Let us talk first about what is cloud native and the benefits of SUSE Cloud Application Platform and AWS when building cloud native applications.
In my previous post , I wrote about using SUSE Cloud Application Platform on AWS for cloud native application delivery. In this follow-up, I’ll discuss two ways to get SUSE Cloud Application Platform installed on AWS and configure the service broker:
With the continuing expansion of data mining by enterprises, it's no longer possible or advisable for an organization to keep all data in a single location or silo. Yet having disparate data analytics stores of both structured and unstructured data, as well as Big Data, can be complex and seemingly chaotic.
Data virtualization is one increasingly common approach for dealing with the challenge of ever-expanding data. Data virtualization integrates data from disparate big data software and data warehouses - among other sources – without copying or moving the data. Most helpful, it provides users with a single virtual layer that spans multiple applications, formats, and physical locations, making data more useful and easier to manage.
In the previous post I explained how to performance test MongoDB pods on Red Hat OpenShift with OpenShift Container Storage 3 volumes as the persistent storage layer and Yahoo! Cloud System Benchmark (YCSB) as the workload generator.
The cluster I’ve used in the prior posts was based on the AWS EC2 m5 instance series and using EBS storage of type gp2. In this blog I will compare these results with a similar cluster that is based on the AWS EC2 i3 instance family that is using local attached storage (sometimes referred as "instance storage" or "local instance store").
In this blog we will go over how to get you up and running with a Red Hat OpenShift 4.1 Bare Metal install on pre-existing infrastructure. Although this quickstart focuses on the bare metal installer, this can also be seen as a “manual” way to install OpenShift 4.1. Moreover, this is also applicable to installing to any platform which doesn’t have the ability to provide ignition pre-boot. For more information about using this generic approach to install on untested platforms, please see this knowledge base article.
Welcome to the 293rd installment of Linux in the Ham Shack! In the episode, the hosts tackle topics from upcoming RSGB contests on the new, hot FT-4 mode, the origin of "Mayday" as a distress call, magloop antennas, CoreCtrl, the vanishing floppy disk, DMR (Digital Mobile Radio) and much more. Thank you for tuning in and have a wonderful week.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.2.5 kernel.
All users of the 5.2 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.2.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.2.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Announced in early May 2019, the Linux 5.1 kernel series brought the ability to use persistent memory as RAM, as well as support for booting to a device-mapper device without using initramfs, support for cumulative patches in live kernel patching, and more preparations for year 2038.
In addition, Linux kernel 5.1 introduced support for configuring Zstd compression levels in the Btrfs file system, more faster and scalable asynchronous I/O, improved power management, scalable monitoring of large filesystems, as well as numerous new and updated drivers for better hardware support.
Lennart Poettering has made available the first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 243 update. Systemd 243 is a big one in seeing more than 1,700 commits since the April release of systemd 242.
Thanks to Valve's open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, there is now experimental support for using Wave32 support on Navi graphics cards for compute shaders.
Navi/RDNA brings support for single-cycle issue Wave32 execution as an alternative to Wave64 for better efficiency. Just over a week ago the initial patches landed adding Wave32 support to RadeonSI for their OpenGL driver while now Samuel has tackled the initial implementation in the RADV driver.
Unlike my POWER8 server, the Blackbird cannot measure its own system power consumption (only the processor's), so I used a simple watt meter to take measurements. When off, with just the BMC on, the system took so little power my meter could not measure it. It kept showing 0 W, so presumably it's under a Watt. At idle, 55 W.
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For each SMT mode, I tried six thread options. The SMT scaling is as expected, at SMT1 there are eight threads, and performance drops after; at SMT2 16 threads, and a corresponding drop after. The "more resources for each thread" effect is also slightly visible, with SMT1 having the highest result at eight mining threads. In SMT4, the efficiency scaling is quite nice, showing that a mere eight-core is not even close to the bottleneck here.
Hot on the heels of the announcements of both Epic Games and Ubisoft supporting further Blender development, the massive Blender 2.80 release is now available.
An incredible step-up for the project including a needed revamp to the user interface, along with a new dark theme and modern icon set. There's also "Eevee", a new physically based real-time renderer, with support for some advanced features like volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, depth of field and more.
A brand new version of the free 3D graphics software Blender is here — and I’ll be honest: it looks amazing.
Am I skilled enough in the intricacies of 3D modelling, CGI, and visual effects work to the point that I can provide you with enlightened insight into the improvements — and boy are there improvements — on offer in this release?
Heck no! I can barely navigate the real world, much less a CGI one.
Blender 2.80 was officially released yesterday with redesigned UI, new render engine, and other improvements. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu.
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Blender offers official Snap packages (runs in sandbox) for Linux Desktop.
Blender 2.80 has been released. This new version "features a redesigned user interface that puts the focus on the artwork that you create. A new dark theme and modern icon set were introduced. Keyboard, mouse and tablet interaction got a refresh with left click select as the new default. Quick Favorites menus provide rapid access to often-used tools." See the Release Notes for details.
Now available for download is the new Blender 2.80 that comes with a redesigned user interface and a whole bunch of new tools.
