PC manufacturer TUXEDO Computers — which you may be increasingly hearing about thanks to the Manjaro Linux laptop explosion — have developed a slick system utility called TUXEDO Control Center. In short, it allows you tune and manage all the various power settings of your laptop with one central app.
Linux has long been considered the more secure alternative to Windows, but at the same time, one of the things that users love the most after the making the switch from Microsoft’s operating system is just how much you can customize pretty much every little component.
And truth be told, users like to customize the software running on their devices just the way they want, simply because it’s cooler to have applications that perfectly match their expectations.
And while Windows comes with some obvious limitations in this regard, not the same thing can be said about Linux, where the power of customization is only limited by your imagination.
Welcome to the 341st installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss topics including IARU workshops, ventilators built by hams, a folding Yagi for satellite work, indoor gardens, Fedora on Lenovo, Ubuntu 20.04, Manjaro and much more. Thank you for listening and we hope you have a great week. Stay safe, stay indoors and play radio!
Announcing a new -ck release, 5.6-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.199. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload. Since MuQSS has reached version 0.199, I'm left wondering what I should make the next version. As it is likely to be just as trivial an update as this one was, version 0.200 will not actually be a significant update to some new fancy scheduler, it will just coincidentally bump the minor version up. That said, MuQSS has been stable for a very long time so I should have bumped it to version 1.0 quite a while back.
Con Kolivas is out with his Linux 5.6-ck1 optimization patch-set and version 0.199 of the MuQSS scheduler. This re-base against the Linux 5.6 stable kernel is coming late due to Kolivas leading a team making 3D printed COVID-19 equipment in Australia.
While a longtime independent Linux kernel developer, Kolivas is also a retired anaesthetist, and weeks ago began working on new designs for ventilators / intubation boxes, face shields, ventilation splitters, oxygen hoods, and other PPE in the fight against the coronavirus. More on those efforts via abc.net.au.
Hence Linux would no longer be just a kernel. Torvalds ended up licensing Linux under the GNU general public license (GPL). This license allows users to modify and distribute the source code. However, whoever distributes Linux has to do so under the same terms. The terms basically assure that any modifications made to the Linux kernel also have to continue being free.
But none of that means that Torvalds himself or any other single entity has ownership of the Linux source code in full. Torvalds himself approves a number of changes made to Linux, but that doesn’t give him the copyright to those changes. Therefore you can contribute code to Linux, which then gets approved by the community, but you get to retain the copyright to that piece of code.
That means you will become one of the thousands of collective owners of Linux. But keep in mind that because of the terms of the GPL, you can’t forbid anyone else from using or modifying your code in the future. Very many people own a copyright in the different parts of the Linux source code. That makes it hard to imagine that the terms Linux is licensed under will ever change.
After the merge request was open for more than a half-year, Mesa 20.1 has landed a Vulkan device selection layer for choosing between multiple Vulkan-enabled GPUs on a given system as the default device.
This Vulkan layer allows for picking the default GPU for X11/Wayland/device sessions, similar to DRI PRIME for OpenGL. This Vulkan layer first checks for the MESA_VK_DEVICE_SELECT= environment variable for being pointed towards the GPU/driver to be used, otherwise checks DRI_PRIME and tries to match it to a proper configuration.
ne of the many new features coming in Mesa 20.1 is experimental NIR support for the vintage Radeon "R600g" driver. That NIR back-end isn't yet to feature parity but is now one step closer with tesselation support now being available along this code path.
With Mesa 20.1 branching this week, there's a surge in last minute driver activity for Mesa Git. One of the last minute changes was merging R600 NIR tesselation support.
  Last month we provided some early benchmarks looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. Wayland gaming performance under GNOME 3.36, but now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has been officially released, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance across a wide variety of desktops on both X.Org and Wayland where supported.
Using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Linux 5.4 + Mesa 20.0.4, Steam Linux gaming benchmarks were done across all the prominent desktop options available and packaged for Ubuntu 20.04 in the Focal archive.
VideoLAN have released today VLC 3.0.10 as the ninth update in the latest VLC 3.0 “Vetinari” series of the popular, open-source and cross-platform media player used by millions of users.
VLC 3.0.10 looks to be a significant update that introduces support for SMB2/3 shares so you can watch movies from more Samba shares across your local network.
Furthermore, the update improves the adaptive streaming support, adds various improvements to the MP4 format, and improves DVD support by addressing several issues.
The Twitch and VLSub scripts have been updated as well in this release, which also addresses several security issues, most notably various DOSes discovered recently in the microDNS service discovery.
PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It's freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.
Bashtop is a TUI Linux resource monitor written in... Bash. It shows the usage / stats for the CPU (including temperature), memory, disks, network and processes.
This top-like tool is quite new, but it has already gained a lot of popularity. Due to requests to make it cross-platform, its developer is currently rewriting it to use the Python3 psutil library for data collection, instead of Linux-specific tools.
