I am an IT professional with over 15 years of experience in a number of different roles—systems administrator, senior Linux administrator, DevOps engineer, automation consultant, and senior scrum master. I started learning Linux on Ubuntu but shifted to CentOS as a sysadmin, and later I moved to Fedora for personal use. But my joy for technology started much earlier than my first Linux distribution, and it came in the form of a movie.
My favorite movie is Hackers. The best scene occurs at the beginning of the movie. The movie starts with a group of special agents breaking into a house to catch the infamous hacker, Zero Cool. We soon discover that Zero Cool is actually 11-year-old Dade Murphy, who managed to crash 1,507 computer systems in one day. He is charged for his crimes, and his family is heavily fined. Additionally, he is banned from using computers or touch-tone telephones until he is 18.
Nokia, born in 1865 in Finland, is the answer to the IT history trivia question: What company made the world’s No. 1-selling smartphone (well, they were sort of smart back in the 1990s and early 2000s) before BlackBerry, iPhone and the Androids?
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007--which subsequently ran rings around every other mobile phone available at the time and, as it turned out, for years to come--Nokia took the hint and did what other smart businesses have done: It pivoted. 2007 was the year it started investing heavily in telecom hardware and software, and in 2013 it sold its mobile phone division to Microsoft for €5.4 billion. In 2015 it acquired Alcatel-Lucent, a respected U.S. provider of IP and cloud networking and ultra-broadband fixed and wireless access solutions for service providers.
While consumers have been buying iPhones and various makes of Android smartphones, Nokia has quietly been rebuilding its fortunes on the enterprise side, and it’s done well. It has thousands of customers--mainly in Europe and Asia--and provides telecom equipment for modest little companies such as British Telecom, Apple, Equinix and others like them.
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That’s where Nokia SR Linux, launched this week, comes into play. Nokia claims it is the first fully modern microservices-based NOS, and the SR Linux NDK (NetOps development kit) exposes a complete set of programming capabilities. Applications are easily integrated through modern tools like gRPC (remote procedure call) and protobuf, with no recompiling, no language limitations and no dependencies.
SR Linux also inherits Nokia’s battle-tested Internet protocols from the service router operating system (SROS), which is the trademark of the huge installed base of Nokia carrier-grade routers. SR Linux is in effect the industry’s first flexible and open network application development environment.
**Gutenprint**, **HPLIP**, and **htop** from Slackware software set AP.
Python is one of the primary languages for IoT devices. With runtimes such as CircuitPython and MicroPython, they are ideal for the really small IoT chips.
Maybe you've heard of the Circuit Playground Express, BBC micro:bit, or the fancy Adafruit CLUE. They aren't too expensive (ranging from $25 to $50 each). But for large groups such as classrooms, this can be a lot of money. Moreover, getting your hands on these devices can sometimes be tricky as well.
Ok, so rc4 was small, and now a week later, rc5 is large.
It's not _enormous_, but of all the 5.x kernels so far, this is the rc5 with the most commits. So it's certainly not optimal. It was actually very quiet the beginning of the week, but things picked up on Friday. Like they do..
That said, a lot of it is because of the networking fixes that weren't in rc4, and I'm still not hearing any real panicky sounds from people, and things on the whole seem to be progressing just fine.
So a large rc5 to go with a large release doesn't sound all that worrisome, when we had an unusually small rc4 that precedes it and explains it.
Maybe I'm in denial, but I still think we might hit the usual release schedule. A few more weeks to go before I need to make that decision, so it won't be keeping me up at night.
The diffstat for rc5 doesn't look particularly worrisome either. Yes, there's a (relatively) high number of commits, but they tend to be small. Nothing makes me go "umm".
In addition to the outright fixes, there's a few cleanups that are just prep for 5.9. They all look good and simple too.
Anyway, networking (counting both core and drivers) amounts to about a third of the patch, with the rest being spread all over: arch updates (arm64, s390, arc), drivers (gpu, sound, md, pin control, gpio), tooling (perf and selftests). And misc noise all over.
The appended shortlog gives the details, nothing really looks all that exciting. Which is just as it should be at this time.
Go forth and test.
Thanks,
Linus
Linux
overlordoverseerprincipal developer Linus Torvalds has signed off on a new policy to adopt inclusive language across the project.
A Git commit adopted changes recommended by kernel developer Dan Williams, with the result that Linux will no longer refer to masters, slaves or blacklists.
In their place coders will be expected to use alternatives such as “primary” and “secondary” relationships, or refer to “leaders” and “followers”, or even “directors” and “performers”.
Blacklists are to become either “denylists” or “blocklists” and whitelists will become “allowlists” or “passlists”.
Torvalds’ commit was made on July 10th and said he thinks there’s no need for the change to wait for the next merge window for a new cut of the Linux kernel.
Torvalds later offered his weekly state of the kernel post in which he perhaps tremulously observed that while last week’s Linux 5.8-rc4 was “small”, “now a week later, rc5 is large.”
Similarly, the recommended alternatives for ‘blacklist / whitelist’ are ‘denylist / allowlist’ and ‘blocklist / passlist’. As you can see, Torvalds has given developers the choice to adopt any of the suggested ones.
“The discussion has tapered off as well as the incoming ack, review, and sign-off tags. I did not see a reason to wait for the next merge window,” reads the commit on Linux 5.8 repository.
According to the commit, old terms will be allowed only when developers are updating code for an existing (as of 2020) hardware or protocol, or when devs are dealing with specifications that mandate those terms.
The decision comes after Linux maintainer Dan Williams raised a proposal that read, “Recent events have prompted a Linuxposition statement on inclusive terminology. Given that Linux maintains a coding-style and its own idiomatic set of terminology here is a proposal to answer the call to replace non-inclusive terminology.”
Linus Torvalds, the principal engineer of the Linux kernel, has approved new terminology for its code and documentation to promote the inclusive language. The change abolishes terms such as blacklist, master, and slave.
There are no formal alternatives in place, but Torvalds suggested plenty of choices. Suggested replacements for master/slave are primary/secondary, controller/device, requester/responder, and main/replica.
Alternatives for blacklist/whitelist are denylist/allowlist and blocklist/passlist.
[...]