Before we get into what the new Blender has to offer, let’s see what this freeware is all about! Blender is a complete 3D creation suite that deals with all elements of the 3D pipeline, such as modeling, simulation, animation, rendering, and video tracking. It is also worth mentioning that people from different walks of life have contributed to the development of this software, therefore the company really emphasizes on YOU, which can be seen from their tag line: ‘Blender, made by you’.
Not like Blender 2.79 was lacking anything, the new Blender brings a lot of new stuff to the table. “What new stuff?”, you might ask. Well, let’s have a look!
Physics is a natural science concerned with the study of matter and energy applying laws that govern natural phenomena. It encompasses the study of the universe from the largest galaxies to subatomic particles, covering mechanics, radiation, heat, electricity, sound, magnetism and the structure of atoms.
A good background of physics is essential in understanding our planet, our neighbouring planets, our solar system, and the universe. It offers explanations for every observed natural phenomenon. Physics is widely regarded as the most central and fundamental science and forms the basis of many other sciences including astronomy, chemistry, biology, oceanography, seismology, and zoology.
Physics is an incredibly stimulating science, challenging our imagination with quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, chaos theory, and electromagnetism. It has contributed to modern society with the development of lasers, computers, homeland security, power transmission, biomedicine and drug development, cancer therapy, medical imaging, light sources, and much more.
Science really prospers and advances when individuals share the results of their experiments with others in the scientific community. There is a certain logic that scientific software should therefore be released under an open source license. This article focuses on selecting the best open source software for physics and physics education. Hopefully there will be something for interest here for all budding physicists.
Here’s our rating for each of the physics tools.
Xibo provides a comprehensive suite of digital signage products, with its Content Management System (CMS) at the heart of this experience-led offering. Xibo for Linux is completely free and natively built for the Xibo CMS, which can be installed on servers or combined with Xibo cloud hosting.
Snaps are containerised software packages designed to work across cloud, desktop, and IoT devices. They work natively on the most popular Linux distributions and feature automatic update and rollback functionality, enhanced security, and greater flexibility for developers.
Utilising snaps allows Xibo to offer a simple, dependency-free installation, as well as the potential for feature enhancements in future offerings, and it works across many Linux distributions. It can be accessed worldwide, and when combined with Xibo in the Cloud, customers can choose whether to host in the UK, Germany, Singapore, Australia or the USA to ensure their content is kept close to them.
Looking for a program like Microsoft Paint but for the Linux desktop? Check out the aptly named ‘Drawing‘, a new GTK app that ably fills the gap.
This simple image editor for Linux desktops is made in the mould of the Microsoft Paint. That mean it isn’t trying to out-do The GIMP, pitch itself as an alternative to Photoshop, or pick up where Pinta left off.
What Drawing can’t do is almost as important as what it can do; that’s to say, it’s a simply designed app designed for simple use-cases.
Think meme making, screenshot annotations, wobbly sketched moustaches on selfies, and that sort of thing.
In one example, it was found that some 300,000 top tier Office users, with the ‘365 Pro Plus' package were being sent back to the US for storage - exactly the sort of behaviour that got Dutch backs up.
In a wider sense, this is a small but public battle in a much larger war, with the EU still leaning heavily on Microsoft to put its post-GDPR house in order.
Apple today reported its fiscal third quarter 2019 earnings, earning $53.8 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $2.18. That revenue is a 1 percent jump year over year. iPhone revenue was $25.99 billion compared to $29.47 billion a year ago. That means the iPhone represented under half of Apple’s revenue for the first time since 2012.
The all-important services unit took in $11.46 billion in revenue. Wearables saw a big boost, likely thanks to Apple’s second-generation AirPods. CEO Tim Cook said that when the services and wearables / home / accessories divisions are combined, they approach the size of a Fortune 50 company. Revenue from Mac sales was $5.82 billion, and iPads were $5.023 billion, up from $4.634 billion last year at this time.
Combined, Apple’s two major independent product lines not attached to the iPhone -- Mac computers and iPads -- made up only 20% of revenue in the fiscal third quarter, despite gains from the period a year ago, the Cupertino, California-based company reported Tuesday. Apple’s also working on a mixed augmented and virtual reality headset for the coming years, but that, too, is likely to be iPhone-reliant.
As a big HTML5 proponent for the past decade, Google encouraged sites to switch away from Flash for faster, safer, and more battery-efficient browsing. In late 2016 and early 2017, Chrome blocked background Flash elements and defaulted to HTML5, with users having to manually enable the Adobe plug-in on a site-by-site basis.
Google promoted today the Chrome 76 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Google Chrome 76.0.3809.87 is now available as the latest stable version of the popular and cross-platform web browser from Google, based on the open source Chromium project. It contains various bug fixes and improvements, as well as no less than 43 security fixes for the latest vulnerabilities.
A Native Linux version of Wavessup2;: Notorious was add.
Virtual reality (VR) is moving from games to work, but on the Linux desktop it's had a hard row to hoe. While many VR peripherals and head-mounted display (HMD) support Linux, some "supported" games have trouble running on Linux. VR gaming on Linux is getting better. But if you wanted to use a Linux desktop via VR, you were out of luck. Your luck may be turning now with the xrdesktop.
