In its monthly report, NetMarketShare shows Windows 10 user share on desktops dipped to 56.08% from 57.34% a month ago. MacOS boosted its share from 3.41% to 4.15%, while Linux and Ubuntu together jumped to 2.86%.
The European project SELENE aims at covering this gap by proposing a new family of safety-critical computing platforms that builds upon open source components such as RISC-V cores, GNU/Linux, and Jailhouse hypervisor.
Responsibly disclosed bugs in SaltStack are already leading to breaches, JuiceSSH releases its first major update in 5 years, MediaGoblin rebases to Python 3, TurnKey Linux rolls out a new version based on Debian 10, and Inkscape hits 1.0.
OpenRazer 2.8 as this third-party, open-source solution for managing Razer devices on Linux is capable of now interfacing with a lot more hardware. Now supported with OpenRazer 2.8 are the Abyssus Elite (D.Va Edition), Abyssus Essential, Base Station Chroma, Basilisk, Blackwidow Essential, Blade 15 Studio Edition, Blade Pro (Late 2019), Blade Pro 2019, Chroma HDK (Hardware Development Kit), DeathAdder Essential (White Edition), DeathAdder V2, Huntsman Tournament Edition, Lancehead, Lancehead Wireless (2019), Mamba Elite, Mamba Wireless, Nommo Chroma, Nommo Pro, Tartarus V2, Viper, and Viper Ultimate.
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.
HandBrake video transcoder 1.3.2 was released a day ago with many improvements and bug-fixes.
  After a little over three years in development, the team is excited to launch the long awaited Inkscape 1.0 into the world.
Built with the power of a team of volunteers, this open source vector editor represents the work of many hearts and hands from around the world, ensuring that Inkscape remains available free for everyone to download and enjoy.
In fact, translations for over 20 languages were updated for version 1.0, making the software more accessible to people from all over the world.
A major milestone was achieved in enabling Inkscape to use a more recent version of the software used to build the editor's user interface (namely GTK+3). Users with HiDPI (high resolution) screens can thank teamwork that took place during the 2018 Boston Hackfest for setting the updated-GTK wheels in motion.
Probably the biggest new thing in the Inkscape 1.0 release is the port to the latest GTK3 UI toolkit. This means that Inkscape will not only look better overall, but it will also work on HiDPI/4K screens.
But there are numerous other new features included in this release that should please even the most aspiring graphic designers, freestyle drawing users, and other artists who work with SVG graphics.
Among these, there’s theme support to let users choose between dark or light themes to match their desktops, a new searchable Live Path Effects selection dialog, new Split-view and Xray modes, as well as canvas rotation and mirroring.
For some software, major version numbers are handed out all willy-nilly. For instance, as of today, the Google Chrome web browser sits at version 81, while Mozilla Firefox is at 75. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel is at version 5.x after 29 years! Ultimately, version numbers are determined by the developers and have different levels of meaning -- there are no definitive rules.
Of course, there is one version number that is universally regarded as one of the most important -- 1.0. It is this number that typically (but not always) tells the world that software has left pre-release status and is ready for prime-time. Well, today, Inkscape 1.0 is released for Linux, Windows and macOS. Hilariously, this number is being designated more than 16 years after the initial release of the vector graphics editor! Despite its sub-one version for more than a decade-and-a-half, the open source software has become a trusted and essential tool for people all over the world.
I'm a very late adopter for PulseAudio. In the past, on my minimal Debian machines, nearly any sound problem could be made better by apt-get remove pulseaudio. But pulse seems like it's working better since those days, and a lot of applications (like Firefox) require it, so it's time to learn how to use it. Especially in these days of COVID-19 and video conferencing, when I'll need to be using the microphone and speakers a lot more. (I'd never actually had a reason to use the microphone on my last laptop.)
Beginner tutorials always start with something like "Go into System Preferences and click on Audio", leaving out anyone who doesn't use the standard desktop. The standard GUI PulseAudio controller is pavucontrol. It has four tabs.
I just hit some unexpected unix-ism (or maybe Linux-ism?) that I'd like to mention here. I found a workaround, but if anybody knows what's actually happening and can enlighten me, please send me an email, and I'll update the post.
