AMD's upcoming Ryzen (Zen) processors appear to be in good enough shape that they are working on the current mainline kernel as far as I can tell based upon limited information available prior to getting my hands on the CPUs or getting any official announcement from AMD, but some Linux kernel patches have yet to be mainlined. The yet-to-be-merged work appears to be more for non-core features and Zen server functionality with those CPUs shipping later than the upcoming Ryzen desktop CPUs.
If Santa didn't come by last night, we'd like to inform you that Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel as a Christmas present to Linux geeks around the world.
If you're watching the Linux kernel scene, you would know that there have been two weeks since the launch of the Linux 4.9 kernel, which appeared to be the biggest kernel version ever released. This means that the merge window for Linux kernel 4.10, which is not as big as Linux kernel 4.9 was, is now officially closed and it's time for us to test drive the RC1 milestone.
"It's Christmas Day, and it's two weeks since the merge window opened. Thus, the merge window is now closed," said Linus Torvalds. "On the whole, this wasn't all that big a release - nothing like 4.9. Although it wasn't tiny either. I think 4.7 was smaller. 4.8 might have been too. It's xmas day, and right now I can't be arsed to actually do the statistics I'd normally do."
For some end-of-year BSD benchmarking were (FreeBSD 12 based) TrueOS 20161215 and DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1 tested on the same Intel Core i7 6800K + MSI C236A WORKSTATION as used for the Linux workstation/server benchmarks from a few days ago. On the same exact system, TrueOS and DragonFlyBSD were both tested out-of-the-box to compare to our numbers from Clear Linux, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 16.10, CentOS 7, openSUSE Leap 42.2, and Debian Linux 8.6
While I have owned many Western Digital hard drives over the years, last week was my first time trying out one of the company's new solid-state drives (SSDs) under Linux. Some Linux benchmark results to share for reference today are of the WD Blue 250GB (WDS250G1B0A) SATA 3.0 SSD.
we're proud to finally announce the new feature release of darktable, 2.2.0!
This Christmas Eve if you have any RAW digital photographs you are looking to manage, the DarkTable 2.2.0 release is now available with many improvements since its 2.0 release.
After more than 13 years of development, the HandBrake Team is delighted to present HandBrake 1.0.0. Thank you to all of our many contributors over the years for making HandBrake what it is today.
We again remind everyone that the HandBrake Website is the only official source for HandBrake. Downloads are not mirrored on any third-party services, excepting the Linux PPA. For more information on downloading and installing HandBrake safely, please read Where to get HandBrake.
HandBrake 1.0 is rather a big release for those in need of video transcoding on Linux/Windows/macOS systems. To learn more about all of the HandBrake 1.0 changes, see the official release announcement at handbrake.fr.
Claws Mail is a lightweight, fast and highly configurable mailer using the GTK2 toolkit. It started life as a fork of Sylpheed and was called Sylpheed Claws, adding bleeding edge features to Sylpheed and feeding them back to the original project wherever possible. Eventually, the two projects diverged too much and it is now a completely separate program.
Unigine Corp is preparing their next major Unigine 2 engine update, Unigine 2.4. This should be another exciting update while unfortunately their new technology demo isn't making it out in time for Christmas.
Their new Unigine "superstition" / "classroom" technology demo built off Unigine 2 is a huge advancement over Unigine Heaven/Valley. Unigine Superstition is built off Unigine 2, features VR support, and offers a ton of rich graphical improvements while still being Linux-friendly. While it was supposed to arrive this year, Unigine Corp recently delayed it until Q1'17. But let me tell you, the delay should certainly be worthwhile and this new demo is absolutely gorgeous.
Red Hat developer Dave Airlie spent some of his Christmas committing some fixes to the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver for benefiting id Software's DOOM game with Vulkan renderer.
During the holiday, I started playing Doom 2. I bet I’ve not touched this game in more than ten years. I can't even remember the last time I played it. My home directory was full of garbage and it was time to clean it up when I came across doom2.wad. I’ve been carrying this file around in my home directory for nearly twenty years now. It’s always there like an old friend you know you can call at any time, day or night. I decided it was time to install one of the doom engines and give it a go. I picked prboom, it’s something I used a long time ago and doesn’t have any fancy features like mouselook or jumping. Part of the appeal is to keep the experience close to the original. Plus if you could jump a lot of these levels would be substantially easier. The game depends on not having those features.