Xrdesktop is an open-source project. It's designed to let you work with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR. It does this by making window managers aware of VR. It then uses VR runtimes to render desktop windows in 3D space. Once there, you'll be able to work on the desktop using VR controllers in place of a mouse and keyboard.
Valve seem to be pushing Linux support even harder now, with the announcement of the open source xrdesktop project from Collabora.
This new project, funded thanks to Valve, enables interactions with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE in Virtual Reality. With xrdesktop, Linux window managers will be aware of VR and be able to use VR runtimes to render your desktop windows in a 3D space. It also gives you the ability to manipulate them with VR controllers, which sounds pretty fun.
Valve have announced the release of Steam Play Proton 4.11, this is a pretty exciting one and it's pretty huge overall.
Firstly, it was re-based on top of Wine 4.11. So it brings thousands of improvements over, considering that's quite a version bump. Additionally, 154 patches from Proton were upstreamed directly to Wine!
The next exciting bit is that Valve are now funding D9VK (and have been since June according to developer Joshua Ashton), along with shipping it in Proton as part of this update. This Vulkan-based Direct3D 9 renderer is still experimental, so it's not enabled by default as you need to use the "PROTON_USE_D9VK" setting.
Humble Bundle are back and they've provided a pretty good one this time, with the Humble Crusader Kings II Bundle. If you enjoy strategy games, this is a seriously good deal not to miss out on!
For our third bit of Valve news today, they also recently announced that their Mesa shader compiler "ACO" had a bit of an upgrade recently as well.
Further pushing what game developers are able to make, Unity 2019.2 is now officially available with plenty of new features, improvements and bug fixes.
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There's also various improvements to their OpenGL and Vulkan API implementations. For OpenGL, it can now use the SRP batcher. For Vulkan, it now supports all GPU formats for RenderTexture, multiple Vulkan crashes were solved, fixes to dynamic resolution when using Vulkan, multiple Vulkan XR fixes and so on. Curiously, Unity will now force NVIDIA drivers on Linux to turn off VSync.
Probably some of the finest work yet from Klei Entertainment, the space colony sim Oxygen Not Included has now left Early Access.
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This isn't just Klei pushing out what was there as released, it comes along with a big update to the game too. There's a bunch of new buildings including an Ethanol Distiller, Airborne Critter Bait, Wood Burner, Duplicant Motion Sensor and more. Two new critters are included with the Pokeshell and Pip, five new plants, new animations, new types of asteroids to colonize, new foods, new biomes and…the list goes on. They've clearly put a huge amount of work into this release.
As a follow-up to 2011's Waves, Waves 2: Notorious has arrived on Linux as part of the 0.73 Early Access update on Steam. Originally entering Early Access in late 2015 it has continued to see big updates and the developer, Rob Hale (aka Squid In A Box Ltd), is planning a full release in Q2 next year. Note: Key provided by the developer.
So what is it? Waves 2: Notorious puts you in the shoes of a Hacker or "Runner", tasked with infiltrating computer networks in a cyberpunk-styled version of cyberspace. Here you must protect yourself against the attacks of the AI "Administrator", while uploading viruses and downloading corporate secrets in an attempt to build your notoriety.
Cultic Games and 1C Entertainment have today announced the Lovecraftian horror RPG, Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, will be releasing with Linux support on September 26th.
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This newly updated and released game adds in Linux support as part of an expanded game overall. The developer said a bunch of ideas couldn't quite fit into the original release, so here we are. It includes new characters to meet, fishing, a better water shader, a new accessibility feature to change the pixel scaling and so on.
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You can find A Short Hike: The Extra Mile on Steam and itch.io. Seems like a really sweet experience if you're after something a little more chilled-out.
We’re releasing Krita 4.2.4 today. The most important fixes are to the shortcut input system and the saving system. Krita 4.2.3 had a bug where a message window would often pop up complaining about a shortcut not being finished properly; this should no longer happen. Anna Medonosova has hardened the saving system even more, especially when closing Krita after initiating a save operation.
There are some more bug fixes coming soon, and we will release 4.2.5 with those fixes in about two weeks, after the coming Krita sprint.
Tuesday, 30 July 2019. Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.16.4. Plasma 5.16 was released in June with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) project, which extends the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In July, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I declared max 30h and got 18.5h.
Now that we identified the relevant change, what’s the easiest way to test this change? There’s an easy way how to build a custom Debian package, based on the official Debian kernel but including further patch(es), thanks to Ben Hutchings. Make sure to have a Debian system available (I was running this inside an amd64 system, building for amd64), with according deb-src entries in your apt’s sources.list and enough free disk space, then run...
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during July 2019 (previous month)...
The final stable release of Linux Mint 19.2 is now available to download.
Don’t get too excited; it not “officially” out yet, which is why the title of this post doesn’t say Linux Mint 1.92 has been released.
But the blessed, finalised release .iso has been approved for release and is up on the Linux Mint servers and release mirrors, where the impatient can grab a copy.
Do note that you won’t be able to upgrade to Linux Mint 19.2 from an earlier release until the release has been officially announced. You won’t have to wait too long: it’s due by the end of this week.
