An increasing number of IT groups are incorporating development tools, such as containers, in order to create cloud-native apps that operate in a constant manner across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
However, the trickiest part is to find the best container platforms for the organization. It is hard to make the correct decisions regarding container orchestration for managing lifecycles of the containers in order to function at scale and accelerate innovation.
Containers can be Linux
It is vital for every application to run on Linux since the containers are always running on a Linux host.
Containers that are used for managing their lifecycles, work best with Linux. However, these days, Kubernetes is the popular container orchestration platform that was built on Linux concepts and make use of Linux tooling and application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing the containers.
The companies are advised to opt for a Linux distribution that they know and trust before taking any decision on the OS for their container platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), an OS platform, suits well for operating company’s containers as it provides stability and security features simultaneously, allowing developers to be agile.
Packed with six months' worth of updates and bug fixes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 promises to enhance the user experience by implementing a new way for both new and existing users to register a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, directly from the installer. As such, users won't have to perform a YUM update after installation to confirm the subscription.
"Additionally, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat's proactive management analytics service that helps to keep RHEL systems running at a high level, can be enabled during the installation process. This capability delivers Insights monitoring immediately after the installation is finished," said Red Hat.
Today, we’re pleased to announce that the latest beta version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2, is now available. Maintaining our commitment to a predictable, six-month release cadence for minor platform releases, RHEL 8.2 Beta is designed to make it easier for IT organizations to adopt new, production-ready innovations faster. This same cadence and engineering process is also intended to help our hardware partners more quickly deliver supported hardware configurations, furthering customer choice for their datacenter estates.
Beyond the continued benefits of the regular release cadence, RHEL 8.2 drives enhancements to the user experience for both new and existing customers, extends monitoring and performance capabilities and adds new supported developer languages and tools.
Red Hat’s Cloud Access program is one of the ways that Red Hat helps its customers use their Red Hat subscriptions in the public cloud. In the last few weeks we’ve introduced significant enhancements and new features we don’t want you to miss, including self-service access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) gold images directly in Microsoft Azure, and a number of customer experience improvements.
The Red Hat Integration Q4 release adds many new features and capabilities with an increasing focus around cloud-native data integration. The features I’m most excited about are the introduction of the schema registry, the advancement of change data capture capabilities based on Debezium to technical preview, and data virtualization (technical preview) capabilities.
Data integration is a topic that has not received much attention from the cloud-native community so far, and we will cover it in more detail in future posts. Here, we jump straight into demonstrating the latest release of data virtualization (DV) capabilities on Red Hat OpenShift 4. This is a step-by-step visual tutorial describing how to create a simple virtual database using Red Hat Integration’s data virtualization Operator.
I've spent most of my career in an organization built on openness and transparency, and yet I have rarely spoken about my mental health and how it might impact my work. In sharing these stories now, I hope to help reduce the stigma of mental health at work and connect with others who may be experiencing similar or related situations. Given the prevalence of mental illness globally, chances are good that if you don't experience a mental health condition first hand, then you're likely working on a daily basis with someone who does.
In the monthly Software Freedom Podcast we talk with people who have inspiring ideas about software freedom. In this episode, we talk with Carmen Bianca Bakker about the REUSE project. By this we are covering the very broad topic of software licensing and the problems there, which REUSE is able to solve with three simple steps. OPUS FeedMP3 Feed
Brent sits down with Jim Salter, co-host of Jupiter Broadcasting’s TechSNAP and technology reporter at Ars Technica. We explore his relationship with computers via the US Navy, when code has it’s place in either proprietary or open source licensing, the value in being a social gadfly, and Jim’s motivations behind his writing and who he is hoping to reach and inspire.
pytest-testmon is a pytest plugin which selects and executes only tests you need to run. It does this by collecting dependencies between tests and all executed code (internally using Coverage.py) and comparing the dependencies against changes. testmon updates its database on each test execution, so it works independently of version control.
In this episode, I talk with testmon creator Tibor Arpas about testmon, about it's use and how it works.
This Linux patch was first brought to light by Twitter user Komachi who has a history of being pretty accurate about tech leaks.
Komachi revealed three different Family 17h devices preparing for the same level of support as the two brand new Family 19h devices we know about.
As announced back at CES, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is being launched as the newest Navi graphics card to fill the void between the original RX 5700 series and the budget RX 5500 XT. The Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards are beginning to ship today at $279+ USD price point and offers great Linux support but with one last minute -- and hopefully very temporary -- caveat.
The Radeon RX 5600 XT features 36 compute units, 2304 stream processors, up to 7.19 TFLOPs, a 1375MHz game clock, 6GB of GDDR6 video memory, and a total board power of around 150 Watts. The Radeon RX 5600 XT like the rest of the RDNA/Navi line-up is a 7nm part, supports PCI Express 4.0, and other common RDNA features.
If you have a Wacom-style graphic tablet and you need a simple and distraction-free painting program, MyPaint seems like it could be a really good fit.
The developer, Martin Renold, says it's a "fast and dead-simple painting app for artists" and I can certainly appreciate the ease of use to it. Very handy for doing any kind of art really. Perhaps if you're in the mood for some sketching, mockups or you're designing art for a game it's pretty sweet.
A big new version is currently in testing, with a Beta that was released back in December. This brings with it great AppImage support to run it (hopefully) out of the box on any modern Linux distribution, along with tons of new features for artists like Spectral Paint/Pigment layer and brush mode, Linear blending for non-pigment layers and brush modes, Smudge enhancements, Fullscreen improvements, "fake inputs" for pressure and barrel rotation (allowing on-the-fly expressive adjustments to your brush even while using a mouse) and loads more.
