The head of delivery for the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) flagship welfare reform project, Universal Credit, has said that the department didn’t adopt open source and web-based technologies at the beginning of the project because “such things weren’t available” two and a half years ago.

Howard Shiplee told the Work and Pensions Committee this week that the department is now using open source technologies in its enhanced version of Universal Credit, which was initially developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and will be rolled out nationally by 2017 for most claimants.

The existing system being used in pathfinder pilots and developed by the likes of IBM, HP and Accenture will be largely be replaced by the digital version.

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The latest stumbling block that's been encountered by David in his pursuit of 3D virtual support emulation to match that of the 3D driver offerings of VMware and VirtualBox is how to handle disconnected VM operations. Libvirt-based virtualization solutions like virt-manager don't depend upon the current running user session (or its X.Org Server) when running a VM but effectively run as their own user.

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While Microsoft is expected to appeal this decision, it will be months before it appears in front of the next court. In the meantime, one of Microsoft main Android patent weapons has been rendered harmless for now in the EU.

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I suspect there will be a lot of happy PCLinuxOS users out there today. I'll snag a copy for a possible review on Desktop Linux Reviews. It's been a while since I looked at it, so it should be fun to give it another whirl with this new release.

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Our initial file-system testing of EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and F2FS from the Linux 3.13 kernel appear to reveal that the performance overall is slower than when using the Linux 3.12 kernel on the same software/hardware configuration.

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History has proven that open source software and collaborative development can speed complex technology challenges that when those challenges are overcome, unleash new opportunities for consumer experiences. The AllSeen Alliance aims to take a page from the Linux and open source playbook to deliver the connected home and business of the future while helping to turn those analyst forecasts into real revenue for the world’s most innovative companies and new experiences for consumers and business users.

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• Metro Last Light Comes To Linux, And It Largely Survives The Transition

  Bringing a game to Linux is always a tricky proposition. More than even Windows PCs, with their infinite permutations of hardware and the drivers that go with them, Linux can be a bitch to achieve any kind of standardization on. This is because now, in addition to considering the liquid hardware and the drivers, the core OS itself can vary from one unit to the next. No two Linux machines run the same variation of the OS and software, and this, alongside the variable hardware configurations, can make porting a game to it (which is by definition resource intensive) a complete mess.

• Unvanquished FPS/RTS Hybrid Release Alpha 22 With A New Map

Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, talks about the next major release of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system.

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While the release of Qt 5.2 is imminent and it features full support for Apple iOS and Google Android along side Qt's other mobile platform support, but missing from the party is Tizen support. Qt for Tizen is still in an alpha state but today they've put out their fifth development release.

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"We want everyone to have access to advanced secure communication methods that are as easy and reliable to use as making a normal phone call or sending a normal text message," Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder of Open Whisper Systems, says in an email. "The collaboration we've done with Cyanogen takes us substantially closer to our goal of completely frictionless secure communication. Users don't have to do anything special or different, it just happens."

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The next significant release of LibreOffice is coming at the end of January 2014 and some of the new features are already apparent. The bug hunting session went really well and the next TDF Board elections are about to commence. So, let's take a sneak peek at some of the upcoming changes.

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KDevelop 4.6.0 was released on Monday as the latest version of the KDE-focused integrated development environment.

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We can see that the memory used when you simply boot to a console and log in has changed very little all the way back to Fedora 13, released 2010-05-25. We’re doing a fairly good job of keeping our base system from bloating excessively. 19 and 20 are both 30MB worse than 17, but then, 17 was 25MB better than 15.

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Pogoplug announced a $49, Linux-based security device called the Safeplug that taps into the Tor network to hide your IP information when using the web.

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