Bashtop lets you filter processes (press f) and it has multiple sort options: sort by "cpu lazy", "cpu responsive", memory, pid, etc., by pressing the ââ  or ââ â keys on your keyboard. You can also show detailed information for a process, and terminate, kill or interrupt a selected process.
MellowPlayer was updated recently with support for remote controlling the application from any another device, Pandora support, and more.
MellowPlayer is a free and open source Qt-based desktop application for using and integrating cloud music services (and more) with your desktop, available for Linux and Windows.
[...]
The desktop integrations consist of a system tray icon, customizable hotkeys / multimedia keys support, can be controlled using MPRIS v2 (e.g. sound menu in various desktop environments), and notifications.
Without any explanations, let’s have a quick look into the list of the best internet browsers for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Superpaper is a cross-platform wallpaper manager that focuses on multi-monitor support. It features pixel density correction that spans an image flawlessly across displays of different shapes and sizes, and bezel correction and perspective correction.
Today Google did a new Stadia Connect video for their gaming service, which was pre-recorded due to the ongoing Coronavirus situation. Google confirmed a bunch more games coming including from EA, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is out now and more.
What is Stadia? Stadia is Google's game streaming service powered by Linux and Vulkan. You can play games in a Chromium browser on a Linux desktop. It's now open to everyone in the 14 supported countries, with two months of Stadia Pro free when you sign up.
Valve and CodeWeavers continuing the long task of improving the Proton compatibility layer (based on Wine) for Steam Play, and today a new Release Candidate went up for some testing.
Looking to get started with Steam Play on Linux? Have no idea what it is? Be sure to check our Steam Play page for some tips and explanations. We'll be keeping that up to date with any major changes. Following the same pattern they did for Proton 5.0-6, you can now opt into the Proton 5.0-7 beta on Steam. This will help the developers catch any major issues before rolling out a new version of Proton for everyone. They're looking to find issues that are new in this latest testing version.
Valve along with their comrades at CodeWeavers are preparing Proton 5.0-7 as the newest version of their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.
The Proton 5.0-7 release candidate is available today as an opt-in option on Steam for those wanting to try this newest feature update.
  In the mood to play a first-person shooter on your Linux PC? Can’t figure out what to play? Follow along with this list as we go over the 5 best free Linux FPS shooters to checkout!
In this list, we discussed 5 best free Linux FPS shooters to checkout. With that said, there are many other great free FPS shooters on the Linux platform that we haven’t brought up. What are your favorite FPS shooters to play on Linux? Let us know in the comment section below!
Iris and the Giant was a genuine surprise when it launched in early March, a roguelike deck-builder with a nice narrative twist and a fun tactical battles.
What is it? Iris and the Giant is a fusion of a collectible card game with RPG and roguelike elements. You play as Iris, who must brave her fears in her imaginary world. Behind the game’s unique minimalist art style players will explore a touching story of a young woman facing her inner demons and soothing the raging giant inside.
Another huge update for Barotrauma, a co-op game about alien ocean exploration in a submarine. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, obviously, and now there's wreckage to find and explore too.
What is it? Barotrauma is a 2D co-op survival horror submarine simulator, inspired by games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Space Station 13. It’s a Sci-Fi game that combines ragdoll physics and alien sea monsters with teamwork and existential fear.
Ufflegrim is yet another game to add a card-based deck-building element to it and it does so with a traditional roguelike. Very strange and yet I love it. Setting itself apart from other similar types, in Ufflegrim you're not only building up a deck of creatures to summon you're also moving around each level yourself too. You can attack, you have health but it's all about your deck.
It's what now? Ufflegrim is a traditional roguelike with card-based, creature summoning combat. Every enemy is not only a challenge, but also a chance to capture unique allies and abilities for your deck. Take on the pilgrimage and travel to the bottom of the 100 floors.
Resolutiion, the Hyper Light Drifter-like from developer Monolith of Minds is getting ever closer to release and now it's confirmed to be launching on GOG and a demo is up too. While the demo news isn't new, being available on GOG is which was formally announced today. It's good to see more DRM-free releases of course.
What is it? Resolutiion is a fast-paced action-adventure created by two angry German brothers leading a band of vagrants who loaded it with lovely pixels, dirty jokes, deep ideas and badassemotional tunes for 20 hours of punishing combat, rewarding exploration, and layered storytelling. Will you be the player or will you be played? In the Infinite Empire nothing is as it seems.
  We continue working on improving the usability of Cantor. Another important change in 20.04 is the new feature collapsible cells which allows the user to collapse the results of a calculation. This is useful when doing many calculation in one worksheet and there is the need to hide some of the results temporarily to get more place in the worksheet or to be less distracted by what is not needed right now. For this, we introduced a new control element for every cell in the worksheet. By double clicking on this new element the result part of the cell is collapsed.
Alternatively, the results can be hidden by selecting “Hide Results” from the context menu of the command entry in the worksheet. This step can be similarly undone to show the results again.
  Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Tutorial: The Best Gnome Shell Extensions For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
We all know that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is the latest version of the Ubuntu and it is already available for the download.
If you have missed out coverage on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, You may want to check...