In May, after George Floyd’s death in the US, a string of protests sprung up worldwide to support Black Lives Matter initiatives. In a way to show solidarity, the tech community proposed to get rid of terms such as blacklist and slave.
Several major product and programming language teams including Twitter, Chrome, Android, Curl, Go, and Microsoft have also adopted alternative terminology.
We are pleased to announce that the Android Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
A few years ago the Android team announced their desire to try to set a path for creating a Generic Kernel Image (GKI) which would enable the decoupling of Android kernel releases from hardware enablement. Since then, much work has been done by many parties to make this vision a reality. Last year’s Linux Plumber’s Android microconference brought about work on monitoring and stabilizing the Android in-kernel ABI, solutions to issues associated with modules and supplier-consumer dependencies have landed in the upstream Linux kernel, and vendors have started migrating from using the ION driver to the DMA-BUF heaps that are now supported in upstream Linux. For a report on progress made since last year MC see here.
Torvalds wrote this statement against the backdrop of rumors that, in Intel’s Alder Lake processors, the AVX-512, apparently, will not be. By the way, Torvalds himself recently for the first time in 15 years replaced the Intel processor with AMD product.
I was thinking how I can build a musical instrument in software. Nothing new here actually, there are even applications like VMPK that fit the bill. But this is also about learning as I have started to be interested in music software.
This is how Minuit is born. The name come from a mix of a play on word where, in French, Minuit is midnight and MIDI is midday. MIDI of course is the acronym Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which is the technology at the heart of computer aided music. Also minuit sounds a bit like minuet which is a dance of social origin.
I rely on desktop feed reader apps to keep tabs on the multitude of projects, repos, blogs, and developer postings needed to feed this site (and thus you) with fresh content regularly.
Overall I prefer the simplicity of Feeds (formerly GNOME Feeds, sometimes referred to as gFeeds) to NewsFlash. While the former isn’t as featured as the latter it feels leaner in use, renders posts cleaner, and yields to convention more.
But if NewsFlash ever adds Feedly support though, I’d adopt it in a heart beat!
One small note: this app uses its own built-in scraper to ‘fetch’ blog posts so that you can read them in-app, without needing to use a browser. This is convenient but be aware that when reading our site you won’t be able to see in-article ‘elements’ such as info boxes, review boxes, image comparisons, image galleries, in-post callouts, themed Flatpak, Snap and other buttons, one-line article summaries, or pull quotes.
Everyone likes to set up their workspaces in a specific way; it helps your productivity and makes life easier to have things organized in a way that feels organic and to have an environment that feels good to you. That definitely applies to terminals too; that's probably why there are so many terminal options available.
When starting on a new computer, the very first thing I do is set up my terminal to make it my own.
My preferred terminal app is terminator because of its minimalist design and built-in windowing options. But it gets more complex from there. I would describe my preferred terminal style as "feature-rich yet, keeping it minimal." That balance is one I'm often fine-tuning.
Embr, a game that pokes fun at the rise of the gig economy by letting anyone tackle fires adds a whole new game mode.
With my initial look at the game on Stadia I found it to be pretty amusing, although it does still feel a little basic. This update appears to be the start of Muse Games expanding on the promise of it, putting a new spin on it by combining the firefighting with food delivery.
Darkest Dungeon: The Butcher's Circus, the free DLC that adds in an online PvP mode will be coming to Linux really soon going by their latest update.
This special PvP mode is entirely separate to the campaign, giving you access to a new set of heroes to fight with. While it's currently only available for Windows officially, Red Hook Studios have been working to iron out all the kinks that came with it before rolling it out to other platforms.
Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, the promising looking top-down WW1 survival horror CONSCRIPT has been granted an extension to their campaign. Originally due to finish on July 16, they've now got until July 23 to hit the $30,000 Australian dollars (about €£16,559) goal.
"During the First World War, a lone French soldier must navigate twisted trenches, scavenge for limited supplies and solve complex puzzles - all whilst fighting for survival in the midst of mankind’s most brutal and horrifying conflict."
Some parts of developing games can end up quite tedious like manually placing down tiles for 2D games, and it seems Tilekit might be able to help with that.
Tilekit is a tilemap editor, one that's centred around pattern-based auto tiling. It's quite clever and could end up being a nice time-saver. Tilekit works by using an input map of basic tiles and a set of user-defined rules to create the resultant output map from your tileset.
OBS Studio is the all-in-one tool for streaming your video in real-time. It is free to use, open-source, and supports all major platforms including Linux. In this article, I will walk you through a tour of OBS Studio. You will learn how easy it is to stream your video from your Linux computer.
Wow, the end of another week over here in the surprisingly hot and sunny UK. Perfect weather to be sat inside playing games and there's been plenty of that here.
Thanks to the news of Celeste coming to Stadia, I was reminded of the fact that Celeste was in the recent itch.io charity bundle so I've been able to give it a thorough go after only previously playing it at a friends PC. I already liked it a lot but now I've sunk plenty more hours into it I'm totally blown away by it. It's truly no surprise to me now why it has amassed such a following, like on Steam where it has over twenty thousand views an an overall Overwhelmingly Positive rating.
If you’re new to Linux, check out our switcher’s guide before reading this, as it helps to know the basics. There’s no one distro that’s “best” for gaming, but Ubuntu-based distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Pop!_OS are good options for their widespread support and helpful communities. If you have a different Linux environment on your system, you may have to research the best way to install the right packages and drivers. However, you can almost certainly get games working.
Before trying anything, you should make sure your distro comes with the requisite graphics drivers. If not, Nvidia users should grab the company’s official proprietary drivers, and AMD users should install the open-source Mesa drivers. The procedure for installing drivers may vary from system to system, so we won’t get into it too deeply here, but I used these instructions for Linux Mint for the drivers and these instructions for some extra Vulkan packages, which produced good results.
Now, before we continue, temper your expectations just a tad. While Linux gaming is easier than ever, it still isn’t on par with Windows. Some games won’t run at all, and others may have small graphical quirks, or decreased performance. Others may require some Googling and command-line tweaking to get playable. The experience isn’t exactly smooth as butter yet-it’s still very Linux-y-but once you have the basics down, you might be surprised at how many games you’re able to run. Here are your options.