Earlier this week, the leader of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre, revealed the fact that the Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" operating system will be officially released later in the week for all supported flavors, including Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.
Now, it looks like the final ISO images of Linux Mint 19.2 were pushed to the main download server, so you can grab them right now and install the operating system on your personal computer if you don't want to wait for the official announcement later this week.
Some of the problems we have had with the new adaptations to UT are caused by apps that do not function properly with Mir. There are conflicts with work done earlier by Canonical. The approach we have taken now is that if it does not work as we want, we kill the app. iOS and Android also kill apps in similar situations, so this is pretty normal practice. It avoids problems that follow when apps don’t behave correctly. The inability to close apps while not in focus has now been fixed.
There needs to be a major refactoring in qtMir and Unity8. It general though, apps take a very complicated route when handled by Mir, so it is not easy to solve problems and the refresh needed will have to be big.
Nevertheless, with those two changes we are very close to the point where Edge channel can be merged into Development channel.
The UBports community developers continuing to advance Ubuntu Touch have shared their latest work items and plans. OTA-10 is being developed while they are also working on ports for the PinePhone and Librem 5 smart-phones, among other items on their radar.
Ubuntu and Linux Mint for legal reasons do not distribute by default all the multimedia codecs that we would like. However, in Ubuntu using the terminal we can install the package ubuntu-restricted-extras where are the Flash plugin, Microsoft fonts, and other things.
In Linux Mint we have that package, but we also have a more specialized one called codecs-multimedia that we can install from the main menu of the distribution.
Conclusion
Ubuntu and Linux Mint are quite mature Linux distributions with clear development goals and lines. Both offer the opportunity to have a nice, stable system with a great capacity to manage programs.
In this post, we have explained the main differences between the two, however, internally there are still many more. It’s up to you to know which one you like best.
You can now buy Orange Pi Zero LTS Arm Linux SBC for $8.49 and up. The tiny board is ideal for headless applications with WiFI and Ethernet connectivity.
Avalue’s rugged “EPS-CFS” computer runs Linux or Win 10 on Intel 8th or 9th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs up to an octa-core Core i7-9700TE, and supplies up to 32GB GB DDR4, 2x SATA bays, 2x GbE, 2x HDMI, and 4x USB 3.2 ports.
Avalue announced an embedded computer with Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake T-series or the new, but similarly 14nm-fabricated, 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh TE-series chips. The EPS-CFS computer, which is built around Avalue’s 3.5-inch ECM-CFS SBC, joins other 9th Gen-ready products including Kontron’s COMe-cWL6 (E2S) and Congatec’s Conga-TS370 COM Express modules.
Nobody knows what Google Fuchsia will look like once it’s released. There’s very little in the way of concrete information, and what is out there is pretty unclear. However, we do know that Google Fuchsia revolves around the idea of being able to do whatever you want from whatever device you have at the ready. We can even see hints of this approach in Google’s recent endeavors, like bringing Android Messages and a VR video editor to a wide range of hardware.
While the Librem 5’s internals are on par with a budget handheld like the Moto E5, its price tag ($699 retail) is a bit higher than the OnePlus 7 Pro and more in line with lower-end flagships like the iPhone XR and Samsung Galaxy S10e.
However, the hardware isn’t the main draw of the Librem 5. Like its laptops, Purism’s devices are more akin to boutique showcases for the company’s software. The Librem 5 will run a mobile-optimized flavor of PureOS out of the box, and Purism has stated that the phone will be fully compatible with different versions of Linux. These include KDE’s Plasma Mobile, Debian, and any other GNU/Linux compatible operating system.
To that end, the app system is a bit different than that of Android or iOS. Rather than having a dedicated app platform with applications designed specifically for the OS, the Librem 5 relies heavily on HTML 5-compatible applications for most of its features. The handset supports OpenGL/ES 3.1, OpenCL 1.2, and Vulkan for graphics. There are a few native applications, most of which are the usual dialer, contact manager, SMS messaging, and web browser apps found on every phone.
Purism has said that the Librem 5 is all about privacy, openness, and enabling users to actually own their handset. While you’re not likely to see the Librem 5 in the pockets of everyone riding the tram to work or walking down the street, the free and open-source community is large enough (and loud enough) for the phone to gain some traction.
At Mozilla, we are continuing to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), a new network protocol that encrypts Domain Name System (DNS) requests and responses. This post outlines a new study we will be conducting to gauge how many Firefox users in the United States are using parental controls or enterprise DNS configurations.
With previous studies, we have tried to understand the performance impacts of DoH, and the results have been very promising. We found that DoH queries are typically the same speed or slightly slower than DNS queries, and in some cases can be significantly faster. Furthermore, we found that web pages that are hosted by Akamai–a content distribution network, or “CDN”–have similar performance when DoH is enabled. As such, DoH has the potential to improve user privacy on the internet without impeding user experience.
Now that we’re satisfied with the performance of DoH, we are shifting our attention to how we will interact with existing DNS configurations that users have chosen. For example, network operators often want to filter out various kinds of content. Parents and schools in particular may use “parental controls”, which block access to websites that are considered unsuitable for children. These controls may also block access to malware and phishing websites. DNS is commonly used to implement this kind of content filtering.
