How many times have you been happily working away when, out of nowhere, Windows either forced a reboot to update, stopped responding, or completely crashed? With Linux, those events are a thing of the past. Because of the way Linux was designed, you (the user) have complete control over nearly everything.
Say, for example, an application fails on you. Instead of that application taking the entire desktop along for the ride (an issue that often stumps even software development providers), you can log into what’s called a virtual console and force that crashed application closed via the command line. Yes, that does take a bit more skill than the average user possesses, but once you know how it’s done, it becomes second nature.
The likelihood of that actually happening, however, is low. The few instances where this has happened to me was due to my using beta or “nightly” releases of software, which the average user wouldn’t be working with.
Linux simply works and works with an almost unheard of reliability.
Our first DevNation Live regional event was held in Bengaluru, India in July. This free technology event focused on open source innovations, with sessions presented by elite Red Hat technologists.
In this session, Kamesh Sampath shows how to apply common Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) with Apache Camel, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift. You will see how the new Camel K framework helps in deploying Camel DSL code as “integrations” in Kubernetes/OpenShift.
Containers and Kubernetes are key to accelerating the ML lifecycle as these technologies provide data scientists the much needed agility, flexibility, portability, and scalability to train, test, and deploy ML models.
Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading containers and Kubernetes hybrid cloud platform. It provides all the above benefits, and through the integrated DevOps capabilities and integration with hardware accelerators, OpenShift enables better collaboration between data scientists and software developers. This helps accelerate the roll out of intelligent applications across hybrid cloud (data center, edge, and public clouds).
Joget is an open source no-code/low-code application platform that empowers non-coders to visually build and maintain apps anytime, anywhere. By accelerating and democratizing app development, Joget is a natural fit for modern Kubernetes Hybrid Cloud platforms like Red Hat OpenShift.
When any systems – including communications service provider (CSP) operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) – are delivered with a narrow, siloed purpose, they tend to be pretty inflexible. As CSPs look to transform their businesses for success in increasingly competitive and dynamic markets, this inflexibility can stall their modernization efforts.
Service providers rely on OSS/BSS to support their services. But for many providers, their OSS/BSS generally lack interoperability. This can limit the exchange of data and access to metrics needed to synthesize more holistic views and address complex problems among the disparate systems. Bottom line: without close integration between OSS and BSS, CSPs may struggle to become digital service providers.
This week we’ve been to the Linux Application Summit in Barcelona. We round up news from the Ubuntu and desktop Linux community and bring you our picks from the wider tech news.
It’s Season 12 Episode 33 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas.
The first release candidate of systemd 244 was made available today for testing. Systemd 244-RC1 has also already been uploaded to the likes of Fedora Rawhide for further vetting.
Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors.
Come the Linux 5.5 stable release in early 2020 is the NVMe HWMON support to allow reporting the current NVMe drive temperature sensor(s) and min/max thresholds via this kernel infrastructure. This in turn allows user-space to simply query the data over sysfs without the need for any utilities, no root requirement, and should gracefully work with the various programs that report HWMON sensor readings to Linux desktop users.
For Linux- and BSD-based platforms, the Nvidia 440.36 proprietary graphics driver is here to add support for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER graphics card, which Nvidia claims it's up to 50 percent faster than the original GTX 1650 and up to 2X faster than the previous-generation GTX 1050.
Now BSD and Linux gamers who bought an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER GPU can use it to play games at full performance if they install the Nvidia 440.36 proprietary graphics driver, which is available to download only for 64-bit operating systems from Nvidia.com or via our free software portal here and here.
Building off the NVIDIA 440 stable Linux driver release from earlier this month, the NVIDIA 440.36 Linux driver is out today as a small update.
The principle update with the NVIDIA 440.36 driver and warranting this Friday release is officially supporting the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER graphics card. The NVIDIA Linux driver has already unofficially supported this new budget Turing GPU but only recognized it as a "Device" but now the strings are in place so the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER is officially supported.
Hi list,
I'm releasing a new mesa 19.2.x release to address being unable to compile on PPC due to a bad backport. There are a couple of additional patches in here because I didn't want to tease them apart and they're all stable anyway.
Dylan
Shortlog ========
Alejandro Piñeiro (1): v3d: adds an extra MOV for any sig.ld*
Dave Airlie (1): llvmpipe/ppc: fix if/ifdef confusion in backport.
Dylan Baker (4): docs/relnotes/19.2.5: Add SHA256 sum meson: generate .pc files for gles and gles2 with old glvnd docs: Add release notes for 19.2.6 VERSION: bumpre to 19.2.6
Eric Engestrom (1): vulkan: delete typo'd header
Hyunjun Ko (1): freedreno/ir3: fix printing output registers of FS.
Jose Maria Casanova Crespo (1): v3d: Fix predication with atomic image operations
Yevhenii Kolesnikov (1): glsl: Enable textureSize for samplerExternalOES
git tag: mesa-19.2.6
Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds.