In comparison to different Android gaming genres, MOBA is a newcomer. But this short time of presence is enough for this extensively exciting game to get immense popularity. However, MOBA is the short form of a long name gaming genre that we know as Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. The uniqueness of this game lets you enjoy fighting on the battlefield side by side with your friends though you are staying far away from each other. It’s like maintaining a connection without friends in the gaming world. If you love to try one, it should be one of the best MOBAs for Android. Otherwise, you may not find the true excitement of playing these games.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.13 Beta!
Here are some excerpts from our change log:
New Experimental Plugins
Thanks to Alexis Jeandet for initial support for the Meson build system!
Thanks to IncrediBuild for contributing their Qt Creator integration!
You need to open Help > About Plugins (or Qt Creator > About Plugins on macOS) and enable these plugins before you can use them.
Editing
We updated LLVM for the C++ code model to LLVM 10, implicitly improving support for C++20 features.
We fixed many smaller issues with the C++ code model...
Welcome back to this Sketch Bridge for Qt Design Studio Tutorial, in the last part we created our first button and got it working with it's different states in Qt Design Studio (referred to as qds for the rest of the tutorial). In this part we're going to go back in and create a menu component from instances of this button and look at overriding the icons and text for each instance.
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Here we can adjust the size and colors of our rectangle until we are happy with it and in this case we can leave the single settings set to merge as we just want a simple single asset for this to begin with.
Software on a computing platform such as Haiku is typically distributed as a package. Without a packaging system it would be hard for users to install software and because software often depends on other software, the chain of dependencies would be difficult for a user to resolve themselves. To orchestrate the distribution and management of the packages, Haiku has a packaging system which consists of applications, online tools, on-host tools and software libraries. One aspect of the packaging system is the coordination and identification of repositories.
This is going to come as something of a shock to most of you, I'm afraid. Some of you may even know this already from the Puppy Linux Users Group page on Facebook.
It is with great sadness that I have to report the passing, on the 22nd May this year, of the revered host of the Murga-Linux Puppy Linux Discussion Forum....John de Murga. The man who hosted, and paid for the Murga-Linux Forum out of his own pocket for nearly 16 years, and without whom the current Puppy Linux membership wouldn't have become what it is today.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXNd0sLYPDRBTa8eMW9CTQO266wfVKCssSWkPB0UAY9KoSXA/viewform
JM spent many years as an analyst/programmer in the banking sector, and was single-handedly responsible for some of the sector's cornerstone software which is still in use today.
It's unclear at this point in time whether John's passing was directly related to Covid-19 or to other, unrelated causes. Hopefully, further details will emerge in due course.
As of yesterday afternoon, the Murga-Linux forum, without warning, went into automatic "maintenance mode".....and since there's no-one around to fix it any longer, we witness the passing of an era, in addition to the loss of an awful lot of useful information.
In this video, we are looking at Neptune OS 6.5. Enjoy!
In my opinion openSUSE is a distribution which does a lot of things right. The project offers a lot of download options, covering a range of CPU architectures and desktop environments without its download options becoming overwhelming. The project's documentation is usually easy to find and read.
The project has an unusual style and its installer, menu layouts, and YaST administration panel are all a little alien when coming from other Linux distributions. This is not to say that openSUSE does things in a way that is better or worse, but it does have a distinct style that can take a little adjustment.
I think the project has a great set of configuration modules and YaST is a gem of a tool. I especially like that it integrates with Btrfs to automatically take snapshots whenever we make a configuration change in case we need to undo an action. This makes openSUSE virtually bullet-proof. In fact, openSUSE appears to be one of the only Linux distributions making use of Btrfs and its powerful features like snapshots and multi-disk volumes.
Which is your favorite Linux terminal text editor? I guess it must be one from the never-ending list of candidates, including Vim and Nano. Even if you’re free to install and use any editor, sometimes you chose the one installed by default. That’s why the default text editor matters.
Speaking of the Fedora system, Vi is the current default terminal text editor in most cases, such as git commit and command-line text editing. Now if you want Nano in Fedora, you have to run a single command dnf install nano. But with the upcoming Fedora 33, you no longer need to run any command to get Nano.
The new Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 release includes a more streamlined and customizable navigation experience in the web console’s Developer perspective. In this article, we quickly share the highlights of the new navigation features that we added based on user feedback.
Each new release of Red Hat OpenShift includes usability improvements and features to help developers meet their goals. In OpenShift 4.5, we’ve improved navigation and added a mechanism for customizing navigation and accessing frequently used resources from the Developer perspective.
Robotics@Canonical puts a strong focus on the migration from ROS to ROS 2. ROS 2 benefits from many improvements, especially robot security. Our goal is to make it easy for you to transition to ROS 2, whether you’re completely new to ROS or a seasoned engineer retooling for a new environment. Your new platform should be secure-by-default, and we expect you’ll need to pivot between different environments as you migrate from ROS to ROS 2.
Along the way we’ve encountered some friction points, some mild surprises, and some opportunities to better leverage existing tools. Whenever that happened we tried to fix them and share our experiences so you didn’t run into the same problems! This has resulted in blog posts and videos in three key focus areas: getting started with ROS 2, software development in ROS 2, and building snaps for ROS. Let’s recap some of our recent output.
Mythic Beats is the company offering hosting services for the Raspberry Pi website, and following Eben Upton proposal they decided to host the website on eighteen Raspberry Pi 4 boards, fourteen of which used as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers, as well as two used as static servers with Apache, and the final two used as memory store using memcache.
Two days before Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM launch, they tested the implementation with “normal” traffic (e.g. around one million visitors a day), and the day of the launch, tens of millions visitors came to the website, and it failed, but not because of a failure of the Raspberry Pi cluster, but instead due to a Cloudflare glitch. This is all explained in Raspberry Pi blog.
A sneak peek at hosting a web site on a PinePhone using Site.js 14.2.0 Alpha.
Most open-source hardware Arm Linux SBCs are optimized for cost, and there are few higher-end boards with extensive connectivity designed for professionals. Beagleboard X15 would be one of the rare examples currently available on the market, but it was launched five years ago.
