Even though E3 opens its doors on June 14th, there are numerous pre-conference activities. Bethesda announced that is bringing the world of Fallout 4 into Virtual Reality and there will be a series of VR experiences and games announced during this ‘media frenzy’ week. Still, what needs to happen for VR is to bring the cost of VR equipment down and one of potential solutions is coming from a company that is starting to challenge Apple with their retail philosophy. Razer is the driving force behind the OSVR, an Open Source Virtual Reality industry initiative. This initiative was one of key reasons why Razer became a unicorn, and
Apple Releases Swift as Open Source
Apple today announced that its Swift™ programming language is now open source. As an open source language, the broad community of talented developers — from app developers to educational institutions to enterprises — can contribute to new Swift features and optimizations and help bring Swift to new computing platforms. Introduced in 2014, Swift is the fastest growing programming language in history and combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages.* Apple today also launched the Swift.org website with detailed information about Swift open source, including technical documentation, community resources and links to download the Swift source
CES to Stage Extreme Tech Challenge
Three winners from the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) will be chosen at CES 2015. All ten finalists will appear on stage at the Venetian in Las Vegas to vie for the opportunity to present their product later to Sir Richard Branson. Finalists have been helped towards their goal with a boost from such companies as Amazon who provides web service. Rackspace offers no-fee hosting. Back-up and recovery services come from Axcient. Helpful tools were additional perks, such as app development from Progress and from Spotfire data analytics from TIBCO. Entrants came from more than 100 countries and were whittled down to the final ten. Only
Jolla Announces Open Source Jolla Tablet with Intel Inside
Jolla has announced their own crowdfunded open source tablet based on their open source Sailfish OS 2 operating system powered by Intel mobile processors.
Groupon GNOME Gname Game
The popular deal website Groupon has been attempting to trademark the term GNOME, which already exists and is trademarked as an open source project.
Khronos OpenVX Computer Vision Standard Finalized
When Khronos had originally announced OpenVX and the associated APIs, there was a lot of excitement about how it could help simplify and unify computer vision within the industry. That announcement was merely the establishment of the working group and the companies that would contribute to the standard’s development and finalization. With today’s announcement, however, OpenVX officially becomes an industry standard that can be commercially deployed within products and developed for immediately. This finalized and ratified OpenVX 1.0 version brings a laundry list of features that help abstract the underlying computer vision interaction with hardware in order to make cross-platform implementations more possible. Keep in
Kickstarter Suspends Anonabox Campaign for Lies
Anonabox was supposed to be an open sourced anonymizer that enabled people to quickly and easily browse the internet anonymously — except it was all a farce.
PC Gaming Alliance Becomes Open Gaming Alliance
The PC Gaming Alliance, also known as the PCGA, known for championing the cause of the PC platform and specifically gaming on the PC, has changed their name to the Open Gaming Alliance and have refocused their efforts. In a short but concise statement, the Alliance has announced that they will be changing their name to the Open Gaming Alliance and refocusing their efforts on open gaming in general instead of just focusing on the PC. After all, most of the PCGA’s members now are involved in gaming in one way or another outside of the traditional PC formfactor. “As the market for digital games
IRS Denying Open Source Projects Non-Profit Status
Apparently the IRS has taken the stance that Open Source projects, that are either created through the collaborations of individuals or corporations (which the government increasingly considers people) are not eligible for non-profit status. This news comes as the OpenStack foundation and Yorba foundation have both recently been denied by the IRS for non-profit status. While it may be true that some open source projects may not necessarily be deserving of non-profit status, most of these projects are run by a community of people and/or companies that come together for a common cause. They also make most of their software free and open to the public
New WordPress breaks FireFox… or not?
Is new WordPress 2.7 breaking Firefox? Several readers contacted me and stated that they have issues with the new wordpress and their lovely browser, Fierry-Ferret of Mozilla Foundation fame.