen-year chemically fueled indiscretions will allow. It was directly after the 2.27 kernel was released. Almost overnight, it went from “wireless sucks in Linux” to “holy crap, wireless works in Linux.” Yeah, there are still holdouts — I don’t want to mention any names but their first initial is Broadcom — and they still suck.

Disk partitioning

Desktop Linux has made some amazing strides in the past decade. Heck, it’s made huge strides in the past two years.

However, for those of us who use and advocate the use of desktop Linux to new users, there’s a but. A big ol’ in-your-face-can’t-sweep-it-under-the-rug “but.” Regardless of how smoothly your explanation of installing and using desktop Linux goes, that big ol’ but steps in your way. That pesky, clumsy pause as you try to figure out how to tell a new user how to partition a drive.

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Surprise! Microsoft Ending Free Upgrades to Windows 10Microsoft Windows 10

Surprise! Microsoft Ending Free Upgrades to Windows 10

By Christine Hall on May 9, 2016 |

Business, News and Operating Systems

Microsoft announced on Thursday that the end-of-life is coming soon to its free upgrade-to-Windows 10 scheme. Afterwards, the operating system won’t be cheap.

Just because Steve Ballmer is no longer at the helm in Redmond doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t go completely bonkers on occasion. On Thursday, the company announced in a blog that free upgrades to Windows 10 are coming to an end.

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Microsoft Windows 10
Windows 10 build 10240 with the Start menu and Action Center open.
While this is a totally expected move — Microsoft always said the free upgrades were for a limited time — it’s not going to happen the way many had anticipated, or in a way that would make sense in today’s market. There’s not going to be a pay-as-you-go subscription model, nor is Windows 10 going to be offered at “attractive” prices. Instead, it’s going to be the same old game. Despite all the talk we’ve heard from Redmond about how Windows in no longer the backbone of the company, the operating system is evidently still seen as a cash cow to be milked for more than it’s worth.

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Toronto Getting a Free Meshnet, Six New Distro Releases & More…Toronto

Toronto Getting a Free Meshnet, Six New Distro Releases & More…

By Christine Hall on May 6, 2016 |

Community, Distros, News and Software

FOSS Week in Review

Also: We hear more from DuckDuckGo about its open source donations and welcome Robin “Roblimo” Miller to the FOSS Force team.

While the big news in FOSS media this week was the Ubuntu Online Summit, I wasn’t there. Too far to travel. However, the big news seems to be that Mir and Unity 8 won’t be the defaults when Canonical ships Ubuntu 16.10 on October 20, although both “will be available as an ‘alternative session,’” according to OMG! Ubuntu! Ho-hum. Now on to some real FOSS news…

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Toronto
Thanks to two developers, Toronto’s getting a free encrypted Internet meshnet.
By chensiyuan (chensiyuan) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The most interesting story this week, to me at least, was a report by Motherboard on efforts underway to bring a free encrypted mesh network to Toronto. A mesh network relies on a series of wireless nodes which only need to be connected to the Internet at a single point. The plan is the brainchild of two local developers, Mark Iantorno and Benedict Lau, who plan to deploy Raspberry Pis as nodes. Meshnets already exist in Barcelona, Berlin, and New York City.

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PBS Digital Studios Asks ‘Should Everything Be Open Source?’proprietary vs open source

PBS Digital Studios Asks ‘Should Everything Be Open Source?’

By Phil Shapiro on May 6, 2016 |

Copyright, Hardware and Video

The Video Screening Room

The DMCA doesn’t just make it illegal for you to circumvent DRM to rip and burn a DVD of ‘War Games’ or to install a pirated copy of Windows. It also can make it illegal for you to repair or modify things you own.

Public television and radio in the United States have been surprisingly shy about covering the open source movement, but this video by Mike Rugnetta at PBS Digital Studios shows that they may be waking up.

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