This tool's main purpose is to shows what is taking up your bandwidth. It was originally called "what", but its name was changed to bandwhich about 3 weeks ago.
bandwhich is able to show the current network utilization by process, connection and remote IP/hostname by sniffing a given network interface and recording the IP packet size, cross-referencing it with the /proc filesystem on Linux and lsof on macOS. Also, the tool attempts to resolve the IP addresses to their host names in the background, using reverse DNS "on a best effort basis"; this can be disabled using the -n / --no-resolve option.
By default, bandwhich runs in interactive mode and it has 3 panes that show: network utilization by process name, utilization by connection, and utilization by remote address. Because bandwhich has a responsive terminal user interface, the terminal window in which you run bandwhich must be large enough for these 3 panes to be displayed - depending on the window width and/or height, only one or two of these panes may be shown.
Those of you just beginning to learn the basics of Linux may be interested in a great video published by the YouTube channel Explaining Computers. The Linux Terminal tutorials are aimed at those of you moving from the Microsoft Windows operating system as well as users of the Raspberry Pi mini PC and similar. The 20 minute video covers a range of Linux terminal commands and Linux concepts, including navigating and manipulating drives and directories using the commands pwd, ls, lsblk, cd, mkdir, rmdir, cp, and mv.
If you would like to play around with the Linux commands but don’t have a Linux system you can also use a terminal emulator. A program that allows the use of the terminal in a graphical environment. Here are some free, commonly-used terminal emulators by operating system : Mac OS X: Terminal (default), iTerm 2 – Windows: PuTTY – Linux: Terminal, KDE Konsole, XTerm
By definition, a file system needs to store files, and they also contain directories. The files are stored within the directories, and these directories can have subdirectories. Something, somewhere, has to record where all the files are located within the file system, what they’re called, which accounts they belong to, which permissions they have, and much more. This information is called metadata because it’s data that describes other data.
In the Linux ext4 file system, the inode and directory structures work together to provide an underpinning framework that stores all the metadata for every file and directory. They make the metadata available to anyone who requires it, whether that’s the kernel, user applications, or Linux utilities, such as ls, stat, and df.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 5.0 is now available.
This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main highlights are:
- Builtin modules in PE format. - Multi-monitor support. - XAudio2 reimplementation. - Vulkan 1.1 support.
This release is dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, who passed away in August 2019 at the young age of 30. Józef was a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation, and the lead developer of the vkd3d project. His skills and his kindness are sorely missed by all of us.
What's new in Wine 5.0 ======================
*** PE modules
- Most modules are built in PE format (Portable Executable, the Windows binary format) instead of ELF when the MinGW compiler is available. This helps various copy protection schemes that check that the on-disk and in-memory contents of system modules are identical.
- The actual PE binaries are copied into the Wine prefix instead of the fake DLL files. This makes the prefix look more like a real Windows installation, at the cost of some extra disk space.
- Modules that have been converted to PE can use standard wide-char C functions, as well as wide-char character constants like L"abc". This makes the code easier to read.
- Not all modules have been converted to PE yet; this is an ongoing process that will continue during the Wine 5.x development series.
- The Wine C runtime is updated to support linking to MinGW-compiled binaries; it is used by default instead of the MinGW runtime when building DLLs.
*** Graphics
- Multiple display adapters and monitors are properly supported, including dynamic configuration changes.
- The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec.
- The WindowsCodecs library is able to convert more bitmap formats, including palette-indexed formats.
*** Direct3D
- Fullscreen Direct3D applications inhibit the screensaver.
- DXGI swapchain presents inform the application when the corresponding window is minimized. This typically allows applications to reduce CPU usage while minimized, and is in some cases required to allow the application window to be restored again.
- Switching between fullscreen and windowed modes using the standard Alt+Enter combination is implemented for DXGI applications.
- The following features are implemented for Direct3D 12 applications: - Switching between fullscreen and windowed. - Changing display modes. - Scaled presents. - Swap intervals. These features were previously already implemented for earlier versions of the Direct3D API.
- The handling of various edge cases is improved. Among others: - Out of range reference values for the alpha and stencil tests. - Sampling 2D resources with 3D samplers and vice versa. - Drawing with mapped textures and buffers. - Usage of invalid DirectDraw clipper objects. - Creating Direct3D devices on invalid Windows, like the desktop window. - Viewports with a minimum Z larger than or equal to the maximum Z. - Resources bound through both shader-resource views and render-target or depth-stencil views at the same time. - Blits between formats with and without alpha components. Since well-behaved applications don't rely on these edge cases, they typically only affect one or two applications each. There are nevertheless quite a number of them.
- Dirty texture regions are tracked more accurately for Direct3D 8 and 9 texture uploads.
- Uploads of S3TC-compressed 3D textures require less address space. Since 3D textures can be potentially large, and address space exhaustion is a concern for 32-bit applications, S3TC-compressed 3D textures are uploaded per-slice, instead of in a single upload.
- The ID3D11Multithread interface is implemented.
- Various lighting calculation fixes and improvements for older DirectDraw applications have been made.
- Limited support for blits across swapchains is implemented.
- More shader reflection APIs are implemented.
- The wined3d CPU blitter can handle compressed source resources. Support for compressed destination resources was already implemented in a previous release.
Wine 5.0 has been released as stable as the annual timed release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.
Wine 5.0 is another big step forward in allowing modern Windows applications to run well particularly on Linux and macOS. Thanks to CodeWeavers and funding by Valve for their work on the Wine-based Proton downstream, there are many game fixes that have been incorporated over the past year especially. So Windows games are in better shape plus there is Vulkan 1.1 support, FAudio integration, and countless other improvements.
The day has arrived, the official stable release of Wine 5.0 has arrived bringing thousands of improvements and a bunch of new features.
[...]
Wine 5.0 as a release is also being dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation and he lead developer of the vkd3d project who sadly passed away in August 2019.
The first stable update for the Steam Client of 2020, pulling in all the recent changes from the Beta versions.
