In 2011, the Gendarmerie added 20,000 Ubuntu desktops, and in 2012 added another 10,000. This year, it added 2000 so far. Between March and June of 2013, the police force also performed an update of Ubuntu, upgrading to version 12.04 from 10.04, over its network. “This January, the last constraints will disappear, and we will replace the last proprietary desktop PCs by Ubuntu.”
via French Gendarmerie: “Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%” | Joinup.
A journaling file system is a special type of file system that maintains a tracking file, called a journal. The journal enables the system to repair any inconsistencies that may arise as a result of a system halted abnormally. It does this by keeping track of changes that are made before committing them to the main file system. In the event that the computer is not shut down properly, any data loss can be recreated. This type of file system is therefore less likely to suffer from corruption, and brings file systems back online quickly.
via Choosing a Journaling File System – Linux Links – The Linux Portal Site.
Orbital officials initially aimed for Cygnus to arrive at the space station on Sunday, Sept. 22, but a data format issue between the spacecraft and orbiting lab forced the company to abort that first rendezvous attempt. Troubleshooting efforts with that glitch and the impending arrival of a new space station crew aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which launched and docked on Wednesday (Sept. 25), pushed Cygnus’ arrival to today.
via Private Cygnus Spacecraft Makes Historic 1st Rendezvous with Space Station | Space.com.
The other firm is SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., which has a $1.9 billion contract for 12 supply missions using its Dragon space capsules and Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX has flown two of those delivery missions already, and is expected to test fly an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket later today in a launch from California. Unlike Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon capsules are equipped with a heat shield and can return science experiments and gear to Earth from the station.
Conventional microphones work when sound waves make a diaphragm move, creating an electrical signal. Microflown’s sensor has no moving parts. It consists of two parallel platinum strips, each just 200 nanometres deep, that are heated to 200 °C. Air molecules flowing across the strips cause temperature differences between the pair. Microflown’s software counts the air molecules that pass through the gap between the strips to gauge sound intensity: the more air molecules in a sound wave, the louder the sound. At the same time, it analyses the temperature change in the strips to work out the movement of the air and calculate the coordinates of whatever generated the sound.
via Matchstick-sized sensor can record your private chats – 26 September 2013 – New Scientist.
In acoustics this movement of air is called particle velocity. The Microflown sensor is based upon MEMS technology, and uses the temperature difference in the corss section of two extremely sensitivy platinum wires that are heated up to 200°C in order to determine Acoustic Particle Velocity. When air flows across the wires, the first wire cools down a little and due to heat transfer the air picks up some heat. Hence, the second wire is cooled down with the heated air and cools down less than the first wire. A temperature difference occurs in the wires, which alters their electrical resistance. This generates a voltage difference that is proportional to the Particle velocity and the effect is directional: when the direction of the airflow reverses, the temperature difference will reverse too.
The DJI Phantom Quadcopter with GoPro Mount is a remote controlled, four-propeller quadcopter with a removable GoPro camera mount for capturing POV footage of flight. The compact and lightweight Phantom is ready-to-fly right out of the box and it includes the remote control unit and receiver, which gives the device a transmission range of up to 984.25′ (300m). The Phantom also features an intelligent Naza-M + GPS multi-rotor autopilot system, which supports two flight modes and a failsafe function that will automatically trigger the device to land safely when control is lost.
via DJI Phantom Quadcopter with GoPro Mount CP.PT.000001 B&H Photo.
Before Xen became part of the foundation, Kurth says, many people in the Linux community favored KVM. “The thinking really went along the lines of: KVM=Linux=Good. Xen=Citrix=Bad.” With the open source community connecting Xen with Citrix, the project’s features and open source nature were overlooked. Kurth says that Xen’s new role as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project has changed how the community and press view it.
Mirror Group Digital enjoyed a surge in daily browsers of nearly 20% last month, after the Sun introduced its website paywall
via Mirror’s online traffic soars in wake of Sun paywall | Media | theguardian.com.
As market data enters the switch, the Ethernet frame is parsed serially as bits arrive, allowing partial information to be extracted and matched before the whole frame has been received.
Then, instead of waiting until the end of a potential triggering input packet, pre-emption is used to start sending the overhead part of a response which contains the Ethernet, IP, TCP and FIX headers. This allows completion of an outgoing order almost immediately after the end of the triggering market feed packet.
The overall effect is a dramatic reduction in latency to close to the minimum that is theoretically possible.
via Groundbreaking Results for High Performance Trading with FPGA and x86 Technologies | Low-Latency.com.
Lucene is used by many companies and groups as the foundation for their search engines. These organizations include AOL, Disney, and Eclipse. Lucene’s chief selling point is that the indexing engine, with a footprint of a mere megabyte of RAM, can index up to 150GBs per hour of text on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. That’s darn good!
Solr comes into the picture as the search platform front-end for Lucene. It provides full-text search, including the ability to handle such formats as Microsoft Word and PDF with Apache Tika; hit test highlighting; and faceted search, which incorporates free text searching with topic taxonomy indexing.
via Solr: The Most Important Open Source Project You’ve Never Heard Of.
Under the hood, Solr is written in Java and it relies on Lucene for its core functionality. It usually runs within a servlet container such as the Jetty HTTP server and Javax.servlet.