One European company noticed the void in this market and asked Olimex to develop a high-end open-source Linux board with a well-documented processor. They ruled out RK3399, and instead went Olimex Tukhla SBC will be powered by NXP i.MX 8QuadMax, the top processor of i.MX 8 family with two Cortex-A72 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, and two real-time Cortex-M4F cores.
F-Droid an open-source application is specially created for the Android platform. This well-known app store is popular for safe to install applications on the android device. Unlike, Play store, you will find all those sought after apps from Google Play Store, rather you will be provided with an open-source and most liked apps on the F-Droid app store.
In case you still want to get all those apps from the Google Play Store, opt to go to the Aurora Store from F-Droid so that Google cannot track your activity. Aurora allows users to retrieve apps from the Google library without any tracking suits. Additionally, you need to link Aurora Store with the Google Play Store.
The success of The Linux Foundation‘s first virtual summit may well have set the standard for new levels of open source participation.
Summit masters closed the virtual doors of the four-day joint gathering on July 2. The event hosted the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2020 and ended with more than 4,000 registrants from 109 countries.
The online attendance platform offered registrants a virtual experience that provided an immersive experience for event participants, according to The Linux Foundation (LF).
That virtual attendance feeling was as close as possible to what they would have received at a face-to-face event, Kristin O’Connell, director of event marketing at The Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider.
One of the newcomers in technical trendsetting at this first virtual conference was the FinOps Foundation. The FinOps Foundation includes 1,500 individual members across the globe, representing more than 500 companies with more than US$1 billion in revenue each.
In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business, and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills and technical processes, LF maintained.
After the huge success of its latest virtual event on Kubernetes for the EMEA region, Canonical brings its expertise to the US with another educational discussion.
On July 31st, Canonical’s panel of experts come together to share their insights from years of working with developers and enterprises on various Kubernetes use cases and interact with the audience live.
For all the benefits it offers around container orchestration, Kubernetes remains a significantly complex platform to deploy and operate. As developers and enterprises alike turn to Kubernetes for more and more types of use cases, available Kubernetes solutions often fail to meet their exact needs. Canonical’s extensive Kubernetes portfolio is centered around Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s, designed to provide full flexibility from cloud to edge in order to facilitate efficient innovation and scaling.
As many web platform developer and Firefox users, I believe Mozilla’s mission is instrumental for a better Internet. In a recent Igalia’s chat about the Web Ecosystem Health, participants made the usual observation regarding this important role played by Mozilla on the one hand and the limited development resources and small Firefox’s usage share on the other hand. In this blog post, I’d like to explain an experimental idea we are launching at Igalia to try and make browser development better match the interest of the web developer and user community.
Sustainability is not just about ticking a few boxes by getting your Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) inventory, adopting goals for reduction and mitigation, and accounting in shape. Any transformation towards sustainability also needs culture change.
In launching Mozilla‘s Sustainability Programme, our Environmental Champions are a key part of driving this organisational culture change.
Recruiting, training, and working with a first cohort of Environmental Champions has been a highlight of my job in the last couple of months. I can’t wait to see their initiatives taking root across all parts of Mozilla.
We have 14 passionate and driven individuals in this first cohort. They are critical amplifiers who will nudge each and every one us to incorporate sustainability into everything we do.
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Daria, Head of Product Design in Emerging Technologies, says: “There are many opportunities for designers to develop responsible technologies and to bring experiences that prioritize sustainability principles. It’s time we unlocked them.” She is planning to develop and apply a Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool that will be used in decision-making around product design and development.
We’ll also be looking at Firefox performance and web power usage, starting with explorations for how to better measure the impact of our products. DOM engineer, Olli will be stewarding these.
And the behind the scenes editorial support thinking through content, timing, and outreach? That’s Daniel for you.
We’ll be sharing more initiatives and the progress they are all making as we move forward. In the meantime, do join us on our Matrix channel to continue the conversation.
The foundation that looks after LibreOffice, a free open-source software suite that is based on the code from the former Star Office, is being forced to look at a commercial edition because developers from companies who are working on it are not being paid by those companies, a senior developer says.
1) The last week I left 5 patches without merging. They are mainly the patches that add support for Calc-comments and Vertical Tab Control. Also the patches of the Calc-comment demo , Writer-comment demo and insert hyperlink demo. The five patches now are merged after working on solving all the comments. The patches can be found in patches status section in the report .
I’m from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I started exploring and using FOSS way back in 2004 (Debian, Red Hat, the BSD family and sticking with Ubuntu till today) when I was studying at the university. From there I started exploring and contributing to Ubuntu, which you can find here, and I was accepted to be an Ubuntu Member, Kubuntu Membes (merits as Ubuntu contributor). Finally I was appointed to be part of the Asia Oceania Membership Board.
A a FOSS community member, I work in a few IT companies in Malaysia and was one of the engineers working at Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC) under Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU). Now I own my own IT company, namely Informology Sdn Bhd. Not stopping there, I continue actively being a FOSS enthusiast in Malaysia. When the cloud computing era came, I was involved by leading Malaysia OpenStack User Group, and I’ve recently been exploring and leading the Endless OS user group for Malaysia.
The Week #068 is my 23rd week in a row participating the weekly challenge. For the first time, I created a package to deal with the “Reorder List” task. It really helped me in thinking straight when dealing with linked list. With the help my favourite CPAN module Moo, creating class is like piece of cake as shown below.
The choice in parameters for back-off configuration is important. It can be the difference between a barely noticable blip in service quality and an hours-long site outage. In order to explore the consequences of the choice, I wrote a little fictional ditty about a fictional website.
I hope you enjoy escaping into this fictional reality as much as I enjoyed writing about it.
Your recipe site is different. After all, recipe sites are a dime-a-dozen. With today's modern technology, any kid can put a quick mock-up together with Django, React, and MongoDB to store recipes and retrieve them by various attributes.
In order to make your recipe site stand above the rest, you made sure it uses really cutting edge techniques. From details of the web requests coming in, using sophisiticated language parsing and machine learning algorithm, with just a few words about the user's likes and dislikes, you find the perfect recipe just for them.
HackerNews called it "just a bunch of buzzwords", of course. But once the graphs went up into the right, with 50% month-over-month growth rates, everyone explained that they knew that this one was different. Popularity sky-rocketed, the engineers worked on scaling up the site, and though it was not the world's most sophisticated microservice architecture, it was medium-service architecture, at least.
