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Linux’s Creator Wants Us All to Chill Out About the Leap Second

The leap second is the rare and obscure practice of occasionally adding a second to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system that most of us use to set our watches. It’s necessary, but not exactly computer friendly. In 2012 it crashed websites such as Reddit and Yelp and snarled up airline departures in Australia, so you’d think most computer experts would really hate them. After all, we have perfectly accurate timekeeping systems, such as the one used by GPS, that don’t futz with leap seconds.

But it turns out many computer folks are OK with the leap second, including Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds:

“Just take the leap second as an excuse to have a small nonsensical party for your closest friends.

“Wear silly hats, get a banner printed that says “Leap Second Doomsday Partyâ€, and get silly drunk. You’ll blink, and it’s over, but at least you’ll have the hangover next day to remind you of that glorious but fleeting extra second.

“And that’s exactly how relevant it should be to most people.”

Read more at Wired.

Open Source Databases Flourish, MongoDB Honored

From cloud developers working to incorporate databases with their deployments to enterprises that want more flexibility from their data repositories, open source databases are flourishing. As a matter of fact, DB-Engines is out with its annual ranking of databases, based on popularity, and all three top databases and tools for 2014 are open source.

MongoDB took the number one spot, as it has before, and Redis, used for managing data, and Elasticsearch, which helps developers build their own search engines, are runners up. If you think the Big Data trend begins and ends with Hadoop, think again.

 

Read more at Ostatic

All Supported Ubuntu Systems Receive Update for NSS

Canonical has published details in a security notice about an NSS vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems. This problem has been corrected and an update has been issued.

A small update has been released for NSS (Network Security Service library), which could have been made to expose sensitive information over the network.

“It was discovered that NSS incorrectly handled certain ASN.1 lengths. A remote attacker could possibly us… (read more)

Read more at Softpedia News

Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 Finally Gets GNOME 3.14

Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is just one of the many official Ubuntu flavors and its developers have been working to implement the latest version of GNOME 3.14.

One of the problems faced by the Ubuntu GNOME developers is the fact that their project is not in sync with GNOME, which puts a little bit of pressure on them. For example, they have been criticized for not having the latest GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 14.10, even if that particular piece of software was released after the feature fr… (read more)

Read more at Softpedia News

Video: Tizen Common with Wayland and Linux Kernel 3.10 Running on Firefly RK3288 with Rockchip ARM SoC

  Tizen Common is a baseline Operating system that other profile / devices can be targeted off like mobile, wearable , IVI (In-Vehicle-Infortainment). Leon Anavi has been working on porting Tizen Common 3.0 to the Firefly-RK3288 development board. This device has Rockchip RK3288 quad-core Cortex-A17 ARM SoC with Mali GPU. The board also has 2GB dual-channel DDR3 RAM and 16GB internal memory.

Firefly-RK3288 has both HDMI and VGA ports, 2 USB hosts, an Ethernet port, infrared, Bluetooth 4.0 and a WiFi. Below is a video showing Tizen Common running off a MicroSD Card, with Android version loaded internally.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdhJxG8d_DU” frameborder=”0

Read more at Tizen Experts

Eight Security Vulnerabilities Patched by OpenSSL Project

OpenSSL has been updated to new versions as its maintainer repaired a set of eight security glitches, most of them graded with low severity.

The risks they pose range from denial-of-service attacks, changing the fingerprint certificate, client authorization without verification message for a DH (Diffie-Hellman) certificate, client accepting the use of a temporary RSA or a handshake that leads to removing the forward secrecy from the ciphersuite.

Moderate severity flaws get fixed

Two of the … (read more)

Read more at Softpedia News

Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 Delay Rumors Return, Overheating Said to Be the Issue

At some point last month we told you the upcoming Snapdragon 810 chip was faced with some production issues. And that this situation could bring about repercussions related to numerous new flagship devices.

The chipset was introduced back in April 2014, but we are yet to see the platform arrive in a real life product. At CES 2015, LG introduced the G Flex 2 bendy smartphone which draws life from this particular SoC.

The handset is expected to go on sale later this month in South Korea, so we… (read more)

Read more at Softpedia News

KDE Frameworks 5.6.0 Officially Released

KDE Frameworks 5.6.0 has been announced by the KDE Community, and as usual, it lands with a ton of improvements that should make this a very interesting release.

The KDE Software Compilation or KDE SC has been split in three separate categories, KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Applications. Frameworks is made of all the libraries and core components of the project, KDE Plasma is the desktop, and KDE Applications is pretty self-explanatory and it includes pretty much all of the regular app… (read more)

Read more at Softpedia News

Round Face Samsung Tizen Smart Watch Could Be Heading to MWC 2015? Codename Orbis SM-R720

  Samsung has been spoiling us with their Tizen based Smart watches of late, and all of them have been sporting a square face, well that is upto now, as Sammobile reports that there is a Round face Tizen based Smart watch in the works. The upcoming Smart watch has the codename ‘Orbis’ and a model number SM-R720. Orbis does sound a bit orbital / round to me.    

We have previously covered Samsung patents of a ring User Interface that could suit many with a rotary input mechanism. The rumoured unveil date is for Mobile World Congress 2015 which kicks off on 2 March, so we haven’t got long to go at all. Hopefully we will see a Mobile World Congress with a Tizen TV, Tizen Smartphone and now a Tizen Smartwatch unviel, and of course Tizen Cameras, alongside Tizen partners exhibiting their products …. oh I’m feeling all tingly now !!!!

Read more at Tizen Experts

Distribution Release: Bio-Linux 8.0.5

Tim Booth has announced the release of Bio-Linux 8.0.5, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with a collection of scientific software for use in the field of bioinformatics: “An updated Bio-Linux 8 version is now on the website in ISO and OVA variants. The key changes are: addresses a recent issue…”

Read more at DistroWatch