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The morning I met Elaine Rich, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her small town home in suburban Maryland trying to estimate refugee flows in Syria.It wasn't the only question she was considering; there were others:Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile before May 10, 2014?Will Russian armed forces enter Kharkiv, Ukraine, by May 10? Rich's answers to these questions would eventually be evaluated by the intelligence community, but she didn't feel much pressure because this wasn't her full-time gig."I'm just a pharmacist," she said. "Nobody cares about me, nobody knows my name, I don't have a...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced a plan to repeal and replace President Obama’s health-care law, an effort by the Republican to insert himself into the increasingly competitive early maneuvering for his party’s presidential nomination. Jindal, a former state and federal health official, said his plan is one of many policy proposals he will release in coming months, making clear that he wants to be seen as a policy-driven problem solver. In his 26-page plan, Jindal lays out a lengthy critique of the health law — which he refers to throughout as “Obamacare” — and reiterates his belief that it needs...

Silicon Valley is in an uproar. Angry blog posts have been written, resignations tendered, and boycotts organized, with no sign that the furor is likely to abate. Seeing such ruckus, a casual observer might assume that some fallout had finally resulted from the shocking revelation that several of the largest names in the technology industry—including Google, Apple, Intel, and others—have secretly colluded to drive down wages among software engineers and executives for the better part of the past decade. In fact it concerns nothing of the sort, but rather the appointment of a man named Brendan Eich to the role...

A pair of gay developers have launched a boycott of Firefox in protest against the Mozilla Foundation's decision to appoint a CEO who appears to be an opponent of same sex marriage. Mozilla co-founder and Javascript creator Brendan Eich was awarded the top job yesterday.Hampton Catlin, creator of Wikipedia Mobile and CSS extension language Sass, said he would no longer develop apps for Firefox after Eich's appointment. The dev cited a six-year-old database of donor contributions to campaigns in support and opposition of Proposition 8 listing Brendan Eich, (Employer: Mozilla) as a $1,000 contributor to a campaign in support of...

Gay marriage is not a gay issue, nor is it liberal or conservative. It is an equality issue, since basic rights of Americans, who happen to be gay, are threatened. As more and more people wake up from the slumber of ignorance and see the light in supporting gay marriage, there are still people that refuse to evolve. You can hate anyone you want, and if you hate gay people, that hate is your burden to live with. Quite frankly, gay people do not need your love or approval, although I'm sure it would be appreciated. What they do need...

The inventor of JavaScript and the Firefox developer's chief technology officer now is running the show. Top agenda items: Firefox OS and Mozilla services.Brendan Eich, the programmer who invented JavaScript in a 10-day burst of activity at Netscape in 1995, now is the chief executive of Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that develops the Firefox browser and Firefox OS mobile operating system. Eich worked on the Netscape Navigator browser and -- after Microsoft won the first browser wars of the 1990s -- on Mozilla's effort to make something useful of the Netscape open-source code base. Although Mozilla succeeded in restoring competition...

For the fifth year in a row, Datamation is closing out the year with a big, big list of all the software we've featured on our monthly open source software guides. This year's list is the longest ever with 1,180 projects in 143 different categories from Accessibility to Wine and Beer.We refreshed the list with all the new applications we've highlighted this year, and we dropped those that hadn't been updated in a while. Please note that the list is organized by category and alphabetically within each category — the numbers don't indicate rank or quality.We hope you enjoy this...

Microsoft announced a new effort to "[protect] customer data from government snooping." FSF executive director John Sullivan issued the following statement on Thursday, December 5th: "Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. Even on proprietary operating systems like Windows,...

Last week's OSCON conference served to remind us that open source software is setting the pace. We've come a very long way from the old saw that "open source doesn't innovate." Instead, you might ask: Is innovation in enterprise software happening anywhere else other than in open source land? Hadoop is at the center of the big data trend. OpenStack has the momentum in private cloud. Open source frameworks and IDEs absolutely dominate app dev, while all the leading NoSQL databases are open source. Do I need to mention that Android now powers more smartphones than any other mobile OS?...