Endless OS 3.8.0 has just been released, which brings GNOME 3.36 to our users. There’s a particularly big overlap between “improvements in Endless OS” and “improvements in GNOME” this cycle, so I wanted to take a minute to look back over what the Endless team worked on in GNOME 3.36.
Fedora 32 was released today after a full six months of development. There are a lot of improvements and new changes included in this release. You can read the announcement here and the complete release notes here.
This release is particularly exciting for the NeuroFedora team. It also marks the first release of our first deliverable: the CompNeuro Lab ISO image! The aim of developing such ready to install ISO images that are packed with the necessary tools is to enable users to quickly set up their computers and get down to work, instead of wasting precious time and effort on installing tools individually by hand. While we hope that this will enable researchers by providing them easy access to Free/Open Source research tools, we also hope that the platform will serve as a teaching aid in Computational Neuroscience courses.
Fedora 32 was released today with a ton of new features. In this Linux quick tip we will show you how to upgrade from Fedora 31 to Fedora 32 in the GUI and on the Command Line.
From your desktop go to the Application Overview and select Software. The quickest way to accomplish this is the hit the super key (sometimes call the Windows key or Systems Key) then type software.
As Fedora Workstation 32 was released today I ended up looking back at our efforts to drain the swamp over the last 6 years. In April of 2014 I wrote a blog post outlining our vision for the Fedora Workstation effort and what we wanted to achieve with it. I hadn’t looked at that blog post in years, but it was interesting going back to it and realize that while some of the details have changed it is still the vision we are pursuing today; to keep draining the swamp and make Fedora Workstation a top notch operating system for developers and makers in general. Which I guess is one of the hallmarks of a decent vision, that it allows for the details to change without invalidating it.
One of my pet peeves at the time with Linux as a desktop operating system was that so many of the so called efforts to make linux user friendly was essentially duck taping over the problems, creating fragile solutions that often made it harder for us to really move forward. In the yers since we addressed a lot of major swamp issues with our efforts around HiDPI & Bolt (getting ahead of hardware enablement for new monitors and Thunderbolt devices respectively), Flatpaks, GNOME Software and AppStream (making applications discoverable, deployable and maintainable), Wayland (making your desktop secure and future proof), LVFS and firmware handling (making them easily available for Linux users), Finger print reader standard (ensuring your hardware is fully supported) and coming up with ways to improve the lives of developers with improvements to the terminal or Fedora Toolbox, our developer pet container tool.
Working on these and other issues we early realized that a model where hardware gets enabled in a reactive manner, in response to new laptops being sold, was never going to yield a good result for our users. As long as we followed that model people where bound to always hit issues with laptops as they came out and then have to deal with those issues for the first 6-12 Months of its life. This is why I am so excited about our new partnership with Lenovo that we pre-announced on Friday as it is both the culmination of our efforts over the last 6 years, but also the starting point of a new era in terms of how we work with hardware makers. So instead of us spending a ton of time trying to reverse engineers basic drivers we can now rely on our hardware partner and their component vendors providing that and we can instead focus on what I call high level hardware enablement. Meaning that as we see new features coming into laptops and computers we can try to improve the infrastructure in the operating system to be able to take full advantage of said hardware, and we can do so in collaboration with the hardware makers knowing that once we provide the infrastructure they will ensure to provide drivers and similar fitting into that infrastructure. Our work on fingerprint readers and thunderbolt support for instance has been two great early examples of that.
The Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, Fedora, has a brand new release today with Fedora 32 showing off some of the latest of what open source has to offer. Fedora 32 comes shortly after they announced a teaming up with Lenovo to provide Fedora on some ThinkPad laptops.
Much like the recent Ubuntu 20.04 release it includes a ton of major packaging upgrades, such as the recent GNOME 3.36 desktop which is in their main Fedora Workstation edition. This includes all the goodies like a new lock screen, an easy to use desktop Extensions application, a better notification system, a do not disturb mode and more UI revamps. You can get other desktop environments too with their various "Spins" like KDE with Plasma, Xfce and more.
The final stable release of Fedora 32 is now available for download, packing in six months worth of development.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: this is supposed to be a blog about Ubuntu. But hey: I like to keep an eye on what other Linux distros are up to and, following on from news that Lenovo is putting Fedora on its laptops, the release of Fedora 32 Workstation feels like a natural extension to that.
So, what’s new in Fedora 32 exactly?
Well, this version of the rpm-based Linux distro ships nearly every nut-and-bolt of the recent GNOME 3.36 release, including the blurry new lock screen, UI theme improvements, and do-not-disturb toggle, and features the redesigned GNOME Clocks app as a default app.
I want to upgrade the Fedora version 31 to Fedora 32 Linux server using the command line option. How do I upgrade Fedora 31 to 32?
Fedora Linux is another popular open-source Linux distribution targeted at desktop/laptop and server users who want cutting edge software in binary format. The latest version of Fedora is 32. Fedora version 32 released on April 28, 2020. This page shows you how to upgrade the existing version of Fedora Linux 31 to 32 using the dnf command.