Mesa 19.2.5 brought support on PowerPC 64-bit in LLVMpipe for using LLVM's large code model for JIT-compiled shaders since for large processes like GNOME Shell and Firefox there could be address space issues with the medium/small code models. Using that larger code model doesn't bring any measurable hit to the LLVMpipe performance but the commit introduced some problems when it was back-ported to the Mesa 19.2 series.
Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver.
TURNIP is the open-source Vulkan driver being written around Qualcomm Adreno hardware as part of the "Freedreno" umbrella. With the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in good shape already for OpenGL support across multiple generations of Adreno graphics processors, TURNIP is of growing work by the developers involved -- primarily from Google -- in advancing this Vulkan driver support.
With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev.
With the AMD EPYC 7642 server running Ubuntu 19.10 used in yesterday's article, I ran the final PHP 5.3/5.4/5.5 benchmarks added in to yesterday's data. So for those curious how the historical PHP5 performance compares to the imminent PHP 7.4, these benchmarks are for your enjoyment today.
Audacity 2.3.3 is mostly a bug fix release that addresses multiple issues reported by users from previous versions, but it also brings some improvements, such as a new quality setting for AAC/M4A exports, the ability to skip leading silence (blank space) in exports, as well as "What you hear is what you get" for exports.
This release also splits the equalization effect into two effects, namely Filter Curve and Graphic EQ, which supports presets using the Manage button and two points at same frequency for steep steps. Furthermore, Audacity 2.3.3 removes some functionality that confused users, such as Nyquist Workbench, Vocal Remover, On-Demand aliased files, and "Normalize on Load."
Coming up this weekend with the Linux 5.4 kernel is emulation/spoofing of the SGDT/SIDT/SMSW instructions around UMIP for allowing newer 64-bit Windows games to run on Wine and Steam Play (Proton). With newer CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series that support UMIP, these instructions are not allowed to run in user-space with Wine due to UMIP. So while the first stable kernel release is about to land with this support, some Wine-based emulation not contingent on the kernel patches is also in the works.
If Valve want the new Half-Life: Alyx to be a success, they need to push VR into every possible country they can and they're working a bit more towards that.
Announced early this morning (around 1AM UTC), the Valve Index is now being made available in Canada and Japan in addition to the availability in Europe and the USA. Half-Life: Alyx doesn't require the Index though, Valve did say it will work with any PC VR kit but this will probably give the best experience.
ASYLUM is an upcoming supernatural horror adventure from developer Senscape, it's high up on our list to check out when it releases and the latest footage is looking great.
Released a few days ago is a new short video, with what Senscape say is entirely "100% in-game without any processing".
Dota Underlords is steadily getting better and another update is now out with some interesting new features for playing with a friend in the Duos mode.
You can now get a persistent team for people you regularly team up with. Once you've played three matches with another, it will also unlock the ability for you to actually name your team. You'll be able to change your team name every three matches. Making it more interesting, it tracks some stats too like number of matches played and your record.
Hypnospace Outlaw could easily win the award for the strangest game of the year, giving you a retro-futuristic look at the internet and now it's getting bigger.
No More Robots and Tendershoot just recently gave it modding support, so now you can create pretty much anything in it. Webpages, images, wallpapers, soundscapes, entire zones, fonts, characters, file downloads and a huge amount more. They said it's now possible for someone to create their own full Hypnospace story.
Currently in Early Access, Monster Sanctuary might not be finished by so far it's turned out a lot of fun. They're giving more people a chance to now try it, with an updated demo.
This demo update comes shortly after a big update to the full game, which included a whole new area to explore with Horizon Beach. A new story arc based around a treasure hunt, eight new monsters to collect (most of which water themed) along with new items and rare equipment. All sounds pretty great. You can also find the Monster Farm, a place to let all your creatures go out into the open and see them, which does look pretty sweet.
Stadia has launched if you have the Founder Edition, our unit and code came a little late but it's here and surprisingly it all seems to be working well.
This new game streaming service from Google is powered by Debian Linux and the Vulkan API, so I've been rather keen to what it has to offer. Keep in mind you will need a good internet connection for it and you do always need to be online, although it's supposed to keep your place for 15 minutes to help with drop-outs and changing devices.
Quite a rough start, as they were clearly sending out codes slowly in batches. Something which wasn't explained properly. However, every Founder should now have access with them moving onto sending codes for those with the Premier Edition next week. I do hope Google learn to communicate better in future.
Karl Bode had a nice write up earlier this week about the ongoing issues with Stadia, Google's play to get gamers to give up their home consoles and GaaS (Game as a Service). As Karl noted, Stadia faces inherent challenges in these United States, given the laughably substandard broadband resulting from full regulatory capture at the hands of a few telecom players. In addition, Google, with all of its resources, seems fully committed to punishing early adopters with a big price tag for what is essentially a public beta alongside some reports of failed hardware deliveries. So big price tag, maybe you get what you bought in order to use the streaming service, and maybe that streaming service works with your broadband connection. Cool.