For Linux users, it's a good one. It fixes the Steam Library not working on some NFS mounts, fixes a crash while prepare the Hardware Survey and some tweaks to the Steam Runtime system info gathering to only run when needed.
Now that the huge update to Slay the Spire is live adding in The Watcher as the fourth character, Mega Crit Games have also updated their opt-in game engine upgrade Beta.
For a while now, they've had a "libgdx199" Beta available on Steam to improve the foundation the game is built upon. However, that's only compatible with save files from the previous major build. A new opt-in Beta "libgdx199.main" has been put up, which is compatible with the current version of the game.
DASH (Danger Action Speed Heroes), a platformer that's built for people who love creating and competing across user-made levels just recently expanded with a big new online multiplayer mode.
It's one thing to create levels, play those made by others and see the Ghost of players from their times. It's a whole different experience to run, jump and fail with others right there with you. That's exactly what the new update to DASH will offer. This Competitive Run game mode might be the first of multiple, with it being a big all-for-one mode too.
So, to help fill in the knowledge gap, KDE is including a new feedback tool in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 release, due in February.
Now, before anyone gets antsy about it, let me stress that this new data collection feature is strictly opt-in (just like Ubuntu’s system reporting). It’s also up to distribution maintainers to decide whether to package the relevant module as part of the Plasma desktop.
With everyone getting back into work, we have managed to control the number of bugs. There are 2 fewer bugs than what I reported last time. I know it is still not a lot, but with Dmitry not available for most of the time and team having to divide its time between the resource rewrite & bug fixing, it is pretty good that the number is decreasing.
We continue working on the plotting capabilities of LabPlot. In the next release we will be adding two new worksheet objects to provide more flexibility and features to create attractive looking visualizations. In this short blog post we want to report on this recent development.
So, today I got finally so tired of navigating (or explicitly stepping over) all the internal functions in gdb (you know, all the inline functions from STL containers, from Boost, from this pointer wrapper class, that string class) that I finally googled 'gdb skip system functions'. And guess what, it's been there since gdb 7.12, from 3 years ago, and it's almost trivial, just adding something like this to ~/.gdbinit:
Well, stop blaming your eyes because it’s turns out that this is a rendering bug — and I’m (personally) pleased to carry word that a fix for the pixel smudging flaw is on the way!
Regular omg! readers won’t be surprised to hear that the patch in question comes courtesy of prolific Ubuntu developer Daniel Van Vugt (he’s contributed major performance improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter in the past).
Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on a variety of interesting performance optimizations for upstream GNOME as well as other usability enhancements for this desktop environment. One of the latest items being tackled is improving the quality of background images on GNOME.
Long story short, for where the background/wallpaper image is larger than the desktop resolution, OpenGL is used for downscaling the image. But the existing means of downscaling could lead to blurry images or just not as sharp as possible images. But now with patches pending, the mipmap level is being limited to still downscale with OpenGL but to have the maximum sharpness possible for the display.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of PCLinuxOS 2020.01 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up.
Fedora Jam, a spin of Fedora catered to audio/music enthusiasts, is set to be eliminated with Fedora 32 if their existing or new maintainers don't step up to work on it. Likewise, Fedora Scientific, a spin catered to shipping scientific software out-of-the-box, is also on the chopping block unless there is maintenance happening.
You install Ubuntu and there it is: the familiar app dock with Firefox, Thunderbird, Files, the Software Center and the seemingly permanent, much-derided shortcut to Amazon.com. It’s been a fixture on the dock since 2012, but it’s about to make an exit. Yep, when Canonical’s upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) release lands this April, that Amazon icon will be no more.
Does the Amazon web app also give you a hard time on Ubuntu?
If yes, then it’s time to cheer for you as the much-awaited Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal Fossa” has finally removed the pre-installed amazon web launcher from the dock. Now you won’t have to worry about the affiliated search results from the Amazon in the dash.
Canonical Ltd. has come up with a way to distribute compute-intensive applications from the cloud so they can run seamlessly on low-powered Android devices.
The solution, announced early today, is a platform called Anbox Cloud. It uses Android as a guest operating system to containerize workloads so they can easily be distributed from the cloud, where they run, to any kind of mobile device.
“The ability to offload compute, storage and energy-intensive applications from devices to the cloud enables end-users to consume advanced workloads by streaming them directly to their device,” Canonical noted in its pitch. “Developers can deliver an on-demand application experience through a platform that provides more control over performance and infrastructure costs, with the flexibility to scale based on user demand.”
With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, mobile users were introduced to the smartphone as we still know it today: touchscreen, cameras and app stores. The launch of Android spurred low-cost alternatives to the iPhone, bringing the smartphone to the masses. Popularisation and growth in app consumption drove demand for mobile broadband.
Smartphones, app stores and mobile broadband are the foundations of mobile UX today. However, we’ve been using mobile devices the same way for over a decade now. But, with Anbox Cloud delivered by telcos, this is about to change.
We’re also fast becoming comfortable with the notion of game streaming too, thanks to Google Stadia.
But app streaming?
Well, that’s the use case that Canonical’s new Anbox Cloud service is taking aim at.
Why? Who’s it for? How does it work? And where will it be supported?
For all those details and more, keep reading.
Canonical this morning has announced Anbox Cloud for containerized workloads using Google's Android as the guest operating system.
Canonical is advertising Anbox Cloud for enterprises wanting to distribute Android-based applications from the cloud. Interestingly, Canonical is also using Anbox Cloud to talk up "cloud gaming" with Android games but equally so also talking up possibilities for enterprise workloads, software testing, and mobile device virtualization.
Don’t get me wrong; the MAAS doc is pretty solid. I just want to do more with it. As in not just update it for new versions, but make it come alive and show off what MAAS can do. I also want to pick up some of the mid-range applications and situations. MAAS is well-envisioned in large datacentres, and there are obviously hobbyists and small shops tinkering, but that’s not the bulk of people who could genuinely benefit from it. I want to dig into some of the middle-industry, small-to-medium-size possibilities.