It’s here! We’re proud to announce the release of Fedora 32. Thanks to the hard work of thousands of Fedora community members and contributors, we’re celebrating yet another on-time release.
If you just want to get to the bits without delay, head over to https://getfedora.org/ right now. For details, read on!
Today, Fedora 32 becomes available for download.
The Fedora operating system may be named after a hat, but I consider it more similar to an old, worn-in, pair of sneakers. It may not be the trendiest or flashiest Linux distro, but it is comfortable as hell. Sure, Manjaro and MX Linux may be what the "cool kids" are using these days, but Fedora remains the reliable Linux distribution that is always there for you -- fast, stable, and focused on open source. An old comfortable shoe.
Today, Fedora 32 becomes available for download. It comes with GNOME 3.36 which you can read more about here. If you don't like GNOME, it isn't the end of the world -- you can instead choose KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, and more. There is even a special ARM variant of Fedora 32 that will work with Raspberry Pi devices.
Fedora 32 is available now. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system to get the latest features available in Fedora. Fedora Workstation has a graphical upgrade method. Alternatively, Fedora offers a command-line method for upgrading Fedora 30 to Fedora 31.
Before upgrading, visit the wiki page of common Fedora 32 bugs to see if there’s an issue that might affect your upgrade. Although the Fedora community tries to ensure upgrades work well, there’s no way to guarantee this for every combination of hardware and software that users might have.
Each year during Red Hat Summit, we recognize Red Hat Certified Professionals who demonstrate ingenuity, hard work and expertise by making a difference in their organizations. We’re proud to announce that Fabrice Harbulot, cloud engineer and Red Hat Certified Architect Level VII, has been named the 2020 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.
Fabrice has earned several Red Hat certifications and is a Red Hat Certified Specialist in Linux Performance Tuning, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ceph Storage Administration, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Best Practices, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Security: Containers and OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Application Development, Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Server Security and Hardening, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Container Management, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation, Red Hat Certified Engineer in Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Certified Engineer and Red Hat Certified System Administrator.
International Business Machines Corp. IBM, +0.27% announced Tuesday that it was raising its quarterly dividend to $1.63 a share, which marks an increase of a penny. The dividend will be payable on June 10 to shareholders of record as of May 8. IBM said in a release that it has boosted its quarterly dividend for 25 years in a row. "IBM's free cash flow and our strong balance sheet gives us confidence to both invest aggressively in cloud and AI technologies, while also returning value to our shareholders," Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in the release. IBM is "fully committed to [its] dividend even during this unprecedented time," he continued. Shares are up 1.3% in Tuesday morning trading. They've lost 8.6% over the past three months as the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.13% has declined 15%.
A push to reinvent the way developers create applications for the internet has gathered significant momentum, catching even some of its most ardent supporters by surprise.
But even as the popularity of infrastructure based on the Kubernetes platform and microservices surges, the adoption has inevitably brought to light the massive challenges big businesses and large organizations face in overhauling unwieldy infrastructure. To help IT managers navigate this transition, products and services that enable simultaneous management of legacy and new systems are gaining in popularity.
Such “hybrid” products will be one of the main themes of the Red Hat Summit that runs today and Wednesday, a recognition of how critical this area has become to companies trying to modernize their cloud-based infrastructure. Speaking on the eve of the event, Red Hat’s Joe Fernandes said he’s among those excited by the progress being made by microservices, but he remains realistic about the challenges such a shift presents.
In past years, I’ve written heavily about the importance of the open hybrid cloud to the present and future of enterprise IT. Clinging to the old world of corporate datacenters is a path to disruption, while going purely all-in on public cloud workloads can wipe out tens of millions of dollars in existing IT investments, disrupt critical systems and applications, lessen control, and add unpredictable costs. Leaning on the hybrid cloud, blending on-premises, traditional systems and applications with the next generation of cloud-native workloads and infrastructure, provides the best of both worlds, especially when built on a foundation of open technologies.
Hybrid puts control and choice in your hands - the technologies you want to use to give you new capabilities and drive transformation and workloads where you want them. Hybrid cloud offers maximum agility and resiliency - more so than I see available in any singular approach.
The Red Hat Enterprise Open Source Survey1 revealed that more than 55% of enterprises surveyed are expecting to increase their use of containerized applications in 2020. While cloud-native applications represent the future of business innovation, many critical production applications remain based in traditional virtual machines (VMs). Today, we’re working to unify these traditional workloads with the cloud-native future through OpenShift virtualization, a new feature of Red Hat OpenShift built from the KubeVirt community project.
OpenShift virtualization enables IT organizations to bring standard VM-based workloads to Kubernetes, helping eliminate the workflow and development silos that typically exist between traditional and cloud-native application stacks. This makes it easier to migrate and modernize existing applications and services on the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.
JBoss Tools 4.15.0 and Red Hat CodeReady Studio 12.15 for Eclipse 4.15 (2020-03) are now available. For this release, we focused on improving Quarkus and container-based development and fixing bugs. We also updated the Hibernate Tools runtime provider and Java Developer Tools (JDT) extensions, which are now compatible with Java 14. Additionally, we made many UI changes to platform views, dialogs, and toolbars.
