Tag: wired

Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version

Nearly 2,000 developers started contributing to Linux in the past 15 months, making up nearly half of all developers writing code for the open source operating system kernel. The new developers are helping fuel an ever-bigger Linux community, according to the latest Linux Kernel Development report, which will be released today by the Linux Foundation. The report is expected to be available at this link . “The rate of Linux development is unmatched,” the foundation said in an announcement accompanying the report. “In fact, Linux kernel 3.15 was the busiest development cycle in the kernel’s history. This rate of change continues to increase, as does the number of developers and companies involved in the process. The average number of changes accepted into the kernel per hour is 7.71, which translates to 185 changes every day and nearly 1,300 per week. The average days of development per release decreased from 70 days to 66 days.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version

PSA: 51 classic Sega Genesis games on Steam for about five cents each

Over the years, we’ve gotten used to Sega porting much of its library of legacy Genesis title to every platform imaginable, from mobile phones to the PlayStation 3. For those looking for a nostalgic fix, paying a few bucks per game for one of these quick trips down memory lane hasn’t been an awful deal. But paying just about five cents each for a bundle of 51 classic Genesis titles is a bargain basement deal that’s too good for practically any gaming fan to pass up. Amazon is currently selling all five pieces of the “Sega Genesis & Mega Drive Classic” series as downloadable Steam codes for the ridiculously low price of $2.62 . Among the dozens of games in the five-part collection are highlights like Eternal Champions, Gunstar Heroes , Phantasy Star 2, 3 , and 4 , Shining Force 1 and 2 , all three Streets of Rage games, all three Golden Axe games, and Vectorman 1 and 2 . A complete list of included titles is available on these Steam pages . Sold individually, these games usually run $3 each on Steam, which is more than the entire 51-game collection will run you currently on Amazon right now. Even in bundles, the collection usually goes for $37.50 on Steam or $18.70 on Amazon. A a quick look at a Steam price tracker suggests the bulk of the collection (not including the fifth part) has never been offered for less than $14.98 on the service. So depending on how you look at it, the current Amazon price is so that’s anywhere from an 85 to 98 percent savings from what were already some pretty good bundle prices for such a massive selection of classic games. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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PSA: 51 classic Sega Genesis games on Steam for about five cents each

Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

Samsung has just announced a new high-end Exynos 7 Octa SoC . It uses eight CPU cores—a combination of four high-end Cortex A57 cores and four low-end, power-saving Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration—and supports the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. However, its most significant new feature is Samsung’s new 14nm manufacturing process, which promises performance and power consumption improvements compared to the existing 20nm process. Samsung is already shipping eight-core 64-bit Exynos chips on its older 20nm process, most notably in the Galaxy Note Edge and some variants of the Galaxy Note 4. Compared to those chips, Samsung claims that the 14nm version “enables up to 20 percent faster speed, 35 percent less power consumption, and 30 percent productivity gain.” Those numbers don’t tell us much in terms of actual clock speeds or performance-per-watt numbers, but it’s safe to assume that the 14nm Exynos 7 will be able to run at higher clock speeds for longer while consuming less power. We don’t know anything about the new Exynos’ GPU yet. The 20nm Exynos 7 Octa uses a high-end Mail-T760 GPU from ARM, and we’ll probably see something similar in the 14nm version. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Ice cores are often relied on to be natural archives of past climate, capturing information that predates both our measurements and our greenhouse gas emissions. They’re a way of having records of the natural world that we don’t have a history of. However, natural archives like these can also act as records of human history, either directly (via fossils or artifacts) or indirectly. In mountainous regions, glacial ice doesn’t go as deep into the past as in Greenland or Antarctica, but it can tell stories of the recent past with excellent resolution. Airborne pollutants, for example, stand out sharply in measurements of the ice. They don’t say “pure as the driven snow” for nothing. Not much of this kind of work has been done in South America, though. Some lake sediment archives have shown the influence of local mining, but the timeline was fuzzy. In a new study, a team led by Chiara Uglietti , now at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, has produced a detailed ice core record of air pollution from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap that goes back to the year 793. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Assassin’s Creed movie officially in production

The long-awaited Assassin’s Creed movie is finally moving ahead, with Ubisoft revealing the film has officially entered production. The video game adaptation will be released on December 21, 2016. Word of the production came from the most mundane of places though—Ubisoft’s quarterly financial call. The publisher is co-producing the film with studio New Regency, which has had a golden period in recent years with films such as 12 Years a Slave , Birdman , and Gone Girl under its umbrella. “We have the pleasure to announce today that the green light has been given by New Regency, and the production has already started,” said Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot. “This is a very important milestone for the project and for our team on Assassin’s Creed .” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Assassin’s Creed movie officially in production