This quick tip helps you to fix the unable to play video file error in GNOME desktop.
LibreOffice has extensive documentation in many languages, thanks to our worldwide community. Recently, the guide to Base, LibreOffice’s database component, was updated by Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Jean Hollis Weber, Alain Romedenne, Jean-Pierre Ledure and Randolph Gamo. A big thanks to them for all their work!
It is obvious that the problems in Site Health are internal - after all, they only started cropping up with the move to WordPress 5.4. Of course, some piece of code somewhere has changed, but then, essentially, if a core product behavior is suddenly radically different than it was just before the update, and there are no huge problems in the other elements of the site's functionality, then it's quite likely the issue stems from said core product update.
I do like the idea of this site-issues-at-a-glance kind of thing, but I am not happy with the false positives, or the goose chase that the errors have created for me, even if only briefly. Errors need to be meaningful. If I have no insight what might be wrong from the way the error manifests, then there's really no point showing the technical details. The cURL error 28 and .htaccess seem so far apart. Anyway, here we are. If you're affected by a similar problem, have a look at your site configuration, see if you're using basic auth, and perhaps suffering from the same would-be bug. We're done here.
The GNOME Shell has long provided the ability for easily launching applications on alternative GPUs namely for multi-GPU/Optimus-type setups especially with the increasing number of laptops having both integrated and discrete graphics. GNOME is now introducing an addition to .desktop files so applications can specify if they should run on the dedicated GPU if available.
GNOME developers have introduced a new PrefersNonDefaultGPU entry key to the .desktop file specification for launching programs. This allows for automatically launching the application on discrete GPUs for PRIME-enabled setups. This is basically a hint for the shell to activate running the GPU on the dGPU rather than the user having to right click on the application and opt for launching on the alternative GPU. For those with single GPU systems, this new option will have no impact on you.
Don’t want to use the Epic Games Store launcher to play one of those freebies you got with it? That’s not a problem now, thanks to the open-source Legendary. (License GPL 3)
The news is a little old now, but it’s still worth covering. The thread for Legendary exploded in popularity on r/linux_gaming in just a matter of days. The author, derrod, modestly acknowledged he needed Linux testers, but so far it’s been pretty easy to use and I haven’t encountered a hitch yet. It uses a text-based interface; the developer’s goal is to eventually incorporate a graphical user interface.
Hardkernel has announced its latest Linux-based handheld gaming console dubbed Odroid-Go Advanced Black Edition or OGA-BE with new hardware upgrades.
It is an upgrade over Odroid-Go Advance Portable, which featured 1GB RAM, a 3.5-inch color display, and was powered by the Rockchip RK3326 processor. Users received the console well, but the lack of WiFi and Type-C charging were some of the downsides highlighted by users.
Krita 4.3.0 will be the next full feature release of Krita. We’ve worked for a year on this new version of Krita, focusing especially on stability and performance. Many tool, like freehand painting and selections are faster than ever. And there is a bunch of fun new features, as well, many contributed by volunteers from all over the world.
The first beta of Krita 4.3 is now available for this advanced open-source digital painting software package. Krita 4.3 has been baking for about one year so there is a lot in store.
Krita 4.3 is bringing with it many animation improvements, new filters for palettize and high pass, various fixes to existing filters, better performance out of layer styles, much better RGBA brush handling, multi-dimension export support for GIMP GIH, various color handling improvements, new gradient tool modes, and other tooling improvements.
In October last year we were focused and the direction was clear. Now, a half a year later, the situation is much different.
Last summer our plan was simple: get the resource rewrite done, fix as many bugs as possible, release 4.3.0 with resource rewrite and make a fundraiser for next year of development.
In October we already knew that fundraiser in 2019 is not going to happen and that the resource rewrite needs quite a bit of work as well. We assigned more developers to the resource rewrite task and we had two sprints: one in October, focused on getting those developers (me, Wolthera and Dmitry) engaged in the task, going to BlenderCon and real life meeting with some of Krita’s business partners, and second one in February, this time focused entirely on resource rewrite and describing the resource rewrite design decisions to the last developer (Ivan) who wasn’t there in October.