Since I already know something about small hospital datacentres, having worked with them for about ten years, that might be a good place to start. Hospitals from 50-200 beds tend to have the same requirements as a full-size facility, but the challenges of a somewhat smaller budget and lower IT headcount. It really feels like a good sample problem for MAAS.
IEI’s Linux-ready “HTB-200-C236” medical vision computer has a 6th Gen Xeon or 7th Gen Core CPU, PCIe x16 and x4 slots for Nvidia or Mustang cards, and AetherAI pathology modules for bone marrow smear, cancer screening, and object detection.
IEI has launched an edge AI computer aimed at the medical industry in collaboration with AetherAI, which is furnishing three preloaded AetherAI pathology modules. The HTB-200-C236 runs Linux or Win 10 on a 6th Gen Skylake Intel Xeon E3-1268LV with 4x 2.4GHz/3.4GHz cores and an Intel C326 chipset. An optional 7th Gen Kaby Lake, quad-core Core i5-7500T has the same 35W TDP.
Back in summer 2018, we wrote about Lindenis V5 single board computer based on Allwinner V5 quad-core Cortex-A7 processor with two MIPI CSI connectors and designed for 4K cameras.
After a slight delay the $149 PinePhone Linux smartphone has now started shipping to customers who have been pre-ordering the unique smartphone since it was made available back in November 2019. PINE64’s Lukasz Erecinski explained in an update, “we’re now ready and I am happy to confirm that PinePhones will begin shipping on January 17th, 2020,” – “The dispatch process will take a couple of days, however, so your unit may ship anytime between the 17th and 25th. At any rate, you’ll have your PinePhone soon.”
For years, Nextcloud has set the standard for run-your-own Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private clouds. Now with the open-source Nextcloud Hub, it's taking on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) office programs such as Google Docs and Office 365.
Nextcloud has long offered Collabora Online Office, a SaaS version of the open-source LibreOffice office suite to its customers. Hub, though, is a new product. It combines Nextcloud's outstanding cloud file system, Nextcloud Files, with Ascensio System's ONLYOFFICE. Together they are a complete productivity office suite with word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software document management, project management, customer relationship management (CRM), calendar, and mail.
But can you trust your VPN service provider? On more than one occasion, the VPN providers have been caught logging, snooping or sharing data with third party. What to do in such cases?
I have shared a list of privacy focused VPNs for Linux in the past and ProtonVPN is one of them. The good news is that ProtonVPN has just open sourced all its apps and underwent an independent security audit.
Following the last year's leitmotif of "bridging worlds", we turn our attention to the removal of the hurdles faced by aspiring developers and users. During the annual road-map discussion on our mailing list, we identified four tangible approaches towards that goal. First, making Sculpt OS more user friendly. Second, reinforcing trust in Genode by fostering the framework's high quality. Third, making the tooling around Genode a joy to use. And finally, the illustration of Genode's versatility in the form practical use cases.
The Genode operating system framework that's been going strong for over a decade and continuing to employ a micro-kernel architecture continues to plan for an interesting future.
The twelve year old Genode OS open-source project has drawn up an interesting road-map for 2020. Some of their plans for this year include:
- 64-bit ARM (specifically the i.MX8 SoC) support for its general purpose Sculpt OS operating system.
Some, including Siegal, point to sexism. Matt McKenna said Siegal’s gender made her a media target: “That it was a woman who helped Jeffrey Epstein come back? I think that narrative was too seductive for the trades.” Several people I spoke to argued that Siegal would not seem so “brusque” if she were a man and invoked seemingly unsinkable male Epstein associates such as Wexner and Black. But has gender protected those men, or has their status and wealth? Some men have lost prestigious posts: Joi Ito, director of the MIT media lab, resigned after his role soliciting donations from Epstein came to light. MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman stepped down amid controversy over leaked emails discussing a different scientist’s Epstein-related sexual assault allegation. Prince Andrew may have been forced into early retirement. “I think we wonder, are we somehow not giving her the pass that we would give to men?” said the observer who thought the scandal revealed Siegal’s larger issues. “But it’s like, no! She’s a person who had no issue kind of orchestrating the social reinvention of David Koch and Jeffrey Epstein,” this person said, referring to Siegal’s relationship with the late billionaire activist. “That’s a specific person. And sometimes ruthless ambition is loathsome.” There are publicists who rehabilitate criminal reputations for a living, a different publicist noted. But Siegal’s job is to bring people places. “She cultivates an audience. You want to feel good about that person.” When the mix is the message, there isn’t room for any error in judgment.
GNU Make 4.3 shot out of the door this weekend, promising a raft of bug fixes and a smattering of new features.
The venerable build automation tool has been around in one form or another for 43 years, which makes the latest version number particularly appropriate. The previous update was 4.2.1 back in 2016.
New features include grouped explicit targets for explicit rules, via a single invocation. Pattern rules have always had the ability to do this. Also new is an .EXTRA_PREREQS variable, which can either be global, applying to all targets, or a target-specific variable.
The previous limit of 63 jobs under -jN on MS-Windows has been increased to 4095. That limit includes the subprocess started by the $(shell) function, the make team adds.
Advertisement Meanwhile, error messages printed “when invoking non-existent commands have been cleaned up and made consistent.”
The Swift programming language has suffered some setbacks in its quest for ubiquity since Apple released it under an open-source license in 2015.
In December, IBM said it had reevaluated its priorities and decided to back away from server-side Swift development. Then last week, Vapor Cloud, a server-side Swift hosting biz, and a related service called Vapor Red, announced plans to shut down in February.
Scala is a modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based programming and scripting language that’s released under the Apache License 2.0. It blends functional and object-oriented programming models. Scala introduces several innovative language constructs. It improves on Java’s support for object-oriented programming by traits, which are stackable and cannot have constructor parameters. It also offers closures, a feature that dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have adopted.