As we reported earlier this month, KDE Plasma Mobile is already running well on the PinePhone, but not all things are working properly, such as phone calls, which the Plasma Mobile team reports that they managed to add multiple patches to integrate telephony functions with the graphical UI.
"Bhushan Shah submitted multiple patches in postmarketOS to integrate telephony functions with user interface. Using which PINE64 Pinephone can connect calls from user interface. Currently audio is a work in progress however, and we hope to have this resolved soon," said the Plasma Mobile team.
Today we started our KF6 sprint at the MBition office in Berlin.
Beside the people attending in person, we have David Faure joining us via web conference.
Thanks already to the people at MBition that spend time on making it possible to host the sprint there.
First stuff to be discussed were some high level things, like does the monthly release scheme work out well. Short answer: yes :) The short period works well, allows people to fix issues directly in frameworks and still have that reasonable fast provided to the users. And the overhead of release creation is low, thanks to automation.
The last GNOME release, named “Thessaloniki”, was busy for GNOME Shell and Mutter. Many changes, ranging from code cleanups to architectural changes to performance improvements to new features landed.
Let’s take a look at the major highlights for the GNOME 3.34 release.
The distro keeps getting new features in each update but this time the work done in making the XFCE desktop environment look beautiful is really appreciatable.
Most of my life, I have heard Windows users saying how beautiful Windows 7 is. Now Windows 7 is going to reach its end of life next year, 2020, all users should think about moving to another beautiful and more importantly more secure operating system. Any Linux distribution can fill the gap but if the design and look matters to you, there is no better place to start than Zorin OS 15.
The best is that all Linux distros are more secure and respect privacy. None of your information is being shared with third-party services while you’re using your computer.
Yesterday, Zorin released Zorin OS 15 Lite, the slimmed-down version of its more robust big brother, Zorin OS 15. The latest lite version of the OS is custom-tailored toward older lower spec laptops and PCs.
The minimal specs are astonishing considering the aesthetically visual appeal of Zorin’s latest release. The minimal requirements are as follows...
I’m writing this in Porteus Linux v5.0rc1 for x86_64, a Live Linux distribution booted from a USB pendrive. It is fast, good-looking and has a good range of applications and utilities. I stumbled upon Porteus recently while looking for a compact Live Linux distribution to install on a couple of spare SD cards. It seemed ideal, as it is a portable distribution designed for USB pendrives and CDs, and optionally can be configured to be persistent between reboots and shutdowns. Porteus is based on Slackware, although I gather the developers might switch to Arch Linux at some undefined future date. Spins of Porteus with various Desktop Environments are available, and I settled on Xfce after trying a couple of the others.
Although my original objective was to install a portable Linux distribution on SD cards, I only managed to install Porteus on an SD card by using YUMI Multiboot USB Creator for Windows, which I run using WINE in Linux, rather than in Windows. The reason Porteus boots from an SD card when installed by YUMI is because YUMI installs its own boot manager on the SD card and chainloads the OS. Actually, if an SD card or USB pendrive has sufficient capacity, YUMI can install several OSs on a single SD card or single USB pendrive and you can choose on the YUMI bootloader menu which OS to boot.
Anyway, Porteus is interesting because, optionally, it can be configured quite easily to be persistent. I.e. if you want it to, Porteus can save new files, applications you install, browser bookmarks, edited configuration files and so on between reboots/shutdowns. However, I was unable to get persistence working with Porteus installed by YUMI on an SD card, but persistence works perfectly when I install Porteus on USB pendrives, which is the medium Porteus is really designed to be installed on.
Slax runs on a wide range of different file systems, including EXT (ext2,ext3,ext4), btrfs, and even FAT and NTFS.
It took me about one hour to download the must-have computing applications and accessory tools that fit my needs. The installation of each program takes longer than a distro installed to a hard drive. USB drives are much slower than an internal hard drive.
Once I had all of my needed software up and running, I generally was pleased with how Slax Linux performed.
Slax is not a perfect Linux platform, at least not yet -- but for me its convenience and flexibility outweigh its current shortcomings.
Another week, in which openQA did block some of the snapshots – and some issues it was unfortunately not able to see. Anyway, during the week 2019/47 we have released three snapshot into the wild (1116, 1118 and 1119), containing those changes:
Mesa 19.2.4: fixes critical rendering issues from earlier Mesa 19.2.3. As this rendering issue did not happen on all graphics adapters, openQA had no chance of spotting it Linux kernel 5.3.11 KDE Plasma 5.17.3 Subversion 1.13.0 binutils 2.33.1
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the new ItemSelector widget that is finding its way into YaST user interfaces. It turned out that just a simple on/off status is not enough in some cases, so we had to extend that concept. For example, software modules may have dependencies, and we want to show the difference between one that was explicitly selected by the user and one that was auto-selected because some other software module requires it.