However as much as we wanted to focus on the resource rewrite, external factors ruled it out again and again. We had quite a lot of issues with building Krita on Windows and Mac, especially Python scripting and notarization on Apple that is now required for the program to be run on a standard user’s Mac. Both of it took several months to rule out (we’re dealing with it since January) and notarization still has some issues. It’s a boring, tedious, frustrating job, which I could taste at the very beginning (with just updating Krita’s dependencies on Windows) around January, but later it was mostly dealt with by Ivan, Dmitry and Boudewijn. Python is particularly tricky: on Windows there are two different Pythons, one (must be installed on the system) is for building Qt, one needs to be built and it provides Python scripting for Krita. Mixing those two up results in the wildest errors.
Adwaita Color Variants is a theme pack containing Adwaita, the default GNOME theme, in 12 colors.
The pack includes the latest Adwaita refresh for GNOME 3.36 for which only the accent color was changed, in the following colors: gray, red, orange, yellow, grass, green, teal, cyan, indigo, violet, magenta and pink.
All these color variants are available for both Adwaita light and Adwaita dark, and they support GTK3, GTK2, and GNOME Shell (so you'll also get an Adwaita GNOME Shell theme in the color of your choice, in both light and dark variants). The pack does not contain a matching icon theme, at least for now.
There's also an Adwaita Color Variants script that can generate Adwaita using the 12 colors I mentioned above, it can install the themes, generate a compressed archive, etc.
Want the VLC media player to look more at home on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS? Check out the Yaru Dark VLC skin.
Created by NovaQC, the Yaru Dark VLC skin can be used to make the versatile video app blend in better on the modern Ubuntu desktop. It gives VLC a complete revamp, complete with with “mock” client-side decoration.
This particular VLC theme, which you can see in the screenshot header at the start of this post, also hides the standard titlebar (all of the options remain accessible from an overflow menu), moves the volume and progress bar to the top of the window, and hides some of the player’s superfluous buttons, including those for repeat and shuffle.
GNOME 3.36.2 is now available. This is a stable release containing four weeks' worth of bugfixes since the 3.36.1 release. Since it only contains bugfixes, all distributions shipping 3.36.x should upgrade.
The GNOME 3.36 flatpak runtimes has been updated as well
If you want to compile GNOME 3.36.2, you can use the official BuildStream project snapshot...
It is Google Summer of Code season again and this year the GNOME project is lucky to have 14 new interns working on various projects ranging from improvements in our app ecosystem to core components and infrastructure.
The first period, from May 4 to June 1, is the Community Bonding period. Interns are expected to flock into our communication channels, ask questions, and get to know our project’s culture. Please, join me in welcoming our students and making sure they feel at home in our community.
This year we will be using Discourse as our main communication channel regarding the program, therefore if you are a mentor or intern, please make sure to check https://discourse.gnome.org/c/community/outreach for announcements. Feel free to create new topics if you have any questions. The GNOME GSoC admins will be monitoring the Outreach category and answering any doubts you might have.
In this video, we are looking at Elementary OS 5.1.4.
openSUSE and SUSE are working on bringing their distribution even closers. So much so that SLE binaries will be available to openSUSE users and it will be easier for openSUSE users to easily migrate to enterprise-grade Linux. We sat down with Dr. Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE CTO and openSUSE chair and Matthias Eckermann, Director Product Management, Linux Platforms.
All around the world, irrespective of the COVID-19 infection rate or the severity of the lockdowns, one key ingredient that we are all missing from the life we lived just a few weeks ago is – certainty. Not only is it very difficult to live under such long lockdowns – let alone the fact that the scale of economic and financial damage of this global crisis are yet to be realized, but everybody across the globe was and still is looking for ways to make informed decisions.
This is where MiPasa comes to help.
MiPasa is a scalable, verifiable open data hub that makes it very easy to process and analyze COVID-19-related information at scale. The MiPasa APIs allow you to fetch data programmatically, as well as to build apps on top of it that consume the blockchain-backed data feed. The goal is for developers to use this unified, secure data source to build applications around trend analysis, graphing, and analytics, incorporating other methodologies for statistical analysis, machine learning, or AI.
The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F32-2020054-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.6.8-300 kernel.
Welcome to Fedora 32.
This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 550+MB of updates)).
A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, ledeni, Southern-Gentleman for testing these iso.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 629 for the week of April 26 – May 2, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.