At Red Hat, our culture is at the forefront of our success. Technology is only part of the picture, without culture to drive it and nurture it, technology can't solve the problems we face today. Culture isn't something that just happens, you have to work towards fostering the culture you want to see in the workplace. As part of that work, Red Hat champions diversity and inclusion in our company and the larger open source community. We want to share some of what we're doing with you during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience.
Cloud-native applications running in container environments have very different management requirements than virtual-based environments of the past. These requirements are why we are introducing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes -- a new management solution designed to help organizations further extend and scale Red Hat OpenShift, the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes enables organizations to manage their Kubernetes clusters with consistency across the hybrid cloud -- from Red Hat OpenShift deployed on-premises, on bare metal, and on major public cloud providers to native clusters from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It provides the visibility, governance and control that organizations need to easily grow and manage containerized environments. Additionally, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes meets organizations where they are on their application modernization journey -- whether they are setting up their first containerized environments or require more advanced management features like policy enforcement and governance controls to accelerate container deployments.
Welcome to Red Hat Summit 2020 - our first virtual-only Summit. We are all facing unprecedented global events. From the COVID-19 pandemic and the grim situation facing healthcare systems to the worldwide economic struggles the disease is leaving in its wake, why would we even hold a technology conference, virtual or otherwise?
Because we want to help, and we think the best way to do that is by engaging these challenges as a global community. This means putting aside our differences as technology companies, as manufacturers, as government agencies and even as competitors for the common good.
When we started planning Red Hat Summit 2020, we were looking forward to seeing thousands of our closest friends in San Francisco and sharing information about progress and plans for the Red Hat product portfolio through 2020 and beyond. Things didn't go quite as planned, but we're excited today to open the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience and welcome so many more of our customers and partners who might not have been able to join us in person.
  Sochip has launched a $440 V831 development kit for the new Allwinner V831 IP Camera SoC. The Linux-driven, single Cortex-A8 SoC supports H.265 encoding of single HD or lower-res dual-stream video, and features a 0.2-TOPS NPU.
Sochip collaborates with Allwinner on Allwinner-branded low-power camera SoCs such as the 1.2GHz, single Cortex-A7 Allwinner S3 found on Olimex’s still-pending S3-OLinuXino SBC and Sochip Quanzhi S3 development board. Now Sochip and Allwinner have launched a new V831 development kit to showcase another new Cortex-A7-based processor, the new Allwinner V831 IP Camera SoC.
  Sequent Microsystems has launched a $20 “4-Relay” add-on for the Raspberry Pi with four line-switching relays for loads of up to 10A and 250V. The cards can stack up to 8x high for 32 switched relays.
Sequent Microsystems has won Kickstarter funding for a Raspberry Pi add-on card designed to switch multiple lights or appliances. Unlike Sequent’s earlier Raspberry Pi 8-Relay Card, which can stack 8x high for 64 relays, the new 4-Relay card offers switching capability between the relays, with support for up to 10A and 250V loads on each relay.
Keen-eyed hardware and computer science aficionados are already nodding along. But what’s a teletype machine, what’s Baudot, what’s ASCII, what’s ... going on here? Let’s take a crash course in the history of over-wire communication.A teletype machine like the one Verdiell uses in this video was a descendant and subsequence of telegraphy. We see people send and receive telegraphs in old movies, and you can still send and receive telegraphs today. In pop culture, the kind we see is almost always entered by hand by a trained operator using Morse code. Samuel Morse invented his eponymous code in 1838, shortly after the invention of the telegraph. Morse must have quickly realized that a standard way to send individual characters and instructions was vital. But Morse code relies on an individual person, a subjective code of “long” and “short,” and characters coded by variable length strings of these codes.Ãâ°mile Baudot’s namesake code, which followed in the 1870s, turned everything into a standard five bits long. That means one binary bit that’s “on” or “off,” repeated five times, allowing for 32 combinations. Baudot also invented the idea of “shift,” the same one we use today, as a way to change from letters to numbers or symbols. This effectively doubles the character set.
The inevitable and necessary responses to Covid-19 — from the lockdown itself, to the underlying and rapidly approved legislation behind it to the contact tracing apps that are now being developed — raise concerns about our civil liberties that in a different time would all have been hotly debated over a considerable time period. Thanks to Covid-19, time is no longer a luxury at humanity’s disposal.
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Tracking those who have had Covid-19 is a non-technical problem that will not be fixed by technology, but of course technology can provide a tool to facilitate tracking. Public acceptance of the apps is also critical to their utility. If that public acceptance is not achieved, then we risk yoyoing between lockdown and freedom, ultimately prolonging the length of time where the economy will be impacted.
The moral requirement on the public to accept these apps will be high and governments therefore hold a heavy burden of accountability for the choices they make under their emergency powers, as well as the long-term impact these will have. The only way to reassure the public that their privacy is adequately protected and to achieve this acceptance is to open source these applications.