This kind of shook the foundations of the underlying classes; all of a sudden a bit is no longer just a bit, but it needs to be broken down into even smaller pieces. Well, we cheated; we now use integer values instead. Most of the class hierarchy still only uses 0 and 1, but the new YCustomStatusItemSelector also supports using higher numbers for application-defined purposes.
For each possible status value, the application defines the name of the icon to be displayed (for graphical UIs like the Qt UI), the text equivalent (for text mode / the NCurses UI), and an optional nextStatus which tells the widget what status to cycle to when the user changes the status of an item with a mouse click or with the keyboard. A value of -1 lets the application handle this.
So this is not a one-trick-pony that is useful only for that one use case (the software modules), but a generic tool that might find good uses in other places all over YaST as well.
Fedora 29 will be End Of Life soon. With it Fedora Atomic Host will have its last incremental release (based on the Fedora 29 stream). Please move to the Fedora CoreOS preview if you can.
Last year we introduced the plans for Fedora CoreOS including that Fedora CoreOS would be the successor to Fedora Atomic Host and Container Linux (from CoreOS Inc.). As part of that succession plan we decided that Fedora 29 Atomic Host would be the last stream of Fedora Atomic Host to be released.
Fedora 29 Atomic Host has served us well, but with Fedora 29 End of Life coming soon , so will the last release of Fedora 29 Atomic Host. The next release of Fedora 29 Atomic Host (in the next few weeks) will be the last two-week release. It will contain all of the latest content from Fedora 29. After that release, Fedora 29, and Fedora 29 Atomic Host will no longer receive any updates.
RPM of PHP version 7.3.12 are available in remi repository for Fedora 30-31 and in remi-php73 repository for Fedora 29 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPM of PHP version 7.2.25 are available in remi repository for Fedora 29 and in remi-php72 repository for Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
For example, if you go out to lunch with a group of colleagues periodically, you might find it natural to talk about Fedora with them. If someone shows interest, you can suggest to get together with them for a Fedora show and tell. There isn’t any need for formal presentations or prepared talks. This is just having lunch and sharing information with people you know.
When you’re with friends, relatives, colleagues, or neighbors, conversation often turns to things computer related, and you can bring up Fedora. There are usually opportunities to point out how Fedora would partially if not completely address their concerns or provide something they want.
These are people you know so talking with them is easy and natural. You probably know the kind of things they use PCs for, so you know the features of Fedora that will be attractive to them. Such conversations can start anytime you see someone you know. You don’t need to steer conversations toward Fedora — that might be impolite, depending on the situation. But if they bring up computer related issues, you might find an opportunity to talk about Fedora.
The 8th OSM Hackfest is over, but the OSM (Open Source MANO) project continues to evolve and is now looking forward to landing release SEVEN. It was an exciting week in Lucca, Italy. We’ve seen a lot of interest from those who attended the event for the first time and a strong commitment from the community to drive the project towards new challenges.
This was also an important week for Canonical as we’ve officially launched our own distribution – Charmed OSM!
[...]
By delegating an experienced team of telco experts, Canonical delivered a plenary session about native charms and a presentation about CNF (container network function) workloads deployment with Juju K8s charms, a feature that is expected in OSM release SEVEN. The session about native charms followed with a brief update on a new charm tech framework. The charm tech framework is event-based which makes charming experience much more intuitive. An example of how to migrate from the reactive framework to the new framework was provided too. The charm tech framework is coming with Juju 2.7 release.
Released at the end of October to little fanfare was webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, the open-source Linux OS currently in development by LG for use on their Smart TVs and other digital products. With webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, they began setting their sights on automobiles and other potential use-cases. That was then extended by this week's release of webOS OSE 2.1.
WebOS Open Source Edition is the open-source spin of this Linux OS that has been controlled by LG Electronics now for the past number of years. This is the operating system formerly developed at Palm a decade ago already before being acquired by HP. The initial webOS Open-Source Edition came last year while this second installment arrived at the end of October.
The default logging system has been changed from pmlogd to journald. That is, on webOS OSE 2.1.0 or higher, journald is enabled and pmlogd is disabled by default.
journald lets you view data logged from various sources including syslog call, standard output and error (stdout/stderr), kernel message (kmsg), and other logging mechanisms, whereas pmlogd only provides messages logged via syslog call. Therefore, with journald, you can use more logging data to trace and debug your program.
To reflect the change and improve comprehensibility, we’ve refactored the documentation. The new logging guide mainly consists of the following sections:
Formatting logs How you can format log messages using the PmLogLib library and its APIs How you can set the logging context and level Viewing logs How to view logs when journald is enabled (default) How to view logs when pmlogd is enabled (optional) We recommend that you read the updated documentation so you can get familiar with the new logging system.