Yet another open-source project pushing out a big release for the holidays is the Awesome Window Manager Framework. Awesome 4.0 was released today with some big changes for this open-source X11/X.Org window manager and incorporates about four years of changes since Awesome 3.5.
My internship in Outreachy is officially started tomorrow. Actually, I felt like dreaming when I got the information that I was elected by GNOME, ariesd from I met too much troubles when I applied GSOC2016 as a absolute rookie in FOSS. So I will treasure this opportunity.
[...]
At last, thanks Marina, Mentor Tong and the maintainers of Chinese localization group who helped and trusted me during the application period. And at the same time, I hope I can contribute more to GNOME, learn more about FOSS organizations, and make more friends through this internship.
My Outreachy intern has been begun for two weeks, and I have completed most UI translations items of GNOME 3.22 (stable).
A number of improvements have landed to the GTK4 tool-kit's early back-end work on supporting Vulkan as an alternative to its OpenGL renderer is gaining ground.
We're happy to announce OSMC's Christmas update is here. These changes come in light as Kodi Jarvis (v16) is near the end of its life and is very stable. We have been working on preparing OSMC for Kodi Krypton (v17) and test builds are now available. We will continue to update them.
We have also been working on a new version of the OSMC skin which will be compatible with the upcoming Kodi release. We've taken a lot of community feedback on board and we continue to update and improve the skin.
We are sorry for all the silence behind our development process of these days, but we were secretly working on 2 main projects, the perfect plan to conquer the world and the new Parrot 3.3 release which fixes many minor but unpleasant bugs and introduces many many updates.
Yesterday, I read an email coming from the mail list of OpenMandriva. It was an announcement about an unexpected release: The community had been working on a surprise and released OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 as a Christmas gift.
The OpenMandriva developers have timed their Lx 3.01 operating system update release for Christmas.
Red Hat (RHT) continues to see growing momentum for its OpenStack, OpenShift, CloudForms and storage technologies. But business in the U.S. government sector –at least in Red Hat’s most recent quarter — appears slower than the company had hoped.
It has been a long time since my last blog post, but that does not mean I stopped doing Fedora-related development. Today, I would like to announce a new project of mine that I had been silently working on for a couple years already. In several cultures, it is customary to make gifts today (in the evening) or tomorrow, so you can take this as a gift for the holidays.
After some discussions and initial thoughts within LXQt SIG I decided to put a first Fedora 25 LXQt remix together. Now I'd like to share the idea to get some input, especially on selection of applications
For anyone hoping this year that Canonical would have decided to abandon their Mir display server efforts and shift focus back to Wayland, that did not happen, but in the stockings this holiday for Ubuntu users is an updated Mir display server release, version 0.25.
Oh, drat. I’ve done gone and procrastinated too much again.
Shortly after Clem Lefebvre and his buddies released the Xfce edition of Mint 18 — that’s “Sarah” for those who prefer names to numbers — I installed it on one of the laptops I keep at the office so I could write a review. I even took the laptop with me to All Things Open in late October to give it a good workout — which I did writing my coverage of the conference for “another website.”
I never did get around to writing the review, but it’s always been on the back burner. I’d get it written before the next version of Mint is released, I figured.
I never planned to use Mint 18 on a daily basis. That hasn’t worked out either. It was originally just going to go on a laptop for a review and that would be it. The office desktop where I do the majority of my work was running Mint 17.0, which would be supported until long after the lifetime the old 32 bit desktop which was already obsolete when it came into our possession.
FriendlyElec’s open source, 64 x 60mm NanoPi A64 ships runs Ubuntu Core and MATE on an Allwinner A64, and provides WiFi, camera, and 40-pin RPi connectors.