License-Review mailing list topics for December 2019: - ESA Permissive PL v2.3, - Mulan Permissive Software License v1 and v2 - LGPL-2+-KDE (Legacy) - Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4) - CasperLabs Open Source License (COSL) - BSD-1-Clause (Legacy) - MIT-0
Lawrence Rosen references a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) involving the use of FRAND in utilizing patents around mobile communications standards and argues that FRAND fails in its attempt to bring logic to the process. Rosen also argues, based on feedback from a patent attorney, that it then significantly increases litigation costs.
libcurl is used in thousands of different applications and devices for client-side Internet transfer and powers a significant part of what flies across the wires of the world a normal day.
Over the years as the lead curl and libcurl developer I’ve answered many questions and I’ve seen every imaginable mistake done. Some of the mistakes seem to happen more frequently and some of the mistake seem easier than others to avoid.
I’m going to go over a list of things that users often get wrong with libcurl, perhaps why they do and of course I will talk about how to fix those errors.
For the past month or so I’ve been living my life exclusively indoors and online. This new normal means that everything has shifted to a virtual realm — working, connecting with family and friends, and even going to the gym. We’re all left with no choice but to use online services in order to live a normal-ish life.
So what can we do if we’re not comfortable with sharing every personal detail of our lives with the companies that provide those services? It turns out, we can fight back. Especially now that we have more free time.
Hubs Cloud is a new product offering from the Mozilla Mixed Reality group that allows companies and organizations to create their own private, social spaces that work with desktop, mobile, and VR headsets. Hubs Cloud contains the underlying architecture that runs hubs.mozilla.com, and is being offered in Early Access on AWS. With Hubs Cloud, it is now possible for external organizations to deploy, customize and configure their own unique instances of the Hubs platform.
The Picture-in-Picture feature in the Firefox browser makes multitasking with video content easy, no window shuffling necessary. With Picture-in-Picture, you can play a video in a separate, scalable window that pops out for viewing on top of all your windows. It stays and plays while you go about your other business on other tabs or do things outside of from Firefox.
In total, 12 apps met Mozilla’s Minimum Security Standards: Zoom, Google Duo/HangoutsMeet, Apple FaceTime, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Jitsi Meet, Signal, Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans, GoTo Meeting, and Cisco WebEx.
The widely used JavaScript framework is moving forward with a new release that adds diagnostic reporting and experimental WebAssembly features.
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 705 other packages on CRAN.
Dart is a client-optimized programming language for fast apps on multiple platforms. Compile to ARM & x64 machine code for mobile, desktop, and backend. Or compile to JavaScript for the web.
Dart is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented, class defined, garbage-collected, scripting language using a C-style syntax that transcompiles optionally into JavaScript. It supports interfaces, mixins, abstract classes, reified generics, static typing, and a sound type system.
Dart is developed by Google and is used to build mobile, desktop, backend and web applications.
My office is very far away from the door, yet, from time to time, KDAB gets deliveries and, as I’m always there, while others come and go, people ask me if I can receive the parcels. I figured it would be cool if I could somehow stay at my desk and get notified if someone rings the bell.
Hmmm…
Some years back, we had fixed up a make-do basic doorbell to cover a period of time when our normal one wasn’t working.
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The rtl_433 project has dozens of decoders of various standard protocols, including the one used by our doorbell. It’s possible to output received data as json, so I set it up to do that. Then I added some glue node.js code to parse the json followed by a webhook to our internal chat. The code is really ugly so I’m definitely not showing it here, but it seems to work :-).
Finally, I tried using an old stick which I had lying around at home to support the DVB-T, but it seems that the stick cannot receive it as well as the DVB-T2 one. Furthermore, since, by this time, I had added an additional doorbell so I could also hear the bell from the other door in the office, (meaning it needed to receive from two places), I stuck with the DVB-T2 one for now, so I didn’t really need the extra stick.
Most programming languages’ grammars fall into the category of Context-Free Grammar (CFG), or sometimes Context-Sensitive Grammar (CSG). What about C++? It turns out parsing C++’s grammar is literally undecidable. In other words, if you have a compiler that parses all valid C++ sources perfectly, you have solved the Halting Problem.
C language is profoundly convenient and is utilized for scripting framework applications. C is a universally useful programming language; it can proficiently take a shot at big business applications. Producing and designing game applications is quite easy when working with C. Learning C language is not that difficult as it is written in basic English language except for the libraries that are specific to it. For that, a proper set of C programming books will serve its purpose. Uses of C are unlimited, but some of the basic uses of C include developing desktop and system applications. C is a very simple, mid-level, and structured programming language; it is super fast and has a rich library.
Python's print() function is typically used to display text either in the command-line or in the interactive interpreter, depending on how the Python program is executed. However, we can change its behavior to write text to a file instead of to the console.
Back in 2017, I wrote about how to create Python modules using Rust. Things changed in between, especially PyO3 project now makes it super easy to create such extension modules.