Modern embedded systems need a reliable and secure way to deliver software updates remotely. Toradex aims to accomplish this by publishing critical operating system updates to customers with devices running TorizonCore, an easy-to-use industrial-grade Linux OS. The system will provide full control over which updates and when these updates are pushed to their devices by way of a web interface. Additionally, customers will be able to push their own updates to their devices using the same OTA system.
Managing deployed devices is made easy by providing a high-level view of all devices and their current status. Grouping devices together into fleets is supported and makes managing updates for many devices easy. Every device publishes information up to the server which can prove useful for evaluating device health, inconsistencies in deployed devices, etc.
Zidoo has launched several TV boxes running Android over the years, some of which we reviewed such as Zidoo X9 (2015), or Zidoo H6 Pro.
Better late than never, momentum seems to be building inside Google to radically overhaul Android’s tortured relationship with its precious Linux-based kernel.
It’s a big job and has been a long time coming, arguably since the mobile operating system was unveiled in 2007.
The company hasn’t made any firm announcements on this but journalists this week noticed a low-key video posted to YouTube of a presentation given by Android Kernel Team chief Sandeep Patil, at September’s Linux Plumbers Conference.
Goldman Sachs wants to give away some of its most valuable software.
The investment bank spent countless hours over 14 years developing a platform called Alloy to help it access and analyze the growing set of financial databases being created across the firm. Now Goldman is taking the unusual step of making that program, as well as the language underlying it, available to the rest of Wall Street for free as open-source software in collaboration with a nonprofit called Finos.
The software and language "have grown to become critical tools within our firm across the trade lifecycle that help us price, assess and evaluate risk, clear transactions, and perform regulatory reporting," said Neema Raphael, co-chief data officer at Goldman. By making it publicly available, "we'll unlock tremendous value for the industry when we co-develop and share models."
Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too.
Arm has been focusing on Chromium optimizations not only for the Chromium/Chrome browsers itself but also for software leveraging the likes of CEF and Electron that rely upon Chromium code for rendering.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 17 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). SourceForge seems to have fixed whatever was making TenFourFox barf on its end which now might actually be an issue over key exchange. For a variety of reasons, but most importantly backwards compatibility, my preference has been to patch up the NSS security library in TenFourFox to support new crypto and ciphers rather than just drop in a later version. We will see if the issue recurs.
This release fixes the "infinite loop" issue on Github with a trivial "hack" mitigation. This mitigation makes JavaScript slightly faster as a side-effect but it's because it relaxes some syntax constraints in the runtime, so I don't consider this a win really. It also gets rid of some debug-specific functions that are web-observable and clashed on a few pages, an error Firefox corrected some time ago but missed my notice. Additionally, since 68ESR newly adds the ability to generate and click on links without embedding them in the DOM, I backported that patch so that we can do that now too (a 4-year-old bug only recently addressed in Firefox 70). Apparently this functionality is required for certain sites' download features and evidently this was important enough to merit putting in an extended support release, so we will follow suit.
I also did an update to cookie security, with more to come, and cleared my backlog of some old performance patches I had been meaning to backport. The most important of these substantially reduces the amount of junk strings JavaScript has hanging around, which in turn reduces memory pressure (important on our 32-bit systems) and garbage collection frequency. Another enables a fast path for layout frames with no properties so we don't have to check the hash tables as frequently.
Week Notes. I'm not sure I will be able to commit to this. But they have a bit of revival around my blogging reading echo chamber. Per revival, I mean I see them again.
The Open Data Institute just started one with a round about them. I subscribed again to the feed of Brian Suda and his own week notes. Alice Bartlett has also a very cool personal, down to earth and simple summary of her week. I love that she calls them weaknotes She's on week 63 by now.
This year, I have a special treat for my readers. On Monday, November 25, at 12 PM UTC, I will start a 30 day series about everything and anything. Could be an accessibility tip, an how-to about using a feature in an app I use frequently, some personal opinion on something, a link to something great I came across on the web… I am totally not certain yet. I have ideas about some things I want to blog about, but by far not 30 of them yet.
But before we go on to look at what’s on offer in this release I need to stress that I am not here to tell you what you should think.
That said, forks of well known software projects (even super duper popular ones like The GIMP) happen all the time, for a variety of reasons, some of which might seem trivial or pointless to you.
So regardless of whether the word “GIMP” does have negative connotations in your world or it doesn’t is by the by. With its first release now out of the door, the Glimpse image editor is beginning to stand on its own merits, to pursue its own path, and deserves to be evaluated on that basis.
We are delighted to announce GNU Guile 2.9.5, the fifth beta release in preparation for the upcoming 3.0 stable series. See the release announcement for full details and a download link.