Firefox 68 landed earlier this month with a bunch of CSS additions and changes. In this blog post we will take a look at some of the things you can expect to find, that might have been missed in earlier announcements.
If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-9 branch!
The NetBSD 9.0 code has now been branched and preparations underway for releasing the next version of this BSD operating system known for its vast architecture support.
Coming for NetBSD 9.0 are many security improvements including optional kernel ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) support, partial ASLR by default, new kernel sanitizers of KLEAK/KASAN/KUBSAN, and other security enhancements.
There is also NetBSD's new NVMM hypervisor for virtualization, their open-source graphics drivers have been re-based against the Linux 4.4 kernel state, NPF performance improvements, NVMe performance improvements, removal of ISDN networking support, and other updates.
When I wrote that article in 2012, the RTL-SDR project and its community were still in their infancy. It took some real digging to find out which TV tuners based on the Realtek RTL2832U were supported, what adapters you needed to connect more capable antennas, and how to compile all the software necessary to get them listening outside of their advertised frequency range. It wasn’t exactly the most user-friendly experience, and when it was all said and done, you were left largely to your own devices. If you didn’t know how to create your own receivers in GNU Radio, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do other than eavesdrop on hams or tune into local FM broadcasts.
Nearly a decade later, things have changed dramatically. The RTL-SDR hardware and software has itself improved enormously, but perhaps more importantly, the success of the project has kicked off something of a revolution in the software defined radio (SDR) world. Prior to 2012, SDRs were certainly not unobtainable, but they were considerably more expensive. Back then, the most comparable device on the market would have been the FUNcube dongle, a nearly $200 USD receiver that was actually designed for receiving data from CubeSats. Anything cheaper than that was likely to be a kit, and often operated within a narrower range of frequencies.
One of the hottest topics within the DevOps space is Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). This attention has drawn lots of investment dollars, and a vast array of proprietary Software As A Service (SaaS) tools have been created in the CI/CD space, which traditionally has been dominated by free open-source software (FOSS) tools. Is FOSS still the right choice with the low cost of many of these SaaS options?
It depends. In many cases, the cost of self-hosting these FOSS tools will be greater than the cost to use a non-FOSS SaaS option. However, even in today's cloud-centric and SaaS-saturated world, you may have good reasons to self-host FOSS. Whatever those reasons may be, just don't forget that "Free" isn't free when it comes to keeping a service running reliably 24/7/365. If you're looking at FOSS as a means to save money, make sure you account for those costs.
Even with those costs accounted for, FOSS still delivers a lot of value, especially to small and medium-sized organizations that are taking their first steps into DevOps and CI/CD. Starting with a commercialized FOSS product is a great middle ground. It gives a smooth growth path into the more advanced proprietary features, allowing you to pay for those only once you need them. Often called Open Core, this approach isn't universally loved, but when applied well, it has allowed for a lot of value to be created for everyone involved.
In the previous article, we have used the Blockchain API to display the Bitcoin vs world major currencies exchange rate in our application. In this article, we will use the Pandas Data Frame object to create a beautiful table for our displaying data. I have already introduced the Pandas Data Frame object before in the previous chapter, therefore, I won’t go through it again in this post. Let us go straight to the business.
Anthony Sottile is a pytest core contributor, as well as a maintainer and contributor to many other projects. In this episode, Anthony shares some of the super cool features of pytest that have been added since he started using it.
We've been eagerly watching Intel's open-source LLVM-based SYCL compiler support developed over the past number of months and today it finally premiered as an experimental feature in their modern OpenCL Linux driver package for its CPU run-time component.
For Intel's modern OpenCL Linux driver stack known as their "NEO" OpenCL driver now there is this experimental SYCL support bundled into their CPU-based run-time.
sed and awk should be on every system you run across; jq is non standard, but easy to install. It’s worth spending some time getting to know these tools. So next time you are processing a text file and need to extract just a bit of it, reach for sed and awk. Next time you get a hairy json file and you are peering at it, look at jq. I think you’ll be happy with the result.
Math is just one of the skillsets that aspiring AI and ML professionals are expected to have. This is only one half the requirement, the other half is one’s expertise in programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, and R.
While C++ helps engineers increase the speed of their coding process, Python will help them understand and create complex algorithms. Python is also the go-to choice for ML developers, and also offers various libraries and frameworks to ease the process of creating an AI model. Similarly, R and Java help professionals understand stats and implement mappers, respectively. They are important considering the role of visualization in explaining AI.
Rather than thinking about the political divide on global warming as the result of dogma versus logic, a better explanation is that people tend to embrace conclusions—scientific or otherwise—that support themes, ideologies, and narratives that are preexisting components of their worldview. It just so happens that the themes, ideologies, and narratives associated with human-caused global warming and its proposed solutions align well with the political predispositions of the Left and create tension with those of the Right.
In the U.S. the cost of a vial of insulin is about $340 ($450 Cdn). In Canada, the same vial will average about $30. On Sunday, an "insulin caravan" rolled through the border city of Windsor, carrying about 15 people with Type 1 diabetes.