Considering how prolific FriendlyELEC (AKA FriendlyARM) has been in churning out open spec NanoPi branded SBCs, it’s surprising the Guangzhou based company has is only now getting around to the mainstream platform of 2016: a quad-core Cortex-A53. The $25 NanoPi A64 is not FriendlyElec’s first 64-bit ARM board — earlier this year it shipped the $60 octa-core -A53 NanoPC-T3 and $35 NanoPi M3. The NanoPi A64 goes up directly against the $35 Raspberry Pi 3, Odroid-C2, and the like for the main event in the hacker board competition.
Planning to upgrade? Don't agree to anything yet until you've seen our list of the best new phones coming in 2017. However, what does 2017 have in store for us? It looks like the new year will be the battle of the greatest smartphones - Powerful, long lasting battery, fastest processor, superb camera, name it!
Whether it's a brand-new Asus ZenPad Z8 or a hand-me-down Google Pixel C, Android tablets can provide your child with hours of entertainment. But these digital babysitters can also put your child at risk. Thankfully, Android has a few tricks up its sleeve to help you out.
The latest images and rumored specs have appeared for the Nokia D1C. The device will mark Nokia's return to the smartphone business after it followed the terms of the Nokia Devices and Services acquisition by Microsoft in 2014. The non-compete clause that was part of the transaction has kept Nokia out of the market until now.
The CyanogenMod project is easily the biggest and most-used custom Android ROM out there. But a series of poor decisions has basically sunk the corporate spin-off Cyanogen Inc., and that failure is also sinking the tools that the original open-source project has built up. Some of the original CyanogenMod team announced earlier today that they'll continue their work for community-created Android device ROMs under a new banner, Lineage OS.
We often, and quite rightly, complain about the way device makers customize the "stock" build of Android to suit their own needs. Customizing software is not inherently bad, but Samsung, LG, and others are usually doing it to push their apps and services. These companies frequently make unnecessary aesthetic changes for the sake of being different.
You don't have to put up with the look and feel of Android on your phone, though. You can customize things to better suit your own style and usage patterns—all it takes is a little legwork. The more time you want to spend on it, the more extensive the customization can be. It all starts with the right tools.
The official announcement is on our website at www.freedos.org—but since I announced the FreeDOS 1.2 RC1 and RC2 here, I figured I'd make a brief mention on this blog too.
We're very excited for the new FreeDOS 1.2 distribution! We've added lots of new features that you should find useful and interesting.
Thanks to everyone in the FreeDOS Project for their work towards this new release! There are too many of you to recognize individually, but you have all helped enormously. Thank you!
We continue to be impressed with the wonderful open source projects that emerge, grow, change, and evolve every year. Picking 10 to include in our annual list of top projects is no small feat, and certainly no list this short can include every deserving project.
To choose our 10, we looked back at popular open source projects our writers covered in 2016, and collected suggestions from our Community Moderators. After a round of nominations and voting by our moderators, our editorial team narrowed down the final list.
Curious how Krampus is doing this year? Well, as the recently hired manager of Krampus's open source programs office, I'm excited to tell you that we have an ambitious plan to adopt one free software tool during each month of the coming year.
Our story might be useful for other non-software-focused businesses (Krampus, Inc. doesn't currently produce any software) who are also are curious about open source alternatives and want to follow a similar path. To get you in the spirit, I've included all the links that made us feel like 12 months of free and open source software adoption is possible.
The latest LibreOffice news just days after announcing their MUFFIN user interface initiative is enabling the program's complex text layout mode by default.
The federal government is striving to increase the agility of the IT systems that underpin mission-attainment and service-delivery. Taking a cue from the private sector, federal agencies are seeking faster time-to-delivery for new capabilities and a rapid response in the face of changing conditions. To that end, U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott recently announced a new government website, Code.gov, promoting a shared-services approach to open-source software under the new Federal Source Code Policy.
Unfortunately for the feds, open source is not the answer to the agility challenge. The reason why is right there in the name of the site and the policy: code.
If you’re looking for a parametric open-source CAD program that can run in your browser, this is it. It’s far enough along that you can use it for real-world (albeit simple) modeling. CAD does, however, still require a certain type of spatial thinking and reasoning. So, if you’re new to the 3D modeling world, it might be worth tinkering with a more learning-oriented tool like BlocksCAD.
Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf. Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 2.4.0.
