While Valve has been busy proving that Linux and open source are the future of gaming with the Steam operating system and gaming consoles, Mozilla and Epic Games have been making their own strides in the open source gaming revolution on the Web.
This week, Epic and Mozilla released a video preview of Epic’s Soul and Swing Ninja games running in the Firefox browser as Web applications on Epic’s forthcoming Unreal Engine 4. Using its asm.js subset of Javascript, Mozilla says it has improved gaming performance within Firefox to reach 67 percent of native speeds – up from 40 percent at last year’s demo of Unreal Engine 3. (A claim largely supported by ArsTechnica’s own testing.) And Mozilla expects it to get even faster, according to their blog post announcing the preview.
“This technology has reached a point where (the) games users can jump into via a Web link are now almost indistinguishable from (the) ones they might have had to wait to download and install,” said Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering at Mozilla, in the blog post. “Using Emscripten to cross-compile C and C++ into asm.js, developers can run their games at near-native speeds, so they can approach the Web as they would any other platform.”
The biggest retail hack in U.S. history wasn’t particularly inventive, nor did it appear destined for success. In the days prior to Thanksgiving 2013, someone installed malware in Target’s (TGT) security and payments system designed to steal every credit card used at the company’s 1,797 U.S. stores. At the critical moment—when the Christmas gifts had been scanned and bagged and the cashier asked for a swipe—the malware would step in, capture the shopper’s credit card number, and store it on a Target server commandeered by the hackers.
It’s a measure of how common these crimes have become, and how conventional the hackers’ approach in this case, that Target was prepared for such an attack. Six months earlier the company began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye (FEYE), whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon. Target had a team of security specialists in Bangalore to monitor its computers around the clock. If Bangalore noticed anything suspicious, Target’s security operations center in Minneapolis would be notified.
Read more at Bloomberg Businessweek.
Mozilla and Epic Games have been working together for some time now, but it looks like they are set to take their partnership to the next level. Last year, the two companies demonstrated Unreal Engine 3, the basis for many games, running in the Firefox browser via the WebGL 3D graphics API and some offshoots of JavaScript. Now, Epic and Mozilla have announced that they are porting Unreal Engine 4 to the web.
To demonstrate that the web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform for gaming Epic Games and Mozilla are providing a sneak peek of Epic’s Soul and Swing Ninja demos, running in Firefox at near-native speeds. You can check out the video demo here. This video is the first glimpse of Unreal Engine 4 running on the Web without plugins.
Martin Maurer has announced the release of Proxmox 3.2 Virtual Environment edition, a Debian-based distribution offering a complete server virtualization management solution based on KVM and containers. From the press release: “Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, developer of the open source server virtualization platform Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), today….
Huawei is no stranger to Windows Phone, having released a handset in the US last year, but the company is now planning to combine Android and Windows Phone into a single smartphone. Speaking to TrustedReviews, Huawei’s chief marketing officer, Shao Yang, reveals the firm is still committed to Microsoft’s mobile software, but the preference is to dual-boot it alongside Android. “With Windows Phone, one direction for us – and one that we are now following – is dual OS. Dual OS as in Android and Windows together,†says Yang. Huawei’s plans are almost identical to PC makers who are dual-booting Android and Windows on laptops and tablets.
Whether you love living in the cloud or still cling to your desktop applications whenever possible, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that the cloud is where computing is headed. And if you’re seeking to keep your skills relevant to the IT jobs of today, and tomorrow, understanding the technology that underlies cloud services is critical.
Fortunately, the cloud offers many opportunities for using open source software up and down the stack. If being on the cutting edge of cloud infrastructure interests you, it’s probably time to take a look at OpenStack. OpenStack is the engine that makes scalable, rapid, and secure deployments of computing power, networking, and storage possible in a modern datacenter. And it’s open source technology, which means anyone can dive right in and get started.