Besides the usual set of optimizations, this release adds an --r6rs option for better R6RS support out of the box, and also adds a new --r7rs corresponding to R&RS. Guile's core exception handling has also been rebased onto the raise-exception and with-exception-handler primitives, enabling better compatibility going forward with structured exception objects, which are more common in the broader Scheme community than Guile's old throw and catch.
GNU Guile 2.9.5 is a beta release, and as such offers no API or ABI stability guarantees. Users needing a stable Guile are advised to stay on the stable 2.2 series.
Geopolitics have put enterprise data centers in the crosshairs of international espionage. From all corners of the globe, hackers of all sorts, including those aligned with national spy agencies, are zeroing in on hardware roots of trust.
For any computing platform, the root of trust is the ultimate line of defense against cybersecurity attacks. No matter how secure your operating system and applications appear to be, they are acutely vulnerable if running on a hardware platform whose root of trust has been compromised by an unauthorized party.
A CSV (Comma Separated Values) format is one of the most simple and common ways to store tabular data. To represent a CSV file, it must be saved with the .csv file extension.
In the last few months, I've been trying to compare the languages that I've worked with so far. The reason being, I often find myself in situations when I have a task at hand, and I realize there are multiple different ways to do it in multiple languages, and I get analysis paralysis.
Anyways, the focus of this post is Python, Javascript, and their use in Web automation. To be fair, both languages have different histories and evolved very differently, but web automation is one area that I feel where both languages have something to offer. I'll try to compare Python and Javascript in the context of different usage patterns and ways of performing web automation.
Building on PyDataCambridge last week I had the additional pleasure of talking on Higher Performance Python at ODSC 2019 yesterday.
The need to transfer files over a network is one that arises often. GNU/Linux systems support multiple protocols and tools for doing so, some of which are designed for somewhat permanent file sharing (such as SMB, AFP, and NFS), while others such as Secure Copy (SCP) are used for quick manual and scripted file transfers. Among these is the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the versatile and ubiquitous protocol on which the World Wide Web relies.
Python, which is included by default in most Linux distributions, provides simple HTTP servers through the “SimpleHTTPServer” and “http.server” modules. The former is found in the Python 2 Standard Library, while the latter is included in Python 3. These lightweight HTTP servers require no separate installation and can be started instantly with a single command.
At the end of 2020, after over a decade in beta, Google will pick up its product-ending shotgun and take Cloud Print for a talk behind the back shed, from which it will never return.
"Beginning January 1, 2021, devices across all operating systems will no longer be able to print using Google Cloud Print," Google said in a support note.
"We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy."
Last week for its own Chrome OS operating system, Google added CUPS printing, which it will use instead of Cloud Print.
Google revealed plans to shut down Cloud Print, a cloud-based printing solution, at the end of 2020 permanently.
The company launched Cloud Print back in 2010 as a solution to print from any Internet connected device to compatible printers. The main benefit of the solution was that users did not have to install printer drivers on their client devices and that devices did not need to be in the same local network as the printer. The solution enabled printing on devices without official support from the printer's manufacturer or drivers for that particular device.
On Windows users could install the Google Cloud Printer application to add cloud printing functionality to the operating system.
After offering printing from any device, from any location, to any web-connected printer with Cloud Print, Google is shutting down the service that has technically been a beta product since 2010. Cloud Print will be gone by the end of next year and users will need to find an alternative before December 31, 2020. Chrome OS, which originally relied on Cloud Print entirely for printing needs, eschewing the need to develop native printing controls, is now going full native.
Chrome OS already handles some administrative tasks for printers that use the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). Google promises to expand administrative options through the end of the year, and add more robust support for external print servers and other security policy administration in 2020. Since Chrome OS and its apps relied entirely on Cloud Print, Google will also be developing APIs for third-party developers to handle printing tasks.
"Safety requirements at these facilities should be stepped up, not rolled back. But this is what we've come to expect from the Trump EPA."
Criminal prosecution and convictions of polluters have fallen to quarter-century lows under the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, deepening three years of overall enforcement declines, according to Justice Department statistics.
Just three short weeks ago, I became Medicare eligible. And shortly afterwards I faced a serious health crisis. What I never knew is how absolutely protected I would be as a Medicare beneficiary when compared to the previous 64 years of my life "covered" by private insurance.
"You'd have to save more than a $100,000 per year for a MILLION years to get there. So where's that wealth tax?"
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dpdk, mingw-djvulibre, mingw-hunspell, mingw-ilmbase, mingw-OpenEXR, php-symfony, php-symfony3, and rsyslog), openSUSE (chromium and squid), SUSE (aspell, cups, djvulibre, and dpdk), and Ubuntu (djvulibre).
Google, which has already paid security researchers over $15 million since launching its bug bounty program in 2010, today expanded its Android Security Rewards program. Most notably, the company is introducing a top prize of $1 million. The previous top prize was $200,000. That’s technically a quintupling, although the maximum reward could be even higher. Google is launching a 50% bonus for exploits found on specific developer preview versions of Android, meaning the top reward could net you $1.5 million.