A common complaint heard about Rust is the size of the binary it produces. They are various reasons explaining why Rust binaries are generally bigger that ones produced with lower level languages such as C. The main one is Cargo, Rust's package manager and building tool, producing static binaries by default. While larger binaries are generally not much of an issue for desktop or server applications, it may become more of a problem on embedded systems where storage and/or memory may be very limited.
GStreamer is used extensively at Collabora to help our clients to build embedded multimedia solutions. With Rust gaining traction among the GStreamer community as an alternative to C to write GStreamer applications and plugins, we began wondering if the size of such Rust plugins would be a problem for embedded systems, and what could be done to reduce sizes as much as possible.
Long-term Java pain points including slow startup time, slow time to peak performance, and large footprint would be addressed by a proposal being floated in the OpenJDK community by Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle’s Java platform group.
Called Project Leyden, the proposal would deal with these pain points by introducing the concept of static images to the Java platform and the JDK. A static image is a standalone program, derived from an application that runs that application, and no other. A static image is also a “closed world” that cannot load classes from outside the image or spin new bytecodes at runtime.
Mental resilience is the quality of being able to snap back after a setback, catastrophe, or anything bad that life throws at you. We all need resilience right now. For some of us, it's second nature, while others may be discovering or desiring to find that resilience because of the current COVID-19 crisis and the widespread stay-at-home orders.
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Use the extra time that the Coronavirus affords you to learn new things. I'm using some of my own newfound learning time to bone up on Kubernetes—a writing topic I've yet to hit—because it'll help me out in the future.
But it doesn't have to be all business; learning new things is also fun. For instance, I've been a huge Bill Murray fan since I was a kid. After hearing stories about random Bill Murray encounters in Charleston, SC, I wanted to know more, so I took the time to watch a documentary and read a book of these stories. Before the Coronavirus outbreak, I never had the time to look into something like this; I was too busy researching something about the cloud or DevOps for my next article assignment.
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Being on forced remote work/quarantine/lockdown, without a million distractions from your own thoughts, can make those feelings of anxiousness or loneliness feel even worse. So don't be hard so hard on yourself if you're not automatically adjusting to this new way of life. It'll take time.
Relishing your humanity during this lockdown means taking care of yourself and, when you are able, taking care of others. It doesn't have to be financially or physically; it can literally just mean leaving room for other people to have their own responses to this situation. Most of us are feeling a lot of the same things in these uncertain times, so it's important to be understanding.
It's amazing how doing this for others can make you feel supported too, and can make recovering from mistakes and setbacks so much easier.
Folks who acutely dig into this website might know that I have been taking more pictures recently, as I got a new camera since January 2018: a beautiful Fujifilm X-T2 that I really like. Recently, I went out on a photo shoot in the rain. It was intermittent, light rain when I left so I figured the "weather proofing" (dpreview.com calls this "environmentally sealed") would keep the camera secure. After an hour of walking outside, however, rain intensified and I was just quickly becoming more and more soaked. Still trusting the camera would function, I carried on. But after about 90 minutes of dutiful work, the camera just turned off and wouldn't power back on.
It had drowned.
I couldn't believe it; "but this is supposed to be waterproof! This can't be happening!", I thought. I tried swapping out the battery for a fresh one, which was probably a bad idea (even if I was smart enough to do this under cover): still no luck, yet I could still not believe it was dead, so I figured I would look at it later when I was home. I still eventually removed the battery after a while, remembering that it mattered.
Public Health England (PHE) says it has found 1,783 "possible/probable" cases - on top of 304 confirmed infections across jails in England and Wales. PHE's report says there have been no "explosive outbreaks" in prisons, but "significant threat levels" remain. Measures to quarantine new and at-risk inmates are needed for a year, it adds. The report, published by the Ministry of Justice, says access to testing for prisoners has been "limited and variable". "Therefore, the number of laboratory confirmed cases reported does not represent the true burden of infection in the prison system," it said. "During outbreaks, where a number of positive laboratory samples have been received (usually around five or more) on prisoners who have been swabbed, then subsequent cases who meet the clinical case definition are included as 'possible/probable cases'."
A pre-auth SQL injection bug leading to remote code execution is at the heart of a data-stealing campaign against XG firewalls, using the Asnarok trojan.
Attackers have been targeting the Sophos XG Firewall (both physical and virtual versions) using a zero-day exploit, according to the security firm – with the ultimate goal of dropping the Asnarok malware on vulnerable appliances.
Sophos said in a posting updated on Monday that the bug in question is a pre-authentication SQL injection vulnerability (a CVE is forthcoming) that leads to remote code execution (RCE). It affects systems configured with either the administration interface (called the “HTTPS admin service”) or the user portal exposed to the WAN zone.
“In addition, firewalls manually configured to expose a firewall service (e.g. SSL VPN) to the WAN zone that shares the same port as the admin or user portal were also affected,” the firm explained. “For reference, the default configuration of XG Firewall is that all services operate on unique ports.”
In this recently published white paper, "Staying Ahead of Cyberthreats: Protecting Your Linux Systems with Oracle Ksplice," we explain why regular operating system patching is so important and how Oracle Ksplice can help better protect your Linux systems.