SNIPPET: "A seventh man, aged 20, was arrested on Thursday and continues to be questioned." SNIPPET: "Irfan Nasser, 30, from Sparkhill, and Irfan Khalid, 26, from Sparkbrook, are accused of travelling to Pakistan for terrorism training, including bomb making, and weapons and poison making; as well making a martyrdom video and planning a bombing campaign. Ashik Ali, 26, from Balsall Heath, and Rahi Ahmed, 25, from Moseley, face charges related to planning a bombing campaign in the UK, including constructing a home-made explosive device for terrorist acts and stating an intention to be suicide bombers. Two other suspects - Bahader...

Open ... and Shut For years the headlines have been about open source cannibalising proprietary software. But what happens when open source starts to cannibalise itself? In some markets, open source rules the roost. For example, Drupal, Joomla, my old company Alfresco and other open-source content management systems regularly duke it out for supremacy, depending on the workload. In application servers, JBoss and Tomcat spar. In cloud, Cloudstack, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and others battle. But web servers? That's a market that Apache won ages ago, with no open-source competition to speak of. That is, until recently. In the past few years,...

Fourth "open movie" released today by the Blender Foundation. Watch it!

A tidbit buried within an hour long video: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA At about 19 minutes, he starts talking about IBM, and how there was a drive to sell Linux. And he goes on to point out how easy to use interfaces just weren't a high priority until the commercial interests came in and did a lot of the boring stuff. They did Q and A. And other things he eludes to but doesn't specifically list. I point this out because I myself have run into a lot of the total anti-commercial venom from various people over the years, and that doesn't have...

Linus Torvalds developed Linux in 1991 while at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He became a US citizen in 2010.Linux creator Linus Torvalds has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for 600,000 euros ($756,000; £486,000) from the Technology Academy of Finland.He was nominated for the award in recognition of the fact he had created the original Linux operating system and has continued to work on it, deciding what modifications should be made to its kernel - the code that lets software and hardware work together.Today variants of the system power much of the world's computer servers, set-top...

Lennart Poettering has written a guide for optimizing systemd to the extent that a two-second boot-time or less for this popular free software project. The systemd optimization guide can be found on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. While right now there's many manual steps to lower the systemd-controlled boot-time, the goal is to eventually incorporate these tweaks into upstream distributions as the defaults. "It is our intention to optimize the upstream distributions by default (in particular Fedora) so that these optimizations won't be necessary. However, this will take some time, especially since making these changes is often not trivial when the general...

There's one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page 'ckremoval' does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true automatic multi-seat support for Linux. A multi-seat computer is a system that offers not only one local seat for a user, but multiple, at the same time. A seat refers to a combination of a screen, a set of input devices (such as mice and keyboards), and maybe an audio card or webcam, as individual local workplace for a user. A multi-seat computer can drive an entire class...

UPDATE: I have been contacted by Qualcomm PR regarding this expected presentation next week. The content of the Qualcomm Atheros developers was not approved by Qualcomm's legal department and the views to be expressed will be of their own personal beliefs. Next week at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be speaking about their Linux device driver development experiences and will go as far as calling for all proprietary drivers to be killed for good. They talk not just about killing proprietary drivers for Linux, but for all operating systems. Can...

t’s not every day that you start a business and quickly decide to say “no” to 70 percent of your potential customers. In retrospect, this turned out to be 4ormat’s secret weapon. At 4ormat, our goal is to provide an easy way for creative professionals to create and manage an online portfolio website. Although the portfolio itself looks great in all browsers, to this day, the portfolio building interface does not support Internet Explorer. And we don’t just mean IE6 or even IE7. We mean every version of Internet Explorer.

An alliance of technology corporations, including IBM, is expanding the scope of patent protection it provides to developers, vendors, and users of open source software such as Linux. The move cuts against the grain of major companies going after each other, filing suit over patent infringement. The consortium, known as the Open Invention Network, already provides an array of patent protections to certain Linux and open-source applications found on corporate data-center and back-office servers. Today's announcement will extend those protections to more than 700 additional open-source software packages, including Android, Google's (GOOG) smartphone operating system; OpenJDK, a popular programmers' development...

Intel's Linux graphics team is seeking any questions or feedback that Phoronix readers have concerning their open-source Linux graphics driver stack. ... Before anyone asks, this is only about the driver developed by the Intel OSTC team for hardware with true Intel integrated graphics -- Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Ironlake, i915, i945, etc -- and not the notorious Poulsbo or now the Medfield situation. This is also only about graphics and not any other area of your Intel Linux desktop/notebook/netbook/tablet. Go forth and post!