According to Sanders, the massive price difference is a result of "pharma's greed."
"Over the last 20 years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign contributions. They buy and sell politicians — Republicans and Democrats," Sanders told a crowd of supporters outside the pharmacy.
"They continue to charge the American people any price they want."
In a new op-ed in Annals of Internal Medicine, a group of doctors called on the health-care community to improve infection control practices and further study the dangerous fungus to stop its spread.
As of May 31, 2019, there were 685 confirmed cases of candida auris in the United States alone.
The cybersecurity firm, Rapid7, found that an attacker could potentially disrupt electronic messages transmitted across a small plane’s network, for example by attaching a small device to its wiring, that would affect aircraft systems.
Engine readings, compass data, altitude and other readings “could all be manipulated to provide false measurements to the pilot,” according to the DHS alert.
However, the [attack] requires physical access.
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Rapid7 verified the findings by investigating two commercially available avionics systems. It determined that only "some level of physical access" to the aircraft's wiring was needed to pull of the hack, which could be delivered by attaching a small device to the plane's Controller Area Network (CAN) bus to send the false commands.
The key problem is that the CAN bus is integrated into the plane's other components without any firewalls or authentication systems in place. This means untrusted connections over a USB adapter hooked up to the plane can send commands to its electronic systems.
Hutchins’ conviction means he will no longer be allowed to stay in or visit the United States, although Judge Stadtmeuller reportedly suggested Hutchins should seek a presidential pardon, which would enable him to return and work here.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (389-ds-base, curl, and kernel), Debian (libssh2), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, and oniguruma), openSUSE (chromium, openexr, thunderbird, and virtualbox), Oracle (389-ds-base, curl, httpd, kernel, and libssh2), Red Hat (nss and nspr and ruby:2.5), Scientific Linux (httpd and kernel), SUSE (java-1_8_0-openjdk, mariadb, mariadb-connector-c, polkit, and python-requests), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8, openldap, and sox).
Zero-day attacks were the second-most cited concern among IT decision makers, according to SpiceWorks, with 18% of respondents citing that as their primary concern. Insider data leaks were the most cited, at 27%, while attacks on IoT devices was third (17%), followed by supply-chain attacks (15%), DDoS attacks (15%), and cryptojacking (15%). Fewer than 20% of respondents indicated their business was "completely prepared" for common security threats.
Considering the risks that accompany unsupported software generally, and the larger attack surface that results from an unsupported (or otherwise unpatched) operating system, there is a relative lack of urgency to migrate from Windows 7. Certainly, while paid support for volume licenses is a possibility for some, smaller organizations ineligible for volume licensing will be left out in the cold. To date, Microsoft has shown no signs of wavering in their intent to grant a reprieve to the remaining users of Windows 7. Without a major shift, or a reprieve from Redmond, the prospect of unpatched, internet-connected systems is fertile ground for botnet creation.
Well known Panama-based VPN provider NordVPN has announced their NordLynx technology today that is based on the WireGuard protocol.
NordLynx is the company's new "fast and secure" VPN solution built atop WireGuard. The company describes WireGuard as a "radical change" and "a breath of fresh air in the industry."
NordVPN has announced an important new option for users of the Linux version of its eponymous VPN tool. The company is introducing a new technology called NordLynx which is based on the WireGuard protocol.
The company says that it successfully combines the highspeed connection offered by WireGuard with NordVPN's own privacy-protecting double NAT system.
The bill, put forward by Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, would bar the U.S. Export-Import Bank from financing the transfer of nuclear technology and equipment to Saudi Arabia, absent nuclear cooperation agreements, and adopting restrictive international standards to safeguard against nuclear proliferation. The Export-Import Bank plays a key role in funding the export of U.S. nuclear energy equipment and technology abroad.
More than 300 bus shelters have been transformed into bee-friendly green hubs to support biodiversity in the city. Grass and wildflowers have been planted on the roofs providing a safe haven for different types of bees that act as pollinators and help plants propagate.
The green roofs also help capture fine dust, store rainwater and provide cooling for the heat, according to Maurice Prijs, a project manager with Utrecht’s municipal government.
The heat wave currently bearing down on Greenland comes courtesy of the same weather pattern that caused Western Europe to experience its hottest day on record on Thursday—a strong, high pressure air mass associated with mild temperatures. That weather system migrated over Scandinavia this weekend, shattering heat records in southern Finland and causing many places in Norway to experience what the national meteorological service described as “tropical nights” on Sunday.
The release comes as 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls prepare for two nights of debates in Detroit Tuesday and Wednesday. Some candidates have already seized on one hot-button environmental issue on the campaign trail: the future of Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac.
Parrington said this year, between 250 and 300 fire detections, or "hot spots," have been recorded north of the Arctic Circle each day.
That's four to five times higher than previous years. Normally, Parrington sees between 50 and 60 hot spots a day, which he estimates amounts to between 100 and 200 fires.
Have you ever stood in front of a supermarket shelf and wondered if you should buy that product made from bioplastics rather than the conventional kind? Many people assume all bioplastics are made from plants and can break down completely in the environment. But that’s not the case.