Scala is particularly useful for building cloud-based/deliverable Software as a Service (SaaS) online applications, and is also proficient to develop traditional, imperative code.
The language helps programmers write tighter code. It uses a number of techniques to cut down on unnecessary syntax, which helps to make code succinct. Typically, code sizes are reduced by an order of 2 or 3 compared to an equivalent Java application.
React.js and React Native are popular open source platforms for developing user interfaces (UIs); both rank well for desirability and use in StackOverflow's 2019 Developer Survey. React.js was developed by Facebook in 2011 as a JavaScript library to address the need for cross-platform, dynamic, and high-performing UIs, while React Native, which Facebook released in 2015, is used for building native applications using JavaScript.
The following are 13 of the best React JavaScript frameworks; all are open source—the first 11 (like React) are licensed under the MIT license and the latter two are licensed under Apache 2.0.
Espacio de Datos is a site-specific, immersive audiovisual installation, consisting of a fulldome projection and a spatialized audio track that I created in collaboration with sound artist Mene Savasta for the +CODE 2018 festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was originally comissioned by Cristian Reynaga and Merlina Rañi, organizers of the festival. Espacio de Datos was also shown at the 2018 edition of the Domo Lleno festival in Bogotá, Colombia, the 9th International Festival of Science Visualization in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2019, and finally at the Elektra Festival XX in Montréal, Canada, in June 2019. This blog post goes in more depth into the background for this project, and the process we followed to create its images and sounds.
[...]
The sound palette was informed by the thematic field of the data, which contained anonymized clinical information of patients affected by Lassa fever, a virual hemorrhagic fever endemic in West Africa. The tragedy of a deadly disease, reduced to indices and values that are then visualized in a cosmic and minimalistic vision. Mene considered these aspects to construct a noisy and glitchy while simultaneously clean palette, where the tragic element is manifested in the dynamic range, such as contrasts and accumulation.
On Jan. 13, Git 2.25 was released, bringing to one of the most commonly used developer tools new capabilities that will help improve performance and overall developer productivity.
Ben Davies has published a module that may well change ad-hoc debugging in Raku: Trait::Traced. It introduces the is traced trait that can currently be attached to any type (class), or to any subroutine or method. So, to find out anything that is happening while executing code in your class Foo, simply do use Trait::Traced and change class Foo { to class Foo is traced {. Yours truly feels this could become a core module rather sooner than later!
As per Python 3 official documentation a key error is raised when a mapping (dictionary) key is not found in the set of existing keys.
Python is the most preferred programming language for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, but it is also the least preferred for being slow to solve certain problems that involve loops.
To challenge this fact, researchers at EPFL Computer Vision Laboratory published a report in which they presented the competitiveness of Python against C++ and Go by solving the popular N-queens puzzle.
It's no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn't have the best reputation. Despite still being one of the most used languages to build web applications; over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not.
While many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there's also a bright side: you can write clean and maintainable, fast and reliable applications in PHP.
In this post, I want to look at this bright side of PHP development. I want to show you that, despite its many shortcomings, PHP is a worthwhile language to learn. I want you to know that the PHP 5 era is coming to an end. That, if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago.
When scholars contemplate the legal tools available to policymakers for encouraging innovation, they primarily think about patents. If they are keeping up with the most recent literature, they may also consider grants, prizes, and taxes as means to increase the supply of innovation. But the innovation policy toolkit is substantially deeper than that. To demonstrate its depth, this Article explores the evolution of designs that help people with disabilities access the world around them. From artificial limbs to the modern wheelchair and the reshaping of the built environment, a variety of legal doctrines have influenced, for better and for worse, the pace and direction of innovation for accessible design.
This Article argues that two of the most important drivers of innovation for accessible design have been social welfare laws and antidiscrimination laws. Both were responsible, in part, for the revolution in accessibility that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike standard innovation incentives, however, these laws operate on the “demand side.” Social welfare laws and antidiscrimination laws increase the ability and willingness of parties to pay for accessible technology, ultimately leading to greater supply. But in doing so, these laws generate a different distribution of the costs and benefits of innovation. They also produce their own sets of innovation distortions by allowing third parties to make decisions about the designs that people with disabilities have to use.
The law can promote innovation, and it can hinder it. The law’s relationship to the wheelchair, the most important accessibility innovation of the twentieth century, produced both results. Policymakers have choices about which legal incentives doctrines they can use and how they can use them. This Article evaluates those tools, and it provides guidelines for their use to encourage accessible technology in particular and innovation generally.
While innovation has increasingly become a collaborative effort, there is little consensus in research about what types of team configurations might be the most useful for creating breakthrough innovations. Do teams need to include inventors with knowledge breadth for recombination or do they need inventors with knowledge depth for identifying anomalies? Do teams need overlapping knowledge to integrate insights from diverse areas or does this redundancy hamper innovation by creating inefficiencies? In this paper, we suggest that the answers to these questions depend on the characteristics of the technologies, which explains why prior evidence based on single domains or that aggregates all technologies have yielded inconclusive findings. Focusing on the degree of modularity and the breadth of application in patent data, we find that differing team configurations are associated with different technological domains.
"Major changes are needed," declares the 159,000-member American College of Physicians, "to a system that costs too much, leaves too many behind, and delivers too little."
There’s a lot of talk in the Trump era about the “war on science.” But this war, such as it is, extends far beyond uninformed Republican attacks on climate change science or Donald Trump’s mocking insults of Greta Thunberg, the teen climate activist nearly 60 years the old bully’s junior. This war involves not only outright science denial, but the myriad ways science is corrupted to serve corporate interests instead of the public good.€
The kindest interpretation of this situation is that the Linux Foundation has a public relations problem that it is unaware of and is overdue to correct. A more cynical interpretation is that, from its very start, the Linux Foundation has been a slow coup, gradually usurping an authority to which it has no right. Ask me on alternate days which one I believe.
