German videogame producer Crytek had long been suggesting they would offer official Linux support for their CryENGINE game engine some day. That day is now.

According to a post on their website last week, we now know that at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) that began yesterday, attendees will be able to see this version of the engine in action. They have not mentioned which games they plan on demonstrating.

CryTek is well known for the popular games the Crysis series and Far Cry,as well as Ryse: Son of Rome. From their website:

During presentations and hands-on demos at Crytek's GDC booth, attendees can see for the first time ever full native Linux support in the new CRYENGINE. The CRYENGINE all-in-one game engine is also updated with the innovative features used to recreate the stunning Roman Empire seen in Ryse - including the brand new Physically Based Shading render pipeline, which uses real-world physics simulation to create amazingly realistic lighting and materials in CRYENGINE games.

There will also be games on offer, with the latest version of free online FPS Warface available to play.

Anyone ready for Star Citizen on Linux? And if you're in the San Francisco area, how about giving your fellow readers a word about how it looks?

"CGI Group, the Montreal-based IT consulting company behind the botched rollout of the Federal Healthcare.gov site, has been removed from the Massachusetts Health Connector project. This comes about two months after being removed from Healthcare.gov, and a few weeks after CGI admitted the MA site 'may not be fully functioning by the end of June, and that one option under consideration is to scrap the multi-million-dollar site and start over.'

Like Oregon's similar troubles , Massachusetts uses paper submissions as a workaround to meet Federal sign-up requirements. 'The paper backlog fell to 21,000 pending applications, from 54,000 two weeks ago.'

If you are in the US, have you used Healthcare.gov or a State equivalent? If you are not in the US, do you use similar online systems in your nation?"

Remember the first time you heard about Google's Summer of Code ? Well, time flies: Google's well-liked summer coding internship program is celebrating its 10th year. And it's got a lot to be proud of.

What is likely to remain the same this year is the overwhelming response from students from all over the world who want the chance to work on free and open source projects with mentoring organizations that Google has hand-picked. Carol Smith, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, tells us that to date GSoC students have helped generate over 50 million lines of open source code to date, from over 8,500 student developers.

Previous summers of code have helped the KDE and FreeBSD projects advance in useful and significant ways, and it's brought a huge number of young programmers into the open source ecosystem, a good thing by any measure. Here's hoping the next ten years of the Summer of Code lead us to bold and interesting places! Or at least help us build the tools that enable us to avoid the robot apocalypse. Whichever.

A recent Nature Podcast ( Radio Signals ) features a new type of optical amplifier which converts faint radio signals directly into laser light . The novel approach shows promise with greatly reduced noise and improved sensitivity.

Radio waves are used for many measurements and applications, for example, in communication with mobile phones, MRI scans, scientific experiments and cosmic observations. But 'noise' in the detector of the measuring instrument limits how sensitive and precise the measurements can be. Now researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have developed a new method where they can avoid noise by means of laser light and can therefore achieve extreme precision of measurements.

We have developed a detector that does not need to be cooled down, but which can operate at room temperature and yet hardly has any thermal noise. The only noise that fundamentally remains is so-called quantum noise, which is the minimal fluctuations of the laser light itself. ... This membrane is an extremely good oscillator and that is why it is so ultrasensitive. At room temperature, it works as effectively as if it was cooled down to minus 271 C and we are working to get it even closer to minus 273 degrees C, which is the absolute minimum. In addition, it is a huge advantage to use optical detection, as instead of using ordinary copper wires to transmit the signal, you can use fiber optic cables, where there is no energy loss, explains Eugene Polzik, Professor and Head of the research center Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Could this be the start of a new era of ultra-sensitive devices, or low-cost/high energy technology?

Windows 8's unique "metro" interface has required developers to spend a lot of time updating their software to fit into the new environment. And the folks at Mozilla have decided it's not worth their time. They've dropped support for the project that aimed to bang Firefox into shape for Windows 8, citing lack of demand for the product as the reason. That frees up developers to spend time doing other things, but leaves users with good old Internet Explorer as their primary browser option on the tiled interface.

Mozilla says millions of users have downloaded pre-release builds of the desktop version of Firefox, while fewer than 1000 seem to be actively using the pre-release of Firefox for Windows 8 Metro. If you were holding out for the release version, time to look for other options!