The term “bioplastics” is actually used for two separate things: bio-based plastics (plastics made at least partly from biological matter) and biodegradable plastics (plastics that can be completely broken down by microbes in a reasonable timeframe, given specific conditions). Not all bio-based plastics are biodegradable, and not all biodegradable plastics are bio-based. And even biodegradable plastics might not biodegrade in every environment. Sounds confusing? It certainly is.
[...]
Take polylactic acid (PLA), for example. This bioplastic is used to make shopping bags, transparent cups, 3-D printing material and other products. Because it can be derived from plant material like corn sugar, potato or sugarcane, it can reduce the demand for fossil fuels used to make conventional plastics.
PLA is recyclable, biodegradable and compostable. But that doesn’t mean the ocean — or any other natural environment — can easily handle it.
To Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP), drinking straws made from PLA are “the perfect example for greenwashing.” They are more expensive than other plastic drinking straws, but don’t readily biodegrade on a beach or in the sea.
“You put it on the package [that it] is biodegradable, but at the point where these materials are . . . fear[ed] to end up, they will not biodegrade,” Wurm says.
Governments have completely failed to make progress in tackling the planetary emergency, and a climate revolution is the sole hope that they will do so.
This sounds like a sound bite from Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who is inspiring schoolchildren worldwide to go on strike, or a slogan from Extinction Rebellion, which has been disrupting city life in the UK and elsewhere to secure an urgent government response to the climate emergency.
Both campaigns might agree with the statement, but it is in fact from a scholarly book, Burning Up, A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption, a detailed study into the burning of fossil fuels since 1950. It looks at fuel consumption in individual countries but also at the political forces that have driven and still drive the ever-growing inferno of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, across the world.
The book illustrates the reasons behind the rather frightening fact that since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, despite many promises and warnings, governments have failed to take decisive action on climate change and in fact have made it decidedly worse by continuing to subsidise fossil fuels more than renewables.
The international nonprofit Global Witness has released an annual report on attacks against land and environmental defenders and has found that the Philippines is the deadliest country for these activists, averaging more than three deaths a week. In total, 164 activists were killed in 2018. A significant number of attacks on environmental activists are linked to the mining industry, as well as hydropower, agribusiness and logging projects. Additionally, many activists in the Philippines face death threats, intimidation and arrests.
When protesters stormed the Legco building in July they denounced the institution as illegitimate. Only half of its seats are directly elected by the public. And young protesters complain that they are not represented there. In 2016 record numbers of them elected legislators with “localist” views, such as self-determination or even independence for Hong Kong from China. Months later, two of those legislators were disqualified for amending their oaths of office in a way that Beijing disapproved of. The following year four more democrats were disqualified for the same thing.
As well as disqualifying elected legislators, other candidates have been barred from running. [...]
The account, which operated under the display name “LYNN THOMAS,” was reportedly suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules against “using multiple accounts to artificially amplify or disrupt conversations.” It’s the second account that the president has retweeted that Twitter has suspended for violating its rules.
Before the suspension, the account enthusiastically pushed Qanon conspiracy memes and bizarre theories about prominent Democrats murdering children to harvest their pineal glands. One such meme targeted Bill and Hillary Clinton, claiming they “torture and sacrifice children” to get at “a drug that can only be found inside the human skull.” That was posted last Thursday—five days before the current president graced the account with a retweet.
It's open season on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and everyone's got ideas. Not good ones, mind you. But ideas. The latest comes from Rep. Paul Gosar whose claim to fame is that six of his own siblings took out an ad to his constituents, telling them not to re-elect their brother. Gosar also has a bit of a checkered history of his own in terms of tolerating "free speech" online. Last year, he was sued for blocking constituents on social media -- leading him to agree to stop the practice in order to settle the lawsuit.
He's now introduced HR 4027, which is entitled the "Stop Censorship Act" (as opposed to Josh Hawley's Stop Internet Censorship Act). The full text of the bill is not yet up, but Gosar has put up a press release and Twitter thread about the bill, saying that it will revoke what he (incorrectly) says is the "unprecedented and unwarranted immunities given to Big Tech" and replacing it with an immunity only to remove "unlawful activity" and some sort of mandate to provide end users their own filter tools.
[Copied] data includes names, addresses, phone numbers and credit scores
It comes as no surprise that Palantir’s Gotham program offers these kind of features. They are precisely the kind of thing that you would expect modern data analytics software to provide. But what is striking from the screenshots of the manual pages obtained by Motherboard is how easy it is to search through distinct, distributed databases. As far as law enforcement officers are concerned, the process is seamless: they simply input a piece of information, and the program does the rest, searching through multiple stores of data, finding connections. Again, that is what you would expect a well-designed piece of software to do. But the implications are important.
Twenty-five years ago, the FBI decided it needed a surveillance system built into the nation’s telephone network to enable it to listen to any conversation with the flip of a switch. Congress obliged by passing the Communication Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), forcing telephone companies to rebuild their networks to be “wiretap ready.” In the more than two decades since then, the FBI has been seeking both legislative and judicial approval to expand this authority to internet communications, insisting that its investigations have “gone dark” because of increasingly widespread use of encryption. Technologists and civil libertarians have so far been successful in opposing those efforts, warning that requiring technology companies to build a backdoor into our encrypted communications would compromise security for everyone and would empower not just the FBI, but repressive governments like China and Iran, to demand or gain access to private communications. But law enforcement and intelligence agencies have not given up.
