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How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi’s operating system

Aurich Lawson When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn’t come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just  turned one year old , we decided to find out how  Raspbian —the officially recommended Pi operating system—came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers. Like the Raspberry Pi itself, an unexpected success story Although there are numerous operating systems for the Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends one for the general populace. When the Pi was born a year ago, the  recommended operating system was a version of Red Hat’s Fedora tailored to the computer’s ARM processor. But within a few months, Fedora fell out of favor on the Pi and was replaced by Raspbian. It’s a version of Debian painstakingly rebuilt for the Raspberry Pi by two volunteers named Mike Thompson and Peter Green. Read 53 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi’s operating system

Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

A comet spotted earlier this year may pass close enough for Mars to feel the rock’s hot breath down its neck, according to new reports that surfaced Monday and Tuesday. The comet, named C/2013 A1, may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet. C/2013 A1 “Siding Spring,” a comet between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted January 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as December 8, 2012. NASA states that other archives have traced sightings back to October 4, 2012. According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office , Siding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years. In less than two years, around October 19, 2014, the comet will pass very close to Mars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

OH MY GOD, Amazon’s having a FIRE… sale . This is bad for business! 20th Century Fox Television Last week, VMware’s top executives displayed just how worried they are about the competitive threat posed by Amazon’s cloud computing service. With customers able to spin up virtual machines in Amazon data centers, VMware is concerned fewer people will buy its virtualization tools. According to CRN , VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told service partners at the company’s Partner Exchange Conference that if “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.” VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.” Given VMware’s view of Amazon, Gelsinger and Eschenbach won’t like the latest news from the “bookseller,” which also happens to be a large IT services provider. Amazon today announced price reductions of up to 27.7 percent for Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Reserved instances requiring up-front payments already provide discounts over “on-demand instances,” which can be spun up and down at will. Using reserved instances requires a little more advance planning to make sure you get the most bang for your buck—although customers who buy more than they need can sell excess capacity on Amazon’s Reserved Instance Marketplace . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

Five-year-old runs up $2,500 in-app purchase tab with Apple

Five-year-olds know as well as adults do: iPads are fun to play with. Parents who regularly hand their iDevices over to their children, take note: you can still be burned by kids making in-app purchases. The  BBC published a story on Friday highlighting a five-year-old’s impressive feat in running up a £1,700 iTunes bill—about $2,500—after his father entered a passcode to allow him to download a “free” game from the App Store. The details of the situation reveal a series of unfortunate events that led to the truly epic tab, though Apple has since refunded the money. There are a few things the Kitchens could have done better when their son, Danny, began using an iPad to play games. The article doesn’t specify whether Danny’s father entered a passcode for the device, for the App Store, or within the app itself, but the last scenario listed seems most likely. Entering a password to download apps in the App Store used to mean the user could begin charging in-app purchases without re-entering that password for 15 minutes as the default iOS behavior. Apple made that more difficult with iOS 4.3 in early 2011 by requiring the App Store password a second time when in-app purchases are made. Assuming the family’s iPad was running a more recent version of iOS, it sounds like Danny’s father entered his password when Danny began to make purchases, not realizing what he was authorizing. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Five-year-old runs up $2,500 in-app purchase tab with Apple

Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users

Apple’s System Status page offers some info, but no expectation of when the services will be back up. If you’re a regular Photo Stream or Documents in the Cloud user, this morning’s iCloud outage is probably already giving you hives. The entire service isn’t down, but key parts of it are. Users can still make use of Find My Friends, iTunes Match, and Contact, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes syncing, but iOS device backups, document syncing, and Photo Stream have been down for (as of this writing) almost seven hours and counting. Apple’s System Status page , which was revamped last December to offer more information to users, shows that the three iCloud services have been down since just after 3am CST. Apple claims “less than 3%” of users are affected by this outage, though such a claim seems disingenuous—at the very least, there’s a hefty portion of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users who back up their devices to the cloud, and tons of others sync documents over iCloud through various apps. (And, as noted by 9to5Mac earlier, some users on Twitter are reporting other iCloud services being down that Apple has not indicated on the status page.) iCloud outages are, unfortunately, nothing new. Still, they rarely last this long. There’s no indication when these services will be back up; we’ve reached out for comment, but Apple has yet to respond. We’ll update this article if we hear anything back. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users

Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Four months after Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 with and for Windows 8, Redmond has finally released a version of the company’s newest browser for its 700 million Windows 7 users in 95 other languages too. The new browser will be available as an optional update immediately. Anyone with the release preview installed will have it sent as an “important” update. That’s significant because Windows Update will, in its default configuration, install it silently and automatically. Over coming months, Microsoft will classify Internet Explorer 10 as “important” in more and more markets to ensure it is installed automatically as widely as possible. This marks a significant change from Microsoft’s past practices. Traditionally, the company has released new browsers only as optional updates, and further, as interactive updates that required clicking through a EULA before installation actually took place. In late 2011, the company changed this policy, converting Internet Explorer 9 to an automatic (“important”) update. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z, one of the hardiest and most svelte tablets we’ve seen. Sony Sony is unveiling a new Android tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday. Sony claims the tablet is not only the “world’s thinnest 10.1-inch tablet” at 6.9 millimeters, but it’s apparently waterproof in up to three feet of water for 30 minutes. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z has a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 1920×1200 display running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. (Sony has gone scouts-honor that the tablet will be updated to 4.2 “after launch.”) The tablet weighs 495 grams (1.05 pounds) and it has an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front camera, plus 16GB/32GB storage configurations with a microSD slot than can take up to a 64GB card. The tablet also contains an IR blaster that works with a special version of an app Sony has created called TV SideView. TV SideView integrates with a user’s cable provider and allows users to browse the program guide as well as currently airing content. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

Qualcomm’s global LTE chip could help end iPhone fragmentation

Qualcomm yesterday unveiled a new series of chips designed to solve one of the nagging problems faced by smartphone manufacturers and smartphone users: a single phone isn’t capable of hopping on any cellular network. This difficulty caused Apple to release three versions of the iPhone 5, with support for different LTE networks. As a result, customers who frequently travel overseas had to think hard about which version of the iPhone they would buy, since different countries and carriers use different cellular bands. The iPhone uses Qualcomm chips . LTE has exacerbated this cellular fragmentation, Qualcomm said. “The wide range of radio frequencies used to implement 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks globally presents an ongoing challenge for mobile device designers,” Qualcomm Senior VP Alex Katouzian said in the company’s announcement . “Where 2G and 3G technologies each have been implemented on four to five different RF bands globally, the inclusion of LTE brings the total number of cellular bands to approximately 40.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Qualcomm’s global LTE chip could help end iPhone fragmentation

Google shows the world its official Android 4.2.2 changelog

When Android 4.2.2 quietly debuted last week , most users were left guessing about what exactly had been included in the software update. Helpful community sites like AndroidPolice had put together a thorough listing of some of the new features in Android 4.2.2, but any official listing of updates had yet to be made. Today, Google published its official changelog for its Android 4.2.2 update, as well as everything else that comes as a part of the Jelly Bean package. Many of the bullet points marked as “new” actually identify features that have been included in Android 4.2 since its initial launch and have since been  thoroughly  discussed. However, the changelog does include some of the minor features not previously touched on, like networking changes that were made to improve Wi-Fi Direct support and faster captive portal detection. Updates also include minor features, like the fact that TalkBack can now be accessed right from the power menu. You can also view the entirety of the Google Cards updates that have been made in Android 4.2. If you’re curious, you can view the official changelog at Google’s official Android site, then try out some of the features you may not have known existed on your Android 4.2 device. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Google shows the world its official Android 4.2.2 changelog

Laser intended for Mars used to detect “honey laundering”

Matthew T. Rader A laser tool funded by the European Space Agency to measure carbon on Mars has been reappropriated to detect fake honey. The counterfeit goods trade might more commonly be associated with handbags and watches, but it turns out that the world of honey trading is also a murky one, riddled with smuggling and fakery. According to a Food Safety News investigation , more than a third of honey consumed in the US has been smuggled from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals. To make matters worse, some honey brokers create counterfeit honey using a small amount of real honey, bulked up with sugar, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery (a type of unrefined sugar) and other additives—known as honey laundering. This honey is often mislabeled and sold on as legitimate, unadulterated honey in places such as Europe and the US. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Laser intended for Mars used to detect “honey laundering”