Over on the Project Zero blog, Maddie Stone has a lengthy post about a zero-day exploit that was found and fixed in the Android Binder interprocess communication mechanism. The post details the search for the problem, which was apparently being used in the wild, its fix, and how it can be exploited. This is all part of an effort to "make zero-day hard"; one of the steps the project is taking is to disseminate more information on these bugs.
On October 3, 2019, we disclosed issue 1942 (CVE-2019-2215), which is a use-after-free in Binder in the Android kernel. The bug is a local privilege escalation vulnerability that allows for a full compromise of a vulnerable device. If chained with a browser renderer exploit, this bug could fully compromise a device through a malicious website.
We reported this bug under a 7-day disclosure deadline rather than the normal 90-day disclosure deadline. We made this decision based on credible evidence that an exploit for this vulnerability exists in the wild and that it's highly likely that the exploit was being actively used against users.
In May 2019, Project Zero published a blog post and spreadsheet for tracking “in-the-wild” 0-day exploits. In July 2019, I joined Project Zero to focus on the use of 0-day exploits in the wild. We expect our approach to this work will change and mature as we gain more experience with studying 0-days, but the mission stays the same: to “make zero-day hard”.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper is returning from Asia with the U.S. still facing a trio of troubles on the Korean peninsula that pose risks to the national security of the U.S. and one of its most important alliances in the region.
Donald Trump loves him some bluster, worships machismo, and always has. Spectacle over substance has long been the name of his game. Decades before his successful presidential run, back when he was still a cartoon billionaire playboy, Trump took out a full-page newspaper advertisement that argued that New York state should bring back the death penalty for five adolescents arrested in 1989 for allegedly beating and raping a jogger—even though the boys hadn’t yet been convicted. Turns out that the infamous Central Park Five were later exonerated by DNA evidence. To this day, Trump refuses to apologize, even though his suggestion would have resulted in the execution of five innocent kids. But regret isn’t part of The Donald’s playbook.
The coup d’etat in Bolivia has divided not only that country but the world.€ The mainstream press, the Trump administration, the Washington-compliant Organization of American States, and right-wing governments have hailed the ousting of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.€
Saba Mahmood is a very talented scholar who has assimilated a post-colonial sensibility. She has learned to look at the world through the eyes of those who have been the pedagogical objects of European colonialism. The literature on Orientalism is vast; and the evidence suggests that Europe cannot easily shake off the deep-seated assumption that its way of life and scholarly products are the Archimedean point for comprehending the entire world. Tomoko Masuzawa (The invention of world religions [2005]) demonstrated provocatively that the idea of “world religion” is an intellectual construction that implicitly assumes that Christianity is the only universal religion that breaks free from locale and particularity.
The Galactic Gardeners’ Forum
This may not be the best time to contact you, but waiting may only make things worse. Since we’re your first neighbors in the galaxy to make contact, we hope you’ll consider us a welcoming committee with a warning. We’ve hacked into all your major channels of communication to transmit our message in every human language. We do not want to go through “official channels” or speak only with your corrupt rulers. We want our words to reach everyone.
We come from a remote handful of living planets and moons scattered across this galaxy. We are a network of galactic gardeners who nurture life by sharing our stories, experiences, knowledge, and ideas. We offer each other encouragement, constructive criticism, advice, and hard-won wisdom. But unfortunately, the vast distance between our worlds deprives us of the joy of actually meeting face-to-face. We’ve decided to contact you because we cherish life everywhere we find it—and life on your planet is in grave danger.
You inhabit an astounding planet. It supports a living tapestry of great vibrancy and splendor. We’ve witnessed Earth-life evolve for eons. Because you are such a young, impetuous species, we’ve refrained from contacting you. We did not know how making contact would affect you, since your awareness remains fractured by conflicts between the powerful rich and the powerless poor; as well as between nations, races, and religions. But we felt compelled to act because your carbon-addicted way of life has made you a threat to yourself and the magnificent biosphere that made you.
Your consciousness has yet to reach the level of holistic awareness and life-preserving empathy so essential for you to become a vital part of your biosphere’s immune system. We hoped this was the path you were on since your ecological sciences and some of your spiritual beliefs extol the need for all humans to care for each other and your “Mother Earth.”
"Wishing her all the best and success in her mission to save the Earth. We can use [all] the help we can get!"
“Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her [expletive].”
The 10-year plan to build millions of sustainable, affordable housing units is called "a new mile marker in the progressive left's efforts to stake out a national housing agenda."
There are two ways to practice politics: you can either follow polls or shape them.€ For four decades now, Democrats have been poll followers, and Republicans have been poll shapers.
"This Labour Manifesto is more than just a book. It represents real hope for communities up and down these four nations."
Who would have figured Fred Rogers for the most effective, fast-acting corrective to the toxic Trump years?