Whatever the case, the solutions are the same. A concerted effort to get community members elected to at-large positions might help, although they would still be a minority. Many, too, might not want to legitimize the foundation by participating in it. A more promising response might be to see that community organizations are strengthened to provide a counter-balance, but that would be a slow solution if it worked at all.
I don’t pretend to have an answer. But I believe that free software owes its success to the fact that it is diverse. Centralizing the authority in the community means an end to free software as we know it — and that is something to be avoided at all cost. The very real good that the Linux Foundation does cannot disguise the harm that its orientation may cause.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openconnect), Fedora (e2fsprogs, glibc, kernel, and nss), openSUSE (Mesa, php7, and slurm), Oracle (.NET Core, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and thunderbird), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk, openvswitch, and openvswitch2.11), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, libssh, libvpx, Mesa, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libbsd and samba).
KeePass 2.44 was released a days ago as the latest stable mono password manager. Users of any previous 2.x version are recommended to upgrade.
KeePass Password Safe was a Windows only password manager. Through the use of Mono, KeePass 2.x works on Linux and Mac OS.
Healthcare is increasingly going mobile, as hospitals and medical practitioners look to reduce waiting room times by harnessing the benefits of treatment on the go. But patients are often placing too much trust in these apps, which can often expose them to fresh security and privacy risks.
The rapid growth of mobile healthcare app market was borne more out of necessity than any medical advancement, in the view of Adam Piper, a software developer working in the UK.
“If I want to get a doctor’s appointment, it has to be today, and by 8.01am all the appointments are gone,” Piper told The Daily Swig.
One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals — government people — is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be.
Students need to be taught a more nuanced and complete narrative on the endless wars America has been involved in.
In the wake of the assassination of Iranian military leader Major General Qasem Soleimani and nine other people by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, tensions between the United States and Iran are at their height. The immediate threat of war is real. Real-time news and expert commentary across the nationwide spectrum of media outlets probably have the heads of American citizens spinning. When things are moving so fast, perhaps it is best to move away from the ever-changing and confusing real-time commentary about what should happen and what will happen. Let’s look for the obvious reasons for not going to war with Iran. Here are eight:
The Trump administration’s January 3 drone missile assassination of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani just outside Iraq’s Baghdad airport brought the world to the brink of yet another catastrophic U.S. war. That the Iranian government would retaliate in a matter of days, if not hours, was unquestioned.
The recent conflict between the U.S. and Iranian regimes brings to mind that hilariously famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s classic, Dr. Strangelove, with the U.S. president calling the Soviet leader to warn him about a foolish mistake that had led to a hydrogen bomb heading their way from an American base. The President is amiable, polite and concerned-sounding, patient and contrite, approaching the situation with the goal of cooperative damage control.
The U.S. assassination of General Qasem Soleimani has not yet plunged us into a full-scale war with Iran thanks to the Iranian government’s measured response, which demonstrated its capabilities without actually harming U.S. troops or escalating the conflict. But the danger of a full-blown war still exists, and Donald Trump’s actions are already wreaking havoc.
The horrors of Nepal’s ten-year insurgency weigh greatly on the country, with a heavy toll of killings, rapes, disappearances, and torture.
The conflict ended in 2006 with a peace agreement and since then, Nepal’s leaders have tried their best to shrug off responsibility for crimes committed during the insurgency. Last week, former Maoist leader, and twice prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who used the nom-de-guerre “Prachanda”,€ blurted out that€ he can “only” be blamed for 5,000 deaths, while “state forces” had killed as many as 12,000.€
Sheyda Shadkhoo called her husband from Flight 752 and said she was scared. The U.S. had killed a top Iranian general. Iran vowed revenge. Hassan told her, “Not to worry. Nothing’s going to happen.” As the plane took off from Tehran, two surface-to-air missiles were fired from a nearby military base. Sheyda, along with 175 others, were killed.
"We're advocating today, and everyday, honoring Martin Luther King's legacy with actions that would have been impossible if not for his dedication to justice and nonviolent protest."
The crisis that has engulfed Australia this summer means we can no longer afford ‘business as usual’, writes George Grundy. And by ‘business as usual’, he means a complete absence of real leadership, and a free pass for corporations that take and don’t give.
Kirk Owers dreams of a better world. One where shock-jocks surprise not for the depth of their ignorance, but for their inspiring activism, unshakeable commitment to equality and social justice, lustrous beards and sensible shoes. Ever the optimist, Kirk has penned an ‘alternate transcript’ of Sydney radio personality Alan Jones’ response to the climate crisis gripping our nation.
Advocates praised the ruling as an "excellent step forward in refugee rights."
A new Wild West has taken root not far from Tombstone, Arizona, known to many for its faux-historical reenactments of the old West. We’re talking about a long, skinny territory — a geographic gerrymander — that stretches east across New Mexico and down the Texan Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. It also runs west across hundreds of miles of desert to California and the Pacific Ocean. Like the old Wild West, this one is lawless, save for the law of the gun. But that old West was lawless for want of government. This one is lawless because of it.
They are disgruntled and have every right to be. Whatever one’s feelings about tennis, expecting athletes to perform in subpar conditions is a rank matter that should see officials taken to task. But administrators of a game are often distant from the practice of the game itself. Being on different, cognitive paths, the players can be left stunned by decisions that have the estranging effect of being made in committee.
The Owyhee Initiative (OI) wilderness and public lands legislation passed Congress in 2009 as the Owyhee Public Land Management part of an€ Omnibus€ package bill. Hoopla on the bill’s ten-year anniversary generated a spate of articles extolling collaboration and idolizing individual cattlemen. OI collaboration talking points are being parroted by supporters of a new round of Quid Pro Quo wilderness proposals.
Planting trees helps to combat the climate crisis by cutting greenhouse gases. But the price can be permanently lower river flows.