After you download and install Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa you may wonder what to do next or how to best customize your Ubuntu 20.04 system to make everything you do as efficient as possible.
This guide helps you to identify things to do after installing Ubuntu 20.04 that are right for your specific needs.
We list below our recommendations and link to other guides that provide you with more detailed instructions on how to achieve a specific system configuration or customization.
With its new features especially the improved image quality, the Raspberry Pi High Quality is expected to address the shortcomings of the old Camera Module (debuted way back in 2013).
As the Raspberry Pi Foundation explains in a blog post: “Versatile though they are, there are limitations to mobile phone-type fixed-focus modules. The sensors themselves are relatively small, which translates into a lower signal-to-noise ratio and poorer low-light performance; and of course, there is no option to replace the lens assembly with a more expensive one, or one with different optical properties. These are the shortcomings that the High Quality Camera is designed to address.”
Currently on offer is a pair of native lenses for the camera: a 6 mm CSââ¬âmount lens at $25 and a very shiny 16 mm C-mount lens priced at $50.
Raspberry Pi has announced a new High Quality Camera add-on, available for $50. It turns your diminutive credit card-sized computer into a fully-fledged digital camera with the variable focus you'd expect from a DSLR.
Raspbery Pi's existing second-generation 8 megapixel fixed-focus camera module from 2016 will continue to be sold alongside it - over 1.7 million have been sold to date.
[...]
Raspberry Pi Press has also published a full guide to the camera, too. Oh, and it's compatible with pretty much all Raspberry Pi models, from the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B onward.
Advantech’s Linux-ready, Apollo Lake based “HIT-507” panel PC for healthcare HMI has a 7-inch, P-CAP touchscreen and options including a camera, handset, PoE, and readers for barcode, Smart Card, and RFID/NFC.
Advantech has launched a 7-inch, panel PC for medical HMI applications. The HIT-507 is available in VESA or open-frame mounting and supports installation in bedhead units. Typical applications include accessing medical records, retrieving lab results, monitoring patient vital signs, and documenting treatment observations.
To date, most unmanned aerial vehicles have a multicopter design. The popularity of this design is mainly due to the fact that it is quite simple in terms of mechanics as well as control when compared to aircraft-type drones. But they usually have very short flight duration, about 20-30 minutes. In addition, multicopters have to rotate the screws at high speed, which makes them noisy and dangerous, so using such devices indoors is not a good idea.
To address these problems, New Zealand engineers Gal Gorjup and Minas Liarokapis have developed a low-cost, miniature indoor robotic airship project, which is intended for indoor use and will be used for educational and research purposes. The engineers are part of the New Dexterity research group at the University of Auckland.
[...]
The 3D-printed case contains a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the motor drivers, a set of DC motors...
For the first time, labs around the world can 3D print their own precision microscopes to analyse samples and detect diseases , thanks to an open-source design created at the University of Bath.
The OpenFlexure Microscope, described in Biomedical Optics Express, is a fully automated, laboratory-grade instrument with motorised sample positioning and focus control. It is unique among 3D-printed microscope in its ability to yield high-quality images. It has been designed to be easy to use, with an intuitive software interface and simplified alignment procedures. It is also highly customisable, meaning it can be adapted for laboratory, school and home use.
NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally this week released an open-source design for a low-cost, easy-to-assemble mechanical ventilator.
The ventilator, designed in just a few weeks by Dally—whose storied technology career includes key contributions to semiconductors and supercomputers—can be built quickly from just $400 of off-the-shelf parts, Dally says.
Traditional ventilators, by contrast, can cost more than $20,000—and that’s when the world hasn’t been slammed with demand for the life-saving machines.
“I hope that we don’t get so many people sick that we run out of ventilators,” Dally says, speaking from a spartan home electronics workshop stocked with oscilloscopes, voltmeters and other lab equipment.
When it comes to Intel's high performance Scalable Video Technology (SVT) video encoders, SVT-AV1 is the most well known for its great speed and usage by Netflix and others. But Intel SVT also consists of VP9 and HEVC/H.265 encoders too and today brought the debut of SVT-VP9 0.2.