They have heard the measured testimony of career diplomats and the mind-boggling account of a first-time ambassador who declared he was in charge of President Donald Trump’s Ukraine policy. Now House impeachment investigators€ are hearing from Fiona Hill, a no-nonsense former White House national security adviser who was alarmed by what she saw unfolding around her.
What follows is a conversation between journalist Jeet Heer and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.
"This woman was awesome."
"I think every time—whether it comes to healthcare, whether it comes to housing, whether it comes to a job that pays a living wage—Bernie Sanders is the answer."
The exchange between the two political heavyweights included discussion of the need for long socks—"You never know when the weather could turn!" declared one Bernie—and other "revolutionary plans" like national rent control to end the issue of leaking sinks.
"Senator Bernie Sanders is gaining momentum in the race for the Democratic nomination," said Emerson Polling.
Refugees are still coming, or trying to. This week, resettlement groups sued Trump's latest racist move to block brown people from our pristine shores even as Portland announced more asylum-seekers - added to hundreds we gladly welcomed, housed and fed this summer and thousands already here - are en route.
"We refuse to tolerate white nationalism and xenophobia in the White House or elsewhere in the United States."
“Is Trump a racist?” I have two answers to that question. First, most white Americans misunderstand racism solely as intentional beliefs held by individual racists who hate people on the basis of race.
Israel’s attorney general on Thursday formally charged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a series of corruption cases, throwing the country’s paralyzed political system into further disarray and threatening the long-time leader’s grip on power.
"These corruption charges for Netanyahu are certainly a start."
It’s a cliché in Westerns. The bad guys ride into town only to be met by a sheriff who stands tall.€ “I am the law,” the sheriff says, “and you boys better move on.”€
Rule number one of politics:€ The first step in exercising political power is to get elected.€ Somewhere along the line the Democratic Party has forgotten this.€ Why this is important is that right now it looks that Democrats are on the road to another 2020 presidential popular vote victory and a loss in the electoral college.€ Simply put, the Democrats have no electoral college victory plan.
Last week, I attended Joe Biden’s first rally in California since he launched his presidential campaign more than six months ago.
I couldn’t believe my ears. I thought Tulsi Gabbard gave her best performance during Wednesday night’s Democratic party debate. She swiftly demolished Mayor Pete and Kamala Harris to their faces, then attacked every prior Republican and Democratic administration (including Clinton’s, although she did timidly omit Obama’s) for wasteful and deceitful war-making and subservience to the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex. In short, she was the only one to say anything new (or sensible) about foreign policy.
The right to vote is fundamental to any democracy. Protecting that right — and making it easier to exercise it — ought to be a priority across partisan lines.
The choking cloud of Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilic legacy has been floating over the Atlantic for some time. It does its best (or worst) in matters of US and British celebrity, warts and all. It has not, for instance, exempted the British Royal Family, whose cupboard stocked with misbehaviours and raunchiness got just more crowded with the antics of the Duke of York.
According to an October Rasmussen poll, 38% of likely voters say they intend to vote for “someone other than President Trump or the Democratic presidential nominee” in the 2020 US presidential election.
Laura Loomer, professional troll, these days seems most well known for all the internet platforms that have banned her:
With no opposition whatsoever, Russia’s State Duma has adopted the third and final reading of legislation that will permit the government to designate any individual as a “foreign agent.” In the final tally, 311 deputies supported the legislation, four abstained, and no one voted against the bill.
"This is how the government keeps working for giant corporations and the wealthy and well-connected."
"This interference effectively prevented me and other journalists from carrying out our reporting at the U.S.-Mexico border."
“Schpring! Schpring zu de velschken feldt!” shouted one of the Amish parents gathered to see their children off for their first day in an Iowa state or “English” school. The year was 1965, the bus had just arrived and the parent was urging the kids to, “Run! Run to the cornfields!” A photographer present to document the event snapped the photo that went viral, leading to national sympathy for the Amish who wished to preserve their traditional way of life which included no more than eight years of education in one of their own one-room schoolhouses.
Time to start sending out some customer satisfaction surveys to New York City residents. After all, they're the ones paying for this. (via Boing Boing)
This month, Meduza’s Russian-language website is using its MeduzaCare project to shed light on the lives and needs of Russia’s disabled communities. Together with the To Be Exact project, we’ve collected a cluster of statistics on the topic in both Russian and English. To see more infographics and a list of nonprofits working on disability and accessibility issues in Russia, click here and navigate to the “ÃÂÃšÞ ÿþ ÿÃâ¬Ã¾Ã±Ã»ÃµÃ¼Ãµ” tab.
Russia’s State Duma has passed a law enabling ordinary people to be labeled “foreign agents” in the proposal’s third and final reading. After Communist Party deputy Alexey Kurinny said the law could be used against the government’s ideological opponents and that letting readers filter their own information would be far better than limiting access to independent sources, Vice Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy of United Russia responded as follows...
