Open-Source Goes Open-Range With Linux Powered Rifle

The Linux operating system is one of the most well-respect open-source OS’ on the planet and now it’s going to war – literally.

The team at Tracking Point have implemented Linux in an attempt to create firearms with more precision. The goal was simple, create firearms that could be more accurate from long distances.

First shown off at CES 2013, the company implements a combination of ARM CPUs, lasers, and on-board Wi-Fi to determine  shooting accuracy. That combined information allows hunters and other armed individuals to increase their distance for accuracy.

The company claims that hunters with a normal range of 200 to 300 yards are often comfortable shooting with accuracy from double and even triple those distances.

Founded in 2009 by John McHale, the company has actually created three “precision guided firearms.” According to McHale the goal was to create more “ethical kills” whereby animal suffering is minimized through effective kill shots.

The software works by determining all the factors that make for an accurate kill. For example the gun examines wind speed, elevation, temperature, humidity, the curvature and rotation of the Earth, along with other factors. The gun then provides a heads up display within its scope which guides the shooter towards an effective and humane kill.

According to the company the gun eliminates shooters error in the following areas:

• Aim
• Trigger pull
• Environmental inputs
• Range miscalculation

The gun works with a complete solution of rifle + scope + ammo which are sold as packages from Tracking Point. The system asks users to input their rifle and round type so it can determine shooting solutions.

The company is really pushing the hunting aspect of its weapons but we have to wonder how quickly they will become part of a military snipers portfolio given their ability to eliminate human error from the equation.

The only downside we have seen so far? The gun costs $17,000.

Would you like to take one of Tracking Point’s precision guided firearms on your next hunting expedition or does it take the fun out of hunting?

video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pWCH41D3SqM

soureces : http://techbeat.com

STEAM MARCH SURVEY STATS: LINUX USAGE HAS DECREASED

In February, the Valve Steam Hardware & Software Survey stats have revealed that 2.02% of Steam users run Linux, a huge increase from January (1.12%). Oddly, the survey stats for March have revealed a decrease and Linux users running Steam are now at ~1.70%.

Steam survey: OS usage stats for March 2013 (the survey is optional)

One reason for this could be the game titles that are currently available on Steam for Linux: there are many interesting games, but obviously it can't be compared to Windows yet. Another reason could be the addition of many new Linux distributions: for February, only Ubuntu, Linux Mint and "Linux 64" were displayed in the stats but for March you'll notice a pretty big list of Linux distributions, including Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE, Arch Linux, elementary OS, Fedora, Chakra, Sabayon and so on, of which many show up with 0%.

As expected, in March, Ubuntu continues to have the most Steam for Linux users with 1.15% of all Steam OSes. Linux Mint comes in second, with 0.21%, followed by "Linux 64 bit" with 0.11% ("Linux 64bit" are probably Linux distributions that aren't detected by Steam) and Arch Linux with 0.04%.

Judging by these stats, the Steam Linux market share doesn't seem to be able to go past ~2% but we should see a huge increase once Steambox is released. What do you think?  

The complete Steam Hardware & Software Survey stats can be found HERE.

AUDIENCE MEDIA PLAYER GETTING CLOSE TO A NEW RELEASE, HELP TEST IT!

Audience is a minimalistic, Gstreamer-based media player written in Vala. The second Audience release is getting close and its developers have invited users to help test it. There aren't any major new features since the previous release, but a large amount of bugs have been fixed recently. So if you can help test it or just want to give it a try, read on.

Audience comes with a beautiful, minimalistic clutter-based interface and very few configuration options and is designed to play videos without getting in your way. The progress bar (which comes with previews support) along with a play/pause button, a sidebar (from where you can access the playlist and language / subtitles) toggle button and an add to playlist button are displayed at the bottom and are set to autohide by default. A few more settings can be tweaked by using Dconf editor (org > pantheon > audience). 

As you can notice from the Dconf path above, Audience is designed for the elementary OS desktop (Pantheon) and it will probably become the default media player in the future. But of course, you can use it in any desktop environment.

Install Audience

Before proceeding, please note that this PPA has quite a few elementary packages that are unstable so read the PPA description before adding it.

Audience can be installed in Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04 (and obviously, elementary OS and other Ubuntu-based Linux distributions such as Linux Mint, etc.) by using the elementary Daily PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audience

Arch Linux users can install the latest Audience via AUR.

And a note from Cody Garver, the main Audience developer, on how to report bugs for Audience:

We only ask that users test videos that do not play/produce errors in Totem before submitting a bug to make sure it's Audience-specific.

Report any bugs you may find @ Launchpad.
soureces : http://www.webupd8.org