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Why are There More Browser Vulnerabilities These Days?

I ran the numbers and vulnerabilities in browsers are up this year, as is their severity. We know more about this for Internet Explorer because Microsoft provides the most data.

Open Source Accelerating the Pace of Software

When we talk about the innovation that communities bring to open source software, we often focus on how open source enables contributions and collaboration within communities. More contributors, collaborating with less friction.

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Read more at OpenSource.com

Distribution Release: Q4OS 0.5.20

Q4OS 0.5.20, a lightweight and minimalist desktop Linux distribution featuring the Trinity desktop (a fork of KDE 3.5) and based on Debian GNU/Linux 7, has been released: “Significant update 0.5.20 of Q4OS is out. The essential new feature is the KDE 4 desktop integration into Q4OS system.”

Read more at DistroWatch

LibreOffice 4.4 To Have A New OpenGL Back-End

Michael Meeks has shared that LibreOffice 4.4 will feature some dramatic OpenGL improvements…

Read more at Phoronix

LLVM 3.5.1 Planned For December Debut

It looks like the first point release to LLVM 3.5 will be out in December…

Read more at Phoronix

Avis Budget Shifts to Linux to Cut Software Costs in Half

Avis Budget Group Inc. says market pressure in a more data-intensive era is forcing it to find more cost-efficient computing tools. In an effort to lower software costs and become more agile, the company will run open-source Linux software over its IBM mainframe, which it says is a less expensive and more manageable alternative to the IBM z/OS operating system it has been using.

The car rental and sharing firm’s actions demonstrate a fundamental shift in the business technology landscape as CIOs look to new systems, often open source, capable of meeting increasing data demands, and at a lower cost. Legacy vendors like IBM Corp. are under pressure to refocus efforts from core hardware offerings to software and services in time to meet this demand.

Read more at Wall Street Journal.

Why It’s Important to Know All Your Storage Options

Because so many options are available, it’s important to understand next-gen storage options and know that many legacy architectures are still usable.

Read more at eWeek

diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

Hardware errors are tough to code for. In some cases, they’re impossible to code for. A particular brand of hardware error is the Machine-Check Exception (MCE), which means a CPU has a problem. On Windows systems, it’s one of the causes of the Blue Screen of Death. more>>

 
Read more at Linux Journal

AMD Radeon Graphics Performance On The Linux 3.18 Kernel

If you’re curious whether the Linux 3.18 kernel will bring any performance improvements for users of the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver, here’s some benchmarks compared to Linux 3.17.

Read more at Phoronix

Selecting an Operating System for an Embedded Application

On desktop computers, the selection of an operating system (OS) is largely a matter of taste – Windows vs Apple vs Linux. There is relatively little choice. For an embedded system, the matter is much more complex. The large number of options available reflect the wide diversity of embedded applications. 

Do you really need an OS?It is rare nowadays to find an embedded system without an OS. Only the simplest kind of device can be built efficiently without a kernel of some kind. But this possibility should not be dismissed. The whole spectrum of embedded devices can be represented by a chart (Figure 1) of CPU complexity – broadly, data bus width – against software complexity.

Read more at Embedded.com.