Story 2014-06-17

post-Eich, Mozilla still has no CEO. Now what?

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in internet on (#3P1)
story imageMozilla's proposed CEO, Eich, departed due to his support of an anti-gay marriage proposition in California. But since then, nothing has changed, and Mozilla is desperately in need of some leadership at a time when its $300M/year deal with Google is coming to an end (Dec 2014, to be precise). Writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:
Today, months later, under the temporary leadership of acting CEO Chris Beard, Mozilla doesn't appear to be any closer to finding a new CEO.

In a June 3 blog posting, Surman wrote that one of the things on the top of his mind is "Finding the right balance between clear goals, working across teams and distributed leadership. If I'm honest, we've struggled with these things at [Mozilla] for the last 18 months or so. Our recent all hands in San Francisco felt like a breakthrough: focused, problem-solving, fast moving." How this will translate into true leadership remains an unanswered question.
What next for embattled Mozilla? And how to prevent the once mighty browser-giant from becoming the next Netscape?

Research meets its inevitable conclusion: espresso in space

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in space on (#3P0)
story imageThank God for researchers. From Lavazza, the folks who make that spectacular espresso coffee :
"An espresso coffee is what I miss most aboard the International Space Station." We have repeatedly heard this comment from the Italian astronauts who for 13 years have been at times working in the International Space Station, and today their espresso wish is about to become reality. In fact, Argotec and Lavazza are working together with the Italian Space Agency (ISA) to actually bring the authentic Italian espresso onto the International Space Station. ... Its name is ISSpresso. It takes its name from the International Space Station (ISS), where it is to be installed. It is the first capsule-based espresso system able to work in the extreme conditions of space, where the principles that regulate the fluid dynamics of liquids and mixtures are very different from those typical on Earth.
This, my friends, is scientific progress.

A look at the KaOS Linux distro

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in linux on (#3NZ)
story imageLike KDE? Looking for something new and innovative? Have a look at KaOS. As described on its home page, KaOS is "A lean KDE Distribution", and it gives these as the ideas and principles behind the distribution:
  • Rolling distribution
  • Built from scratch (not derived from some 'larger' distribution)
  • KDE desktop / Qt toolkit only
  • x86_64 architecture only
Interesting to have a distro that's not just a remash of some version of Ubuntu, and the narrow focus of the distro means there are fewer moving parts to worry about. I'll be giving it a look over the weekend. Here is KaOS' page on Distrowatch. But J.A. Watson over at ZDNet does a pretty reasonable job of reviewing it this week, too.

Linux gaming on the rise: 7hits

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in games on (#3NY)
PCWorld is running an article about the rise of quality games on the Linux platform .
For the first time in a long time, Linux gamers have a reason to smile. Gaming on the open-source operating system has long meant dabbling in Wine and arcane workarounds, but ever since Valve launched Steam for Linux just over a year ago the number of native Linux games has positively exploded.

Sure, Valve's embrace of Linux may have a wee bit to do with advancing the Steam Machine ideal, but any game released for "SteamOS" works just fine on other Linux distros, too. Here are 7 killer, big-name PC games that've recently become Linux natives-starting with a juggernaut that landed on Linux just this week.
Warning: it's one of those articles where you have to click 7 times to see all ten entries, but if you can stomach the format, it's a pretty interesting article.

Military Tech increasingly following sci-fi

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in hardware on (#3NX)
story imageWith upheaval in the Crimea, Iraq, and elsewhere again overwhelming the news, the military and their hardware are again in the forefront of everyone's consciousness. Good time then to see what kind of tech soldiers are using or will soon be using on the battlefield.

Not surprisingly, the tech pioneered by Oculus Rift is extremely interesting to military planners . But as real life mirrors sci-fi and even comic books, it might be a surprise to see the military is now debuting an Iron Man suit to protect its troops .

If the junction of hardware and battle tech interest you, you'll be disappointed to know you just missed a big trade show in Paris where you could come browse the latest and greatest, presumably in the presence of hostile governments planning on using the same equipment against you! Don't worry, there will be others - the military market isn't going to disappear any time soon.