Joab Jackson

The newest release of the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux distribution includes a number of technologies that haven't made their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) yet, including a new version of the OpenStack cloud platform, code-named Essex, that the company plans to adopt in future editions of its flagship distribution.

Fedora 17, released Monday, also includes the latest version of the Gnome -- version 3.4 -- as the default user interface.

The newest version of the Oracle NetBeans IDE (integrated developer environment) will come with support for the latest versions of PHP and C++.

NetBeans 7.2, released in beta form Thursday, will also offer the ability for users to easily deploy their applications on the Oracle Public Cloud, now offered as a preview service. Applications can also be uploaded to the Amazon Beanstalk service, also in beta mode.

With the new version of Linux Mint, released Wednesday, the developers behind the open source Linux distribution have put all energies behind Gnome, offering two versions of the desktop interface.

One version of the Linux Mint distribution, called Mate, is based off the widely used Gnome 2 desktop interface. The other, called Cinnamon, runs a variant of Gnome 3, which offers more cutting-edge features, such as support for 3D acceleration. Both versions will be supported until April 2017.

Expanding beyond its scientific and engineering number-crunching software, Mathematica maker Wolfram Research released a desktop application for full-scale system modeling and simulation, the company announced Wednesday.

SystemModeler allows engineers and designers to create models of physical systems, using a modeling palate and a vast library of physical and logical components. In addition to providing a static model of the system being designed, SystemModeler also can simulate how a system runs, using time-lapse visualizations.

Taking a step into the social media marketing industry, Oracle is purchasing Vitrue, the two companies announced Wednesday.

Vitrue helps corporations disseminate their messages and advertising across popular consumer social media platforms, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Google+. It coordinates social media marketing campaigns, analyzes the results and helps organizations interact with individual consumers on a more individual basis. The company offers these services though its own hosted social relationship management (SRM) platform.

Besting a record set by Yahoo in 2009, the research arm of Microsoft have deployed a new technique for quickly sorting large amounts of data, called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS).

The researchers will discuss their work at an Association for Computing Machinery conference dedicated to databases this week in Scottsdale, Arizona. They are also implanting their data-sorting techniques in Microsoft's Bing search engine, where it could boost response times to user queries.

Preparing for the eventual widespread conversion to IPv6, the Nmap Project has updated its namesake security scanning tool so it can scan IPv6 networks using a variety of novel techniques.

Nmap Security Scanner version 6.0 is the first major update for the free, open source security-testing tool since version 5 was released in 2009, and features some major updated and new features, as well as a variety of cosmetic changes and performance improvements. Overall, the project and associated volunteers have made more than 3,900 changes to the code base.

The Nasdaq computer system that delayed trade notices of the Facebook IPO on Friday was plagued by race conditions, the stock exchange announced Monday. As a result of this technical glitch in its Nasdaq OMX system, the market expects to pay out US$13 million or even more to traders.

A number of trading firms lost money due to mismatched Facebook share prices. About 30 million shares' worth of trading were affected, the exchange estimated.

Just over two months after its last major release, Linus Torvalds has posted the newest version of the open source Linux kernel, which supports new graphics processors from Nvidia and Intel, improves file system functionality and comes with a new security module.

Torvalds, who oversees input from thousands of programmers, commented on how smoothly work on this release proceeded.

#1 You will need to think about big data

Big data analysis got its start from the large Web service providers such as Google, Yahoo and Twitter, which all needed to make the most of their user generated data. But enterprises will big data analysis to stay competitive, and relevant, as well.

Vint Cerf once wore a shirt that read "IP on Everything," a wry comment on the versatility of the Internet Protocol he helped invent, a protocol that underlies all Internet communication. Now a University of California Berkeley researcher has put Cerf's maxim to the test, running an IP network over a set of xylophones, played by human participants.

While not practical for everyday use, the experiment has helped both computer experts and novices alike better understand how computer networks operate, said R. Stuart Geiger, a graduate student at the Berkeley's School of Information who led the project.

Preparing for its entry into the market for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), Hewlett-Packard on Thursday launched a second beta program of cloud computing services it plans to offer commercially.

The company's HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network services can now all be accessed by the public. All the services will be offered on an hourly pay-as-you-go model.