Los Angeles, the desert city, may have more species of trees than any other city in the United States, almost none of which are native to the basin. Thank Luther Burbank, the Johnny Appleseed of southern California. Trees in LA are used to advertise, decorate, disguise, shade, beautify, camouflage, capture carbon, barricade, cool and conceal. I spent an hour or so each day for the last couple of weeks walking the neighborhoods of the Valley and its nearby canyons surveying LA’s mad assemblage of trees, lustily taking root where no trees should grow. – JSC
The national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not changed in a decade, and there is widespread agreement that it is far below what constitutes a living wage anyway. As if the statistics on the federal minimum wage weren’t dismal enough, leave it to Silicon Valley to figure out “innovative” ways to pay workers even less. A new, in-depth quantitative study released this week, as part of a worker campaign in collaboration with the worker rights non-profit Working Washington, found that contract delivery workers for food delivery company DoorDash earn $1.45 per hour on average, after other expenses are accounted for.
The majority also said they believe they won't be better off five years from now.
The UK, a nation of food banks and Ferraris, ranks as the world’s sixth-richest economy. Advocates are demanding change.
The boss of world car maker Nissan€ — arrested and under intense surveillance around his luxury mansion, and charged with gorging himself with about $140 million of unauthorized pay — makes a daring escape from under the nose of Japanese authorities and across half the world. It will take months for details of how Carlos Ghosn ran away to become public, and probably years to verify which of them are true and which are diversionary stories. However, the lessons about global capitalism are already plain to see.
"Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist."
A Google search for “paying school lunch debt” reveals a long list of recent news stories about good Samaritans paying off the school lunch debt of children whose families cannot afford it.
“I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble,” former Vice President Joe Biden told an audience at the Brookings Institute in 2018. It was a few months before he’d officially declare his candidacy for president, but Biden’s position was clear: “The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
Donald Trump is celebrating “phase 1” of his big trade deal with China. While corporate America seems to be joining the celebration (the stock market has been rising), it’s a safe bet that it is not likely to produce much of a benefit for ordinary workers.
"We've never ever in our lifetimes had a true champion of social, economic, and climate justice this close to the White House."€
Every schoolchild knows that the Ancient Mariner was forced to wear a dead albatross around his neck.
Here are eight ways in which the toxic policies of Gitmo have contaminated American institutions, as well as our laws and customs, in the years since 2002.
The newspaper's endorsement of both Warren and Klobuchar, said one critic, reveals "so much about the liberal reaction to a resurgent left, a reaction that holds Trump as an aberration and polite, well-mannered centrism as the greatest virtue."
Responding to President Donald Trump’s official answer to the impeachment charges against him now facing trial in the U.S. Senate, the Democratic House Managers assigned to prosecute the case rejected Sunday morning the president’s claim his conduct was “perfect” by saying there is “a different word for it: impeachable.”
For too long, PBS has been afflicted by a disease of contempt for its viewers. Corporate sponsors come first.
President Donald Trump’s legal team asserted Monday that he did “absolutely nothing wrong,” urging the Senate to swiftly reject an impeachment case that it called “flimsy” and a “dangerous perversion of the Constitution.” The lawyers decried the impeachment process as rigged and insisted that abuse of power was not a crime.
“It’s amazing,” fellow CounterPuncher Eric Draitser recently wrote me, “that people ever thought a Trump administration would be something other than this.”
It’s going to work out in the end.
Federal prosecutors in Brazil on Tuesday charged the American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force.
In a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday, prosecutors in the capital, Brasília, accused Mr. Greenwald of being part of a “criminal organization” that hacked into the cellphones of several prosecutors and other public officials last year.
Mr. Greenwald could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Intercept Brasil, a news organization Mr. Greenwald co-founded, has published several articles based on a trove of leaked messages he said he received last year.
In a 95-page criminal complaint, prosecutors say Mr. Greenwald did more than merely receive the hacked messages and oversee the publication of newsworthy information. Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers, prosecutors say the journalist played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.”
[...]
The articles raised questions about the integrity, professionalism and motives of key members of Brazil’s justice system — particularly of figures directly involved in the investigation of a vast corruption scheme that resulted in the imprisonment of powerful business and political figures.
Among the revelations in the articles, for instance, were chats in which Sérgio Moro, a former federal judge who handled the prosecution of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2017, provided strategic guidance to prosecutors, in violation of legal and ethical norms. Mr. Moro is now Brazil’s justice minister.
On August 11, 2014, officers from the Caldwell, Idaho Police Department asked for Shaniz West’s permission to enter and search her home. They were looking for her ex-boyfriend. West authorized the search and handed over her keys.
"FBI, translated: Of all the people we have wiretapped, blackmailed, and tried to drive to their deaths through suicide, there are none we think more highly of than Dr. King."
The FBI’s aggressive efforts against Martin Luther King Jr. remain a huge stain on the Bureau, and exemplary of the dirty work it carried out during the long 1960s. Less known, but of no less consequence, was the unwanted attention it directed at Coretta Scott King, the wife of the late civil rights leader. Scott King was meticulously monitored by the Bureau, which compiled over 500 pages of records on her. Her file offers not only a clear view of the FBI and government’s preoccupation with Communist infiltration during the Cold War — and the depths the FBI would sink to in attempting to undermine anyone associated with it — but the larger racist ugliness festering in U.S. society, one still very much present.
Dr. King’s commitment provides a wonderful example for all of us, but particularly for the young. By the wisdom of his teaching, the justice of his cause, the intensity of his commitment, he helped transform America.
King "saw racial injustice, economic injustice, and war as three of the world's great evils."
In his keynote address for the Civil Rights Movement’s March on Washington, DC in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his despair and disappointment that a century after emancipation, freedom still was not a lived reality in the United States of America:
Dr. King’s spirit lives on in the new Poor People’s Campaign, and in every place radicals gather to change the world.