In the face of increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats, protecting IT systems has become vitally important. To help administrators more easily and regularly apply Linux updates, Oracle Ksplice offers an automated zero-downtime solution that simplifies the patching process. Ksplice allows users to automate patching of the Linux kernel, both Xen and KVM hypervisors, and critical user space libraries. It is currently the only solution to offer user space patching.
Join Oracle’s Simon Coter, Product Management Director, Oracle Linux and Virtualization, and Storware’s Marcin Kubacki, CTO and VP, for a live webinar on Thursday, April 30, 2020.
On February 28 2020, the Defence Information Systems Agency (DISA) released the Oracle Linux 7 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) Release 1 Version 1 (R1V1). Oracle has implemented the published STIG in Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) format and included it in the latest release of the scap-security-guide package for Oracle Linux 7. This can be used in conjunction with the OpenSCAP tool shipped with Oracle Linux to validate a server against the published implementation guide. The validation process can also suggest and in some cases automatically apply remediation in cases where compliance is not met.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, java-1.7.0-openjdk, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, qemu-kvm, and thunderbird), Debian (qemu and ruby-json), Fedora (chromium, haproxy, and libssh), openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine and teeworlds), Oracle (kernel), SUSE (apache2, git, kernel, ovmf, and xen), and Ubuntu (cups, file-roller, and re2c).
According to conventional wisdom, the way to extract patent royalties from Geman corporations is the pursuit of injunctive relief. While a reform process is underway, the corridor for any "reform" (a misnomer, thus in quotes) is so very narrow that it won't have any impact on negotiation dynamics. The pro-reform camp missed the opportunity: instead of acting like piranhas that smell blood in the water and then kill their prey, they kept making the kinds of modest political demands (only ultra-rare exceptions for extreme cases of egregiously abusive conduct) with which they got the reform process started, and they continued to limit themselves by operating only within the framework of associations (a recipe for failure). Now it's too late to move into a higher gear, and the German patent injunction regime is here to stay.
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Under German patent law, members of the executive board are personally liable, a fact that patent holders can exploit. However, it works only against executives who live in Germany or at least some other EU member state. Otherwise, cross-border enforcement is unlikely to succeed. Hypothetically speaking, enforcement against a U.S.-based CEO would probably work only if he flew to Germany on a private jet that could be confiscated. The managing directors of local subsidiaries can be sued, but only if their entities actually sell products--not if they are merely marketing agencies within a global group structure.
Germany- and EU-based C-level executives can also be scared into settlements by threatening with criminal action. Willful patent infringements are a punishable crime in Germany (and the pseudo-reform that is in the making won't change a thing about that either), though the hurdle is reasonably high.
Sometimes I think of myself as the creativity machine. A cool part of this system is that I have a right to seek and obtain patent protection for my inventions (if any). The USPTO is treating Mr. Dabus differently. When Dabus filed for patent protection in 2019, the examiner refused to examine the patent and the PTO Commissioners Office has confirmed the refusal.
The problem is that Mr. Dabus (DABUS) is not human, but rather is a machine – a creativity machine.
App’n No. 16/524,350 was filed listing DABUS as inventor and identifying DABUS as an “artificial intelligence” that “autonomously generated” the invention. Stephen Thaler created DABUS, then DABUS created the invention. Thaler then filed as the applicant.
In briefing to the PTO, the patent applicant explained that DABUS conceived of the idea of the invention and recognized its “novelty and salience.” In short, DABUS did everything necessary to be listed as an inventor with one exception — DABUS is not a human person.
In a post-truth world, it is more tempting than ever to evaluate data based on gut instinct, intuition, and anecdotal evidence. It is thus refreshing when results of a robust statistical analysis are published, even if the response to the ultimate outcome is, "Yeah, we knew that."
Case in point, patent eligibility. Most patent practitioners are likely to agree that the Supreme Court's Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank decision made it more likely to receive 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 rejections during prosecution before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Many of these practitioners would also likely concede that Alice made it less predictable as to whether a given claimed invention would run into eligibility issues. These same practitioners would probably concur that the Federal Circuit's Berkheimer v. HP case as well as the USPTO's 2019 patent eligibility guidance (PEG) made it less likely to receive such a rejection and resulted in the eligibility inquiry being more predictable.
The State of Georgia claims copyright to its Annotated Official Code (Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA)). The (e)book includes every Georgia statute and a set of annotations (including summaries of cases and articles discussing the statutes). The OCGA is created by a state entity – the Code Revision Commission – directed by the state legislature. LexisNexis actually did the work of writing the annotations, but copyright (if any) originated with Georgia as a work-made-for-hire.
Public.Resource.Org (PRO) is a nonprofit organization facilitates public access to government records. PRO copied the OCGA and began freely distributing it to the public. Georgia then sued for copyright infringement.
After some amount of litigation, Georgia eventually stopped arguing that the statutes themselves were protectable by copyright. However, the state continued to argue that the annotations were copyrightable since they did not carry the force of law.
