Looking around the British Education Training and Technology show, BETT 2009, it was clear by the sheer size of the event, that an awful lot of money is being spent on technology in education. With Open Source Software covering almost every requirement in the national curriculum, a question has to be asked why schools do not back it more fully
Softhaus writes “The guys at Blood Frontier have been busy for the last two years working on a new FPS called (surprise) Blood Frontier . This game is an enhanced Cube 2 engine with original artwork and new gameplay (including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood — a nice option for a change). Add the new paintball mode and you have a real ‘game community’ here. The code is all there (complete for you to play with), the team listens to feedback from the community, and the game is great! It’s nice to see these talented guys showing a true free software attitude. They’ve mentioned that the first actual release is scheduled for next Friday. Does anyone know of other great open source games that are truly ‘open?'”
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billybob2 writes “CoreBoot (formerly LinuxBIOS), the free and open source BIOS replacement, can now boot Windows 7 Beta. Videos and screenshots of this demonstration, which was performed on an ASUS M2V-MX SE motherboard equipped with a 2GHz AMD Sempron CPU, can be viewed on the CoreBoot website. AMD engineers have also been submitting code to allow CoreBoot to run on the company’s latest chipsets, such as the RS690 and 780G.”
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Verunks writes “Ars takes the KDE 4.2 release candidate out for a test drive on Windows. The popular open source desktop environment has moved beyond Linux and is becoming increasingly robust on other platforms. Even KDE’s Plasma desktop shell is now Windows-compatible.”
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There are plenty of open source applications that can help you tremendously as a web designer. In this article, you’ll find 30 exceptionally handy open source applications for web designers.
Howardd21 writes “PC World reports that Mozilla Labs wants 1% of its Firefox users to voluntarily provide information about how they use the browser, and their web browsing habits. This would be done through an add-on named “Test Pilot” that collects the information and associates it with some demographic information that the user has provided. Unlike other data collection utilities that software developers may include to provide usage information, the add-on will follow the same open source concept that Firefox adheres to, allowing the market to better understand what is being collected. Mozilla Labs stresses privacy when discussing how they will collect, store and use the data, including publishing it for other researchers to to analyze.”
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“Linux is great. It’s a free, open-source operating system (OS) based on work done by Linus Torvalds in the early ’90s. Again, it’s free, powerful and easy to … Oh wait, it’s a pain to use.”
svonkie writes “C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent. PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby’s been a hot topic for many.”
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President Barack Obama is a smart guy. Where others zig, he zags. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that he’s been asking around about the benefits of open source, according to Sun Chairman Scott McNealy, who has been asked by President Obama to author a white paper on the benefits the U.S. government can derive from open source.
mytrip writes “In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems’ market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun’s market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat’s.”
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