His long time doctor, ophthalmologist Anastasiya Vasilyeva, separately said Navalny had been poisoned by "some sort of unknown chemical substance."
"The latest statements from President Bolsonaro threatening Glenn Greenwald with jail time are an inappropriate and dangerous escalation of the Brazilian government's troubling response to The Intercept Brasil's reporting," said CPJ Central and South America Program Coordinator Natalie Southwick in New York. "Brazilian authorities must respect journalists' constitutional right to do investigative reporting and hold power to account."
The death sentence he received in December 2014 on a charge of apostasy was eventually commuted to two years in prison by a Nouadhibou appeal court in November 2017. He should then have been released but many demonstrations calling for his execution had been held during his trial and the authorities continued to detain him on “security grounds”, denying him access to his family and lawyers.
There's border garbage going on in Europe as well. A report by The Intercept shows border officials have cobbled together junk science, tech, and a spin on a notoriously-sketchy piece of equipment into its newest border security offering.
It's called Silent Talker. It subjects travelers to lie detector tests predicated on the fiction that people call tell other people are lying just by looking at them. It's the same pseudo-science that powers the TSA's useless "Behavioral Detection" program. Only this is possibly worse because it considers itself to be a lie detector and it's been known for years lie detectors can't reliably detect lies.
It works like this: travelers upload their passports to the border agency's website and are put face-to-"face" with a blue uniformed avatar. The software takes control of the device's camera to scan the traveler's face and eye movements for "signs of lying."
Here's the thing: it doesn't even work when it's humans doing the face-to-face work. A report on the TSA's Behavioral Detection program found it to be completely lacking in scientific background. The justification for the program was predicated on hearsay, conjecture, and anecdotal evidence. The TSA claimed it was hard science, but actual scientists have said there's no evidence backing the claim that anyone can suss out lies just by looking at people's faces.
As expected, the Department of Justice has signed off on T-Mobile's controversial $26 billion merger with Sprint. You'd be hard pressed to find many objective folks who think greater consolidation in the telecom space is a good idea, given the deal will likely result in less competition, higher prices, and some major job cuts as redundant positions are inevitably eliminated. And in countries where four major wireless carriers were reduced to three, the resulting problems are usually pretty damn obvious.
Still, both the FCC and DOJ have tripped over themselves to approve the deal after T-Mobile's full-court lobbying press, which has included hiring Trump allies like Corey Lewandowski as advisors, and pandering up to the Trump administration by ramping up patronage of Donald's hotels.
To make its approval of the deal seem like a good idea, the DOJ has come up with a quirky solution: it is demanding that Sprint and T-Mobile offload prepaid brand Boost Mobile and some spectrum to Dish Network, who then will (theoretically) use those assets to create a new fourth carrier to replace Sprint.
The move, announced Monday, follows a leadership shake-up in June when CEO Dara Khosrowshahi combined the company's marketing, communications and policy teams.
The cuts, which were also announced internally on Monday, are taking place in multiple Uber offices around the world, the company said. The marketing team had more than 1,200 people before the layoffs. Uber employs almost 25,000 people globally, nearly half of whom are based in the United States, according to recent regulatory filings.
I’m not against cryptocurrency at all. I’m not against the distributed nature of cryptocurrency. I think the idea that there’s no central control is kind of overblown because there are so many forks and there are so many changes and administrational issues that you know there’s always some external factor forcing control. But the problem I have with Facebook is that Facebook is in a unique position with over 2.2 billion worldwide users.
By having those tentacles everywhere globally, they have the opportunity to be more impactful in countries where there is less stability. And when you get a company like Facebook, with the power and leverage and the financial resources that they have, putting their tentacles into — not to pick on Africa, but African countries that have less stable currencies and governments — that can create issues that can lead to people dying. And so if Facebook were to say, “We’re going to start off the United States with Libra” or “We’re going to start off in the United States and Canada and Western Europe.” Fine, go for it. Let’s see what happens. But when you look to extend that into 2.2 billion users globally, the law of unintended consequences is inevitable, and most likely, it’s going to be a negative output.
That makes it all but certain that U.S. lawmakers won't be in a position to take even the most tentative steps forward on the deal before the start of Canada's federal election campaign, which is set to begin by mid-September at the latest.
For some, that could mean fireworks for the Canadian campaign — ignited by a petulant Trump.
Cyndee Todgham Cherniak, a Toronto-based international trade lawyer, said the Democrats are likely to want substantive changes that could leave the deal in limbo for many months. In the meantime, the Democrats will be sharpening their talking points on USMCA to use against Trump in the 2020 U.S. election, she said.
And that could set Trump off, she said.
The operators of popular music upload site Picosong say that their project will shut down in October. The stated reason is that there are "better alternatives" so the site isn't needed anymore. However, TorrentFreak has learned that the RIAA is currently trying to find out who runs the site after a leaked Kanye West track was uploaded to the platform.