SVT-VP9 0.2 is the new version and the first since the original pre-release of it last October. Since then have just been a few commits to the SVT-VP9 source tree with seemingly much more attention on SVT-AV1 given all the industry interest in this royalty-free video codec.
RedNotebook is a modern desktop journal. It lets you format, tag and search your entries. You can also add pictures, links and customizable templates, spell check your notes, and export to plain text, HTML, Latex or PDF. RedNotebook is Free Software under the GPL.
Previously known as SIP Communicator, Jitsi is an open-source video call and chat platform that supports full encryption.
Acquired by 8Ãâ8 Inc from Atlassian in 2018, Jitsi is still completely an open source / free software, and is freely available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. It can also be installed and run independently on any compatible own server.
Their Jitsi Meet service is the closest competition to Zoom. It is marketed as being more secure, more flexible and a completely free video conferencing platform.
Are you a Firefox user? Have you heard that Mozilla has launched a new email relay service called Firefox Private Relay? The idea is to provide an ’email alias’ wherever a company or a service asks for your email address, so that you can avoid giving out your actual address and protect your identity.
With the release of Firefox 76, we are pleased to welcome the 52 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 50 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions...
With the Glean SDK we follow in the footsteps of other teams to build a cross-platform library to be used in both mobile and desktop applications alike. In this blog post we're taking a look at how we transport some rich data across the FFI boundary to be reused on the Kotlin side of things. We're using a recent example of a new API in Glean that will drive the HTTP upload of pings, but the concepts I'm explaining here apply more generally.
Storing and processing big data has remained the biggest challenge until today since the beginning of its journey. It is important to be able to compute datasets to generate solutions for businesses. But sometimes, it becomes really challenging to produce accurate results due to the outliers, scarcity of sources, Volume, and inconsistency. But there is no value of big data if you can not use it or extract meaningful information. The below mentioned Hadoop Interview Questions would help you to get a solid foundation and face interviews as well.
An open source technology first implemented at YouTube is now being rolled out to scale-out MySQL-compatible databases.
[...]
The core technology, Vitess, is intended to enable SQL databases to scale out in a manner similar to NoSQL platforms like MongoDB, relying heavily on sharding. Acting as classic black box middleware, it logically shards the database on the presumption that most queries are going to be around data associated with specific records. So, it groups all data with common record IDs on the same shard. It also provides connection pooling to overcome the high memory overhead that is common with MySQL implementations so that the platform can handle high concurrency. And to further protect the database from getting overloaded, it has query limiters that throttle so-called "queries from hell."
Vitess has been initially designed to support MySQL and related platforms like MariaDB, providing a middleware tier that allows you to implement the regular edition of the database, with the middleware handling all the scale-out. According to Vaidya, the technology could also theoretically support PostgreSQL as well, but as a start-up, they are focusing on their existing sweet spot.
If this all sounds like a familiar story, it is. Vitess in many ways resembles a latter-day reinvention of the classic transaction processing (TP) monitors of the 1990s. At the time, distributed transaction databases were not feasible, and so the only alternative was to run transactions on a single node that would scale up. And given that most database platforms at the time were licensed based on processing power, TP monitors helped reduce server requirements by offloading transaction processing, and handling all the connection pooling. It was a highly contentious issue for database providers at the time – many would invalidate license if their caught their customers in the act. But when the Internet started delivering scales of transactions that overwhelmed even the most properly-licensed servers, TP monitors got reinvented as appservers, with many of those same database companies now biting the bullet.
Amisunderstanding is circulating that the GNU Project demands you run 100% free software, all the time. Anything less (90%?), and we will tell you to get lost—they say. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our ultimate goal is digital freedom for all, a world without nonfree software. Some of us, who have made campaigning for digital freedom our goal, reject all nonfree programs. However, as a practical matter, even a little step towards that goal is good. A walk of a thousands miles consists of lots of steps. Each time you don't install some nonfree program, or decide not to run it that day, that is a step towards your own freedom. Each time you decline to run a nonfree program with others, you show them a wise example of long-term thinking. That is a step towards freedom for the world.
If you're caught in a web of nonfree programs, you're surely looking for a chance to pull a few strands off of your body. Each one pulled off is an advance.
