An anonymous reader writes: Along with the open-source AMD Linux driver having a great 2014, the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver for Linux has also improved a lot. Beyond the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver closing in on Catalyst, the latest Phoronix end-of-year tests show the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is beating Catalyst on Windows for some OpenGL benchmarks. The proprietary driver tests were done with the new Catalyst “OMEGA” driver. Is AMD beginning to lead real Linux driver innovations or is OpenGL on Windows just struggling? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Catching Up To and Beating Windows
Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054 . Read more… 
If Times Square is too gaudy, crowded, and frankly insane for you, then there is another New York tradition worth your New Year’s Eve—one that is, in fact, ending tonight. For the past fifty years, the Pratt Institute has set out its amazing collection of big old steam whistles out on the lawn of its Brooklyn campus . Tonight’s your last chance to steam blast your way into the new year. Read more… 
jones_supa writes: Another day, another corporate network intrusion. NVIDIA has reportedly been breached in the first week of December, with the attack compromising personal information of the employees. There is no indication that other data has been compromised. This is according to an email sent out by the company’s privacy office and Nvidia’s SVP and CIO Bob Worwall on December 17th. It took NVIDIA a couple of weeks to pick up all the pieces and assess the incident. It appears that the issue was pinned down by an employee or several employees getting their personal data compromised outside of the company network. After that, the information was used to gain unauthorized access to the internal corporate network. NVIDIA’s IT team has taken extensive measures since then to enhance the security of the network against similar attacks in the future. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