Every year, until The Revolution comes again, the counter-revolution manipulates the historic birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, that so many people fought for, as their symbol of Black “integration” into imperialism and “non-violent” acquiescence to, at best, Barack Obama’s cynical negation of his dream. As Donald Trump has just assassinated Iranian General Quassem Soleimani—with Democratic Party token opposition at best and acquiescence at worse, Dr. King reminds us that “the United States, my government, is the greatest purveyor violence in the world.” As Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren squabble for position and too often, reduce the meaning of life to a barren economic populism, Dr. King reminds us that U.S. society is a moral disgrace and we need a revolutionary movement to challenge its “racism, militarism, poverty, and materialism.” His thoughts offer Democrats and the Movement a challenge. There is an urgent need for a revolutionary worldview to challenge the racism and reaction of Donald Trump’s Make America Great fascist appeal. Meanwhile, on the ground, Black and Latino communities and the world are suffering the worst political, economic, and ecological catastrophe with little help in sight. In this context the most engaged and introspective study of Dr. King’s theory and practice is an urgent corrective than can offer hope and inspiration.
As we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., it’s natural to remember his courageous advocacy for racial equity. But before he was assassinated, King had also begun to broaden his efforts to unify the around economic justice.
In 1858, the United States Attorney General issued an opinion, Invention of a Slave. Relying on the Supreme Court’s recent declaration in Dred Scott v. Sandford that African Americans were not citizens, he created a formal racial barrier to the patent system, declaring inventions by all African Americans, enslaved and free, unpatentable. Within a few years, legal changes that overruled Dred Scott and abolished the law of slavery rendered the opinion obsolete. This brief opinion became, as far as lawyers and legal scholars were concerned, forgotten. Unlike many overruled opinions dropped from the legal canon, however, Invention of a Slave and the associated story of an enslaved blacksmith who invented an innovative plow have been continuously remembered. Women and men committed to fighting the legacy of slavery maintained both in the collective memory of those seeking full civil rights for African Americans. Our legal forgetting was an act of persistent blindness to their efforts and publications. This Essay excavates the generations of African American writers and activists who have worked to remember the opinion and argues that legal forgetting has carried a cost. Their remembering was not casual storytelling but rather deliberate, strategic, and political. I offer Invention of a Slave as a case study of race and selective legal memory, tracing an unacknowledged color line that demarcates legal memory and the costs of that line. Because of our forgetting, the opinion appears as an obscure part of the antebellum past. When we understand their remembering as a political act, we can see what they have always seen: There is a connection between the patent system and the legal and social definition of citizenship. At a time when the boundaries of citizenship and the contours of who is worthy to be considered an American are hotly contested in ways related to race and ancestry, learning from those who remembered Invention of a Slave offers lessons that link this piece of the past to our present and future, with implications both for the patent system and for our on-going conversation about race, equality, citizenship and the laws that affect them.
Apple contacted Masimo in 2013, the lawsuit alleges. Following that, a series of meetings were held, after which the tech giant hired away important employees at both Masimo and Cercacor. Two notables to depart were Masimo Chief Medical Officer Michael O'Reilly and Cercacor Chief Technology Officer Marcelo Lamego.
[...]
The disputed Masimo and Cercacor patents cover noninvasive technologies that use light to monitor aspects of a user's health. Health monitoring was a novel selling point of the Apple Watch when it was launched.
BlackBerry Ltd. beefed up its patent portfolio last year, leading a list of Canadian technology companies that received new patents in the United States. The Waterloo, Ont.-based company received 322 U.S. patents in 2019, according to patent data firm IFI Claims. That’s down slightly from 337 in 2018, but still highest among Canadian firms.
Other tech players in Canada that added substantially to their patent holdings included OpenText Corp. and Pratt & Whitney Canada. That’s based on research by IFI, which was provided to BNN Bloomberg.
We may have moved on from a nearly-daily cycle of news involving tech giants sparring in courts over intellectual property infringement, but patents continue to be a major cornerstone of how companies and people measure their progress and create moats around the work that they have done in hopes of building that into profitable enterprises in the future. IFI Claims, a company that tracks patent activity in the US, released its annual tally of IP work today underscoring that theme: it noted that 2019 saw a new high-watermark of 333,530 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The figures are notable for a few reasons. One is that this is the most patents ever granted in a single year; and the second that this represents a 15% jump on a year before. The high overall number speaks to the enduring interest in safeguarding IP, while the 15% jump has to do with the fact that patent numbers actually dipped last year (down 3.5%) while the number that were filed and still in application form (not granted) was bigger than ever. If we can draw something from that, it might be that filers and the USPTO were both taking a little more time to file and process, not a reduction in the use of patents altogether.
Is this why Sonos decided to sue Google rather than going after Amazon?
Our search of U.S. patent records this afternoon, following news that the high-tech speaker maker is suing the search giant for patent infringement, turned up an interesting and potentially relevant patent that was granted to Amazon in 2016, based on a 2013 patent application.
Under the title, “Distributed speaker synchronization,” the patent describes a system that uses a “signal synchronization component” to perform calculations “to align signals corresponding to the output audio of the electronic audio devices and then determine a delay for the output audio transmitted from the electronic audio devices with respect to each other.”
The much-heralded return of Conor McGregor this weekend ended in a stunning 40-second victory for the UFC's biggest star. The event also resulted in one of the biggest piracy fails in recent memory when a Twitch user broadcasting the PPV event illegally managed to expose details of his personal life to more than 130,000 people. This incident and others like it raise questions not only for amateur pirates but also the UFC.
Pirate streaming giant 'IndoXXI,' stopped offering pirated movies at the start of the year. This left millions of Indonesian pirates without their favorite site. However, according to anti-piracy group AVIA, many others have jumped in to fill this gap. Industry insiders are now calling on the government there to consider criminal prosecutions.
