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This year's Blender Conference was filled with all kinds of interesting talks about interesting uses of Blender and open source technology. A particularly novel one that caught my eye was nestled neatly within the art and pipeline presentation for the Blender Institute's open movie, Cosmos Laundromat. In that talk, Paul Benoît of Qarnot Computing spoke about his company's very unique render farm. It's common knowledge that high-performance computing (HPC) generates a lot of heat. At HPC datacenters, a lot of time and energy is spent figuring out how to cool these powerful computers. Not only does this have a significant...

Help teach Cortana to say 'Sorry, Dave' Microsoft's decided that it, too, wants to open source some of its machine learning space, publishing its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) on Github. Google released some of its code last week. Redmond's (co-incidental?) response is pretty basic: there's a framework, and two algorithms, but Microsoft Research promises it will get extended in the future. The DMTK Framework is front-and-centre, since that's where both extensions will happen. It's a two-piece critter, consisting of a parameter server and a client SDK. The parameter server has "separate data structures for high- and low-frequency parameters", Microsoft...

Linus Torvalds The Linux community often recognizes two anniversaries for Linux: August 25th is the day Linus Torvalds first posted that he was working on Linux and said “Hello, everybody out there…” and October 5th is the day he released the first kernel.To mark the anniversary of the first kernel release in 1991, we look at some facts and consider the progress that has been made since that early version. Version 0.01 of the Linux kernel had 10,239 lines of code (source: Wikipedia). Version 4.1, released in July 2015, has more than 19 million lines of code (source: Phoronix). ...

Microsoft will later this year release its open-source friendly lake for big-data analytics in the cloud. Azure Data Lake Store – announced at Build in April – will be released as a preview, Microsoft said Monday. The store will be built on Apache YARN for developers and data scientists, to analyse information, and will use Azure HDInsight – a managed service for Hadoop, Spark, Storm and Hbase. HDInsight was developed by Microsoft working with Ubuntu-shop Canonical and Hadoop spinner Hortonworks, Microsoft and Canonical said. In preparation for the preview Microsoft Monday threw the doors open on managed Linux clusters. Microsoft’s...

Analysis America's broadband watchdog is suffering a backlash over plans to control software updates to Wi-Fi routers, smartphones, and even laptops. In a proposed update [PDF] to the regulator's rules over radiofrequency equipment, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would oblige manufacturers to "specify which parties will be authorized to make software changes." In addition, it proposes that "modifications by third parties should not be permitted unless the third party receives its own certification." While the intent is to make the FCC's certification of the next generation of wireless equipment faster and more flexible, open source advocates were quick to notice...

Version 4.0.0 of Mono, the FOSS implementation of the .NET Framework, has been released. This is the first release of Mono that replaces various components of Mono with code that was released by Microsoft under the MIT license. Microsoft itself is working towards .NET Core: a redistributable and re-imagined version of .NET, which has two code drops: CoreFX and CoreCLR. Mono at this point continues to provide an API that tracks the .NET desktop/server version. This means that most of the Mono code that has been integrated from Microsoft comes from the ReferenceSource code drop. ...

[VIDEO] Anyone with some brains and lots of courage can build their own space rocket using everyday, off-the-shelf products. We recently flew to Denmark to meet the founders of Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit open-source D.I.Y. space endeavor.

Could Microsoft's open source advocacy ever result in the company offering its cash cow Windows OS up to open source? It's possible, according to one Microsoft official, though his comments Wednesday should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. During a technology panel session in Silicon Valley, Microsoft's Mark Russinovich, CTO for the company's Azure cloud platform, did what Microsoft officials have been prone to doing in recent years: Preach Microsoft's conversion from open source skeptic to proponent. Open source, Russinovich said at the Chef Conf 2015 conference, was "no longer taboo" at the commercial software giant, pointing to...

Don't blink. Microsoft is starting to pick up speed as it starts to implement drastic changes in the way it does business. Open sourcing of server software with ports to other operating systems, increasingly aggressive service bundling, support for WebRTC, and free Windows for mobile devices are evidence that cloud first and mobile first aren't just hot air. CEO Satya Nadella is shaking up Microsoft in a way that would have given Steve Ballmer a heart attack. Announcing open sourcing of the .NET core framework with distributions for Linux and Microsoft OS X, as was done this week, would have...

Microsoft is planning to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and to take that open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X, alongside Windows.Microsoft officials announced the company's latest .NET programming-model plans on the opening day of the Connect(); developer-focused event on November 12.In April 2014, Microsoft announced plans to open source a number of its developer technologies, including ASP.NET, the Roslyn .NET compiler platform, the .NET Micro Framework, .NET Rx and the VB and C# programming languages. Microsoft officials said they planned to make these technologies available via a newly created .Net Foundation.Today, the company is adding...

What are pro&con of using PaleMoon?

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.... ...Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.... "...We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale...

Welcome to the FossaMail homepage! FossaMail is an Open Source, Mozilla Thunderbird-based mail, news and chat client for Windows, brought to you by the Pale Moon developer (and therefore not affiliated with the Mozilla Corporation). It is an optimized and reconfigured re-build of Mozilla Thunderbird ESR.

It has been over two weeks now since Microsoft support for Windows XP expired. So far, the world as we know it has not come to a grinding halt for Windows XP users, but that isn’t a reason to let your guard down—it’s really just a matter of time. With hundreds of millions of Windows XP systems still in use by businesses, government agencies, and individuals around the world, maybe Microsoft Microsoft should make the operating system open source and let developers take over. When May 13 rolls around, things might start to look different. Many XP users viewed April...

Microsoft really wants people to stop using Windows XP. The company launched a new promotion that offers XP users $100 off the purchase of a new PC that costs more than $599 through the Microsoft Store from now until June 15. Buyers will also get 90 days of free support and free data transfer from their old XP-powered PC. Microsoft is ending support for XP, which has been around for more than a decade, in April. That means any security flaws found by attackers after that point won’t be patched, leaving users who are still clinging to their old computers...

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...