The web front end would call the machine learning cluster, running on special GPU machines, to get the appropriate keywords by which to look up the recipe. Maybe not a the kind of 50-microservices-architecture that takes three whiteboards to explain, but at least it was easy enough to scale up horizontally. You hired a great Site Reliability Engineer, who built a sophisticated continuous delivery machine. As your machine learning team fine-tuned the model, it would slowly roll out into the cluster, running continous A/B tests that would immediately roll back the change if the model performed worse than before.
The Python's map() function takes an iterable object, along with a function, and applies that function to each element in the iterable.
Some time ago, I was talking to Martin on the Pybites Slack about a challenge that involved the pandas library.
I never really looked at data analysis, but triggered to complete the challenge ahead, I dove into the library and immediately noticed how strong it was to manage large data collections.
Throughout this article we'll have a basic look at collecting data to handle with pandas, normalizing it so that it becomes more representative, and I'll have a small stop at Jupyter notebooks.
Recently, we published an introduction to data science in R for the beginner in programming. This is a complementary article written using the same approach, but this time focusing on Python, which is another open source programming language.
Python has an even larger following than R, so both articles should get the beginner up to speed in the two main languages for doing data science. The differences in the tutorials highlight how R and Python tackle the same task. Often it is your own experience, and the data science task that you want to do, that determines which language to choose.
The tutorial requires some basic knowledge of Linux, but other than that we shall go through the steps to set up the tutorial.
This week we welcome Dr. David Pena as our PyDev of the Week! David is the author of StremeCoder, a Graphical Python Programming Editor.
Hello and welcome to my 7th weekly check-in. I will be sharing my progress with single actor physics simulation and TextBlock2D sizing issue which was pending for quite a while now. I will also be sharing my thoughts regarding the TAB UI component. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.
Nowadays Javascript can be easily defined as the world most used programming language: it is used on a variety of platforms, it is integrated in web browsers and thanks to the Node.js runtime it can also be used server-side. In this tutorial we will see the loops we can be used in modern Javascript.
Cas' ruling means City, who are guaranteed to finish second in the Premier League this season, will play in the 2020-21 Champions League.
In this year's competition, Pep Guardiola's side face Real Madrid in their last-16 second leg at Etihad Stadium on 7 August. They lead 2-1 from the first leg and will face Juventus or Lyon if they progress.
Cas, who will provide full written reasons for the ruling "in a few days" said the decision "emphasised that most of the alleged breaches reported by the adjudicatory chamber of the CFCB were either not established or time-barred".
It added that in clearing City of the more serious charges surrounding "dishonest concealment" of sponsorship deals it was "not appropriate to impose a ban on participating in Uefa's club competitions" for the lesser charge of "obstructing the CFCB's investigations".
On reducing the fine, Cas said that, while it considered "the importance of the co-operation of clubs in investigations conducted by the CFCB" and Manchester City's "disregard of such principle and its obstruction of the investigations", the Cas panel "considered it appropriate to reduce Uefa's initial fine by two-thirds".
It added: "The final award with reasons will be published on the Cas website in a few days."
Uefa said it noted there was "insufficient conclusive evidence to uphold all of the CFCB's conclusions in this specific case and that many of the alleged breaches were time-barred".
The governing body added: "Over the last few years, Financial Fair Play has played a significant role in protecting clubs and helping them become financially sustainable and Uefa and the European Club Association remain committed to its principles."
Roughly 11 years after the Great Recession, the social and economic inequality of the U.S. has been laid bare by a pandemic. This time, however, there is no skills gap to blame for job losses and unemployment: Workers in all sectors of the workforce are losing jobs and careers. As a result, community college students — 35 percent of undergraduates, including a high percentage of low-income and non-white students — who have followed expedited and limited curricula to a place in the existing economy, have found themselves, again, at the whims of the economic, political and cultural interests that have little concern for their future role in determining what we do next. They also face cultural and political crises that call into question the very idea of what it means to live in a democracy.
"It's incredible to me that the federal government would see the necessity of bailing out airlines and banks and not see the need to do something similar for the public schools in this country," said one San Diego teacher.
The secretary’s focus was on the single message that schools need to re-open. But other than threatening to defund schools that refuse, she provided no answers for how they might deal with a possible outbreak and placed that responsibility on the institutions themselves.
Wallace continued: "And secondly, isn't cutting off funding exactly the wrong answer? Don't you want to spend more money to make schools safer, whether it's with plastic shields or health checks, various other systems?"
"Doesn't it make more sense to increase funding for schools where it's unsafe rather than cut off funding?" he asked.
DeVos doubled down on her threat to defund the education system.
His team bought over 1000 waterproof probes or bare chips from more than 70 different vendors on eBay, AliExpress, and online stores in 2019, and found the vast majority to be fake, counterfeit, or clones.
Contrary to a recent New York Times headline, it's clearly not a question of "who" is protesting, when it comes to public health recommendations. It's "what" is being protested.
Health inequity for Black people in the U.S. is not a new phenomenon. But Covid-19 shined a light on the problem—and it’s costing€ lives.
A new index from the Surgo Foundation, a non-profit firm, offers a glimpse of what the answer might be for countries in Africa. The researchers have built a model which takes into account a number of socioeconomic and demographic factors to work out which parts of the continent Africa will suffer most if the pandemic takes hold. These include the age and density of populations, political fragility and the quality of health systems. Their data indicate that health risks will be fairly evenly spread across countries. Richer states such as South Africa and Egypt have much better health-care systems than say, Mali and Niger, but also have older populations.
We appear to be stuck in a circular conundrum, which everyone can perceive but no one can fix: Kids have to go to school because their parents have to go to work, because that's the only way society can possibly function — but none of that stuff is possible amid a massive public health emergency that seems to be getting worse rather than better, especially under a federal government whose official policy is that reality does not exist.
Given all that, what will actually happen? Nobody knows, but it won't be good. Most big school districts, including New York's — by far the largest in the country — are trying to cobble together some version of "blended" or "hybrid" learning, which means a combination of limited, socially-distanced in-person instruction and the largely disastrous online-learning experiment of the spring.