Each time you tell the people in some activity, “I'd rather use Zoom less—please count me out today,” you help the free software movement. “I'd like to do this with you, but with Zoom on the other side of the scale, I've decided to decline.” If you accepted the nonfree software before, you could say this: “I'd like to participate, but the software we are using is not good for us. I've decided I should cut down.” Once in a while, you may convince them to use free software instead. At least they will learn that some people care about freedom enough to decline participation for freedom's sake.
Back in March we reported how AMD developers were looking at GNU C Library platform optimizations for Zen and in part could be leveraging some of the capabilities currently employed by Intel for Haswell and newer. It's looking like some solid progress is being made in that direction.
The patches from AMD in March provided better run-time detection for CPU features like AVX2 and could allow making use of more optimized code-paths at run-time when run on such hardware, similar to Intel Glibc optimizations for Haswell and newer. This would be a big win not only for AMD Zen but also current Zen 2 CPUs and future Zen 3 parts, etc in basically providing more reasonable optimized code-paths at run-time for prominent CPU instruction set extensions.
The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.
Over the past month I've reimplemented debugging support for multi-threaded programs and upstreamed the support. It's interesting to note that the old support relied on GDB tracking only a single inferior process. This caused the need to reimplement the support and be agnostic to the number of traced processes. Meanwhile the upstream developers introduced new features for multi-target tracing and a lot of preexisting code broke and needed resurrection. This affected also the code kept in the GDB basesystem version. Additionally over the past 30 days, I've also developed new CPU-independent GDB features that were for a long time on a TODO list for NetBSD.
After the past month NetBSD has now a decent and functional GDB support in the mainline. It's still not as featured as it could and CPU-specific handling will need a dedicated treatment.
Poke struct types can be a bit daunting at first sight. You can find all sort of things inside them: from fields, variables and functions to constraint expressions, initialization expressions, labels, other type definitions, and methods.
Struct methods can be particularly confusing for the novice poker. In particular, it is important to understand the difference between methods and regular functions defined inside struct types. This article will hopefully clear the confusion, and also will provide the reader with a better understanding on how poke works internally.
This tutorial will introduce you to GraphQL with Python, Django 3 and Graphene. We'll see how to create a simple Django 3 project to demonstrate how to build an API server based on GraphQL (instead of REST) then we'll see how to use graphiql_django, an interface for testing GraphQL queries and mutations before building your front-end application, to send GraphQL Queries (for getting data) and Mutations (for posting and updating data). In this part we'll be dealing with building the backend. In the next tutorials we will see how to use frameworks and libraries such as Angular and React to build a front-end application that consumes and updates our GraphQL server and advanced use cases such as user authentication, permissions and Relay
Working with dates and times is one of the biggest challenges in programming. Between dealing with time zones, daylight saving time, and different written date formats, it can be tough to keep track of which days and times you’re referencing. Fortunately, the built-in Python datetime module can help you manage the complex nature of dates and times.
This release provides many bug fixes and some significant improvements. Among other changes you will find big improvements in the cost price computation and stock accounting, the link buttons to display related records and the employee audit on key actions.
You can give it a try on the demo server, use the docker image or download it here. As usual the migration from previous series is fully supported. Some manual operation may be required, see Migration from 5.4 to 5.6.
Two bits of Vulkan related news to share today. Recently the Vulkan specification was bumped again with new extension and today a new NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver went up.
For the Vulkan API specification update to 1.2.140 it adds in VK_EXT_private_data that enables "attaching arbitrary payloads to Vulkan objects" which was worked on by NVIDIA.
It's been a while since I've reported on my Amiga floppy recovery project. With my bulky Philips CRT attached I slowly ground through the process of importing all my floppy disks, which is now done. The majority of disks were imported without errors. Commercial disks were the most likely to fail to import. Possibly I'd have more success with them if I used a different copying technique than X-COPY's default, but my focus was not on the commercial disks.
I have not yet restored the use of my LCD TV with the Amiga. I was waiting to hear back from Amiga Kit about an agreed return, but despite their web store claiming they're still open for business, I haven't been able to get any response to my emails to them since mid-February. I've given up, written off that order and bought an RGB/SCART adaptor elsewhere instead. Meanwhile my bulky CRT has returned to the loft.
