In April, LWN reported on the case of Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, which addresses the issue of whether ideas implemented in software are patentable. The ruling [PDF] is now in: a 9-0 decision against patentability. “We hold that the claims at issue are drawn to the abstract idea of intermediated settlement, and that merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.“
A half-decade ago the Debian project switched from GLIBC to EGLIBC as their standard C library. Debian is now reverting course and switching back to GLIBC…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) sets the pace for innovation in cloud and sets pricing. For all of the “Everything is awesome!” singing surrounding the open-source cloud-computing platform OpenStack, it still lags AWS in almost every feature that cloud customers value.
Most attempts to improve OpenStack come from longtime open-source contributors like Red Hat. But one new entrant, Tesora, is something of a johnny-come-lately to open source. Last week, Tesora announced that it was open sourcing its previously proprietary database virtualization engine as part of its commitment to OpenStack’s Trove database-as-a-service (DBaaS) project. Like other DBaaS offerings, Trove aims to provide customers with appropriate levels of database capacity depending on their requirements at any given time without tying them to particular database servers.
While Tesora still has much to prove, it claims that OpenStack’s DBaaS now delivers superior functionality to Amazon’s competing DBaaS, known as RDS. But “superior functionality” may not be enough to unseat the AWS behemoth.
The X.Org Foundation reminds us that the first announcement for the X Window System came out on June 19, 1984. “The X developers have pushed the boundaries and moved X from a system originally written to run on the CPU of a VAX VS100 to one that runs the GUI on today’s laptops with 3D rendering capabilities. Indeed, X predates the concept of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as we currently know it, and even the company that popularized this term in 1999, Nvidia.” Congratulations to one of the oldest and most successful free software projects out there.
Many Linux gamers have written in today with excitement that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now available via Steam on Linux…
Linux kernel 3.14 is one of the latest versions available, but it looks like this particular build has managed to break Wine for all the applications that were running in Windows 9x mode.
Linux users need Wine to run applications from the Windows platform, but the bulk of apps accessed in this way is actually quite old. Sure enough, it’s possible to run newer software as well, but most users need Wine for much older stuff.
OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, is not the most widely deployed private-cloud platform. But it’s a close second, according to a new survey from database vendor Tesora, which also said the rise in OpenStack adoption is helping push organizations toward scalable database and database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solutions.
The survey results indicate that among responding organizations, 15 percent are running private clouds on VMware, followed by 11 percent using OpenStack.
FTP or File Transfer Protocol is one of the widely used services on the Internet, mainly for transferring files from one host to other. FTP itself was not designed as a secure protocol, and as such, the classic FTP service is vulnerable to common attacks such as man in the middle and brute force attacks. […]
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For years the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers have been working on frame-buffer compression (FBC) support but never it’s worked out quite good enough to turn it on by default in full. Frame-buffer compression has the ability to reduce power consumption for those using Intel HD Graphics while reducing the amount of memory bandwidth used for screen refreshes. Now though the Intel DRM FBC code has been re-worked and perhaps this time it will be flipped on by default…
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has gone ahead and improved the feature request of replacing Yum with DNF for the Fedora 22 release likely to happen in the first half of 2015…