While Audible is the dominant player in audio books, it has struggled to get its listeners to embrace its original content and faces competition from Spotify, which is spending more than $1 billion to transform its music service into a broader platform for original programs.
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit technology consortium dedicated to protecting and advancing Linux, an open source operating system. The group provides support to numerous open source projects and communities. As part of the Linux Foundation, the LF AI Foundation supports open source projects in AI, machine learning and deep learning.
Open source projects, while open to the community, are still controlled by an individual or vendor. They individual or vendor can limit who works on the project, the direction the project takes and how quickly it updates.
With this latest move, IBM concedes control of the three AI toolkits to the vendor-neutral LF AI Foundation. Linux Foundation's open governance model, in theory, eliminates single-vendor control of open source projects, broadens the community working on them and helps accelerates their growth.
A new Linux Foundation hosted group will support open source data management and promote interoperability between applications and data sources, on premises or cloud-based.
Fast forward three years to today, and while griping to a friend about how it didn’t work inside tmux, I discovered that technology has advanced and there is now a fix, named pam_reattach! It’s a PAM module that you configure to run before the built-in pam_tid.so, and it makes the sudo command able to find and use the TouchID module to authenticate, even from inside tmux.
Formbook has been around for years. According to FireEye, Formbook has been "..advertised in various hacking forums since early 2016." My previous diary about Formbook was back in November 2019, and not much has changed since then. It still bears documentation, though, if only to show this malware is still active and remains part of our threat landscape.
A new report reveals that common home routers from Netgear, Linksys, D-Link and other vendors contain serious security vulnerabilities that even updates don’t fix. While Linux can be a very secure OS in theory, researchers have found that many of these vulnerable routers are powered by very old versions of Linux that lack support and are riddled with security issues as a result.
Digital payments initially did surge as people struggled to get banknotes, but they reverted to cash as the amount of notes in circulation rose again. Now the pandemic, which has made people wary of close personal interactions, is giving online payments a fresh boost.
But in China, it’s a different picture. Deloitte’s 2018 China Mobile Consumer Survey showed that Chinese people checked their email 22% less than users globally. Instead WeChat is dominant; some 79.1% of smartphone owners are regular users of the app, while 84.5% of people who use messaging apps in China use WeChat. And that preference extends into the office: the 2017 WeChat user behaviour report compiled by Penguin Intelligence, a research arm of Tencent (which created WeChat), found that almost 88% of 20,000 people surveyed used WeChat in their daily work communication. Phones, SMS and fax were used by 59.5%. Email was a distant third on 22.6%.
Eva Hsu, who runs a digital branding business, is Taiwanese and spent some of her youth living in the US. She’s been working in Shanghai for six years. For her foreign clients, Hsu says she communicates via email and LinkedIn, but for her Chinese clients it’s a different story. “Chinese clients tend to use WeChat and send files on WeChat as the main way of communication,” she says.
I have strong doubts about the efficiency of any tracing app of the sort, and even less in the context where it is unlikely that a majority of the population will use it.
There's also the problem that this app would need to work on Apple phones, or be incompatible with them, and cause significant "fracture" between those who have access to technology, and those who haven't. See this text for more details.
Such an app would be a security and privacy liability at no benefit to public health. There are better options, see for this research on hardware tokens. But I doubt any contact tracing app or hardware will actually work anyways.
Those using Facebook to log into services such as Spotify on their iOS devices are having a bad Friday, as something has gone awry with Zuckerberg's ad-slinging platform.
A glance at social media reveals a howl from those affected by the problem which appears to have started early this morning (UK time) and hit iOS devices. Those running Android seem to be unaffected.
The issue looks to be related to Facebook's Software Development Kit (SDK), used by many popular apps, including TikTok, Tinder and Spotify. It manifests itself by the app crashing at login.
Even the likes of Call of Duty: Mobile have been unable to put a bullet in the borkage (although its players would doubtless be keen to wreak the same levels of despair caused by the failure.)
Two recent attacks seem to add dropping missiles from the sky and walking bombs in on the ground to Israel’s resume of acts of war on Iran. And the resume is long.€
Jihadists seized control of chunks of Mali in 2012 and were stopped from overrunning Bamako, its capital, only after thousands of French troops were hurriedly flown in. The insurgents have since pushed across the border into Niger and Burkina Faso (see map). In those three countries alone, 4,800 people lost their lives in the conflict last year. Fully 1.7m people have been forced to flee their homes. Now the war is beginning to jump borders again, putting at risk some of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, including Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast.
The site, registered on Monday, states:
"Although Mia makes many false statements, innuendos, and accusations, we have tried to stay silent and allow Mia to have her publicity stunt without responding. Mia has taken our silence as an 'all clear' to not only continue but ramp up her false statements. We therefore have no choice but to respond to the most glaring, objectively false statements. The following are facts over Mia’s fiction."
The design of the site is similar to that of a negative political ad, with edited footage turned black-and-white. BangBros suggests that it believes Khalifa has manufactured outrage at the company in order to raise her own profile, and published Google Trend results tied to news events in order to attempt to illustrate this.
"Love of life is the guide and motivator of ecological healing on Earth. Next comes learning how to put that love into action. How do we do that for that most alive of all places, the Amazon?"
The fact that climate plans from the House Democrats and the "unity task forces" set up by Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are better than anything we’ve seen in over a decade does not make them good enough.
As the roads became freer of cars, they grew full of possibility. Rollerblading and skateboarding have come back into fashion. Sales of bicycles and electric bikes have skyrocketed.
But there is a catch: Cities are beginning to cautiously open back up again, and people are wondering how they’re going to get in to work. Many are worried about the spread of the virus on public transit. Are cars our only option? How will we find space for all of them?
In much of Manhattan, the average speed of traffic before the pandemic had fallen to 7 miles per hour. In Midtown, it was less than 5 m.p.h. That’s only slightly faster than walking and slower than riding a bike. Will traffic soon be worse than ever?
Not if we choose another path.
Rather than stumble back into car dependency, cities can begin to undo their worst mistake: giving up so much of their land to the automobile.
The business lobby says that sales of e-bikes have risen briskly, though they still only represent about one tenth of total sales. However it forecasts that this year's sales may double compared to last year.