Ruby 2.4.0 is the first stable release of the Ruby 2.4 series.
The Ruby project has continued in its annual tradition of releasing a new version of their programming language on Christmas, a tradition held up now for the past number of years.
This is the second release of my new documentation generation system for my packages. It's still probably not of much interest to anyone other than me, particularly since the metadata format is still rapidly evolving so I've not documented it yet. But the templates are getting fleshed out and it's generating more and more of my package documentation, which will make releases much easier.
krb5-strength provides password strength checking plugins and programs for MIT Kerberos and Heimdal, and a password history implementation for Heimdal. This is the first new upstream release since I left Stanford, since I don't personally use the package any more. But it's easy enough to maintain, and it was overdue for merging some contributed patches.
This is my general collection of utility functions, standard tests, and portability code, mostly for C but also including a fair bit of Perl these days.
For a handful of settler votes in the next election, Netanyahu risked his country's interests and made it even more dependent on Trump. But don't expect any soul-searching anytime soon.
Daily News columnist Gersh Kuntzman is doubling-down on his celebratory-but-not-celebratory-but-obviously-celebratory take (12/20/16) on the December 19 murder of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov by an off-duty Turkish police officer. His follow-up column, “Vladimir Putin Is Demanding an Apology From Me!” (12/21/16), came a day after Kuntzman openly justified the killing of Karlov in the United States’ sixth-largest newspaper.
Earnest said this is one of the biggest “beefs” he has with journalists, claiming that “President Obama has been the most transparent president in American history.” And he wishes Obama got more credit for it.
You may remember the years-long legal battle journalist James Risen underwent in which the government was pressuring him to identify his confidential sources in a leak case. The case was finally resolved two years ago, but Risen has been on record saying the Obama White House has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”
He told Stelter today that not only does he still believe that, but he believes this White House to be the most secretive and “the most anti-press administration since the Nixon administration.”
Come fall, polar bears are everywhere around this Arctic village, dozing on sand spits, roughhousing in the shallows, padding down the beach with cubs in tow and attracting hundreds of tourists who travel long distances to see them.
At night, the bears steal into town, making it dangerous to walk outside without a firearm or bear spray. They leave only reluctantly, chased off by the polar bear patrol with firecracker shells and spotlights.
On the surface, these bears might not seem like members of a species facing possible extinction.
Major flooding in the UK is now likely to happen every year but ministers still have no coherent long-term plan to deal with it, the government’s leading adviser on the impacts of climate change has warned.
Boxing Day in 2015 saw severe floods sweep Lancashire and Yorkshire, just weeks after Storm Desmond swamped Cumbria and parts of Scotland and Wales. The flooding, which caused billions of pounds of damage, led to the government publishing a review in September which anticipates 20-30% more extreme rainfall than before.
But Prof John Krebs, who leads the work on adapting to global warming for the government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), told the Guardian: “We are still a long way from where we need to be, in that there is still not a coherent long-term view.”
Voters spoke very clearly on November 8 when they elected to raise the minimum wage in Arizona and Maine, along with Colorado and Washington State.
But those wins, the democratic process, and the express will of the people are being defied and denied in Arizona and Maine, where corporate lobbyists and their legislative allies are working to block, delay, even rewrite the laws approved on Election Day.
These efforts to flout voter-approved laws are part of ongoing conservative and corporate-backed strategies to keep wages low.
I recently returned from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2016 States and Nation Policy Summit, in Washington, DC. As a Mayor, I was most interested in the corresponding meeting of the American City County Exchange (ACCE), an offshoot spawned by ALEC in 2014 to spread ALEC’s ideas about “limited government, free markets, and federalism” down to the most local levels of government.
I had attended the 2014 ACCE conference and was eager to see how the group had evolved in its formative years. What plans were its leaders developing in response to the surprising ascension of Donald Trump to President-elect, and the consolidation of republican power in the Congress and in statehouses nationwide?
The short story is the group is working hard to expand its membership and stable of corporate sponsors, but in the meantime a handful of people are cranking out cookie-cutter “model” ordinances with little informed discussion.
With just four weeks left until inauguration, President Elect Donald Trump has yet to deliver on his promise to tell the American people how he is going to handle his corporate empire in order to avoid crippling conflicts of interest.
