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Firefox closes door for spammers

Facebook has closed a hole that was being used by spammers to automatically post wall messages and direct messages to friends.

Read more at ZDNet News

The significant new AIX 7 capabilities for virtualization

The IBM AIX operating system provides a highly scalable IT infrastructure for client workloads. Learn about the latest version, AIX 7.1, an open standards-based UNIX operating system, that includes significant new capabilities for virtualization, security features, availability features, and manageability.

Cairo 1.10.0 available

The 1.10.0 release of the Cairo graphics library has finally been released. “One of the more interesting departures for cairo for this release is the inclusion of a tracing utility, cairo-trace. cairo-trace generates a human-readable, replayable, compact representation of the sequences of drawing commands made by an application. This can be used to inspecting applications to understand issues and as a means for profiling real-world usage of cairo.” The profiling feature has evidently been used to improve performance in a number of areas. There is also improved printing support, better 16-bit buffer support, and better use of hardware acceleration.

Read more at LWN

Open Source goes to High School

Before heading out to film this story on the Open High School of Utah, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had a lot of the same questions most people would have about an online high school: What kind of students go to high school online? How are teachers building their curriculum from open educational resources and what does it look like? How are the students interacting with their teachers and other students in an online venue?
 
Read more at OpenSource.com

Why Do We Love Linux?

 When you’re a fan of Linux, any blog post entitled “27 Good Reasons to Love Linux” is going to be impossible to resist. No wonder, then, that a recent post with just that title has created endless fodder for conversation in the Linux blogosphere of late. Among the reasons listed in said post were the usual arguments in favor of Linux’s attractive price and superior security, of course. In addition, however, the list refers to the ease of installing new software, the compatibility with older hardware, and Linux’s environmental friendliness, among other virtues.

Read more at LinuxInsider

iPad competitors lining up

Starting this fall and stretching into early next year, big-name gadget and PC makers are readying their own touch-screen tablets.

Read more at CNET News

GNU Debugger adds D language support

The GNU Debugger Project has published the second point update to version 7.0 of its standard debugger for the GNU software system, adding support for the D language and enhancing C++ support

Read more at The H

Version 2.0 of NoSQL database Redis released

Version 2.0 of the NoSQL database Redis database has been released with new features including virtual memory support, a hash datatype and publish/subscribe messaing.

Read more at The H

MIT app turns your Android phone into a supercomputer… of sorts

Oh, sure — a few people have called Google’s Nexus One a “superphone,” but suddenly, that nickname has taken on a whole new level of meaning. A team of talent from MIT has put its head down in order to concoct a new Android application that can come darn close to solving complex computational problems in just a fraction of the time that it’d take a bona fide supercomputer. The goal here is to let researchers and scientists convert to Google’s mobile OS, but if you aren’t falling for that one, it’s also designed to “let engineers perform complicated calculations in the field, and to better control systems for vehicles or robotic systems.” Of course, the models that are hosted on the phone do require a supercomputer to create, but once certain formulas are embedded, the app can then compute approximations in mere seconds rather than hours. Best of all, rbAPPmit is available for download as well speak in the source link below, but we’d probably wait for the (presumably thick) user guide to surface before diving in headfirst.

Read more at Engadget Mobile

Systemd Test Day on Tuesday 2010/09/07

Fedora will be holding a Systemd test day on September 7, 2010. “This week’s Test Day, which will take place on Tuesday 2010/09/07 rather than the more usual Thursday, is on systemd, so it’s a very important one! It will also serve at least two functions: as usual, the testing will help us to improve the code so that if it does go into the final Fedora 14 release it will work as well as possible, but the Fedora steering committee will also be using the results of the Test Day to help inform their final decision as to whether to go ahead with systemd for the Beta and final release, or whether to revert to upstart. So there’s a lot riding on this Test Day.

Read more at LWN