Riku-Pekka Mikkonen, head of sales at Finnish bike manufacturer Tunturi-Hellberg, says that this year many people have replaced their second car with a regular or electric bicycle.
In his interview with Radio France Internationale, the Chinese water expert also criticized the Chinese government and state media for refusing to acknowledge the potential danger of the reservoir. He said that scientists who have spoken the truth have been criminalized by Beijing, resulting in a society with no communication.
July 6th also was the 7th anniversary of the disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec when a train full of Bakken oil from North Dakota derailed and exploded —€ resulting in 47 fatalities and the destruction of much of downtown€ Lac-Mégantic.€
44 million Americans hold over 1.6 trillion dollars of student debt and the cost of higher education continues to skyrocket. And it’s the poor, people of color and women who are most severely impacted. The COVID-19 crisis highlights the vulnerability of debt when people are unable to find jobs or pay off loans. We look at two urgent solutions to the debt crisis. First, reporter Kathryn Styer Martinez takes a look at a free school called Berea College in Kentucky. Then, we discuss the politics of debt and how to organize a debt strike, with Thomas Gokey from the Debt collective.
President Donald Trump complained via Twitter on Sunday that a privately constructed border wall in Texas was a bad idea and poorly done — not mentioning that his administration has awarded the builder a $1.7 billion contract to build more walls.
This story is part of a collaboration between ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. Learn more
"You may try to sell the office you hold, your personal integrity and€ your soul, Mr. President—but I assure you Puerto Rico is not for sale!" tweeted Rep. Nydia Velazquez.
Stone could not have been more different. He clowned, he cavorted, he demanded limelight—which made it in some ways impossible to imagine that he could have done anything seriously amiss. Bank robbers don’t go on Twitter to announce, “Hey, I’m going to rob a bank, sorry, not sorry.” Or so you’d expect.
Yet Stone is the central figure in the greatest scandals in U.S. history. Ames, Hanssen, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss—none of them worked with a foreign intelligence service to help a candidate for president of the United States. Stone did. And now he will receive a commutation of his sentence from the president he served.
The amazing thing about the Trump-Stone story is how much of it happened in the full light of day. A (very) partial timeline:
At the behest of the U.S. government, German authorities have seized a computer server that hosted a huge cache of files from scores of U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement agencies obtained in a Houston data breach last month.
The server was being used by a WikiLeaks-like data transparency collective called Distributed Denial of Secrets to share documents _ many tagged “For Official Use Only” _ that shed light on U.S. police practices.
The data, dating back to 1996, include emails, audio and video files and police and FBI intelligence reports. DDoSecrets founder Emma Best said the data, dubbed “BlueLeaks,” comes from more than 200 agencies. It has been stripped of references to sexual assault cases and references to children, but names, phone numbers and emails of police officers were not redacted, said Best, who uses they/their pronouns.
In a security alert issued to U.S. citizens in China on Saturday, the State Department advised Americans to "exercise increased caution" to avoid possible detention without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime. It said U.S. citizens could face "prolonged interrogations and extended detention" for "state security" reasons.
Without citing specific examples, the State Department pointed out that Chinese security personnel may "detain and/or deport" U.S. nationals for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government. It added that individuals who are detained or arrested should ask prison officials to notify the U.S. embassy immediately.
The State Department did not explain what had prompted the alert, according to Reuters.
Of the Russians who went out to the polls to decide whether Vladimir Putin could stay in power until 2036, whether to ban same-sex marriage in the Constitution, whether ethnic Russians are uniquely integral to the Russian state, and more, almost 80 percent allegedly voted “yes.” Turnout for the nationwide plebiscite was reported at 65 percent. Independent experts believe the actual turnout among Russian citizens between June 25 and July 1 was significantly lower, as was the actual number of people who voted in favor of the constitutional amendments on the table. Still, those “yes” votes represent a significant portion of the Russian population. We asked some of that group who also read Meduza why they supported the amendments. Here are a few of the most representative or intriguing responses we received, with minimal edits for style and concision.
I certainly have no fun in posting these images but I had to make a point when I read that that a 75 years old fellow, irrespective of the political party he adheres to, was arrested for posting, IMHO, a not-so-offensive photo & text about the Prime Minister.
Social media platforms Twitter and Facebook and messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger remained restricted with Mali’s leading cellular operator Orange 10:30 p.m. UTC / local time Friday as tensions peaked.
The disruption has significant but not total impact and affected users are able to regain access via VPN services which circumvent internet censorship by tunnelling to other countries. Listed platforms remain blocked or degraded as of Saturday afternoon while other online services and websites continue to function normally.
The episode followed a now-familiar arc: Facebook receives criticism for the way its platform operates, promises to do better, makes some inconsequential tweaks, and then media attention moves on to something else.
In this particular interlude, corporations, which have long butted heads with Facebook and were happy to spend a bit less money this summer anyway, got a chance to appear woke. Many are likely still quietly advertising through Facebook internationally, on Instagram, and on third-party apps using the Facebook Audience Network.
Yet the predictability of the episode belies a broader shift. Slowly but surely, public opinion is moving toward the idea that online digital platforms and social media content should be more strictly regulated.
What’s popular on YouTube is a reflection of what its users want to see, but also what YouTube wants them to see, what YouTube wants them to want to see, and what advertisers want them to see.
“So much of the confusion about YouTube comes from the fact that we use these public-square metaphors for what is fundamentally a commercial space,” Ms. Lewis said. “Thinking about it through market frameworks is more accurate.”
YouTube isn’t so much the marketplace of ideas as a marketplace for some ideas, if those ideas work well in video format, in the context of a subscription-driven social environment consumed mostly on phones, in which compensation is determined by viewership, subject matter and potential for sponsorship.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has lambasted the Islamic Republic of Iran for interrogating the jailed director of the now-defunct dissident website AMAD News on TV.
And the press vest, handy though it may be, has no formal status at all. We know this because whenever someone complains about journalists being injured when covering street protests, the Force’s response is always that journalists have no special status. Along with first aiders, social workers, human rights observers, and wandering members of the public they are liable to be shot, soaked, or pepper-sprayed at any time they are in the wrong place at the wrong time in one of the Force’s shooting galleries, or streets as we used to call them.