With investments and developments in at least 20 countries around the globe, not to mention the United States and Washington, DC, Trump brings an unprecedented array of conflicts to the White House, along with an equally unprecedented risk of bribery, foreign influence, and corruption.
So what better use of taxpayer money and time than for your State Department to make idiotic holiday videos?
Acting like an asshat is something of a State tradition year-round, but these annual videos seek to memorialize it. The very broad theory is that these things “humanize” American foreign policy in a way drones do not, and because they get lots of “clicks,” prove those foreigners really do love us after all. Of course, lots of people slow down for gory car wrecks, too.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump urged a foreign power, Russia, to interfere in the American election in order to undermine his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Russia complied. The American intelligence community, including the CIA and FBI, has reached a “strong consensus” that the Russians interfered with the presidential election in order to help Donald Trump win.
It has also been reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed this espionage operation. So serious was Russian interference in the American presidential election that the Obama administration warned Putin that it was tantamount to “armed conflict.”
Republican leaders in Congress were briefed on Russia’s interference in the presidential election and how it was targeted at elevating Trump and hurting Clinton. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans chose to block any public discussion of these findings. In what could be construed as a quid pro quo, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, has been selected by President-elect Trump for a Cabinet position in his administration.
Two bipartisan Congressional committees are the latest to express their opposition to government-mandated encryption backdoors. The House Judiciary Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee have arrived at the same conclusion as the experts FBI director James Comey insists on ignoring: encryption backdoors are a net loss for everyone, no matter what gains might be experienced by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Councils were given permission to carry out more than 55,000 days of covert surveillance over five years, including spying on people walking dogs, feeding pigeons and fly-tipping, the Guardian can reveal.
A mass freedom of information request has found 186 local authorities – two-thirds of the 283 that responded – used the government’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to gather evidence via secret listening devices, cameras and private detectives.
Among the detailed examples provided were Midlothian council using the powers to monitor dog barking and Allerdale borough council gathering evidence about who was guilty of feeding pigeons.
Wolverhampton used covert surveillance to check on the sale of dangerous toys and car clocking; Slough to aid an investigation into an illegal puppy farm; and Westminster to crack down on the selling of fireworks to children.
The story of how impoverished refugees helped Snowden evade authorities in 2013 only emerged in September, propelling them into the media spotlight.
Former National Security Agency contractor Snowden hid out in Hong Kong where he initiated one of the largest data leaks in US history, fuelling a firestorm over mass surveillance.
After leaving his initial hotel bolthole, he went underground, fed and looked after by some of the city’s 11,000 marginalised refugees.
[...]
She also says her case worker recommended she have an abortion when she was three months’ pregnant with Danath.
ISSHK told AFP it “completely denies” that allegation, and has rejected assertions by the refugees and their lawyer Robert Tibbo that it has breached its obligation to provide them sufficient humanitarian assistance.
But Supun feels refugees in Hong Kong are treated “like animals”.
One man wrote a check for $10,000 to an organization that helps women get elected to office, saying he was “embarrassed” that Donald Trump won the presidential election.
Someone else walked into the office of an organization advocating for immigrant rights and handed over a bag of cash he had just collected from members of his local community civics group.
à ženol Buran, a tea-maker working at the Cumhuriyet daily’s ðstanbul headquarters, has been arrested by a Turkish court for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoßan, the Cumhuriyet daily reported.
According to the daily, Buran was late to work on Dec. 24 after authorities closed roads and stopped public transport to deny access to the à žià Ÿli district, where President Erdoßan was to attend a meeting.
“When I finally arrived at the building [of Cumhuriyet], the security chief asked me why was late. I explained the situation and he told me that the police closed the roads because of the president. He also told me that I would serve him a glass of tea if he pays us a visit,” Buran said.
New research by Jaron H. Wilde, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Iowa’s, Tippie College of Business, “demonstrates for the first time that financial shenanigans at companies decrease markedly in the years after truth tellers come forward with information about wrongdoing in their operations.”
Is a figurative sign representing a hand with a raised middle finger contrary to morality and public order?