Cloud data centers are evolving to an architecture that is accelerated, disaggregated and software-defined to meet the exponential growth in AI and high performance computing. To build these modern data centers, HPC and networking hardware and software must go hand in hand.
NVIDIA provides the leading accelerated computing platform. Mellanox is the high-performance networking leader, now part of NVIDIA in a combination described in our founder and CEO’s welcome letter.
Today we announce our plan to acquire Cumulus Networks, bolstering our networking software capabilities. The combination enables the new era of the accelerated, software-defined data center.
With Cumulus, NVIDIA can innovate and optimize across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software including analytics like Cumulus NetQ, delivering great performance and value to customers. This open networking platform is extensible and allows enterprise and cloud-scale data centers full control over their operations.
Nvidia has announced its plans to acquire the open-source centric company Cumulus Networks which specializes in helping enterprise businesses optimize their data center networking stacks.
Cumulus Networks also offers its own Linux distribution for network switches, its own data center switch with Cumulus Express and tools for managing network operations.
Although both companies have yet to reveal the price of the acquisition, it will likely be quite high as Cumulus Networks has raised $134m since its founding back in 2010, according to CrunchBase.
One area that 5G will directly affect is the design and architecture of the Radio Access Network (RAN). Simply put, the RAN is a collection of edge located functions that connect a mobile device to the CSP’s core network. But there is nothing simple about it. The latency requirements and network load of 5G will put a great deal of strain on the RAN, and the traditional ways of deploying RAN equipment are not well suited for the new needs. A new, cloud- based Virtual RAN (vRAN) approach will be required, as enabled by the Wind River Cloud Platform. This solution provides the necessary functionality for 5G; performance, flexibility, and cost-efficiency that isn’t available in existing fixed-function RAN equipment.
According to the project’s announcement blog, Helm started in 2015 as a hackathon project at startup Deis, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2017. Its makers initially aimed at making the deployment of cloud native applications easy for those new to Kubernetes and providing package management at enterprise scale.
The Python Software Foundation is looking for a Project Manager to assist with CPython’s migration from bugs.python.org to GitHub for issue tracking. CPython's development partially moved to GitHub in February 2017. All other projects within the PSF's organization are hosted on GitHub and are using GitHub issues. CPython is still using Roundup as the issue tracker on https://bugs.python.org (also known as “bpo”). To read more about the rationale behind this migration, read PEP 581.
Thank you to GitHub for donating financial support so this project can begin.
In another incident of online breach, hackers gained illegal access to the open-source operating system for smartphones Lineage OS. The online intrusion was confirmed by the company. As per the company, the OS was hacked on Saturday last week around 8 pm US Pacific coast. It said that the hack was detected on time and that the attack did no harm to the source code of the operating system. Builds and signing keys too remain intact, it added.
At the same time, those vulnerabilities present a cybersecurity opportunity for governments to more closely monitor social media discussions about software gaps, the researchers assert. Their findings were published recently in the journal PLOS One.
"Some of these software vulnerabilities have been targeted and exploited by adversaries of the United States. We wanted to see how discussions around these vulnerabilities evolved," said lead author Svitlana Volkova, senior research scientist in the Data Sciences and Analytics Group at PNNL. "Social cybersecurity is a huge threat. Being able to measure how different types of vulnerabilities spread across platforms is really needed."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to face an extradition hearing in September, after a court decided to delay proceedings because of the Covid-19 lockdown.
Westminster Magistrates’ Court said the US government’s extradition case against Assange would heard by another court, potentially outside London.
The decision follows arguments from lawyers representing Assange and the US government that it would be difficult to hold a fair hearing on 18 May, during the coronavirus lockdown.
Journalists and observers attempted to call into the hearing on a remote telephone line but were unable to hear the proceedings, after a court clerk reportedly made an error with the phone system.
The court heard that Assange was too unwell to attend the hearing by video link from Belmarsh Prison. The WikiLeaks founder faces 17 charges under the 1917 Espionage Act, after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a former US Army soldier turned whistleblower, in 2010-11.
The court heard last week that Assange’s defence team had not been able to communicate with their client to take instructions over new documents served by the US Prosecutor, Gordon Kromberg, because of Covid 19 restrictions.