Apple increases the maximum size of iOS app binaries for the first time ever

For the first time since the introduction of the App Store in 2008 , Apple is increasing the maximum size of the app binaries that developers can upload to iTunes Connect. The company announced today that the cap would increase from 2GB to 4GB , though this doesn’t affect the 100MB limit imposed on apps downloaded on cellular networks. iOS app binaries contain both the executable file and all of the images, sounds, and other assets that the app needs—everything from icons to splash screens to UI is all included in one big file. Because of how they’re packaged, these binaries can get rather large. Binaries include all the assets for all the devices they support. If you’re shipping a universal app that supports all iOS 8 devices, for example, you’ve got Retina iPhone assets, Retina and non-Retina iPad assets, and special “3x” assets specifically for the iPhone 6 Plus (Apple’s got a table here ). Universal apps include all of those assets, and the binary you download from the App Store is the same whether you’ve got an old iPhone 4S or a brand-new iPad Air 2. If you’re running on an iPhone, for example, a universal binary will still contain assets for other iPhones and iPads, increasing the amount of space the app needs even though some of those extra assets aren’t needed for your device. Xcode 6 partially supports vector graphics to ease the developer burden of maintaining and generating all these assets, but they’re still stored as PNG files when the binary is built and uploaded. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple increases the maximum size of iOS app binaries for the first time ever

15-year-old bug allows malicious code execution in all versions of Windows

Microsoft just patched a 15-year-old bug that in some cases allows attackers to take complete control of PCs running all supported versions of Windows. The critical vulnerability will remain unpatched in Windows 2003, leaving that version wide open for the remaining five months Microsoft pledged to continue supporting it. The flaw, which took Microsoft more than 12 months to fix, affects all users who connect to business, corporate, or government networks using the Active Directory service. The database is built into Windows and acts as a combination traffic cop and security guard, granting specific privileges to authorized users and mapping where on a local network various resources are available. The bug—which Microsoft classifies as MS15-011 and the researcher who first reported it calls Jasbug—allows attackers who are in a position to monitor traffic passing between the user and the Active Directory network to launch a man-in-the-middle exploit that executes malicious code on vulnerable machines. “All computers and devices that are members of a corporate Active Directory may be at risk,” warned a blog post published Tuesday by JAS Global Advisors, the firm that reported the bug to Microsoft in January 2014. “The vulnerability is remotely exploitable and may grant the attacker administrator-level privileges on the target machine/device. Roaming machines—Active Directory member devices that connect to corporate networks via the public Internet (possibly over a Virtual Private Network (VPN))—are at heightened risk.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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15-year-old bug allows malicious code execution in all versions of Windows

Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built. Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s. SPDY’s major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

Report: iOS 9 will focus mainly on stability and performance

Longtime Apple users speak fondly of the Snow Leopard (10.6) release of OS X. Even though it came with ” no new features ,” it won users over by reducing the footprint of the OS and focusing mostly on refinement. A report from 9to5Mac’s well-sourced Mark Gurman claims that Apple is taking a similar approach with iOS 9, focusing on fixing bugs and optimizing performance rather than adding another big stack of new features to the pile. The report isn’t specific about what Apple will be doing to accomplish those goals, but in any case it’s a departure from the release-first-fix-later approach Apple normally takes with iOS. iOS 7’s biggest problems were addressed by iOS 7.1 six-or-so months later, and so far we’ve seen six minor updates for iOS 8 that have attempted to address everything from bugs to performance  and the amount of free space required for update installation. Though stability will be “a tentpole component” of iOS 9, Gurman says that the new operating system will still come with other improvements. Don’t expect a repeat of the “no new features” reveal, in other words. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: iOS 9 will focus mainly on stability and performance

Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

In the world of online piracy , it seems like it’s one in, one out at the moment. While The Pirate Bay returned  last week, Kickass Torrents has now been taken down via a domain name seizure. The site, which was already blocked from direct UK access as a result of high court blocking orders, now turns up an error message when users attempt to access its Somali .so domain. A look at its Whois record  shows the site listed as banned. The Somali registry was seen as a safe haven for the site, away from copyright holders and their lawyers, but it appears the takedown was a result of a claim. Several other sites with a .so domain, including the unaffiliated scam site kickasstorrents.so, have also been taken down, which indicates a far-reaching block on any URL with “kickass” in it that is based in the country. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site