Articles by Jack M. Germain

Results 1221-1240 of 2148 for Jack M. Germain

Arduboy Could Spark Retro Gaming Revolution

Arduboy, a new pocket-sized 8-bit game device, has ignited a firestorm of interest on Kickstarter. With 27 days to go, the campaign already has drawn contributions of more than eight times its modest $25k goal The rapid funding response could spark a miniature retro revolution. The handheld Arduboy has the potential to divert gamers from smartphone...

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Voyager-X Will Take You on a New Xfce Journey

Voyager-X is a closely knit Xubuntu clone with a few impressive differences that set it apart from the typical Xfce desktop.Voyager-X 10.14.4, released in March, is based on Xubuntu/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). This new Voyager-X is one of the first distros to use the new Xfce 4.12 desktop, more than one year in the making....

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Vivid Vervet Doesn't Have Much Meat on Its Bones

In what is becoming a recurring scenario for Ubuntu desktop releases, you will not see much new in Ubuntu 15.04, aka "Vivid Vervet" (as in East African monkey) unless you peer under the hood.Canonical last Thursday made its latest desktop release available for download. Canonical is Ubuntu's parent company and developer of the Ubuntu family of Lin...

VMware Draws on Open Source to Manage Cloud Micro Services

VMware last week released details about two new open source projects that aim to bridge the divide between the company's virtualization software and other vendors' containers. Both projects integrate into VMware's unified platform for the hybrid cloud, allowing the company to create a consistent environment for cloud-native and traditional applications...

Ubuntu's Vivid Vervet Makes Snappy Entrance

Canonical on Tuesday announced the release of Ubuntu 15.04, aka "Vivid Vervet," as in East African monkey. It will be available for download on Thursday The new OS offers tools for cloud, device, client and Internet of Things development. The Ubuntu desktop release includes mostly maintenance and bug fixes, along with new integrated menus and dashb...

Survey: OSS Gives Enterprises More Bang for Less Bucks

Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners on Thursday published the results ofThe Ninth Annual Future of Open Source Survey The number of companies using at least some open source products or developing software built with open source components is at an all-time high, the survey found....

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SuperX OS Greases the Classic Linux Wheel

SuperX OS is a solid Linux distribution that dispels all of the criticisms about using free open source operating systems.SuperX is a relatively new distro developed by Libresoft. Based on Ubuntu and Debian, it adds a highly customized KDE desktop environment. Version 3.0 -- dubbed "Grace" after computing pioneer Grace Hopper -- was released March...

Chrome Web Store Gives Bad Extensions the Boot

Google recently purged some 200 extensions from its Chrome Store inventory. Extensions and add-ons let users add functions and features to the Chrome Web browser, but bad extensions can expose users to a greater risk of spyware and malware. A major problem with many browser add-ons is ad injectors. The clean-up resulted from an extensive search fo...

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Parsix 7 Morphs GNOME Into a Better Desktop

Parsix GNU/Linux 7 is a feature-rich rendition of the GNOME desktop that you must take for a spin regardless of how you feel about the GNOME desktop.Linux GNOME desktop distros are a dime a dozen. What makes Parsix a shinier dime than many of the others is how the tweaking of the GNOME desktop makes this distro such a pleasure to use.

Google Goes Crazy for Chromebooks

Google on Tuesday announced two new budget-busting Chromebook computers, a tablet/notebook convertible with a full swivel screen, and a Chrome computer-on-a-stick The Haier Chromebook 11 (pictured above) and the Hisense Chromebook both are available for preorder for US$149. ...

The Futility of the Strong Password Solution

After experiencing a data breach, most companies take a number of measures to strengthen security, including advising users to change their passwords and to make them strong Although it stopped short of confirming that it was hacked or that any customer data had been exposed, Amazon-owned Twitch last week notified users that its network might have ...

Big Money Helps Cyanogen Go for Android's Jugular

Cyanogen this week announced the completion of a follow-up round of Series C financing that brought US$80 million in new funds to pay for more hiring and accelerated development of its open platform software development kit Premji Invest led the round, which included some key new investors, such as Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm, Telefnica Ventures, Sm...

Amazon Fires 1st Shot in Storage Price War

Amazon on Thursday announced two new plans for unlimited storage in its Cloud Drive service The Unlimited Photos plan includes 5 GB of additional storage for videos or other documents and files. It costs US$11.99 per year.

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Bodacious Bodhi Broadens Linux Desktop

Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 RC3's implementation of the Enlightenment desktop, makes an awesome desktop computing platform for office or home. Bodhi is one of only a handful of Linux distros embracing the Enlightenment environment. Its developers call Bodhi the Enlightened Linux Distribution.

Obama Lauds STEM Progress at White House Science Fair

President Obama on Monday announced US$240 million in new pledges from private businesses, schools and foundations across the country for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. The president also announced that a national goal set four years ago to provide 98 percent of Americans with high-speed wireless Internet has been reac...

Microsoft's Novel Windows 10 Antipiracy Plan

Microsoft this summer will distribute Windows 10 to anyone running Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows Phone 8.1, regardless of whether the existing OS is a genuine or pirated copy Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft's operating systems unit, disclosed the marketing strategy last week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) summit in Shen...

Did VMware Flout Open Source License Terms?

The Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this month announced that it was funding a lawsuit filed by Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Germany The conservancy entered a grant agreement with Hellwig for the legal action. Its funding of the legal action is part of the program activity of its G...

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Q4OS Is a Bare-Bones Business Tool

Q4OS has the potential to become a new attention-getter among up and coming Linux distros.But this distro has a way to go before its development reaches full functionality. Right now it is working its way to a non-beta version 1.0 release. New beta versions are frequently released, often a few weeks to a month apart. The latest release was version...

New Facebook Marketing Tool Chews Up Data, Spits It Out

Facebook last week launched Topic Data, a new service that reveals to advertisers the subjects users discuss, the brands and products they use, and the activities they follow Marketers will be able to sift through data compilations of what users say about events, brands, subjects and activities. Facebook's 1.3 billion users can not choose to be exc...

The Linux Kernel's New 'Play Nice' Patch

Some 60 Linux kernel developers last week adopted a small "patch," called the "Code of Conflict," that attempts to set guidelines for discourse in the kernel community and outlines a path for mediation if someone feels abused or threatened Linux creator Linus Torvalds posted the appeal for good behavior on his personal git.kernel.org page.

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