Government ethics watchdogs and congressional Democrats were among those outraged late Friday after President Donald Trump announced his commutation of his longtime associate Roger Stone’s 40-month sentence, in what Democratic leaders called a “transparently corrupt” move.
The labor movement is split on the question of cops. While union officials have signaled their tempered support for police unions, the push to expel law enforcement from the movement has grown quickly in the rank-and-file.
In Mexico the police will kill you for not wearing a mask and the state will disappear you for demanding justice. This is the conclusion drawn by Alejandro Puerto, a young grassroots political activist in the state of Jalisco, who spoke with Truthout about the violence and repression doled out by the state government of Gov. Enrique Alfaro.
To survive this bursting convergence of technology, inequality, and populism we must come together as humans on this planet. We must unify and evolve.
The alternatives are as obvious as they are terrifying.
The Justice Minister, Nasredeen Abdulbari, announced on his twitter account that a series of laws had been finally approved by the council, among them, the amendment to the Criminal Law article 141.
The draft law, which criminalizes Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), had been previously approved by the cabinet in April. It establishes a possible three-year prison term and a fine to those who perform FGM.
“The demand is unprecedented and unlike any challenge that we've faced in food bank history in the United States. We’ve really never seen the level of need that we’re seeing now, and having seen it come about as quickly as it’s come about, it’s been a real shock,” said Katie Fitzgerald, chief operating officer at Feeding America. “It’s been a perfect storm in that the demand has been unprecedented and the supply of food has been pretty significantly disrupted.”
“It’s just a mad dash to make sure nobody’s going hungry during COVID,” said Christopher Robertson, director of Market to HOPE, a food pantry that operates within Catholic Charities of Southeast Texas. “The folks we’re seeing now are new people. A little less than half of the people who came in during the month of June were brand new people."
One in five Americans who live in rentals could face eviction by the end of September as Congressional Republicans move to cut off unemployment assistance and other coronavirus relief, according to an analysis by the Aspen Institute.
The first story comes from Mexico, where apparently everything our community does will soon be illegal. We couch that statement because the analysis is based on Google translations of reports from Mexico, possibly masking the linguistic nuances that undergird legislative prose. So we did some digging and it indeed appears that the Mexican Senate approved a package of reforms to existing federal copyright laws that will make it illegal to do things like installing a non-OEM operating system on a PC, or to use non-branded ink cartridges in a printer. Reverse engineering ROMs will be right out too, making any meaningful security research illegal. There appear to be exceptions to the law, but those are mostly to the benefit of the Mexican government for “national security purposes.” It’ll be a sad day indeed for Mexican hackers if this law is passed.
The other story comes from Germany, where a proposed law would grant sweeping surveillance powers to 19 state intelligence bodies. The law would require ISPs to install hardware in their data centers that would allow law enforcement to receive data and potentially modify it before sending it on to where it was supposed to go. So German Internet users can look forward to state-sponsored man-in-the-middle attacks and trojan injections if this thing passes.
While the Federal Circuit's decision last fall in Arthrex, Inc. v. Smith & Nephew, Inc. raised issues about the appointment of Administrative Patent Judges (APJs) serving on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), it should be remembered that it also wiped out a PTAB decision in favor of Smith & Nephew in the underlying inter partes review of Arthrex's U.S. Patent No. 9,179,907 on anticipation grounds (which, given the deferential nature of Federal Circuit review on factual issues, the challenger had every expectation the PTAB decision would be affirmed). At the end of June, Smith & Nephew (S&N) had its opportunity to explain to the Supreme Court why the Federal Circuit was wrong and why the Court should grant certiorari and reverse.
[...]
The petition also applies these supervisory roles to the IPR context, including several that are not reviewable (initiation, reconsideration, termination). The consequence of these controls, S&N argues, is that "'[t]he Director'—a principal Officer who is removable at will—'bears the political responsibility'" for the work APJs do," citing Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe v. Mylan Pharm. Inc. (Somewhat amusingly, S&N cites one of the more vociferous commentators for "regularly tak[ing] the Director to task" for his decisions as an example of the "political accountability" intended under the Appointments Clause.)
If the Director's control isn't enough, S&N contends that the Secretary of Commerce is another principal officer who exerts control over the APJs sufficient to render them inferior officers, providing in likewise all the tools at the Secretary's command to exert such control, for example "failure to follow instructions," citing Cobert v. Miller.
The Federal Circuit failed to properly consider these indicia of supervision and direction, according to S&N, and instead applied the multipart test. This was error, according to S&N, because the panel misapplied Supreme Court's Edmond precedent. The petition analogizes the Director's level of control over APJs with that asserted by the Judge Advocate General over military judges in Edmond, contending that both superiors had the power to remove the respective judges under their control from their assignments and that the Federal Circuit erred in interpreting the removal power to apply to being able to discharge them from employment.
And the petition characterizes the Federal Circuit as having "elevated form over substance in asking whether 'the Director [has] the power to single-handedly review, nullify or reverse' a Board decision," again analogizing the lack of finality by the adjudicators here and in Edmond ("APJs cannot, in any meaningful sense, speak the last word for the Executive Branch 'unless permitted to do so by other Executive officers,'" citing Edmond). Of course, even the Director (and the Secretary) are subject to supervision by the Federal Circuit, where the Director has the right to be a party in any appeal. 35 U.S.C. ۤ 143.
[...]
Finally, the petition acknowledges the forfeiture issue contained in the government's petition and provides its reasoning why this issue is another reason for the Court to grant certiorari (and notes that it will write more fulsomely in response to the other petitions submitted to the Court in this case.
Last week, the New York Times had a meme, posted by President Trump, removed from Twitter. The newspaper also asked Facebook to remove the same image but thus far the social media platform has yet to take action. At the same time, the Times has yet to act against others who shared the same meme, which could raise a fair use debate.
After finding itself on the wrong end of a $1 billion copyright infringement verdict, Cox Communications is under pressure to combat so-called repeat infringers. Today, a former Cox customer reveals that after receiving multiple copyright infringement complaints from copyright holders, this month his ISP handed him a six-month Internet ban.
